She turned 60 in September, but you won’t see her knitting in front of the TV. You have a better chance of catching a glimpse of her on a bus crossing faraway lands or sneaking out to the cinema during her lunch hour.
They call her Aunt Irma, but to the thousands of young women who write to her for advice, Irma Kurtz is rather the big sister of their dreams: warm, straightforward, independent, adventurous–and, yes, wise.
Kurtz, an American expatriate who has written five non-fiction books and three novels, is Cosmopolitan’s first and only “agony aunt”–in charge of the magazine’s “agony” advice column–and is its longest-running contributor.
She started her Cosmo column in 1976, a few years after her son, Marc, was born.
“I still call him my luxury item,” she says.
Slim and tall in her oversize tea-rose T-shirt and pastel long skirt, she sits by a desk in front of a small window brightened by potted flowers. Every wall of her modest flat in the heart of Soho is covered with neatly organized shelves and every corner turned into a mini-room. She folds her glasses on top of her electric typewriter and reaches for a framed photograph of a handsome young man.
“This is Marc,” she says fondly. “He is 22 and 6 foot 2. It’s a bit crammed here when he comes home.” But now Marc is off for a two-year trip in Australia. Wanderlust runs in the family, it seems.
Marc was conceived in her mind on the top floor of a department store in Japan.
“I saw all these kiddie clothes, and I had this raging, fiery urge to have a baby. `Hey,’ I thought, `I am 36. Now is the time,’ ” says Kurtz, who had left her native Jersey City years ago for a bohemian life, first in Paris and now in London. “I came back to London and got pregnant within 20 minutes of getting off the plane,” she continues giggling. “It’s not what it sounds. I had a lover at home, and I knew exactly what I was doing.”
So this writer left her glamorous Notting Hill Gate flat and bought a $7,500 little house in an unfashionable part of London. With some help from Marc’s father and a procession of au pairs, she raised her son alone.
“These were the hardest years in my life. But it was great.” If money hadn’t been so tight, she would have loved to have more children. “But you can’t have everything,” she says, shrugging.
Kurtz never married Marc’s father–nor anyone else. She never saw the point. When all her classmates at Barnard, the women’s college in New York where she studied English literature, had diamonds glinting on their fingers, Kurtz escaped to Europe and fell in love with Paris, then with a string of men–“handsome and damaged,” the way she loves them. “I saw marriage as the end of an adventure.”
Living to the fullest and true to herself, Kurtz has no regrets and more than one word of advice for the young women who write to her.
“Motherhood, organized and independent and self-financed, was the greatest adventure of my existence,” she writes to “Unfulfilled,” who asked whether she should marry a man she doesn’t love because being single and childless scares her.
The letters arrive from England, America and Australia by the boxful–2,000 a month from America alone. “I read them all. I am interested about them all. I love writing the agony column. It is like writing letters to friends.”
Ninety percent of all the letters are about love, Kurtz says, and all of them written out of a lack of self-confidence. But women’s attitudes vary across continents.
“Basically, the Americans feel they are entitled to be happy–not the pursuit of happiness but happiness itself–and they get angry if it doesn’t arrive and tend to blame others. Nobody else in the world feels that way.”
In the UK, women tend to blame themselves for everything. “He’s being naughty. What did I do wrong?” they ask. Australian women, for their part, are the true stiff upper lips, she says. “They have to go pretty far with pain before they cry for help.”
As for herself, this agony aunt defies geographical classification. “I’ve walked all over the world,” says Kurtz, who crisscrossed the globe as a reporter in the ’70s. “I don’t feel American, I don’t feel anything. Even my accent doesn’t fit anywhere. I call it `freedom.’ “
This anarchist of the soul was born in Jersey City on Labor Day 1935 into a loving Jewish family. At 14, she discovered the subway to New York and proceeded to spend all her free time hanging in Greenwich Village’s coffee bars listening to existential poets. “I became addicted to coffee and very stage-struck.”
During her college years at Barnard, the arty student with very long hair and tight jeans moonlighted as a waitress–her favorite job next to writing–to pay for her trip to Paris.
“Paris was love at first sight. It was so intense, so intellectual,” says Kurtz, who taught English at Berlitz and hitchhiked all over Europe in the early 1950s. After two years back in New York working in fashion publicity, she headed again for Paris, then Ibiza, where a great tall man from Argentina helped her with her luggage. “And bang, I fell in love. It was my first great love affair.” He was a goldsmith and a sailor–handsome and damaged, of course. She was 26.
After months at sea together, Kurtz brought her sailor back to Paris. “But you cannot transplant romance,” she sighs. At the same time, her own romance with Paris began to sour. It was the end of the 1950s. “I began to see the real nature of the Parisians, so focused on themselves. If cities were people, Paris would be a transvestite–very vain and not quite what it seems to be.”
Miserable in Paris and too proud to go back to the States, Kurtz opted for London. “I stuck. I have been here for 30 years,” she says, inhaling with pleasure the delicious smell coming from the Thai restaurant below her window. “I found the Londoners welcoming, fun and courteous.”
If London and New York were to disappear, however, Chicago would win her heart, Kurtz declares. She discovered this new love while on a three-month Greyhound journey across the country a few years ago. “My kind of town, Chicago,” she writes in “The Great American Bus Ride,” (Simon & Schuster, 1993) a book relating her trip. “I like the way people use the center of it, lots and lots of them, and on foot. . . . The people in the streets looked good-humored too, and with more than a fair share of handsome old men in evidence, laid on, no doubt, for us Saul Bellow fans.”
Irma Kurtz’s new book, “Irma Kurtz’s Ultimate Problem Solver,” will be published in December by Crown Publishers.
