When she was 14, Judith Krantz persuaded her dentist to take off her braces, temporarily, then went home and put on a gray suit, black suede medium-height heels and her mother’s fur jacket. It was 1942, so her look wasn’t unusual, although her mother’s tacit approval of the reason for such adult attire was. Judy was traveling, on her own, from New York’s Penn Station to Annapolis, for a blind date with a 20-year-old midshipman at the Naval Academy, the affluent son of a family friend’s friend. Remarkably unsupervised, the child of wealthy and emotionally remote parents, she never told them that over the summer, when the young man came to New York, he sexually abused her again and again. When she tried to stop seeing him, he told her that he would die without her, he would despair, flunk out and be sent off to war to drown at sea. She was young, so young that this logic, as if from a twisted fairy tale, could be persuasive. She was young enough to believe that she had that power; she was so young that she was powerless to walk away, to tell anyone about her miserable secret.

That depressed, cringing girl was 16 when she wrested her life back, at which point she embarked on a life of rigorous self-invention. After graduating from Wellesley, she moved to Paris in 1948 (“French gave me a second personality,” she later wrote). At 21, she moved in with an older man and lived la vie bohème in an abandoned brothel; she returned to New York, where family connections and her own resourceful smarts afforded her a fast rise in the then-influential world of women’s magazines. Her connections were legion: An ex-boyfriend went on to found the famed restaurant Lutèce; a fashion contact from Paris invited her to drinks with Marlene Dietrich. An old high school classmate, Barbara Walters, introduced her to her future husband, Steve Krantz, who started in radio and ended up in Hollywood, producing “Fritz the Cat,” the first animated feature to receive an X rating.

Susan Dominus is a staff writer for the magazine.

