In this moving memoir, Judy Crichton brings to life her turbulent marriage to novelist Robert Crichton and the exhilarating creative world of New York of the 1950s and 60s. He was a hard-drinking writer knocking around Greenwich Village, haunted by his time in World War II. She was an Upper East Side girl from a feckless family, out on her own and determined not to marry one of "the gray men" her grandmothers had in mind for her. Judy would go on to become an award-winning documentary producer. Bob would write three bestsellers, including The Secret of Santa Vittoria and The Camerons. But to get there, they had to wrestle with all they had been raised to believe-and needed to cast off-about the role of men and women at home and in the world.
Like Shy, the memoir by Judy's cousin Mary Rodgers, Portrait of a Marriage brings the reader not only into the couple's private world but their swirling social world as well, one they shared with indelible figures such as poet Frank O'Hara, actress Marilyn Monroe, composer Richard Rodgers and legendary editor Robert Gottlieb.
Intimate, truthful-yet never bleak or humorless-Judy's memoir is an unexpected page-turner. As New York Times bestselling novelist Cathleen Schine writes, "I love this book! Is it because of the love the author has for her charming, difficult, talented, impossible husband which animates every page? Or the portrait she paints of a lost New York City from Greenwich Village to Morningside Heights? Or the sense of a woman finding her own strength and mission? I do know this: I love this book!"
Illustrated with photos throughout to capture these exciting, changing times.