M. on December 25, 1962, Jacqueline Susann—a fading TV actress with an unemployed husband, an autistic son in a mental hospital, and a lump in her right breast—began to scribble in a notebook.

The Real-Life Sex and Scandal That Inspired Jacqueline Susann

Wives’ and kids’ names were recorded, as were birth dates, hobbies, and comments on their importance, personality, and physical appearance. And yet, it is immediately obvious what made Valley of the Dolls the success it was, what lassoed 30 million readers. The film was included in the 1978 book The Fifty Worst Films of All Time (and How They Got That Way) by Harry Medved, Randy Dreyfuss, and Michael Medved.

In addition to cobalt treatments and daily chemotherapy injections, Seaman says, she was subjected to massive doses of a spectrum of powerful drugs, all with hideous side effects. Determined to help his wife, in February 1963 Mansfield sent a copy of the manuscript to Earl Wilson, their influential columnist friend. But Susann’s insistence, on the one hand that female desire was potent and couldn’t be simulated (in the character of Anne) and, on the other, that femaleness was something far larger than femininity (in the character of Jennifer) was a powerful waypoint in the mapping of a feminist terrain. It’s a camp catfight that echoes the climactic confrontation in the play that earned Susann her Equity card, The Women.

Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann | Goodreads

Columnist Jack Martin, who passed countless days with the Mansfields at Cabana 8 at the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, says, “I never met anyone who enjoyed fame more than Jackie. Susann recorded the monthlong odyssey in a journal with photographs, the kind of scrapbook that she feared would be Josephine’s fate. She still loves him, but she’s left wondering, How did it get kind of ugly when I thought it would be beautiful?

And then a week later the whole world collapsed,” Susann wrote, somewhat disingenuously, in the diary. Cindy Adams says, “No effort was too humiliating, too horrifying, or too tough for Irving” if it meant helping them attain their “one goal—which was to make ‘Jacqueline Susann’ a household name. It was part of the Woman's Hour programme's ongoing fifteen-minute daily drama slot, [25] and has been rebroadcast several times on BBC Radio 4 Extra in three 70-minute omnibus episodes.

50 years of Valley of the Dolls - The Guardian

Perhaps because Bob liked to defy his wife by indulging their little girl’s taste for films and theater, Jacqueline from a young age became obsessed with showbiz and its larger-than-life personalities. And by hauling his showbiz know-how into a new arena, Mansfield could claim to Life, for once without exaggeration, “We’ve revolutionized book publishing. She named her first poodle, Josephine, after him, and the title of her last book, Once Is Not Enough, came from the comic’s 1971 deathbed words—an eleventh-hour variation on his signature line, that “if you play your cards right” in life, once is enough. Valley of the Dolls is considered a roman à clef, with its characters based on famous figures such as Judy Garland, Carole Landis, Dean Martin, and Ethel Merman.In other words, her breast cancer had spread to her lungs and was so advanced she probably had only a few months to live. But the similarity that really jumped out at me was how both novels exploit our obsession with wealth (and fame) by luxuriating in its excesses, and then reassure us about our lack of these things by depicting its wealthy (and famous) main characters as incredibly miserable and/or terrible people. I figured after I’d get all the rejects, I’d type it neatly—paste in all her pictures—have it bound—and keep it as an album.