Judith Krantz, who chronicled the sex and shopping of the super-rich and super-beautiful in bestselling novels from Scruples to Princess Daisy, has died at the age of 91.
The American writer, who sold more than 85m copies of her 10 novels in more than 50 languages, died at her Bel Air home from natural causes, surrounded by her family, friends and dogs, her publicist said.
Born in New York City in 1928, this “Nice Jewish Girl” – she liked the capital letters – went to Wellesley College and wrote for women’s magazines including Cosmopolitan on subjects such as “The Myth of the Multiple Orgasm”. She turned to fiction at the age of 50 with Scruples. This story of an exclusive boutique owner called Billy Ikehorn – a “female of rampant sexual vitality” with “a fortune estimated at between two hundred and two hundred and fifty million dollars” – topped book charts in 1978 and helped drive the wave of steamy novels in luxurious settings that followed through the 80s. Remembering her book tour for Scruples in her memoirs, Krantz said that male interviewers were invariably so shocked that almost every one of them asked, accusingly: “How could such a nice married woman, of your age, with two children, write such an erotic book?”
India Knight, who wrote an introduction for Scruples’ 35th anniversary, called it “the bonkiest of the 80s bonkbusters – and the one that everyone remembers”.
Krantz wrote nine more novels, following the winning formula of beautiful, successful, rich women looking for handsome men with whom they could enjoy great sex. Many of her books have been adapted for television, often produced by her husband, Steve Krantz. Princess Daisy, which won her a record paperback advance of $3.2m, told of the beautiful daughter of a Russian prince and an American film star. Her last novel, The Jewels of Tessa Kent, was published in 1998 and followed a rich film star’s attempt to reconcile with the daughter she gave birth to at the age of 14.
Angela Carter said that reading Krantz’s books was like “being sealed inside a luxury shopping mall whilst being softly pelted with scented sex technique manuals” – but admitted they were “not without a certain preposterous charm, as of a champagne picnic on the crust of an active volcano”.
Krantz herself wrote in her autobiography of how she initially “detested” her reputation as a “sex-and-shopping novelist” – but she eventually became reconciled to it. The memoir is entitled Sex and Shopping – a line Krantz acknowledged would “unquestionably be in the first line in my obituary”.