Three books by Jacqueline Susann you really should read Part One: Valley of the Dolls

I forget the exact details of how I became acquainted with Jacqueline Susann. I was in college, sometime between 1997-1999. Either Bitch or Bust magazine had done a profile on her and I was instantly taken by her persona, this big hair/big makeup/big personality writing from a time period I hadn't lived in and could hardly imagine.


But it was years later before I stumbled across a copy of Valley of the Dolls and inhaled it in practically one sitting. This broad can write a book. OK, so her dialogue is laughably stilted, her plot devices are ridiculous and melodramatic and everything is so over the top it is a caricature of itself without knowing it, but dammit her writing is fun. I love her books for the sensationalized window onto a bygone era that they are. A time when everyone smoked and drank and popped pills with reckless abandon. A world where characters check themselves into Swiss clinics for "sleep cures" to shed the pesky extra pounds. A world where the beautiful get punished yet no-one gets what they deserve. Elektra complexes, Oedipal complexes, breast fetishes, tranny sex and casual abortions. If you haven't read Jacqueline Susann you, my friend, are missing out. In no particular order, I present your reading list:



Valley of the Dolls,: This is it, the one, the only, the legacy. I haven't seen the movie, but I'm told it's vastly inferior. Methinks it's high time for a good remake. The novel follows three women whose lives intersect in the world of New York show biz in the post WWII era and following them through the next fifteen years or so. There's saintly Anne, the icy New England beauty, frigid, yet ambitious. Beautiful, but not trashy. Only one man makes her heart grow pitterpat and that's the devastating Lyon Burke. Their on/off relationship frames the rest of the narrative. There's Anne's apartment neighbor Neely O'Hara, a scrappy show-biz kid with charisma, but not looks. Neely ends up being the fame monster of the group, becoming a huge star. Her rise to fame/inevitable flame out and transformation into a soulless celebrity machine is great stuff and while the pop culture references are dated, the meat of her story is still relevant in today's fame-whore-centric world. Then there's the gorgeous, stacked, sweet, untalented but stacked, (and did I say stacked?) Jennifer North who has a heart of gold and a brain of mush. She falls for and marries a handsome man who she fails to notice is severely developmentally disabled until the wedding night. Later in the novel after she divorces husband number one she finds true love-for-real-you-guys-oh-my-god. Unfortunately she also discovers she has breast cancer. Rather than have a mastectomy on her glorious rack she offs herself instead. Life without her magnificent mammaries is evidently not worth living. The beautiful blonde dying a tragic death theme was evidently one Susann was enamored of as there are variations of this story arc in both The Love Machine and Once is Not Enough.


Throughout the novel these points get hit home with a sledgehammer:


Men are pigs: Lyon Burke is an emotionally unavailable horndog who dumps Anne in her hour of need and spends a large portion of the novel avoiding her. After their reconciliation his behavior changes not a whit and he continues to cheat on her, blatantly. The other men in the novel are one-note cyphers, sex-crazed power-mad narcissists, nearly interchangeable.

Women are pigs too: Not that the fairer sex gets a break. But for protagonist Anne and sweet yet doomed Jennifer the women characters are manipulative, controlling, jealous harpies. All of them obsess over preserving their looks and youth to the exclusion of having any other personality traits and there is definitely no Sisterhood is Powerful consciousness raising going on here. Published in 1966 the woman's movement has no place in Susann's novels. It's every broad for herself, armed to the gills with pancake makeup, fake hair and Seconals.

You can't always get what you want: and even if you try sometimes, you don't necessarily get what you need either. Our three leading ladies all end up miserable, or dead. The quest for fame leaves Neely overweight, pilled out and psychotic. Anne ends up a desperate housewife, popping seconals and chasing them with vodka to silence the crushing misery of her existence with Lyon. Jennifer finds happiness, but dies shortly afterwards. Happy endings you won't find here.

So go, seek and read. Valley of the Dolls is the perfect gateway drug to the other two which I shall get to in due time. It's practically child's play next to the orgy scene in Once is Not Enough or the tranny sex of The Love Machine. But it's a good start. So go forth and enjoy.