And then there are the ritualized viewings of Valley of the Dolls-the 30th-anniversary screening in San Francisco’s Castro Theatre attracted 1,550 zealots, some in Doll drag, who chanted every line, à la The Rocky Horror Picture Show the inevitable Jackie-cult Web sites and the Columbia University graduate school course in which Valley of the Dolls was required reading.įeminist author Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the original publicist for Valley of the Dolls, reports, “This revival is the answer to Jacqueline Susann’s prayers. Writer Rae Lawrence is currently working on a Valley of the Dolls sequel, based on plot notes in Bishop’s Susann files. The manager of Susann’s literary catalogue, filmmaker Lisa Bishop, is in pre-production on a remake of Valley of the Dolls and is also co-authoring with poet and Susann archivist David Trinidad The Jacqueline Susann Scrapbook: Dogs, Dames, and Dolls. Michele Lee co-produced and starred in a 1998 USA Networks biopic, Scandalous Me, and in January, Universal opens a comedy feature entitled Isn’t She Great (based on a New Yorker story by Michael Korda), with Bette Midler playing Susann opposite Nathan Lane as the writer’s husband, Irving Mansfield.
The following year Grove/Atlantic began reissuing the Susann trilogy of major novels, and, accelerating the momentum, the 1967 movie version of Valley of the Dolls was released on video in 1997. The first to resurrect Jacqueline Susann as a pop-culture deity was Barbara Seaman, whose 1987 biography, the definitive Lovely Me, was reprinted in 1996. It has taken longer than the apotheosis of the Beatles or the deification of Andy Warhol, but Susann’s nervy prophecy has finally come to pass. No wonder she dared to proclaim to a Boston newspaper critic, who imagined he was hoisting her on her own petard, “Yeah, I think I’ll be remembered. 1 spot on The New York Times’s best-seller list. Not only did she write Valley of the Dolls (1966)-registered in The Guinness Book of World Records in the 1970s as the best-selling novel of all time (30 million copies sold)-she also became, with her next two novels, The Love Machine (1969) and Once Is Not Enough (1973), the first author ever to have three consecutive books catapult to the No. In her 12 remaining years-the tumor was malignant and a full mastectomy was performed the day after Christmas-Susann more than made good on her dream. I can’t die without leaving something-something big. 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.
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