Burning Down The Colby Mansion
Here I am now. How are you? How’s your relationship going? Did you get through it all? Wasn’t the seventies a drag, you know? Well, here we are, let’s make the eighties great because it’s up to us to make what we can of it.
John Lennon
When I found out Judith Krantz died, several of my dreams died with her.
Not all my dreams. I’ve realized many of them: I’m a college graduate, even have a Masters in Writing. I’ve managed to get published on a regular basis since I was twenty-five. I’ve worked with authors whose works I’ve loved. I know I’m very lucky and privileged.
But I’ve also held on to dreams that are outdated. I don’t want to say unrealistic, because the last thing I want is to shame my childhood dreams. I’m not trying to shame you, dreams. It’s not you, it’s me. But they were Eighties Dreams, dreams that don’t fit in the 2021 world.
“It’s the 80’s/snort cocaine and vote for Ronald Reagan.”
Riff on Mystery Science Theater 3000
Keep in mind that the beginning of the eighties were supposed to be the start of something big and new, especially with the election of Ronald Reagan. Get rid of the do-gooder days of ending war, equal rights for all. It’s a dog eat dog world out there, kids. You better fend for yourself and not depend on anyone else-especially the government-to get what you want. Not what you need. What you want. So if you wanted to oh, buy a helicopter because you could, awesome. You want a Rolex watch even though you had a watch, go for it, babe. Get the house with all the rooms and a pool. Those poor people who aren’t so lucky? If they work hard enough, they’ll get theirs. It’s trickle down, isn’t it?
And if you were growing up during that time, you had to have everything. All the toys like Strawberry Shortcake, Cabbage Patch Dolls, and Teddy Ruxpin. You had to watch Bill Cosby on Thursday nights and think he was America’s Dad. You had to have Guess jeans, torn sweatshirts, and Reeboks. I wanted a pair of Guess jeans so bad. I was lucky when I got a pair from my mother. Growing up, Krantz’s greatest wish was for her mother one day bring home a cashmere sweater for her oldest daughter. She never did.
I write about clothes as magical things that can change you … the character suddenly appears…If she had (bought a cashmere sweater) ,I never would have known the power, magic and mystery clothes could have. Out of that yearning you get fiction.
Judith Krantz
The eighties were meant for Judith Krantz, who wrote about heroines who worked their way up in the world. They were women who usually had a great best friend, a definite frenemy, an enemy, and a guy that made them happy in the morning after they finally made love. Very happy. Pages of pages of happy. So many pages of happy.
Krantz was late to writing novels. Oh sure, she loved reading them. Her goal when she went to Wellesley College was noble: to read all the novels in the library. But writing it scared her to death. It didn’t stop her from having adventures: going to Paris. Writing for magazines like Good Housekeeping. Getting married to Steve Krantz, a TV producer, a setup planned by college friend Barbara Walters. They had two sons, then moved to Beverly Hills and she got a regular gig writing for Cosmopolitan. She still felt unsatisfied.
She decided to face down her fears. Flying was one, so she earned her pilot’s license. She never did anything halfway. Then she decided to face another fear and write fiction. Fiction was Something Else. Fiction was a whole different animal. But she gave it a go. It helped she knew people who knew people, so in months she had a book deal. A year later, Scruples was published, the same year she turned fifty. The girl who desired cashmere sweaters never looked back.
Of course, Krantz wasn’t like other writers. She always traveled by limousines. Most writers I know usually try to scrounge for change for the bus or gas. She always had “Adolfo suits ready to go” for interviews and readings. I pretty much live in long skirts and yoga pants. One of her big worries was Stacy Keach staying sober during the filming of Mistral’s Daughter, a miniseries so the miniseries would be completed. One of my big worries this year and a half is trying not to get COVID-19.
In her first three novels, Krantz’s heroines all had jobs and worked hard at what they did. Scruples’ Billy loved to shop, so after her husband died, she didn’t want to wallow in grief. She decided to open her own store. Princess Daisy decided to get a real job in an advertising agency to avoid dealing with her horrible rapist half brother to pay for her twin sister’s special school. Daisy even wore thrift store clothes to save money. She made no apologies for her thriftiness, she had things to do, people to see. In Mistral’s Daughter, Maggy Lunel was a model one day, then when nude paintings of her showed up in New York (Painted by that cad, Julien Mistral) the phone stopped ringing. So she sold some jewelry and bam! She started a modeling agency. Krantz’s heroines were tough, beautiful, and utterly plucky.
When I started reading Krantz, I was twelve years old. My middle school was a combination of rape culture and a bad sitcom without the laugh track. I had bad skin and was painfully shy, so this made me a target. For two years, I was bullied everyday, being called ugly, stupid, and other names I’ve now blocked. In Judith Krantz’s world, I could escape to Los Angeles, or to New York, where a better life was within reach, if you worked hard enough and knew the right people. The bad guys never won. They would be defeated. I wanted to rise, to grab my Judith Krantz happy ending.
I’ve never written about real people. In a way, I write Horatio Alger stories for women.
Judith Krantz
My favorite Krantz heroine was I’ll Take Manhattan’s Maxi Amberville. I found the book one bright Saturday morning in February 1987, right when the library opened. It was so new there were no creases on the spine. It still had the new paperback smell, fresh and rich. I took it home then oaded up on Cherry Cokes and See’s candy. I went into my room, then I then read about Maxi Amberville, the spoiled heiress whose father created magazines, but died under mysterious circumstances. She made a bet with her mother: if she can’t turn around one of the magazines, her father’s dynasty will be sold. So she turns Buttons and Bows into B&B, the Cosmo/Vanity Fair magazine we never knew we needed. She saved the day, proving her evil uncle and family members wrong.
I finished the novel that afternoon, stunned. Maxi was my new heroine, the woman I could actually imagine being. I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to turn something ordinary and make it beautiful as Maxi did. Although I did admire Billy, Daisy, and Maggy, I didn’t want to buy a store, I didn’t want to work in advertising, and there was no way I wanted to be a model. I wanted to leave my small town, leave and become someone. I wanted to buy my mother the Colby mansion in Beverly Hills.
I wasn’t impressed with the Dynasty Mansion; I knew it was really Filoli Gardens in Woodside. No, I wanted the mansion in the Dynasty spinoff The Colbys, the big white mansion surrounded by yellow and red roses. Oddly, I never liked the show The Colbys, but that mansion! It had a special gate to get in. There was a circular courtyard surrounded by trees. In the back of the house was a large pool, along with a pool house. It also had a tennis court and horse stables. Okay, I didn’t play tennis and I wasn’t good riding horses. I could learn. I’d replant pink roses instead, maybe daffodils in the winter, sunflowers in the summer/fall. I’d write big fat paperbacks that were sold at the drugstore. I’d never had to worry about money again. Not only would we have the Colby mansion, we would have a New York City Penthouse, and a summer house. I was going to be on the cover of People. My mother wouldn’t have to worry about money again. I always felt as if people were judging us, be it that she worked, or I wasn’t like others my age because of learning disabilities, or we didn’t have much money, or we rented rather than owned. Was this my overactive imagination? Or was it based on truth? I now think a mixture of both. But I had to dream big.
Only the little people have to pay taxes.
Leona Helmsley
It didn’t work out the way I planned it. Part of it was a simple fact: I grew up. My reading interests expanded. I started reading such writers as Ellen Gilchrist, Terry McMillian, Amy Tan, Flannery O’Connor, Anne Tyler, John Steinbeck, Armistead Maupin, Anne Lamott, and Richard Brautigan. I wrote short stories, poems. It took me a long time to graduate college, but I did it. Same with graduate school. I also noticed other things: It was the privileged, the lucky who accomplished huge dreams like the dreams I had.
By then I was working on my memoir about a cold case surrounding a girl buried near my grandparents, a cold case I wrote about that eventually led to an arrest after a DNA match. Yet I still had the same dream: having the Colby house. Never mind it wasn’t for sale. I was going to have that house! Right after graduate school, I had to take a seasonal job to get myself out of debt, leaving no time to work on the memoir or the proposal. I felt like a failure. Why hadn’t I gotten the Colby mansion yet?
“And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.”
Nora Ephron
My sadness about Judith Krantz dying surprised me. Even though she stopped writing years before (She would say in interviews it wasn’t fun anymore) many tributes were written, mostly by women. They mentioned the um, very very vivid sex scenes she wrote in her novels. But the tributes also mentioned her female characters demanding a decent living. They had wonderful best friends. They had beautiful homes. And oh yeah, good sex. I read the tributes and was reminded of Krantz’s background: marrying young, her husband a producer of miniseries. She wrote about what she was obsessed with: sex and shopping. It worked for her.
Then I realized my dreams were eighties’ dreams. Oh, I don’t regret having those dreams. They got me through tough times. But to think I was a failure because I didn’t have a mansion was just not right. I was a successful writer who did the best she could. I helped solve a murder. Why didn’t I give myself credit?
In her book We Are Witches, Ariel Gore quotes astrologer Rob Berezny who wrote: “This is how spells are broken… by burning down the dream house where your childhood keeps repeating yourself.” Gore then drew a picture of the home she grew up in, then burned it.
For fun, I looked up the Colby mansion. It was located in Beverly Hills, last sold for 14.1 million dollars. Still beautiful. I couldn’t burn it down. But I did think of Shawn Colvin’s lyrics from the song “Sunny Came Home”:
Get the kids and bring a sweater
Dry is good and wind is better
Count the years, you always knew it
Strike a match, go on and do it.
In my head, I strike the match. I burn the judgments I made about myself, the judgment I felt from others. It is a controlled fire that won’t spread. I count the years. I move on.
