That same reviewer took issue with Sandy’s preoccupation with sex, summoning an accusation that had followed Judy since Forever—that she was intentionally using saucy scenes to sell books. “Sandy is a woman on the prowl, searching for Deep Meaning,” Isaacs wrote. “But since even a computer knows that profundity is less marketable than sexuality, Sandy Pressman’s search is more genital than cerebral.” Ouch!
In fact, even before Wifey, Judy had earned a new nickname in the press: “The Jacqueline Susann of Children’s Literature.” Newsday attributed it to a librarian in Garden City, New York, who was trying to make sense of Blume’s unmatched popularity among young book borrowers. People magazine used the phrase as part of the headline for a splashy feature on Blume, illustrated with photos of the forty-year-old author posing in a lacy camisole. “I cringe, even today, thinking of that article,” Blume wrote in 2004.
People’s story emphasized Blume’s slender and youthful appearance—“At 5’4” and 100 pounds (‘103 on a fat day’), wearing T-shirt and jeans, Judy is always mistaken for a daughter when she answers the door”—as well as her cozy life of “family skiing, Scrabble and horseplay.” By then, Wifey was a hit, and she and Tom had moved from Los Alamos to nearby Santa Fe, which was considerably more cosmopolitan. There, Judy settled in a bit, embracing Southwestern style: she lined the adobo house with colorful Navajo rugs and started wearing chunky silver jewelry. Tom commuted to Los Alamos, which was just over thirty miles away.
The move had been an attempt to save the marriage, but it hadn’t worked. Judy and Tom still weren’t getting along. They tried putting on a happy face for the media, letting photographers into their home to snap pictures of them with Judy’s kids and the family cat, a fluffy calico named Chanelle. “We have a very nice family life,” Blume told the Chicago Tribune in 1978. “I think kids are happy at home if they are living with people who are nice to each other and things are friendly and calm.”
The People writer tried to position Blume’s second marriage as her personal triumph, but a trickle of its challenges spilled through. “There is a problem for Judy in mixing family life and the long commute back to New York where her work really is,” Kitchens told the reporter, in a rare interview. “They have to be cut apart, or one encroaches. Either role is demanding: the public would love to consume her, and of course, the family would too. There will always be a conflict.”
And the undertow of her career was getting even stronger. Wifey made the New York Times bestseller list; by November 1979, there were a reported three million copies of the paperback in print. Judy had liberated herself artistically and financially. Now if only she could free herself from being a wife.
She was concerned about her reputation, and her mother. She was especially worried about how another divorce would affect her kids. She had hoped to hold out until Randy and Larry went off to college, so at least they’d no longer be living at home when it happened. But she couldn’t do it. “After three-and-a-half very painful years my second husband and I finally divorced,” Blume wrote in Letters to Judy. “We had made a terrible mistake… I don’t think we could have survived two more years together. Finally, I made the decision to take control of my own life.”
But taking control wasn’t easy. Unlike with her first divorce, Judy knew exactly how another marital fissure would destabilize Randy and Larry. They’d never really bonded with Tom and vice versa, so for them, losing him wasn’t such a big deal. However, moving again would be a huge disruption. Although she preferred New York and the kids spent their summers there with their father, she decided to stay in Santa Fe for the time being so they wouldn’t have to switch schools yet again. Everything felt unmanageable and Judy’s guilt, for putting her family in this situation, was like a boulder she carted around, day in and day out. “I think divorce is a tragedy, traumatic and horribly painful for everybody,” she told the Chicago Tribune a few years later, in 1985.
That perspective made its way into Just as Long as We’re Together, a middle grade novel that Blume published in 1987. It covers similar ground as It’s Not the End of the World, but this time, the breakup is messier and it takes more than her friendships to get Stephanie Hirsch, the seventh grader at the heart of the story, to feel better about it. She and her younger brother, Bruce, both experience difficulties as a result of their parents’ separation. Bruce, age ten, suffers from ever-worsening nightmares about nuclear war. Stephanie starts binge eating, which causes bullies in her class to dub her El Chunko. Her self-esteem takes a hit. One night, she looks at herself in the mirror after a bath. “My breasts were growing or else they were just fat. It was hard to tell,” Stephanie observes. “Maybe if I lost weight, I’d lose them, too. My glutes were pretty disgusting. When I jumped up and down they shook. The hair down there, my pubic hair, was growing thicker. It was much darker than the hair on my head.”
The one-two punch of family drama and puberty propels Stephanie into a surly depression. She’s nasty to her father’s new girlfriend, Iris. She gets into fights with her friends. She’s angry with her parents for keeping her and Bruce in the dark about their relationship status. She’s ready to know if they’re breaking up—or not. “I hate not knowing what’s going to happen!” Stephanie yells at her mom after finding out her dad is moving back from Los Angeles, leaving Iris behind and taking an apartment close by, in New York. “I’d almost rather know you’re getting a divorce. I want it to be settled one way or the other so I can get used to the idea, so I can stop thinking about it.”
Just as Long as We’re Together suggests divorce is never tidy. At the end of the book, we still don’t know what’s going to happen between Stephanie’s parents. Stephanie’s own “breakup”—a nearly two-month-long, silent treatment standoff with her lifelong best friend, Rachel Robinson—gets resolved when the two of them finally swallow their pride and talk it out. Bruce’s nightmares stop, too, not because things with the adult Hirsches improve, but because he wins second place in a “Kids for Peace” poster contest and realizes he’s not the only person his age sitting up at night scared about nuclear weapons. The metaphor is easy to decipher. Divorce sets off a bomb in a family. Kids need the comfort of other survivors.
No matter what was going on in her personal life, Judy could take solace in one thing: that as an author, she genuinely connected with children. Her young readers had begun writing her letters to tell her so. First, just a few arrived; then they came in by the hundreds. By the mid-1980s, when she published Letters to Judy, she was receiving almost two thousand fan letters a month, all carefully handwritten and filled with children’s deepest secrets, questions, and confessions.
They wrote about everything from friendships, to puberty, to arguments with their teachers and parents. Some of them reached out with darker problems. Most of the kids who contacted Judy received a mailer in return, complete with a signed black-and-white headshot and some jovial family photos: Randy smiling while her mom eats an ice cream cone; a floppy-haired Larry posing with Judy in front of a bus. It came with a cheery note typed on the back. “I wish I could write to you individually but then I would never have time to write another book,” the message said. “The letters I receive from young readers are very important to me and the highlight of my day is sitting down to read my mail. Because writing is such lonely work, and I am really a people person, your letters remind me that I’m not alone,” it went on, before offering up some breezy biographical details.
In fact, Judy did write back personal notes to a handful of her young correspondents, particularly those who shared they were suicidal or victims of incest or other physical abuse. She maintained an epistolary relationship with some of these children for years on end, becoming something of a lifeline for them. Letters to Judy is a mixture of memoir and samples of all kinds of letters. “Could you sort of be a second mother to me and tell me the facts of life?” an eleven-year-old named Camille wrote her after sharing that she felt she couldn’t ask her own mom. A fifteen-year-old named Alisa sent Judy a letter about her battles with alcohol abuse, obesity, and depression. “Besides family and doctors you are the only person I’ve ever told this to,” Alisa admitted. “You seem to understand teenagers so much that I figure you’d understand my problems.”
Judy had become a mother figure to an entire country’s worth of children, which was ironic, because at home she was struggling to raise her own pair of angry, rebellious teenagers. Randy and Larry didn’t have the luxury of seeing their mom as some magnanimous, all-knowing guru. “With her own children, Judy Blume concedes, she’s less a heroine than she is with all those other people’s kids who write to her,” Joyce Maynard wrote in the New York Times. “It can’t always be easy, having for your mother this national expert on the private, and often sexual, feelings of teen-agers,” she continued, with Randy tersely confirming: “Sometimes Judy and I disagree.”
The entire world, it seemed, needed Judy’s advice, yet her own kids wouldn’t come to her, though at times their unhappiness was obvious. “During a particularly rough time for our family my daughter, Randy, confessed to someone else that she wasn’t telling me the truth about how she was feeling because she sensed that I only wanted to hear that everything was wonderful,” Judy wrote in Letters to Judy. “Well, everything wasn’t wonderful and Randy found a way to let me know—by acting out her feelings.”
By the late 1970s, Judy was a twice-divorced single mother stuck in a Southwestern city so that her children could graduate high school. She was also one of the hottest authors of her generation. Everything wasn’t wonderful, but some things were. And even Judy couldn’t deny that after four decades of people-pleasing, she was finally letting go.
Chapter Seventeen Fame
“One day, there’s going to be Judy Blume tampons.”
On the night of Friday, January 6, 1978, Judy became TV-movie famous.
The screen adaptation of Forever aired on CBS. Set in idyllic San Francisco instead of the East Coast suburbs, the cinematic version otherwise hewed closely to the novel: high school seniors Katherine Danziger and Michael Wagner meet at a party and spend the months leading up to graduation falling head over heels in love. Katherine was played by Stephanie Zimbalist, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of Efrem Zimbalist Jr., a sixties-era small-screen star who helmed the detective shows 77 Sunset Strip and The FBI. A then-unknown actor, a Bay Area native named Dean Butler, played Michael.
Butler, at the time a handsome, blond twenty-one-year-old, wasn’t familiar with Blume or her books when he got the script. But once Forever was on his radar he picked up a copy of the novel. “The book struck me as incredibly candid,” he said. “I mean, one of the big deals in the book was what Michael’s name for his male anatomy was. I had never seen anything like that at twenty-one.” He approved of the sequence where Katherine went to get a prescription for birth control. “My mother was on the board of directors of Planned Parenthood in the Bay Area. So I was completely in sync with that idea.”
He and Zimbalist “felt safe with each other,” Butler said, which was important because the script featured its fair share of love scenes. Unlike Blume’s book, the movie was cautious around its presentation of teen sex and sparing in its language—this was for national television, after all. Butler and Zimbalist’s Michael and Katherine engage in breathy, dimly lit, horizontal makeout sessions and exchange snippets of just-vague-enough dialogue.
“Oh come on,” Michael says in an early sequence.
Katherine shakes her head no.
“Why not?” he goes on.
“Not yet,” she answers.
Just like in Blume’s book, Michael and Katherine are “good” kids: they’re both college-bound and culturally fluent, bonding over Thoreau and Virginia Woolf. Their dates are sweet and age appropriate: dusky walks on the beach and goofing around with épées at a Renaissance Fair. Butler said the casting had a lot to do with how the young lovers come across on screen. Zimbalist—a lithe and wholesomely pretty brunette with thick, waist-long hair—“radiates a person with a good head on her shoulders,” Butler explained. “And so, this wasn’t some hot young teenager looking to go out and score. Stephanie’s Katherine was in love and she wanted to do the right thing.”
Butler said the set of Forever was comfortable with the exception of one awkward moment around the night Katherine loses her virginity to Michael. The castmates were shooting in a hot tub, with Zimbalist wearing a nude bandeau so that it looked like she was naked under the water. The music cue was “Right Time of the Night” by Jennifer Warnes—then a hit song with the lyrics It’s the right time of the night / For making love—“So you sort of know what’s going to happen there,” Butler said. But Butler recalled that one producer suggested shooting “an alternate version” of the scene for potential release in Europe, where Zimbalist would be topless (Blume was not involved in the making of the film and was not on set). Despite the pressure of being a young woman surrounded by a crew full of men, Zimbalist refused, Butler said. “She was resolute about that,” he remembered. “That’s the only time that I really recall that there was a moment where this could have gone beyond what was going to be acceptable for television.”
The final cut was prime time–friendly, with Katherine’s eventual sexual awakening communicated in subtle, clever ways. On prom night, she surprises Michael by slipping off her dress and climbing under the sheets with a red flower, which she had been wearing in her hair, brandished in her mouth. The tone of the scene is silly, loving. Yes, the couple still breaks up in the end, but Butler’s Michael handles it better than Blume’s original character. Their final encounter in town, before they both head off for college, is more positive than awkward. The movie makes it clear that they’ve both learned something important from the experience.
Just like in the book, Katherine is surrounded by strong female role models. Her mother, played by Judy Brock, doesn’t flinch when Katherine starts asking her questions about sex. However, in a later scene, she’s firm about the fact that she doesn’t approve of her daughter adjusting her college plans to stay closer to Michael. “I see a bright young girl with a full life ahead of her,” she explains patiently. “And she’s rearranging it to follow a man around.”
Katherine’s grandmother, played by Romanian actress Erika Chambliss, ultimately supplies the film’s intended takeaway in a scene between her and Katherine, in which Katherine expresses regret about the breakup. “You didn’t ruin anything,” her grandmother reassures her. “You found out something about yourself. About men. About life. Think how much more you’ll know the next time. You’ll be a woman of the world.”
In the language of the movie, a woman of the world isn’t a literal traveler. She’s taking in the landscape—as Katherine and her grandmother are at that moment—with kind and intelligent eyes, sharpened by her experiences. She’s open to love, but responsible with her heart and her body. She’s strong enough to walk herself into Planned Parenthood, but still soft with the people she keeps closest to her.
Judy loved the adaptation—of course she did! She got to see her progressive ideas about young men and women pumped out into people’s living rooms by way of the small screen. Unlike the literary Michael, the movie’s male protagonist ultimately forgives Katherine for breaking up with him, proving that he was worthy of her all along. And Butler said he enjoyed every minute of filming it. The movie didn’t change his life but it opened doors in the industry, and he nabbed a starring role on Little House on the Prairie less than a year later. He said no one stopped him on the street after Forever premiered, but his dad’s reaction to seeing it was particularly memorable.
“I remember my father looking at me afterwards and saying, ‘Boy, I wish I had your job,’ ” he said.
When it came to pop culture in 1978, there was very little that felt off-limits. That year the film Pretty Baby, which serves up a doe-eyed eleven-year-old Brooke Shields as a child prostitute on an actual platter, landed in theaters. The same spring, audiences flocked to see Paul Mazursky’s An Unmarried Woman, where a newly divorced woman named Erica, played by Jill Clayburgh, discovers her inner strength through a series of sexual and romantic affairs. National Lampoon’s manic, raunchy campus comedy Animal House commanded rave reviews from serious critics including Roger Ebert and Frank Rich. Disco—glittering, sticky, breathless, gender-bending—was having an honest-to-God moment all over the country.
Quickly, Judy’s face and name got aligned with this version of America, where sexuality came out of hiding to stay. But outside of movie theaters and nightclubs and beyond magazine covers, a new conservative movement was bubbling. Phyllis Schlafly, a Missouri-based mother of six and attention-grabbing anti-feminist activist, had already founded the Eagle Forum, a political interest group that promoted “traditional” family values. Prominent Baptist minister Jerry Falwell Sr. had been traveling the country for years promoting his fundamentalist vision of Christianity, which was anti-abortion, anti-gay, and anti–premarital sex. And in California, a charismatic former actor turned politician had made a name for himself on a national stage as a popular governor. Ronald Reagan helmed the Golden State for two terms, from 1967 to 1975. In that time, he reneged on his campaign promise to cut taxes—the state still had a deep bench of Democratic elected officials in place—but made it known that he wished to slash spending on public education and welfare. Reagan also made a number of new appointments to the state board of education, resulting in a bid to downplay the teaching of evolution in schools, requiring that Darwinism was always described in the classroom as a theory, not a fact, and that the religiously inflected idea of Creationism was given equal credibility.
Blume, still living in Santa Fe, wasn’t terribly burdened by any of this. The burgeoning Religious Right still seemed fringe, nothing that she and her friends would have to take very seriously. Instead, she was working on an emotional new young adult novel, which she’d been calling “After the Sunset.” It was about a fifteen-year-old girl living in Atlantic City when her beloved father is shot to death in a robbery at his 7-Eleven. A mourning Davis “Davey” Wexler then moves with her mother and younger brother to Los Alamos, New Mexico, where her aunt and uncle live. The book eventually got renamed Tiger Eyes.
Judy was also writing Superfudge, the long-awaited sequel to Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing. In 1972, she’d published Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, but that was more of a spin-off, centering on Peter’s neighbor and often classroom rival Sheila Tubman. The book was well received but it didn’t satisfy the hunger for a new story about the brothers Hatcher. Over the years, she had reached for another Fudge-focused storyline, but nothing persuaded her to sit down at her typewriter.
Suddenly, it hit her one day in the shower: the Hatchers should have another baby! And they’d leave the city for a while, testing out suburban life by renting a house in Princeton. Superfudge is even sillier than Tales, and introduces another zany animal plot when Fudge gets a French-speaking mynah bird named Uncle Feather. The bird’s side-splitting, kid-pleasing catchphrase is “Bonjour, stupid!” Of course, he has a knack for saying it at inappropriate times. “I love to make kids laugh, and I laugh a lot myself when I’m writing,” Blume told Newsday in 1980. “And so I’d be sitting there typing away [at Superfudge] and laughing my head off.”
