RIP Rona Jaffe

Rona Jaffe -- popular novelist
- Mitchell Owens, New York Times
Sunday, January 1, 2006


Rona Jaffe, the preternaturally youthful writer whose 1958 novel "The Best of Everything" told the melodramatic story of four nubile, cashmere-sweatered career girls torn between storybook romance and cutthroat corporate Manhattan, died Friday in London, where she was on vacation. She was 74.

She died of cancer, said Alan Rothfeld, her attorney and a longtime friend.

Essentially commissioned by the movie producer Jerry Wald, Ms. Jaffe was a 25-year-old former associate editor in publishing when she sat down to write a book that Wald could turn into a blockbuster feature like "Kitty Foyle: The Natural History of a Woman," a 1940 film that won Ginger Rogers an Academy Award for playing a plucky working girl who finds love, heartache, an unwanted pregnancy and, finally, romantic redemption.

Published by Simon & Schuster, "The Best of Everything," which drew on Ms. Jaffe's four-year employment at Fawcett Publications as well as the experiences of close friends, was the urban answer to "Peyton Place," Grace Metalious' risque novel of lust in small-town America, which had been published two years earlier.

Ms. Jaffe's beautiful heroines -- Caroline, April, Barbara and Gregg -- toil as stenographers but are distracted by men, most of them cads, not to mention a lecherous boss called Mr. Shalimar. As Martin Levin of the New York Times wrote in a review of the book: "Before very many coffee breaks, one is a stretcher case, one is pregnant and the third is off to Las Vegas with a notorious lounge lizard. But that's the life of a working girl, at least as seen through Miss Jaffe's wide eyes."

Critics howled, but America was entranced, which is precisely what its editor, Robert Gottlieb, was sure would happen. "It was a basic story -- three or four or five girls start off together, one finds love, one goes crazy and/or dies, and one of them becomes a huge success -- but Rona's take was very up-to-date," Gottlieb said Friday night in a telephone interview. "What made it work for the time was that it had a fresh young-career-women-in-New York quality with a fillip of shock."

The synergy of its canny packaging as a book written expressly for Hollywood production was equally shocking at the time. Within two weeks of publication, the book was on the New York Times best-seller list, where it stayed for five months.

Less than a year later, thanks to Wald's involvement, "The Best of Everything" was released as a chic but heavy-handed film by 20th Century Fox and director Jean Negulesco. The heroines' work site, Fabian Publishing, was set in the brand-new Seagram Building, and some of the sets were designed in seeming homage to a hot New York society decorator of the moment, Michael Greer. In a review of the movie's release on DVD last summer, Amy Nicholson of the Web site digsmagazine.com described its melodramatic, nail-biting charms as best accompanied by "bonbons, chilled blush wine and possibly an emergency hanky."

Like many of her characters, Ms. Jaffe had numerous romantic adventures, including a relationship with an Astor real estate heir. Ms. Jaffe did not, however, ever marry, preferring to avoid what she once dismissively described as "the rat race to the altar." She leaves no survivors.

In the decades that followed "The Best of Everything," Ms. Jaffe wrote 15 more popular books, several of which used the quartet-of-women narrative approach, including "The Last Chance," a 1976 novel that one reviewer described as "best devoured alone in bed, with a container of yogurt," and "Class Reunion," a sudsy 1979 novel about three decades in the lives of four Radcliffe classmates, one of whom has a gay husband.

Her last book was "The Room-Mating Season," published in 2003. Gottlieb said he believed that her finest work was "Mr. Right Is Dead," a 1965 collection of short stories and the title novella, about a call girl.

In her later years, Ms. Jaffe established herself as a patron of the arts.

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