Author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Lucinda Franks can’t quite get over how the story of her May-December marriage to New York legal eagle Robert Morgenthau has been reviewed, mostly glowingly.
“This is my fourth book and I never had a book with such a good reception,” Franks said in a phone interview from New York.
Franks is frank. Even her former employer, the New York Times, had mostly good things to say about “Timeless: Love, Morgenthau and Me.”
Considered an unlikely pair with a nearly 30-year age difference, their sensibilities couldn’t have been more opposite, either. She was a self-described anti-establishment hippy, a product of the 1960s. He was a straight-laced widower with five children from an aristocratic family of German Jews. His father was President Franklin Roosevelt’s secretary of the treasury.
Nearly 40 years later at 95, the former Manhattan District attorney is working for a law firm, albeit pro bono, Franks said. So he can’t join his wife for her March 14 talk at the Festival of the Arts Boca’s Authors and Ideas series. The festival runs March 6 to 15 with eight talks and four musical performances at the covered Mizner Park Amphitheater or the Mizner Park Cultural Arts Center.
Franks is in good company with other well-known writers, among them Thomas Friedman, Clive Thompson and Michael Grunwald. Tickets are $20 to $40 at festivaloftheartsboca.org/artists/lucinda-franks/.
This is a romantic book, never cynical. Is that the way you intended it?
You just write a book and what’s happened and what you know. I never thought I would.
Weren’t you intimidated by his fame?
I was never scared of him. Being a journalist at the time, you had entrée to all kinds of people. I was interviewing Robert Redford and scientists and inventors, so he became as source and when he asked me out I was flabbergasted. I thought he was just trying to give me a story, but things moved so fast. I had more compunctions about marrying someone three decades older with five children.
Was the family’s Jewish background a big issue?
I was being a huffy teenager and said the Palestinians had every right to be in Israel. My father’s eyes welled and up and he said, ‘Cindy, you will never know what happened to the Jewish people.’ He got up and left the room. My father was a spy in deep cover and I got his story out of him about his connection to the Holocaust. [She chronicled his role liberating a concentration camp in her book, “My Father’s Secret War: A Memoir.”]
You’re candid about your own second thoughts.
I didn’t have a choice. Every time I left him and dated other people, I couldn’t bear to stay away from him and he couldn’t, either. He was very persistent. He would hear I was going out with someone and he would be at my door. Underneath the differences, we were very much alike.
You had two children; the first when he was 65.
Amy is 24 and lives in an apartment above us. Joshua is 30 and he’s living in Brooklyn and also runs our apple orchard and made it organic and put it on the map.
Why do you think your marriage has worked so well?
It’s a great love partnership…. We really lucked out finding each other. I was a radical hippy.. and he was a man in a gray suit and part of the establishment. He moved liked a fish, changing the system.
