As an
early 1980s undergrad, I nodded in agreement when one of my English Department
professors confidently predicted that, though Valley of the Dolls had
topped the bestseller lists, its lack of merit would eventually put it out of
print. He turned out to be only half right.
At one
point, the novel went out of print and stayed that way for 15 years. But a
clamor must have gone up for this guilty pleasure, because in the autumn of
1997 it was reissued, leading to a phrase associated with it making its
appearance in The Atlantic Monthly’s “Word Watch” column in April 1998:
“pink trash,” defined as “the newly revived literacy” of Susann’s novel.
“Word
Watch” drily noted the term’s origin: “reports that [Susann] typed her
manuscript on pink paper.” The “trash” part of the phrase came from the book’s
subject matter, “the seamy side of show business.”
Maverick
publisher Bernard Geis took a flyer on the book when other, more
reputable publishers, as revolted by its awful style and structure as by its
tawdry content, passed when it was offered to them.
Little did
he know that the author he gambled on would capitalize on changing sexual mores
and her own tireless promotional know-how to push the novel to the top of the
bestseller list—or that she would become so annoyed by him that she’d dump him
when she got to her next book, The Love Machine.
Over the
prior decade, readers had become accustomed, through novels like Grace
Metalious’ Peyton Place and D.H. Lawrence’s long-banned Lady
Chatterley’s Lover, to more graphic depictions of sexuality. Now, Ms.
Susann was not only including pre-marital and extra-marital sex, but same-sex
relationships.
Moreover,
with jazz and rock ‘n’ roll musicians continually in the news for experimenting
with hard drugs, all the pill-popping that the author included (the “dolls” of
the title referred to valium) paled by comparison.
For
readers actually paying attention to characters, Susann included entertainment
figures that most, if not all, of her readers could have guessed at: a Broadway
musical-comedy star jealous of her perch (Ethel Merman); a rising young star
who becomes addicted to pills (Judy Garland); a blond beauty (Marilyn Monroe);
and a reputed “good girl” who, at the start of her career, becomes involved
with an older, married man (Grace Kelly).
Valley
of the Dolls was a
roman a clef (literally, “novel with a key”), a literary genre that over
the years has figured in The Sun Also Rises, Tender Is the Night,
and The Dharma Bums. But Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Jack
Kerouac possessed something that Susann clearly didn’t: ability.
Maybe you
are among the relative few who know something of the story of Susann from the
2000 film Isn’t She Great, with Bette Midler as the obstreperous author.
I stress the word “something” because, as with so many “based-on-fact” movies,
it departs from reality in some respects. (For instance, the character “Michael
Hastings,” stunned by the cyclonic Ms. Susann, was actually legendary editor
and author Michael Korda.)
But the
movie was correct in one respect: publishing staffers who dealt with her on a
regular basis probably wanted to scream “Help!” whenever they heard her on the
phone or, worse, saw her entering their offices.
But booksellers
from coast to coast loved her. She’d come in laden with all kinds of stuff:
gifts, personalized copies of her books, and, for the truckers hauling them
from the warehouse, trays of Danish pastries.
And,
because, through contacts made by her publicist husband Irving Mansfield, she’d
appeared on “The Tonight Show” with provocative opinions on everything, crowds
would be waiting on her book tours. In fact, her great innovation wasn’t her
content or style but the author promotional circuit.
More than
a few critical brickbats came Susann’s way, though the ones that may have hurt
the most came from Gloria Steinem (who lamented her opposition to feminism) and
Sara Davidson (who, after taking advantage of her hospitality and
thoughtfulness in an interview—including making a call from the house and
lamenting her love life—savaged the novelist and Mansfield).
Five years
ago, in an interview with Literary Journalism Studies, Davidson copped to misgivings about her article. She seemed especially
apologetic about making all-too-easy sport about the couple’s lifestyle, but
there was a larger flaw she didn’t admit to: invading the family’s zone of
privacy.
At one
point, Davidson noted, “A subject Jackie and Irving never bring up is their
son. When questioned, they say the boy is sixteen and in school in Arizona.”
What
Davidson didn’t know—one hopes, anyway—is that Guy Hildy Mansfield had been
diagnosed with severe autism/Kanner’s syndrome at age three. After treatment
for cancer in 1962, Susann may have believed she was on borrowed time, so she
wanted to make enough money to ensure his institutional care after she was
gone.
She didn’t
have very much time, but she did make it count. Before she died at age 56 in
1974, Susann penned three more scandalous bestsellers: The Love Machine,
Once Is Not Enough, and Dolores.
Before
Susann, publishing tended to be a rather tweedy gentleman’s profession. She swept
in with a different attitude: "A new book is like a new brand of
detergent," she said. "You have to let the public know about it.
What's wrong with that?" For a publishing industry that, especially in the
1960s, began to transition from independent houses to corporate subsidiaries, her
mindset fulfilled the imperative to meet the bottom line, come what may.
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