“Words by the millions have been printed about you, but none have revealed your real life, your secret life—which is that you belong to me.”
In this beautifully rendered literary memoir, Lucinda Franks, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, tells the intimate story of her marriage to New York’s District Attorney, Robert Morgenthau, one of the great men of our time. When Lucinda interviewed Bob for The New York Times, the two took a while to understand they had fallen in love. Franks, However, was a radical, self-styled hippie who chained herself to fences, trespassed on government property and had poured pig’s blood on draft files. Morgenthau was a famous lawman, a symbol of the establishment, who could have put her in jail. She was twenty-six. He was fifty-three. Now, thirty-six years into a marriage that was never supposed to happen, one between two people as deeply in love as they are different, they are living proof that opposites – old vs. young, Jew vs. Christian, radical vs. moderate – can forge an irresistible life bond.
In Timeless Franks offers a confidential tour of their unconventional years together, years that are both hilarious and interlaced with suspense. At the same time, she takes us behind-the scenes of some of Morgenthau’s most famous cases, many of which she helped him brainstorm: the discovery of how prosecutors and police bungled the Central Park jogger case; the outrageous happenings behind the Astor elder abuse case; how he found out Arthur Goldberg had had a lover who was a Soviet spy and secretly stopped his promotion to Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. Morgenthau repeatedly broke precedent, making new law, reaching past his jurisdiction to thwart terrorism and white collar crime. His crusade against the death penalty helped end executions in New York State. To the fury of museums everywhere, his swift seizure of an Egon Schiele painting from the walls of the Museum of Modern Art and its return to the family of a Holocaust survivor, set off a unique international landslide to find art looted by the Nazis and give Jews back their heritage.
A compelling memoir that calls to mind Ann Patchett’s This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, with piercing insight into how a relationship grows and develops over a lifetime, Timeless grants us an enlightening window into one of New York’s most famous yet defiant and iconoclastic couples, and the trials and successes of their union.