At the store-which was modelled on the über-successful Giorgio Beverly Hills-Billy hires a smooth salesman named Spider Elliot, a blond lothario who sleeps with his customers as often as he dresses them. But, as an account of nascent eighties decadence the novel remains one of the most enjoyable texts I’ve ever read. Much of the book reads today as deeply out of date the phrases “divine wop” and “fag bullshit” are tossed off within the first ten pages. The rest of the plot of “Scruples” is schlocky, steamy “Dynasty”-era romance fare: hearts get broken, tongues get intertwined, gossip gets spread around. So she decides to do what any clotheshorse dreams of: she opens a luxury boutique, called Scruples, on Rodeo Drive, and becomes the queen of Los Angeles fashion.

When Ellis dies, Billy finds herself a rich young widow with money and ambition to burn. They marry, and she takes to Ellis’s lavish life style with gusto-appearing at events and on best-dressed lists, and wearing a pair of eleven-karat Harry Winston diamond earrings at all times of day, “heedless of convention.” Then Ellis suffers a stroke, and the couple move to Bel Air for the mild weather. It centers on Billy Orsini (born Wilhelmina Hunnenwell Winthrop), a young striver who moves to New York, where she takes secretarial work at Ikehorn Enterprises, a global conglomerate, and begins sleeping with the C.E.O., Ellis Ikehorn. Her first novel, “ Scruples,” published in 1978, is a fashion-retail version of a Cinderella story, set in nineteen-sixties L.A.

So when she turned, with trepidation, to fiction, she wrote what she knew. Her career up until that point had been in women’s magazines she had been an accessories editor at Good Housekeeping and then a writer at Ladies’ Home Journal and Cosmopolitan, and she was an avid connoisseur of clothes. Judith Krantz always wanted to write fiction, but it was not until she was approaching fifty, in the late nineteen-seventies, that her husband, Steve, persuaded her to finally attempt a novel.

Scruples krantz