Jacqueline Susann’s potboiler, Valley Of The Dolls, was a virtual autobiography

LIKE the heroines who populated her racy novels, Jacqueline Susann wanted nothing more than fame and fortune.

Anne Welles (Barbara Parkins), Jennifer North (Sharon Tate) and Neely O’Hara (Patty Duke) in a scene from Valley Of The Dolls in 1967.

LIKE the heroines who populated her racy novels, Jacqueline Susann wanted nothing more than fame and fortune.

And although panned by critics as pulp fiction when published in February 1966, Susann’s debut novel Valley Of The Dolls was a virtual autobiography. Even at the time, Susann admitted at thousands of publicity appearances and interviews for her novel that she had long referred to pills she used to sleep, wake or keep her weight down, as her “dolls”.

The highs and lows experienced by four ambitious 1945-vintage glamours who populate Valley Of The Dolls were also drawn from lengthy conversations with members of Susann’s informal New York “hockey club”, who spent hours gossiping about who was “hocking” whom in their celebrity circle. Charting the love and sex lives of beautiful Anne Welles, Judy Garland-inspired vaudeville star Neely O’Hara and busty airhead Jennifer North, played by Sharon Tate in a 1967 movie, Susann’s novel explored their dependence on alcohol and drugs to survive heartbreak and broken dreams.

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Author Jacqueline Susann in an undated picture.

Born in Philadelphia on August 20, 1918, although she later claimed 1921, her father Robert Susann was a portrait artist, and her mother, Rose, a public school teacher. Her biographer Barbara Seaman claimed in 1987 that her research found three women who admitted to affairs with Susann’s father, who encouraged his daughter’s fascination with films and theatre.

Susann apparently decorated her room with images of actors June Knight and Margalo Gillmore, and repeatedly auditioned for a spot on Philadelphia radio program The Children’s Hour. When her father helped judge a local beauty contest, in April 1936, Susann was named “Philadelphia’s most beautiful girl”. Along with a silver cup, she won a screen test with Warner Bros in New York. After she failed the screen test, her father reputedly helped land her a part as a French maid in Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women, starring Susann’s idol Gillmore. Unable to master the French accent required for her three lines, Susann was fired.

When a part as a lingerie model came up, Susann joined the cast of The Women in June 1937. She had then met press agent Irving Mansfield. Impressed by his “ability to get her picture in the paper”, they married at her parents’ house in 1939. As she won small theatre parts and pursued affairs with comedians Eddie Cantor and Joe E. Brown, and possibly also actors Carole Landis and Ethel Merman and designer Coco Chanel. Susann separated from Mansfield in the early 1940s, but they later reconciled. Their son Guy was born in 1946, but at age three was diagnosed as autistic, when Susann’s drug and alcohol habits reportedly escalated.

After playing a stripper in Between The Covers, in March 1946 Susann and actor Bea Cole co-wrote a bedroom farce, The Temporary Mrs Smith, which played briefly in New York. Their next attempt, Underneath The Pancake, about women in show business, also enjoyed limited success. Susann moved to live television work and sometimes hosted programs. Sacked from Night Time, New York, which screened from 1am to 7am, for interview tactics, the show sponsor kept her as spokeswoman. After nine months off to write her first book, Every Night, Josephine!, about her pet poodle, at the end of 1962 Susann was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent a mastectomy.

Book cover Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann.

“I’ve got to leave something worthwhile on this earth before I go,” she wrote. “I also don’t want it discovered after I go. I want to be around to get that Nobel prize.” Mansfield later wrote she had gone to Central Park to make a pact with God: if He would give her 10 more years, she promised “she could make it as a writer”.

Every Night, Josephine! was published in 1963. Inspired by best-selling novelist Harold Robbins, Susann decided he had created a formula by giving a set of different characters one common denominator.

Working 10am to 5pm every day, Susann wrote five drafts of her first novel. In the first, on “inexpensive white paper”, she “spilt it out”. On yellow paper she drafted characters, on pink paper she plotted “story motivation”, on blue she “cut, cut, cut”. Co-ordinating chalk colours to paper colours, she also drew the plot on a blackboard. The final draft was written on “good white paper”.

The editor assigned to Valley Of The Dolls, Don Preston, recalled: “It was a big mess of a book. A cheap soap opera — not a book anyone with any brain cells could take seriously.”

But the novel topped the New York Times’ bestseller list on April 29, 1966, and stayed for 28 consecutive weeks. Released in paperback in July 1967, it became the fastest-selling book in history, selling up to 100,000 copies a day. Susann wrote two more novels before her death in 1974.