Living with Tom in New Mexico, Judy had not found the freedom, sexual or otherwise, that she had been after when she left John; to the contrary, she had quickly found herself in another bad marriage. Frustrated, she poured her liberatory aspirations into the book; despite her failure of nerve at the end, Sandy Pressman takes herself for a wilder ride than Judy ever had — flying away to a secret assignation with one lover, sleeping with her brother-in-law at a party (a pool party, where the women ended up drunk and topless), dating the husband of a friend in an open marriage.
“I was wild,” Judy said. “My fantasies were wild.” She remembered having dinner with her agent, Claire Smith, and Smith’s husband in Brooklyn, after both the Smiths had read a draft of Wifey. “Everyone was so scandalized by it. But [Claire] was not so scandalized so that she wouldn’t sell it. A lot of people wanted me to change my name, warning me I would ruin my lovely career if I published this under my own name.” Before publication, she sent a draft to John. “I said, ‘If there is anything in this book that you don’t want, let me know.’ And he said to me, ‘I don’t care … It’s okay with me.’” Judy wasn’t sure that John ever read it — “I don’t think John ever read any of my books” — but at least she had his blessing.
While she refused to publish under a pseudonym, she did make one concession to the dictates of decency. In an early draft, Judy had written a scene in which Sandy uses her dog to pleasure herself. “The dog did a little licking of Sandy, and that was very satisfying,” she said. “A little oral sex.” The scene was pure fiction — as an adult, Judy never even owned a dog — but it felt true to Sandy’s character. “It seemed like a good thing to do, [for] somebody who was unfulfilled.” Judy couldn’t remember who asked her to remove the scene; it might have been Claire Smith, or her editor, Phyllis Grann, or Helen Honig Meyer, the publisher of Dell, which oversaw Laurel, Judy’s paperback publisher. Judy heard, second- or thirdhand, that when the book went to Meyer, “she was absolutely scandalized — something to do with [how] her granddaughter liked my books.” Whatever the case, the dog had to go.
When Wifey was published in September 1978, critics mostly agreed that it was not a good book. The Los Angeles Times critic liked Wifey, calling it “a voyage into reality that is somehow funny in spite of its frustrations and disappointments.” But that was a minority point of view. The Minneapolis Tribune critic said she “didn’t feel much of anything except that there was a lot to wade through on the way to the occasionally risqué,” while the Roanoke Times said the book “meets no needs and offers little fun” and “is a collection of stereotypes performing redundant sexual activities amidst much melodrama and shallow perceptions.”
It’s hard to credit the assertion that the book “offers little fun,” for, if anything, the book offers too much fun, at the expense of characterization. It’s easy to see how Sandy steps out on her marriage but much harder to make sense of her bizarre internal monologue (using a vinegar douche, Sandy imagines that she is concocting “cunt vinaigrette”), or her willingness to go to bed with any man who comes on to her, including her friend’s husband, whose foreplay involves calling her animal names (“my mountain goat, my baby burro”). The problem, for the novel, is not that Sandy is experimental, adventuresome, or even obscene, but rather that she seems to change from page to page. Judy would later stress her own instability during that period (“I was wild”); it’s hardly surprising that the character onto whom she projected her inner life, the character who conceivably would let a dog go down on her, did not entirely cohere on the page.
Yet the novel has its strengths, ignored by its critics and, presumably, by its millions of readers, who flocked to the sexy stuff, the inferior pastiche of Erica Jong, Jacqueline Susann, or Anne Roiphe. Sneaking around in the bushes, the old Judy Blume is still there. For one thing, she is still a funny writer, unparalleled at depicting a turtle-swallowing toddler or, it turns out, a predictable husband. “Rules and Regulations for a Norman Pressman Fuck,” one section begins. “The room must be dark so they do not have to look at each other. There will be one kiss, with tongue, to get things going. His fingers will pass lightly over her breasts, travel down her belly to her cunt, and stop. He will attempt to find her clitoris.” And so on, unsparingly.
Wifey also has, nestled in all the moist valleys between breasts and ass cheeks, insightful writing about racial injustice (there is a subplot about whether the Pressmans should sell their house to a Black family), class tensions (between the Pressmans and their friends, between Norman and his employees), and, as ever, the indignities of being young and female. There is a genuine pathos to the story of Sandy’s twin nieces, agreed by all to be unattractive, thanks to their weight and their noses. When it’s time for the twins’ joint nose jobs, long planned by their mother, Sandy drives her mother into New York City to visit the girls in the hospital. The scene offers a pitiless view of the sexism, and materialism, of the culture in which the girls were being raised.
“It’s a shame they got the Lefferts’ noses instead of ours,” the twins’ grandmother Mona says to Sandy, their aunt. (Sandy feels the same way; earlier in the book, we read of her surprise that her sister “had produced such unattractive children.”) Mona has it on good authority that although a nose job typically costs $1,800, because they are twins and because of professional courtesy (their father, whom Sandy has slept with, is a gynecologist), “they’re getting a break — two thousand dollars for both.”
Whatever its merits — and it had some — Wifey was treated by readers and critics as less important than its author. Judy Blume had become one of those celebrities — like Barbra Streisand, say, or Elizabeth Taylor — who was bigger than her body of work. A magazine story about Judy, while occasioned by a new book, could ignore the book and focus on the personal life of the woman who had created it, because that was what readers really wanted to know about. Shortly after the publication of Wifey, two of the country’s most widely read magazines ran long stories about Judy. Neither one could have enhanced her reputation as a serious writer.
In October 1978, People ran a 2,000-word profile by John Neary, which, with its numerous photographs by his wife, Joan Neary, stretched over five pages. The spread opens with a full-page photograph of Judy looking straight at the camera, in a lacy teddy, leaning back against some sort of comforter or pillow. And it’s all downhill from there. The text of the article is a reasonable summation of her career, beginning with the present (Wifey is a smash, in its third printing, paperback rights sold for $350,000) and looking back at her beginnings (the NYU writing class, early rejection letters). But it is, alas, punctuated by the Blume-ian clichés about her weight (100 pounds, “103 on a fat day,” Judy says) and her youthful appearance. “Judy is always mistaken for a daughter when she answers the door of her sprawling, $140,000 adobe home,” the article says, referring to the house in Santa Fe that she had bought after two years in Los Alamos (the article doesn’t say so, but Kitchens did not contribute to the purchase of their houses). Discussing the impact of Margaret on her career, Judy makes herself sound uncharacteristically naïve: “That was the first time I felt, ‘My God, I really can do this! These people are taking me seriously! This is not just pretend, not just something to keep me out of Saks!’” The quotation may have been Judy’s — a mordant allusion to John Blume, who had made the Saks joke about her writing — but the exclamation points, which drive home the false impression that she is a giddy child or a recovering shopaholic, were People’s added touch.
Photo: © Joan Neary
Still, Judy colluded with this lightweight approach, this portrait of the artist as a sex kitten. According to Judy, photographer Joan Neary came up with the idea of posing her in a teddy, and Judy just went along with it. But Neary said that wasn’t so. “As a photographer I never posed anyone for a picture — just hung around long enough for people to relax and forget about me,” Neary said. As for the teddy, Neary said it couldn’t have been her idea: “How would I have known she had that garment?” On the second page of the article, Judy is shown fully dressed but with her arms around Tom’s neck and her legs wrapped around his waist; he is holding her in the air, as if he has just spun her around and they have come to a dizzy stop. The caption reads: “In a playful moment, Judy tells husband Tom, ‘I let you live out your fantasies. This is position No. 32.’”
On the final page of the article, the photograph at the top shows Judy lying barefoot on a bed, on her stomach, her head propped on one hand, while the other hand holds a pen, scribbling something on a pad of paper. Just as the opening photograph of the piece shows her in bed, wearing skimpy nightclothes, the final photograph implies that she scarcely leaves the bed, save for a change of clothes. Sex, writing — it’s all in the bedroom. The caption under the final photograph reads, “‘I do not see myself as a great novelist,’ she says, ‘but it brings people pleasure, and me pleasure. So why not?’”
Judy always regretted collaborating with the Nearys. “They knew what People wanted, and they delivered.” The article prompted a disappointed letter from novelist Norma Klein, a friend and frequent correspondent. “When I saw that terrible photo of you in People, dressed in the nightgown with that shy, frightened smile on your face, I practically wanted to cry,” Klein wrote. “It was so pathetic and unnecessary. Don’t play into that.” If the People article manages to erase Judy’s career as a pioneering writer for children, painting her instead as a semi-talented dilettante of adult literature, holed up in the bedroom writing about the pleasure principle, with breaks to give Tom “position No. 32,” the New York Times Magazine article that ran two months later does her the disservice — or was it meant to be a favor? — of overlooking the adult novel altogether. The Times Magazine piece, which mentions Wifey only twice, is by Joyce Maynard, who at 25 was already a literary star herself. Maynard had become precociously famous with the 1972 publication, in the Times Magazine, of “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life,” an essay that she expanded the next year into a full-length memoir. By the time she wrote the Blume profile, Maynard had dropped out of Yale, moved in with the writer J.D. Salinger (he had sent her a fan letter after reading her essay in the Times Magazine), left Salinger, gotten married, and had a baby. She brought the baby to her interview with Judy in Manhattan.
By assigning the profile to a 20-something memoirist celebrated for writing about her own adolescence, the Times Magazine was in effect overdetermining the piece that they would get: an appraisal of Judy the children’s writer. “When Judy Blume visits bookstores to autograph copies of ‘Wifey,’ it is the kids who besiege her,” Maynard wrote. “Every week more than 200 of them write her letters — requesting bust-development exercises and asking for more details on how you get a baby. ‘How can I tell my mother that I know some things about sex?’ Or, simply, ‘I am desperate.’” Maynard effectively sidesteps the occasion for the profile — Judy’s new, bestselling, sexy adult novel — to offer an evaluation of her outsize role in youth culture. Maynard is saying to adults, You may have heard about this sensation called Wifey, but are you aware of what the author means to your daughters?
“Coming of Age with Judy Blume” is a long piece — it was the longest profile of Judy to date — and, with her ample word limit, Maynard limns the basics of Judy’s life. She inserts in the middle, in the heart of the piece, a trip to Bath, Ohio, where she interviews girls and their mothers about the appeal of Judy’s work and explains the twisty road a Blume hardcover can travel: “Then Beth Rice went on a shopping trip with Christiane Boustani and told Christiane’s mother it was O.K. to buy the book. Christiane got the book from Beth after Beth had read it. Heather Benson, age 13, borrowed Forever on a choir trip. Possibly it was Beth Rice’s copy, now covered in brown paper, since one belonging to another girl was confiscated by a teacher at the Bath Middle School. Heather’s mother, Pat, found the copy Heather had, picked it up and was so shocked she couldn’t put it down.”
Maynard’s Times profile is the rare piece that quotes actual young people about what Judy means to them, and it’s one of the first to connect her popularity with the rising number of parents challenging her books, asking that the books be removed from schools or libraries — a good sign, it’s implied, since it’s the kind of thing that happens to authors only once they get popular. The accompanying photographs are of Judy talking to teenagers and of daughters and mothers quoted in the piece. In short, Maynard takes Judy — and her readership — seriously.
Nevertheless, certain clichés follow Judy from article to article. Her youthful mien, for example, remains irresistible to the journalist, even the shrewd Maynard: daughter Randy is “often taken for Judy’s sister”; Judy “still has a girlish voice, and in figure she could be about 12 years old”; she “could fit right in as a guest at a seventh-grade slumber party.” More interesting, Judy herself is far too self-deprecating; she’s unwilling or unable to own her talent. “I can’t entirely explain why they [sell], myself,” Judy tells Maynard about her books’ success. “I know I’m no great literary figure.”
Mark Oppenheimer
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