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- [00:07]
A
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm David Fuerst in for Alison Stewart. Coming up later this hour, we'll hear from producers Simon Close and Jordan Loff, who embarked upon a scheme that caused so much arguing in the office that we had to hear them talk about it on the air. What have we done? But first, here's Alison's full bio conversation with author Mark Oppenheimer.
- [00:36]
B
Today is the last day of the full bio series. About the book Judy Blume, A Life. It was written by Mark Oppenheimer. After a career as a leading writer for children and young adults, Judy Blume decided it was time to write her first book for adult readers. She wrote four in total, One Wifey, Smart Women, Summer Sisters. And in the unlikely event, here's Bloom answering a question on WNYC about writing for children versus adults. I don't think there's any difference in writing for kids or writing for adults. It's horrible either way. I mean, it's so difficult either way. And it's always a question of getting the voice. So I don't, I don't think that it bleeds through. I don't know. I mean, I like to put young characters in books for adult readers. I do like that. And I think some of my best teen characters, I would say my best teen characters are actually in the books that I've written for adults. While she had success with her books, she had a harder time with the media, from the days of People magazine to Twitter, as you'll hear. But as her fans will attest to, their relationship with her didn't change. Here's our final installment, a full bio with Mark Oppenheimer, author of Judy A Life. Judy Blume was divorced in 1975 from John Bloom. And then she had a very tumultuous relationship with her second husband. You note that sometimes she sort of glosses over him in interviews. You know, even though she terminated two pregnancies during this marriage, what was wrong with this union with Tom Kitchens?
- [02:28]
A
What was right with was not a wise decision. She would be the first to say, as her marriage to John Bloom was coming apart in the early 70s, early to mid-70s. At one point she was on a flight, I think she was flying from Colorado back to New Jersey, maybe stop, stopped in Omaha. I forget she was flying somewhere in America. It's in the book. It's in my book. And she met on her aisle, I think, I think she was seated and then her kids. And then on the other side of her kids maybe was Tom Kitchens. And they struck up a conversation. And he was this sort of roguishly handsome, non Jewish, Southern Baptist, not anymore, but raised Christian in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Midwestern or Southern or frontier physicist. He was sort of everything John Bloom wasn't. John Bloom was sort of, you know, coastal bookish Jewish lawyer and this guy's heartland gentile scientist man who makes stuff happen. And they struck up this flirtation. They exchanged addresses. And then pretty soon thereafter, Judy was separated from John Bloom. Tom Kitchens was in Washington at the time. Judy was in New Jersey. They struck up an affair, and pretty quickly she moved to England to be with him. Taking her kids out of school and in New Jersey, going to London. They get married in London. And almost from the start, she knew that it was a mistake. He was possessive. He wasn't particularly nice to her children. They didn't have a great deal in common. She did follow him back to the States. A few months later, they settled in New Mexico so he could work at Los Alamos Laboratories. He made a perfunctory effort to be a stepdad to Larry to Judy's son. But it was kind of a mess from the start, and the marriage broke up within a couple years.
- [04:12]
B
Her third marriage seemed to have magic. What made Judy and George Cooper a good couple?
- [04:21]
A
Fate. You know, Judy and George are a love match. You can tell when you're around them. You can tell in the way that they speak warmly of each other. You can tell in the way that they are protective of each other. And it was clear from the very beginning it could have gone wrong. I mean, Judy went on a blind date with this guy, George Cooper, not too long after her divorce or separation from Tom Kitchens. And they went out one night. And then on their second date, a night or two later, he stayed over and he pretty much never left. And when Judy's daughter Randy, came home from college at Wesleyan, this new guy is living there, George Cooper's living there. And there's a great scene where she says something about, like, you know, at. At the. At the dinner table where Randy says, you know, I guess this guy here is, you know, part of the. The man of the Month Club. And George says, says, yes, but I'm the primary selection. The other men were alternate selections. And so kind of diffuses the whole thing. People who don't remember the Book of the Month Club won't. Won't get that. But it was. It was a witty comment, first for 1979 or whatever. And anyway, so it could have. I mean, here she slid into another relationship with Someone who, let's be honest, she barely knew. But, but this one really worked out. They just were well suited to each other. They adore each other. He was a part time professor at Columbia Law School. He had this sweet deal that he'd arranged where he was a fully tenured professor, but he worked only half time, so he was able to be out in New Mexico a lot. They eventually settled back in New York City and he ended up quitting and has had a lot of projects, but among them has been, you know, managing her finances, being the in house lawyer, accountant, consiliary consultants, you name it.
- [06:02]
B
When did Judy Blume decide to write books for an adult audience?
- [06:09]
A
The first of these was Wifey, which she began drafting in I think Santa Fe. So, you know, we're talking 77 or 78, and she was in this marriage to Tom Kitchens. But really Wifey is the story of the loose, the fictionalized story of aspects of her marriage to John Bloom. There's a lot in it that is completely fictional, but in terms of it being a Jewish couple in the eastern suburbs with children, you know, fairly long term marriage that's having struggles. It's really the story of her and John Bloom, not at all the story of her and Tom Kitchens out west. And so she, she begins drafting it in Santa Fe and her agent and her editor and everyone in New York publishing who's advising her says, this is not the book for you. I mean, it's an adult novel. It's very, very smutty. A lot of sex, a lot of very graphic sex. There were people who advised her to publish it under a pseudonym, said if Judy Blume writes this book, you'll never be taken seriously as a children's writer again. But she forges ahead and she publishes it. She does make some concessions. There's at least one scene that's too obscene for, even for, for her. In the end, she's a public radio,
- [07:28]
B
you have to read about it.
- [07:29]
A
And for public radio, you'll have to read about it in the book. But it's really something it did. My, I will say my eyes literally bulged when I, when I read about this scene or when she told me about the scene that had been cut and, you know, and then it's published and it got a lot of attention and it sold very, very well. It was not a critical smash. I would say the reviews were mixed. I think that it's in some ways a better book than it was given credit for, but it was part of a genre of, you know, wives in Repressed marriages, Breaking Free that you saw a number of in the 1970s, of course, Erica Jones, Fear of Flying being the most famous.
- [08:06]
B
After that book, there was a profile in People magazine, which was huge in 1978, to get a huge profile in People magazine. And it basically showed her, as I think, as you wrote, like a sex kitten, which is how she dressed in it, sort of coquettishly. What did Judy Blume hope would happen with that article? And how did that article follow her?
- [08:33]
A
Yeah, one thing to understand about People magazine at this point is it had only debuted a few years earlier. I think the first issue was right around the time I was born, in 1974. I think Mia Farrow was on the first cover and it was a huge smash success. It was this magazine that combined celebrity coverage with stories about everyday people, which now seems obvious, but it had always been either or before. And they just had a kind of new formula. And millions of people got People magazine. I got People magazine. Growing up, my parents always got People magazine, along with the New York Review of Books and the Sunday New York Times and all the fancy stuff. The other thing to know is the articles were longer. I mean, now it's a lot of photos with some cut lines and paragraphs here and there, but this is like a five or six page spread with a lot of text. This was. This felt more like a New Yorker profile. And yes, the, the photographs are a bit much. I mean, in. In at least one, she's posed in a sort of black lace teddy on her bed. In another one, her husband Tom is swinging her around. And the quote that goes with that photograph is something like, we're going to try all of the positions. Here we are in position number 35 or something. And I don't know what Judy was thinking. She told me that the photographer, Joan Neary. Judy said that Joan Neary suggested it. And Joan said to me, how would I have known that she had lingerie in her closet? Right. Like, I. I didn't. It had to have been her idea, not mine. The photographer doesn't come over and know what kind of clothes the person has. So I think Judy in some ways has run from it a little bit. Obviously it was a different time. I mean, for one thing, the article was pretending that her marriage was strong. This was the only article that ever really showed Tom Kitchens, because he came and went very quickly. But here she was play acting that she had a good marriage and that everything was good. So she was in a little bit of denial. She was running from one life Heading towards another one and publishing a novel that was turning everything upside down. So I think what you see is this woman in kind of painful transition. And I'm, I, I would bet that it's a hard piece for her to look back on.
- [10:37]
B
My guest is Mark Oppenheimer. We're talking about his book Judy A Life. It's our choice for full bio. This was something that was interesting in the book. Judy Blume was asked if she would ever write a book about aids and she said it was unlikely. And given the subjects that Judy touched on in her children's books, why wouldn't she write about something that was culturally important? Even in her adult books, Judy tended
- [11:06]
A
to write what she knew, which I totally respect. Every writer has to know what they're good at. And there are writers who write about completely invented worlds that have nothing to do with what they know, right? There are writers who write about wizards and aliens and dimensions in which, you know, there's no gravity. And they, their books take place entirely on the plane of imagination and unreality. And then there are writers, brilliant ones, who write pretty close to the ground that they've walked on. Saul Bellow, Nobel Prize winning Saul Bellow, you know, wrote about intellectuals in Chicago because that's what he was. Philip Roth wrote a lot about New Jersey and Jews in New Jersey because that's what he knew. Jonathan Franzen tends to write about Gentiles in the Midwest. That doesn't mean they're autobiographically writing. It just means they're drawing details from stuff that they know and that they have a certain confidence in and, and, and a certain authority with. And that was Judy. You know, Judy did not write about. Well, I mean, once in a while she made Tony Miglione, you know, an Italian Catholic, a Jersey Catholic, as opposed to a Jersey Jew. And then again, maybe I won't. But that's about as far as she would stray. Otherwise. Her protagonists were usually girls from middle class families in towns that resembled more or less the updated versions of what she'd grown up with. You know, she, she grew up in the 40s and she was usually, she never, except for one book, never wrote the 40s. She wrote the 70s or 80s. But otherwise the details were stuff that she knew about. And I think she felt that writing about AIDS would just take her too far afield, that she'd get something wrong. And she thought better to not write about it than to, to take a swing and a miss.
- [12:50]
B
One of the interesting things in the book, and this may be because I'm a pseudo writer. It was how Judy Blume had to find a new agent in 1996. Her agent unfortunately had lung cancer and Judy put together a 10 page sort of manifesto of what she wanted in a book. Agent. What did she want from an agent this far in her career?
- [13:18]
A
That was really tough for her. She had this agent, Claire Smith, who had been with her for quite a while and they adored each other and they had always kind of had this implicit promise that, you know, Judy would keep writing as long as Claire was alive and Claire would stay alive as long as Judy was writing and that they would just see out their careers together. And now Claire had to go and die on her. And I think Judy didn't know what she wanted. What she wanted was Claire, and Claire wasn't coming back. So Judy set out to basically speed date a lot of potential agents, which is something that a lot of us writers know. You know, we have an agent and we break up with the agent or the agent drops us, or we drop them and you look for the next person. It's not unlike looking for the next doctor, right? Looking for the next dentist or primary care physician or whatever. You try a few, you hope something clicks. She talked to some of the agents who worked at the agency Claire had been with and ultimately decided none of them was for her. She talked to agents at big agencies, small boutique agencies and so forth and so on. And she really was just on a kind of hunt and. And one got gets the sense almost she was killing time. Like she was going to keep interviewing them, hoping that somebody would remind her of Claire Smith, which no one did. At one point she decided not to go with the now fairly famous agent, Molly Friedrich, because Molly Friedrich had shown up smelling of cigarette smoke, right? And, and Judy was just. Now Claire had smoked. And I think Judy didn't want another agent who was going to risk lung cancer. And she didn't like the smell. And you know, Molly said to me, like, I would have quit if I thought that was the thing. Like, so, you know, she was, she was tough to please. Very understandably so, because the agent's an important person in a. Especially with a career that big. So she eventually found. Found the next person. But it was, it was a big chapter and I kept that in because I think for people, first of all, I think it's fun and interesting, gossipy, super interesting. Also for anyone who's ever wondered about the publishing business and wanted to demystify it, whether because you're an aspiring writer or just because you wonder how does you know, how does a bill become a law, so to speak? How does a writer become a published author? This is the stuff of it and it's really interesting. And I just thought people would want to know.
- [15:33]
B
What did Judy Blume think when Hollywood started to pursue her and the rights to her works?
- [15:39]
A
Not surprisingly, Judy was a hot property from almost the beginning. There are people who wanted to make movies out of her books. There were also people who wanted to do all sorts of schlocky merchandise with her books. One of the things I write about in my biography of Judy is how many ridiculous offers she got from people who wanted to license the rights to Margaret from Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. People who wanted to make Margaret themed underwear. People. I think one of the jeans companies, it might have been Jordache, wanted to work with Judy to come up with a line of jeans. There were people who wanted to make a Judy Bloom board game, sort of like a Game of Life or Monopoly, but. But with a Judy Bloom theme. So, you know, the. The joke was sort of, you know, you go three spaces forward, then you get your period, have to go two spaces back. Like you get. You go up to the next bra size, go five spaces forward. You know, really hokey stuff. And she was very, very protective of her characters. She never merchandised any of them. There's no. There's no Judy Blume merch out there. And you can imagine how much money she could have made from that. So when Hollywood would knock on her door, she was similarly protective. She wanted a role in any project. She wanted to make sure they did a good job. A lot of projects started but never got off the ground. A lot of things were options but never got made. And that's par for the course. Certain books went farther along the road toward being made into movies. There were at least a couple scripts for Dini that got written by fairly prominent screenwriters that never got turned into a movie. So it was a frustrating relationship. Then the TV show that they made of Fudge was one that she didn't like very much and she felt a little bit ill treated by. So it was tough for me. The sort of missed opportunity, the one that breaks my heart, is that she did once take a meeting with Michael Price and Charles Strauss, who were the original director and writer of the musical Annie. And they talked about turning one of her books into a musical that presumably would have gone onto Broadway if it were good. I mean, this is Charles Strauss. Annie was the biggest hit in the land when they met. And Nobody followed up. You know, Michael Price told me, we took that meeting. I vaguely remember it. And I think we all dropped the ball. And I do have this kind of place in my heart for the unmade musical that would have been based on a Judy Blue novel and written by the creator of the musical Annie. How great that would have been.
- [18:09]
B
My guest is Mark Oppenheimer. The name of his book is Judy Bloom, A Life. It's our choice for full bio. I found it very interesting that Judy Blume was sort of an early adopter of the web, starting early with aol. Why did this make sense to you?
- [18:27]
A
Well, Judy was always interested in what the kids were doing. She was always interested in youth culture. A lot of her ideas came from her own childhood. The line in Margaret, we must, we must, we must increase our bust. This famous line came directly from this quartet of friends that Judy had the preteen kittens, who in the book became the preteen sensations. So she was always drawing on her own childhood for this and that, and she would draw on her children's lives. Blubber is based on a story that her daughter Randy told her about school. Super Fudge is loosely based on Larry. So she's attentive to children and she was always attentive to what their culture was giving them and what they were doing in the culture. So when AOL came along, it's not surprising that she was curious about email, about websites. She was also married by this point to George, who is a. An inveterate tinkerer, handyman, self taught everything. And he figured out how to hack together a website for her very, very early on. And to this day, if you go to judybloom.com I love how retro it feels. I mean, surely they could update it and make it all flashy and zippy. And I don't even know that it's George who still is doing the upkeep though he might be. But, but the spirit of her on the web is the spirit of this writer and her supportive husband, her kind of partner in crime, sitting down and saying, what'll it take to get on the web? And then AOL comes knocking. And in their early years, you and I will both remember, they were doing all these chat rooms where you could chat with certain celebrities. You know, they pull in, you know, Hillary Rodham Clinton for, you know, for a little chat, you know, join this chat room at 8pm and ask questions of Oprah or Hillary or whatever. And. And so they asked Judy to be one of their kind of web web celebrities. And they paired her. At one point, they had this program where they were pairing celebrities with. With. With teenagers, and they would correspond using AOL just to prove that AOL was a good method of communication. So she is this very sort of interesting figure in the early web. And of course, she has. She has stuck to it. And it became the vehicle through which her fans write to her. I mean, she was getting at 1.2 thousand letters a month in the mail. And once email becomes a thing, all of a sudden she's not getting sacks and sacks of US Postal mail anymore, but it's all coming through this portal. So it was a very good tool for her.
- [20:54]
B
It's interesting, though, she got in kind of a nasty situation when Twitter was. Twitter, kind of not realizing kind of what it was about. She responded to a post by a transphobic author. I'm curious, what did Judy miss about the kind of media attention that can happen to you in 2018?
- [21:16]
A
Well, that. That was a really interesting thing. She was actually defending J.K. rowling from Twitter mobs and making the point that no matter what one thinks of one's political views, nobody should be attacked, shamed, mobbed on Twitter. That basically she was making an argument for decency and civility. And the British newspaper that had done that interview with her then ran it under the headline, a headline that said something like, you know, Judy Bloom, colon, I'm 100% with J.K. rowling. And understandably, a lot of people felt that that meant that Judy was aligning her view of trans politics with J.K. rowling's. And that, as you suggested, was, was, and is very controversial. And I think so. Judy, to begin, probably didn't understand how controversial it would be to say anything about J.K. rowling. And she might have demurred and not talked about it with the journalist who was profiling her, who was interviewing her. If she had been more thoughtful about that and wanted to stay out of the news a bit at a time when she was doing interviews to promote the movie of Are you there, God? It's me, Margaret. Right. She wasn't trying to just sort of talk generally about her politics. She really wanted to stay on message. And then she also really was not up to date on all the charges and countercharges against J.K. rowling, and ultimately felt that she'd been somewhat misled by certain things that she had read and that she probably should have read a little more deeply. I don't think there are any heroes or villains, by the way, in this particular exchange, I Think you put it exactly right, which is that, if anything, it showed a way in which she was perhaps a little bit out of her depth in understanding the culture of the Web.
- [23:05]
B
Judy Blume is now in her 80s and she runs a nonprofit bookstore in Florida. We've seen Forever was the basis for a Netflix series. There was a prime video documentary, Judy Bloom Forever. And now this book. And you write in your epilogue. I surely have not captured the amount of emotional energy Judy has spent worrying about the mental health of young people who are. Who have written to her. Why does she care so much for young people?
- [23:36]
A
For one thing, Judy is by nature a nurturer. She always liked children. She liked being a mom to her own children. She loved being a grandmother when her daughter had a son. And she was an attentive and nurturing grandma. So it was. She was already primed, I think, to feel this compassion and sympathy for children, which, by the way, is not true of all children's authors. Right? I mean, they. Roald Dahl famously, you know, was not necessarily a warm. A warm, cuddly, fuzzy person. But Judy was, when it came to children and is. And then she was, through her literature, was thrust into a role that I don't think she ever expected, which is that a lot of young people felt that she knew them, that because Judy's characters felt so relatable and she was creating these surrogate friends for millions of, you know, 8, 9, 10, 11 year old boys and girls. Those boys and girls often felt the creator of Margaret or Fudge or Deanie would understand me better than my own mom or dad, whom I am right now in conflict with. So they would write to her asking for advice about sexuality, about bullying at school, about their weight, you name it. And she took that responsibility very seriously. At one point, she sought therapy because she was concerned that she was getting too wrapped up in the problems of these thousands of young people whose problems, of course, she could not solve. But that didn't stop her from trying. There are letters in her archive in which she's writing to college deans saying, I've been getting a letter from a freshman at your college who I'm concerned is depressed or suicidal. Do you know about this? At one point, she was in touch with AOL because one of the kids who was writing to her via AOL had some very worrisome problems going on in their life. And. And so Judy was hoping that AOL could either track down this kid who I think was in a foreign country, or could maybe alert somebody in that child's locality. I mean, she went to pretty extreme lengths in some cases to help these kids. And how could she not? I mean, she felt they're reaching out to me. So putting up boundaries and carving out her own space, both physically but also psychologically, was an ongoing challenge for her.
- [25:45]
B
Is there anything in Judy Blume a life that I haven't touched on that you wanted to get to?
- [25:51]
A
Oh, gosh. I mean, we've touched on so much. I think that. I think that my favorite part of the book is those high school years where she was at this girl's high and found it so empowering to be at Batten High School, you know, where the, where the clubs were all run by girls, where the automotive club was run by girls, where they were reading novels together, where she had this incredibly intellectual group of friends who would call each other with excitement when a new short story by Salinger ran in the New Yorker. I mean, they were, they were really smart and they were unashamed to be smart. And they didn't feel that they had to perform for boys in part because there were no boys there. So even though she loved boys and very much had boyfriends, wanted them, it was excited to get married and, and was in some ways a kind of, you know, typical stereotypical, you know, popular, perky girl at the time. She also had this space at her single sex high school to be so intellectually free and to be so smart. And to me, that, that chapter in the book, I think is just something that I hope everyone, certainly my four daughters, but really everyone of any sex will read.
- [27:03]
B
Would Judy Blume say she's a feminist?
- [27:06]
A
100%. Oh, yes, Judy. Judy might not have said that in 1960, she wasn't among the earliest of the second wave, but when that first copy of Ms. Magazine slipped through the slot in her mail door in suburban Jersey. And remember, the first issue of Ms. Magazine was an insert as a special edition of New York magazine. So if you subscribe to New York, you got an issue of Ms. You got the premier issue, whether you thought of yourself as a feminist or not. And from the moment that arrived and she started reading it, she knew that she was a feminist. And she's never shied away from that label.
- [27:43]
B
The name of the book is Judy A Life. It is by Mark Oppenheimer. Mark, thank you for giving us so much time today.
- [27:50]
A
It's been a real honor and a treat. Thanks for having me.
- [27:53]
B
Thanks again to Mark Oppenheimer. You can read so much more in his book, Judy A Life Full Bio was produced by Jordan Loff, engineered by Shana Sangstock, and written by me.