Reading Hollywood #1: Valley of the Dolls

The first edition of our book club delves into one of the most infamous and best-selling novels of all-time. Sparkle, Neely, sparkle!

Welcome to the very first edition of the Gossip Reading Club book club! I’ve wanted to do something like this for years, and the jump to Substack felt like the ideal opportunity to start something new. You voted for the first book and went for one of the biggest-selling novels of all time. It sure fit the bill for Hollywood scandal!

Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann

(This was my edition.)

Anne Wells, a beautiful Massachusetts girl, leaves home to make a new life for herself in New York City. She finds work as a secretaty to an entertainment lawyer and becomes friends with two very different but equally ambitious women: vaudeville performer and aspiring stage actress Neely O'Hara, and Jennifer North, a gentle actress mostly known for her beauty and figure. Over the course of twenty years, the trio find themselves embroiled in personal scandals, career drama, and a changing industry where women are best seen and not heard. Binding it all together is their tenuous friendship and the alluring power of uppers and downers, nicknamed dolls.

I first read Valley of the Dolls when I was about 16. I’d seen it listed in Guinness World Records as the biggest-selling novel of all-time (an honour it shared with To Kill a Mockingbird and Gone With the Wind) and my interest was piqued. I’d also heard it was terribly scandalous and full of lots of highly adult things, and since the only way I rebelled as a kid was by reading controversial books, I had to get my hands on it. I’m not sure I entirely got it at that age, even though I understood the scandalous nature of a story full of drugs, exploitation, and anal sex. Revisiting it as an adult who knows way too much about celebrities and the entertainment industry offered a much richer experience, although I was also more aware of the book’s uh, wonkier prose.

(Image via Vanity Fair, which provided a key source of research for this piece.)

Before becoming a publishing phenomenon, Jacqueline Susann was a bit-part actress who had roles on Broadway and TV but never truly broke out. On the side of sporadic acting gigs, she wrote and produced commercials, but felt creatively restricted by it all. During the '50s, she wrote a sci-fi novel that wouldn't be published until her death, but it was through feverish devotion to her ageing dog Josephine that she found inspiration for her true debut. Every Night, Josephine! got passed along to Annie Laurie Williams, the agent of John Steinbeck and Harper Lee (?!), and it sold over 35,000 copies during its first run. It earned her a few thousand dollars, and her publisher offered her $3,000 for the rights to whatever she had planned for her sophomore effort. Inspired by her time as an actress as well as a recent bout of breast cancer, Susann spent well over a year and a half working on what would become The Valley of the Dolls.

Everyone read Valley of the Dolls. It stayed at the top of the New York Times best-seller list for 28 consecutive weeks. It had sold at least 31 million copies by 2016. Every newspaper reviewed it (most of them poorly.) Susann turned up on talk-shows and became a massive star in a way that generally only happened to literary gadabouts like Truman Capote (who, of course, didn't like the book or Susann herself.) Everyone talked about it and everyone knew who the book was about.

While Susann seemed ambivalent about the novel being considered a roman à clef, saying it was only good for helping her to sell more books, it's tough to deny how much of the sprawling narrative is, at the very least, heavily inspired by some well-known celebrities. Neely O'Hara, the plucky vaudeville performer who becomes a major musical star and eventual nightmare diva addict, seems so blatantly to be based on Judy Garland that you're insulted on her behalf. Old school belter Helen Lawson is Ethel Merman, with whom Susann had a tumultuous friendship and rumoured romance. Jennifer North, the stunning blonde who is fetishized for her body, seems to be partly based on Carole Landis, a B-Movie star and sex symbol who died by suicide (although many saw her as a stand-in for Marilyn Monroe, but I think Landis makes more thematic sense.)

(Suck it, Shogun series! Image via Facebook.)

It's this gossipy insider quality that helped to make the novel so inescapably popular upon release. While celebrities of the studio era hadn’t been entirely shielded from the cruelty of the press (see Judy Garland, among many others), stars used to have a system in place to help clear up messes and protect them from the harsh gaze of the tabloids. The general public may have read giddily salacious magazines like Confidential, but they also enjoyed the carefully manicured lie sold to them by Hollywood. Some of that stuff had become tough to conceal after the Hays Code lost its power and studios weakened in the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. The invention of the paparazzi coupled with changing social mores made invasiveness extremely cool. Two years before Valley of the Dolls was published, Liz Taylor married Richard Burton and spawned a new era of the omnipresent celebrity couple. Three years prior, Marilyn Monroe had died. The swinging ‘60s was about to brush up against flower power. I think dirt was simply something we wanted more of.

And boy, does Jacqueline Susann deliver. Valley of the Dolls moves at a frantic pace, fitting for a story where everyone is on some form of amphetamine. There is drama in every chapter, from affairs and behind-the-scenes scandals to drug addiction, abortion, mental breakdowns, genetic diseases, cancer, dirty movies, and a bunch more stuff I can’t remember off the top of my head. There’s not much time to breath, which adds to that sensation of being let in on a big secret by an especially gossipy friend. Almost every man is a scumbag or tragic little boy. Most of the women are brash or broken of some combination of the two. Everyone’s drama is everybody else’s business, most of all the reader’s.

Some of this makes the book baggy, so to speak. Everyone talks in a combination of exposition, witty one-liners, and homophobia (seriously, the frequency with which the F-word slur is used…) Contemporary critics slated the book for its poor prose, although, while it is wonky and sometimes clumsy, it’s not unreadably so. This ain’t noted author Dan Brown. But it is obviously and proudly trashy, in the way that the entire genre of “Hollywood exposed” narratives are. They exist partly to let us normal Joes feel simultaneously part of the in crowd and smug that we’re not that messed up.

Most stuff labelled trash doesn’t carry a lot of empathy for its characters, but Susann seems to deeply care about many of her heroines (less so the men.) Jennifer, for example, is so painfully sad and mired in disaster that she might as well have been lifted from a Greek tragedy. The first time we hear about her, it’s Anne’s boss Henry describing her as gorgeous but untalented, and this is positioned as okay because men will get such a kick from looking at her that they don’t need to see her try and do anything else. She falls for Tony Polar, a Dean Martin-esque crooner who is petulant and sex-obsessed but very attractive. He’s a philandering creep and Jennifer truly believes marriage and a family can change him, even while his sister Miriam controls his life. And then Miriam reveals to her that Tony is developmentally disabled, struggling with a hereditary condition that will eventually leave him utterly incapable of looking after herself, and the baby Jennifer is pregnant with will most likely inherit this. She divorces Tony, gets an abortion, then moves to Europe to do “nudies” for the money. It’s one agonizing struggle after another with Jennifer, and her life eventually ends in suicide. Diagnosed with breast cancer, she chooses death over a mastectomy after it becomes clear that her new husband, an older senator with hardcore Kennedy vibes, only wants her for her body. You can laugh at some of the Neely stuff or the sheer amount of profanity, but all the Jennifer scenes? You cannot help but be invested, or reminded of how familiar her story is.

Sharon Tate in Valley of the Dolls.

The Guardian described the book as being propelled by "the way Jacqueline Susann’s obsessions, trials, anxieties, and, above all, I think, anger, spring so unmediated on to the page," which captures the frenzy of its unnuanced approach to very prickly issues. This is definitely a book where people just say what they’re thinking, even when they’re not on drugs. It feels like Susann’s had a lot of feelings bottled up on these topics for a long time and wants to get them out to you as passionately as possible, like a friend in a bar with the juice of the century. Its familiarities to real life and oft-speculated celebrity gossip isn’t limited to the women of the story but that’s clearly where Susann has the most ideas and grievances to cover. This was a world she knew, however briefly, and experienced as a woman. Reading the book, you do get the sense that Susann met a lot of wannabe actresses and showgirls who were shoved to the sidelines or outright exploited.

She knew Carole Landis (and possibly had an affair with her), a woman who fought hard to be seen as more than a body but struggled to obtain even a scrap of power in the studio system. Hal Roach, the founder of Hal Roach Studios, cast her as a sexy cave girl in One Million B.C. then tried to market her to the press as "The Ping Girl" (it's meant to be a contraction of "purring", but it makes no sense and sounds like an insult.) She hated this, and she didn't like it much either when others tried to sell her as "The Chest." She was demoted to B-Movies at 20th Century Fox when she ended her relationship with studio head Darryl F. Zanuck. Towards the end of her life, she had an affair with Rex Harrison, which was an open secret in the industry. She hoped Harrison (a noted arsehole) would leave his wife for her. He didn't. She died by suicide in 1948. Harrison was one of the first people to discover her body. He waited several hours before he called a doctor and the police, and spent a long time claiming they were just friends afterward. Pictures of Carole Landis' body can be found in Kenneth Anger's Hollywood Babylon.

Nobody gets out of the book in one piece. Jennifer dies. Tony ends up institutionalized. Anne gets hooked on pills and clings to her crappy husband as he repeatedly cheats on her with the vicious Neely. Ms. O’Hara is climbing back to the top of the business but she’s irrevocably broken and the shadow of Judy Garland hangs overhead on every page she’s featured on. They’re all alone. The men don’t escape these cruel fates but they do seem to have a semblance of power the women lack. So goes Hollywood. Helen Lawson, the battleaxe of another era, is okay, but it’s clear she’s had to claw her way to the top and cause a lot of hurt in the process, much of it to herself. For a book that so many deemed to be fluff, it’s a bleak take on not just fame but all our futures. John Updike wishes.

It was, of course, adapted into a film, with many of the major elements changed and a happy ending given to Anne. Izzy of Be Kind Rewind did the best double video essay analysis of both the casting of that film and its evolution from critical disaster to “the best worst film ever”, so I heartily recommend you check those out (and her entire wonderful channel.) I think the film is probably what people reference more these days than the book, which was surprisingly out of print for quite some time. In fairness, it is eminently quotable and perfect for drag brunches, but the book is a far darker beast that I do think is worth your time, even if the basic literary merits are a tad lacking. It certainly earned its place in the vast and ever-growing canon of “Hollywood is a cesspool that will kill you” fiction, although I wouldn’t put it over, say, A Star is Born or Play It As It Lays. At the very least, you should check it out to see why it became such a phenomenon. The books that sell like this these days are far more boring.

Thanks for joining us for the first edition of Reading Hollywood. This issue was free for all but after this, the book club will be a paid subscriber exclusive, so if you’re eager to join in on future reads, please consider signing up.

Our choices for issue two are…

1. DisneyWar by James B. Stewart: The ultimate deep-dive into Michael Eisner's 20-year tenure as Chairman and CEO of The Walt Disney Company, and the blueprint for why modern Hollywood is the way that it is.

2. Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood by William J. Mann: Hollywood meets true crime with the murder of of silent film director William Desmond Taylor in 1922, one of the incidents that led to the Hays Code's "cleaning up" of the film business.

3. Watch Me by Anjelica Huston: One of the true legends of Hollywood and one generation of a major industry dynasty shares her story, from her many love affairs to her iconic film roles to living under the shadow of her father John.

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