Portrait of a Marriage

In this intimate and truthful, yet never bleak or humorless memoir, documentary filmmaker Judy Crichton brings to life her turbulent marriage to novelist Robert Crichton and the exhilarating creative world of New York City in the 1950s and 60s. They met on a spring day in 1951 in the offices of the magazine where he worked. She was 20, wearing a black dress with lilacs at the bodice, with long long legs. He was 26, the tallest man she had ever met, lanky and at ease in a corduroy suit. By the end of the afternoon, they were in love. By the end of the year, they were married. Bob Crichton was a hard-drinking writer who knocked around Greenwich Village, haunted by his time in the Battle of the Bulge where he nearly lost his legs to frostbite. Judy Feiner had been on her own since graduating high school at 16, an Upper East Side girl with feckless parents and a family connection to Broadway and Hollywood.He was raised Catholic-and Communist. She was from an "Our Crowd" Jewish family, a world that cared more about appearances than religious laws. He had gone to Harvard. She barely finished high school. But they forged a rocky, love-infused partnership unique in a time when husbands were expected to be a family's breadwinner and wives were meant to stay at home with the children. Portrait of a Marriage brings the reader not only into Bob and Judy's private world but the social world they shared with indelible figures such as poet Frank O'Hara, actress Marilyn Monroe, composer Richard Rodgers, legal luminary Thurgood Marshall and editor Robert Gottlieb. Judy would go on to become an Emmy-winning documentary producer. Bob would write three bestselling books such as The Secret of Santa Vittoria and The Camerons. But to get there, they wrestled with their own doubts and fears as well as all they had been raised to believe-but needed to cast off-about the role of men and women in society.Family photographs illustrate each step of these changing, exciting times.