“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.”
Fudge was already so popular with young readers that Blume received a reported $500,000 advance for Superfudge (over $2 million in today’s dollars). By then, Judy Blume wasn’t just a writer, a woman, a mom, she was a hot commodity: JudyBlume. Her name alone, spoken all in one quick exhalation, made children bounce up and down with excitement. And would-be entrepreneurs outside of the publishing world had caught on.
They wanted her to slap her name—THE JudyBlume!—on all sorts of products, from T-shirts to training bras. A rep for Jordache jeans got in touch about developing a range of Blume-themed denim (Judy gave them a vehement no). She was particularly annoyed by the board game someone pitched her called Growing Up with Judy Blume. “I am NOT a product,” she insisted to the Boston Globe in 1981. “You wouldn’t believe the tacky stuff I’ve been asked to endorse—like a Judy Blume board game with cards that read ‘Your parents get divorced—move back six spaces’ and ‘You get your period—move ahead eight spaces.’ ”
Larry liked to tease her about it. “One day, there’s going to be Judy Blume tampons,” he told her.
She did lend her name to The Judy Blume Diary, which Dell put out in 1981. The rainbow hardcover featured quotes from her books, artsy black-and-white snaps of real children taken by young aspiring photographers, and plenty of room for writing. Judy pledged the royalties from the diary, which cost $6.95, to the KIDS Fund: her own newly established charity devoted to encouraging better communication between kids and their parents.
It’s no wonder that people wanted to cash in on Judy’s name—she was a legitimate publishing phenomenon.
In December of 1980, six of her books topped the bestsellers list at B. Dalton, then one of the country’s largest book retailers with over seven hundred stores, most of them in shopping malls (in a nod to the store’s premillennial ubiquity, a B. Dalton storefront shows up in the background of Kevin Smith’s 1995 Mallrats). Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing, Otherwise Known as Sheila the Great, Blubber, Are You There God?, Iggie’s House, and Freckle Juice dominated the top ten, with Then Again, Maybe I Won’t coming in at number thirteen. Young readers couldn’t get enough of Judy’s books.
She was everywhere, suddenly representing something much bigger than herself. For children, left-leaning parents, and educators, JudyBlume signaled honesty and freedom. But for a growing contingent of conservatives, Blume’s brand stunk of the rot at the heart of the culture.
America’s favorite children’s book author wasn’t prepared for what came next.