THE SIXTIES
Once Was Never Enough
From Globe Photos.
A quarter-century after Jacqueline Susann’s death, the novelist who made publishing history with Valley of the Dolls, The Love Machine, and Once Is Not Enough is being reissued, re-examined, and reincarnated by Bette Midler in this month’s film Isn’t She Great. How did a pill-popping failed actress write three No. 1 best-sellers in a row? Amy Fine Collins recalls the showbiz world that gave Susann her sex-and-scandal-packed plots, the marriage that gave her a partner in ambition, and the sheer grit that won her the fame she so desperately wanted.
At 3:30 A.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. “This is a bad Christmas,” she wrote. “Irving has no job. . . . I am going to the hospital. . . . I don’t think I have [cancer]. I have too much to accomplish. I can’t die without leaving something—something big. . . . I’m Jackie—I have a dream. I think I can write. Let me live to make it!”
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. Not only did she writeValley 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. 1 spot on The New York Times’s best-seller list. 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 . . . as the voice of the 60s. . . . Andy Warhol, the Beatles and me!”
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. 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. 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. Michele Lee co-produced and starred in a 1998 USA Networks biopic, Scandalous Me, and in January, Universal opens a comedy feature entitledIsn’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 manager of Susann’s literary catalogue, filmmaker Lisa Bishop, is in pre-production on a remake ofValley of the Dolls and is also co-authoring with poet and Susann archivist David TrinidadThe Jacqueline Susann Scrapbook: Dogs, Dames, and Dolls. Writer Rae Lawrence is currently working on a Valley of the Dolls sequel, based on plot notes in Bishop’s Susann files. 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.
Feminist author Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the original publicist for Valley of the Dolls, reports, “This revival is the answer to Jacqueline Susann’s prayers. She predicted the celebrity culture we live in now. Actually, she invented it: fame is as fame does.” Impresario Anna Sosenko, whose friendship with Susann dated from the 40s, adds, “When Jackie was dying she’d call me—scared, sad, and crying. She worried that in a few years everything she’d done would be forgotten. And I told her, ‘Darling, you have expressed your historical era—10 transitional years, from J.F.K.’s assassination to Watergate. Your time will return.’”
The exact historical era into which Jacqueline Susann was born, in Philadelphia on August 20, 1918, was that of the fin de guerre flu epidemic. Her mother, Rose, a fastidious schoolteacher, added a second n to the Sephardic Jewish family name, while her father, Robert, a philandering portrait artist, retained the original spelling. 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. She papered her room with images of stage divas June Knight and Margalo Gillmore, and auditioned repeatedly for The Children’s Hour, a Philadelphia radio program. One summer in Atlantic City, where the Susanns rented a beach house, Jackie, aged about 11, discovered that a celebrated actress had taken up residence in a nearby hotel. Anna Sosenko says, “So Jackie schlepped her poor little girlfriend over to this hotel and they knocked on the actress’s door. . . . The actress shouted, ‘Get lost!’ and slammed the door in her face. Jackie was starstruck and that was the leitmotif of her world of thinking. Once Jackie wanted to know somebody, she pursued them relentlessly. Sometimes the door slammed, and sometimes it opened.”
The exit door from Philadelphia opened when her father helped judge a local beauty contest. Deemed “Philadelphia’s most beautiful girl” on April 16, 1936, the 17-year-old Jackie was awarded a silver loving cup and a Warner Bros. screen test in New York. The contest left her with the unshakable conviction that she was “a tearing beauty,” Sosenko explains. “She always described herself exactly that way. Jackie was very sold on her looks.”
Having flunked her screen test, Jackie resided at Kenmore Hall, a ladies’ hotel in New York, where she befriended a vaudeville waif named Elfie—the prototype for the young Neely in Valley of the Dolls. In the fall of 1936, Susann’s father again intervened on her behalf, pulling strings to land her a part as a French maid in a show heading for rehearsals—Clare Boothe Luce’s The Women,starring Susann’s idol Margalo Gillmore. Despite the help she received from a fellow cast member, a patrician New England blonde named Beatrice Cole, Susann could not master the French accent required for her three lines, and was fired. But she felt so attached to the production, she watched every performance from the wings, nurturing what Irving Mansfield called her “fierce crush” on Gillmore. At last a part as a lingerie model opened up, and in acknowledgment of her devotion to the hit show, Susann was allowed to join the cast of The Women on June 2, 1937.
In the meantime, Susann demonstrated Lux toilet soap with Bea and hung out at Walgreen’s, whose bank of phone booths functioned as a makeshift office for a motley assortment of Broadway types. It was in this humble setting that Susann and press agent Irving Mansfield “met cute,” to use the parlance of old Hollywood. Dazzled by Mansfield’s ability to get her picture in the paper, she married him at her parents’ house in 1939. Mansfield admitted in his 1983 memoir, Life with Jackie, “I can’t really claim that Jackie and I were propelled into each other’s arms by an irresistible passion.” Anna Sosenko observes, “The truth is she thought that Irving would make her a star.”
Producer Armand Deutsch—who met Mansfield before the war when the press agent was publicizing The Rudy Vallee Show and Deutsch was the radio program’s ad representative—calls the young Mr. and Mrs. Irving Mansfield “a Damon Runyon couple.” The pair settled into the Essex House, and when Eddie Cantor, star of vaudeville, radio, screen, and stage, was in town, he stayed at the same residential hotel, usually in the company of his five daughters and his wife, Ida. Undeterred by this family entourage, Susann eagerly threw herself into an affair with Cantor. Actress Joan Castle Sitwell says, “When she told me about Cantor, I said, ‘Are you kidding?’ I suppose he was some kind of father figure for her.” Actress Maxine Stewart adds, “Jackie was simply crazy for Jewish comics.” Yet the liaison paid off in a way that mattered to Susann. Cantor gave her a small speaking part in his new vehicle, Banjo Eyes, which opened at Broadway’s Hollywood Theatre in December 1941, just after America entered the war.
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In the period when Mansfield was promoting CBS’s The Rudy Vallee Show, the writers and Deutsch met regularly at the Essex House apartment of Vic Knight, their producer, to prepare the scripts. Partly because she lived in the same building where the radio men gathered, but mostly because she was “an odd girl, a different girl,” Susann, Deutsch says, “hung around our working sessions, went to dinner with us. I always got the feeling she knew life could be better for her. She yearned for something more.”
“Something more,” at that moment, turned out to be an excellent part as Helen in the road version of the wartime drama Cry Havoc, which opened in Chicago on March 1, 1943. It so happened that the Jewish comic Joe E. Lewis—whose performances Susann had been following avidly since her first days in New York—was also in town doing a show. Consequently, when she dragged members of the all-female cast to see Lewis at the Chez Paree, she was by no means a total stranger to him. And neither was her husband—who, conveniently, had just been drafted into the army and was stationed at Fort Dix, New Jersey. Maxine Stewart, a Cry Havoc co-star, remembers, “Jackie was in love with Joe E. She had left Irving and she was staying at the Royalton. She said to me, ‘I’m not going to live with a man who’s making so little money’—he was on an army salary.” The affair with Lewis ended when the U.S.O. shipped him to New Guinea. Yet even after she reconciled with Mansfield, around 1946, Susann still carried a torch for Joe E. 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.
Susann’s attitude toward the Jewish comics to whom she gave herself so freely surfaces in her portrait of The Love Machine’s TV host, Christie Lane, an uncouth tightwad given to leaving the bathroom door ajar as he lets rip “explosive bowel movement[s].” There is more than a little of her own sense of humiliation embodied in the same novel’s awkward, promiscuous Ethel Evans, whose “cooze is like the Lincoln Tunnel.” And her feelings about Irving at this juncture come through in her characterization of Valley of the Dolls’ Mel Harris, a close replica of her own spouse: “Mel was kinda weakish,” Neely says, but Jewish men like him “make marvelous husbands.” Presumably the fact that Mansfield’s career was, in his words, “leaping ahead” helped lure Susann back home, now at the Hotel Navarro on Central Park South. By the late 40s he had moved into radio production, and by 1949 he had maneuvered his way into the infant medium of television.
And Susann’s own ambition to make herself a marquee name remained undiminished. She played in J. J. Shubert’s fifth New York revival of Blossom Time and Cole Porter’s Let’s Face It. More satisfying was her role in Shubert’s A Lady Says Yes, a 1945 vehicle for Hollywood pinup Carole Landis. (Barbara Seaman believes that Landis and Susann not only compared notes on their mutual conquest, George Jessel—yet another Jewish comic—but also were to some degree physically involved themselves.) During this time Susann began a scrapbook, reserving one cardboard page for a series of notations which amount to a fever chart of her search for fame. “Am I any nearer to success,” she asks herself in August 1944. “Slightly,” she answers in February 1945, a response followed by the addendum marked March 1946, “Oh yeah.” At that date she was playing a stripper called Fudge Farrell in a bomb entitled Between the Covers, set in the publishing world.
Fed up, Susann hauled out of her closet comedian Goodman Ace’s wedding gift, a portable typewriter. In a few weeks she and Bea Cole, whose acting career was also on the skids, co-wrote a bedroom farce called The Temporary Mrs. Smith. The play actually made it to the stage, retitled Lovely Me for its New York opening. Yet, foreshadowing her books’ reception, the universal pans it received forced the play to close to standing-room-only audiences. Still steaming over bad reviews more than a year later, Susann “belted” Daily News critic Douglas Watt at Sardi’s, Walter Winchell reported in April 1948.
Susann did not ditch her typewriter yet—she and Bea next tried writing an exposé about women in show business, a Valley of the Dolls precursor entitled Underneath the Pancake.Susann also availed herself of the wide-open opportunities of live television, frenetically pushing sponsors’ products—Quest-Shon-Mark bras, Sunset appliances, Hazel Bishop cosmetics, and Vigorelli sewing machines—on a spate of ill-fated programs, some of which she hosted.
Though she was booted from one of these shows, WOR-TV’s Night Time, New York (a one-to-seven-A.M. variety broadcast), for her confrontational, proto-shock-jock interview tactics, its sponsor, Schiffli Lace and Embroidery Institute, retained Susann as its spokeswoman. Never one to do things by halves, Susann not only acted in her Schiffli ads but produced and wrote them as well. From 1955 until 1962 she shilled on Schiffli’s behalf on The Ben Hecht Show and then on The Mike Wallace Interview. Offscreen, the “Schiffli Troubadour” plugged her ware at shopping centers, synagogues, and department stores. “She loved the TV commercials,” Joan Castle Sitwell says. “Anything to get her face in front of the public.”
In January 1951, Mansfield took out a full-page Variety ad, in dubious taste and of unfathomable motivation. In banner type-face it declared, “This is Show Business—conceived by Irving Mansfield. The New Sam Levenson Show—conceived by Irving Mansfield. Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts—conceived by Irving Mansfield. The Stork Club—conceived by Irving Mansfield.” And beneath this proud scroll of credits ran a photograph of a smiling little boy, accompanied by the caption “Guy Mansfield—conceived by Irving Mansfield.” Farther below was the line “in association with Jacqueline Susann.” This was not the first press mention of the Mansfields’ son. New York Post columnist Earl Wilson had run an item back on July 16, 1946: “Irving Mansfield and Jacqueline Susann will have a baby in December.” Guy Hildy Mansfield was born on December 6, 1946, under markedly inauspicious circumstances. Susann and Bea Cole’s Lovely Me was in tryouts in Philadelphia, and “flop sweat” was in the air. Not far from her due date her water broke, and with a hotel towel wedged between her legs she took the train back to New York, where Guy was delivered with the aid of forceps.
“Guy seemed like a lovely little baby at first,” Sitwell remembers. “But once he started to stand and walk he began screaming a lot.” Penny Bigelow, a CBS producer for Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts, says, “Guy was standing up in his crib, hitting his head against the wall.” When he started to speak, “Mama,” “Dada,” and “Goddamnit!” were the extent of a vocabulary that soon vanished entirely, Seaman says. Dr. Lauretta Bender, a pioneer in children’s psychiatric disorders, diagnosed Guy’s condition as autism, an illness just then being identified. In Dr. Bender’s care the three-year-old underwent shock treatments. When that drastic measure failed, she advised the Mansfields to send Guy to the Emma Pendleton Bradley Home, a mental institution for children in Rhode Island. Sitwell says, “Jackie had a broken heart. That was the reason for all the pills. And I think it made her sick—what I mean is, I think it gave her the cancer.”
The Mansfields said to the rest of the world that their son was attending school in Arizona due to severe asthma. Penny Bigelow explains, “They always hoped Guy might recover, and they didn’t want him stigmatized once he got out.” Says one ex-patient, Judy Raphael Kletter, who was at Bradley with Guy for three years, “The Mansfields were always there. They were very into Guy, but they couldn’t help him.” (Guy, now 53, is still institutionalized and visited regularly.)
Grieving, Susann began grasping at anything that would numb the pain or distract her. There were her pills, which she nicknamed her “dolls”—her favorite term of endearment. There was work—the manic forays into television and radio dated from this time, as did another playwriting attempt with Bea Cole. “Now, added to Jackie’s innate drive to succeed,” Mansfield wrote, “was this new sense of desperate need to earn money, big, big money, for Guy’s sake and security.”
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There was also the considerable diversion provided by her female friends, loosely organized around her into a society known as the Hockey Club. The group took its name from a corruption of the Yiddish word for “banging,” and the main topic of conversation was, Penny Bigelow says, “who was ‘hocking’ who.” In addition to talking about their own romantic adventures, the women—many of them former actresses (Joyce Mathews, Joan Sitwell, Dorothy Strelsin) who had married well—spied on one another’s errant men. “Billy Rose feared us—he said we were more efficient than the K.G.B.,” says Bigelow. Their exploits were even chronicled in Leonard Lyons’s New York Post column. Dorothy Strelsin (the inspiration for the character Cher played in Franco Zeffirelli’s autobiographical Tea with Mussolini)says: “Jackie was our den mother. We all phoned her when we had nothing else to do and told her everything.”
Under the spell of the glamorous chanteuse Hildegarde—whose popular performances at the Plaza Hotel in New York she attended with the fervor of a groupie—Susann also attempted to find solace in Catholicism. “Jackie was an impressionable woman,” says Anna Sosenko, then Hildegarde’s manager. “A hero-worshiper.” Hildegarde became Guy’s godmother, and Susann gave him the middle name Hildy after her. Sitwell says, “Jackie turned Catholic because of her huge crush on Hildegarde. She would go into Saint Patrick’s and make deals with God for her son. She would quit smoking if Guy would get better.” This unusual approach to religion led Mansfield to say his wife “was treating God like the William Morris office.”
More complicated for Susann than her idolization of Hildegarde was her ill-fated friendship with Ethel Merman, which resembled an exceptionally hard case of puppy love. “She was absolutely loony, like a 12-year-old,” says Sitwell. Yet, Sosenko elaborates, “Ethel was as intrigued by Jackie as Jackie was by Ethel. But all that baloney about them having an affair—they were just girlfriends. Then the two of them got into a fight over something. Ethel had a weird temper. Irving, I think, got mad and threw a drink at her in a restaurant, and Ethel was embarrassed and hurt. Jackie was mortified. That’s how the fight started. Being rebuffed by Ethel stung Jackie deeply—she had really fallen for her. When Jackie wrote about her, as the character Helen Lawson in Valley of the Dolls, Ethel was very burnt up.”
Susann, however, had found another female on whose constancy she could depend. Around 1954, “Jackie fell madly in love with my little Tinker Toy,” Dorothy Strelsin says. “After that she simply had to have a poodle.” Susann ended up adopting a black half-toy, half-miniature, whom she named Josephine, after Joe E. Lewis. Susann had Josephine’s portrait painted on the side of her Cadillac Eldorado, appeared with her in Schiffli ads, and fed her foie gras, Bloody Marys, and coffee, some of it sent up courtesy of the Hotel Navarro’s room service. Never mind that Josephine’s teeth were coming out and her belly bulged to such proportions that her legs could barely support it. Susann now had a creature in the house to whom she could be “Mother.” And with a Jewish mother’s pride, Susann wrote letters detailing her beloved poodle’s escapades, many sent to her friends Billy Rose and his wife, Joyce Mathews, then living in the South of France. When they returned to New York, the couple told Susann, “That dog of yours is a card.” Susann objected, “It’s not the dog that’s a card, it’s me.” In that case, Rose advised, “put it in a book.”
Once again, Susann dusted off her typewriter from Goodman Ace. “I decided to take a year off,” Susann wrote in a long diary entry, recently rediscovered in Lisa Bishop’s archive. “Neither TV or the theatre was about to fall apart with my temporary ‘retirement.’ I worked on the book for nine months. . . . Deep down I didn’t expect it to be published. 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. But before I settled for this I was determined to try for the top. . . . To have it rejected would crush a very real belief I had nurtured all my life—that I could write.”
Susann did begin at the top—with William Morris, which dealt with Mansfield’s TV shows. But, Sosenko recalls, “when Irving would talk to them about Jackie, they turned a deaf ear.” Sosenko agreed to have a look at the manuscript, entitled Every Night, Josephine! “It was adorable, delicious,” she says. “I acted immediately.” Sosenko sent it to her friend Annie Laurie Williams, an agent of John Steinbeck, who had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and Harper Lee, who had just won the Pulitzer Prize. Williams shared Sosenko’s enthusiasm and invited the author to her office for a meeting. “I’ll never forget that day,” Susann wrote. “Before I went, I changed outfits ten times. First I tried a suit—I looked like a writer—but maybe I was too much ‘on the nose’—perhaps a plain black dress.” To Susann’s relief, she noted in the diary, Williams spoke to her new client in exactly the language she understood. “As an actress when you’re up for a part, if the producer says no—that’s it. But with a book, if a publisher says no—you send it to another publisher. . . . It only takes one yes to make a hit.”
In the early fall of 1962, Williams sent Every Night, Josephine! to Doubleday—which shortly thereafter stopped returning calls. To take her mind off Doubleday’s maddening silence, Irving treated his wife and her mother, Rose, to a trip around the world. Susann recorded the monthlong odyssey in a journal with photographs, the kind of scrapbook that she feared would be Josephine’s fate. During the voy-age, Susann happily discovered that Seconals were sold over the counter in Japan. She stockpiled them, intending to barter them with Joyce Mathews for “new outfits.” But the revelation that would permanently alter Susann’s life was made in Hong Kong. On November 9, 1962, she wrote an affectionate epistle to Mansfield: “Doll! . . . Any news from Annie Laurie Williams about Every Night, Josephine!? This waiting is a killer. . . . I love you. . . . Jackie. P.S. Call and make an appointment with Dr. Davids for me. I have a tiny lump. It’s probably nothing, but we might as well make sure.”
Like Jennifer in Valley of the Dolls, when Susann learned the truth about her tumor—infiltrating ductile carcinoma, Seaman states, was the diagnosis—her first instinct was to bolt from the hospital. Back at home, Susann made a diary entry for January 1, 1963: “I’ve looked at the ledger and it doesn’t add up. God, Saint Andrew, the Chinese good luck charm and the whole mishpocheh owe me more than I owe them. I’ve got to leave something worthwhile on this earth before I go. I also don’t want it discovered AFTER I go. I want to be around to get that Nobel Prize.” And when she was strong enough, she went out to a rise in Central Park near the Navarro that she called her Wishing Hill and made a pact with God. If He would give her only 10 more years, she promised God, “she would prove she could make it as a writer,” Mansfield said, “as the number-one writer.”
Doubleday finally informed Susann that its editors liked Every Night, Josephine! But since the firm had already paid an advance to Beatrice Lillie for a book on her pet, Susann’s poodle story would have to wait. Despairing, Susann began to see a psychoanalyst and ingest huge quantities of pills. Determined to help his wife, in February 1963 Mansfield sent a copy of the manuscript to Earl Wilson, their influential columnist friend. “Earl hadn’t read [Every Night, Josephine!]” Susann recounted in her diary pages. “He was just being a good friend” when he rang up Bernard Geis, the head of the “flashy and prestigious” house that bore his name. Geis remembers, “When Earl Wilson called, he said, ‘I’ve got a beautiful young woman in my office, in tears.’” After hearing Susann’s tale, Geis told Wilson the distraught lady should “dry her tears.” Intending to read only 20 pages as a courtesy, Geis instead “finished the manuscript” at seven A.M., Susann wrote in the diary. “He got dressed and took a walk. All the dogs and their masters or mistresses were emerging. He stared at them all. . . . When he came home, his wife was up and reading the MS. She looked up and said, ‘you’re publishing this, aren’t you?’ . . . Josie came out in November 1963. I always say I was ‘born’ on that day.”
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Bernard Geis Associates was “born” in 1958, and “five of our first six books were on the [best-seller] list,” says Geis. These included books by Groucho Marx and Art Linkletter, who were also investors in Geis’s new venture. By the time Susann came on board Geis had also published Sex and the Single Girl, by the unknown ad copywriter Helen Gurley Brown, and President Truman’s Mr. Citizen. Thanks to what movie producer (and Helen’s husband) David Brown calls Geis’s “riverboat gambler’s” instincts, his involvements with television personalities, and his clever publicity director, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, Geis at that time was, the publisher himself says, “the only one who knew how to promote books.”
The Mansfields, who modeled their publicity tour on Helen Gurley Brown’s for Sex and the Single Girl, also conjured up a few novel P.R. tricks of their own. “To remind people of the cover of the book,” Susann wrote in her diary pages, on every TV show she and Josie dressed in matching leopard-patterned pillbox hats and coats. To her chagrin, however, some of Susann’s “mother and dog” engagements were thwarted. “I was booked on a tour—first stop Los Angeles. And then a week later the whole world collapsed,” Susann wrote, somewhat disingenuously, in the diary. “President Kennedy was assassinated.” Pogrebin remembers clearly “how appalled she was that J.F.K. dared to be shot so close to her publication date! We were all watching the TV in my office, tears rolling down our eyes. And she was stomping around, demanding, ‘What’s going to happen to my bookings!’” Josephine, which had an initial printing of 7,500, sold 35,000 copies, made it to No. 9 on Time magazine’s best-seller list, and went on to sell about a million copies when it was republished in the 70s. Susann earned a few thousand dollars, and Geis paid her $3,000 for the rights to whatever she wrote next.
The day that she put on her little black dress and introduced herself to Annie Laurie Williams, Susann “went home, put a piece of paper in the typewriter immediately—and wrote Chapter One of VOD. Because I figured,” Susann told her diary, “in case, all the publishers said no, I wanted to be deeply involved in another book.” The story had been gestating in Susann’s mind all during the sojourn with her mother. In fact, in the letter from Hong Kong in which Susann had announced so offhandedly to her husband the presence of the lump in her right breast, she had also excitedly reported to him, “I think I have a great title—Valley of the Dolls—all based on our little red dolls in the medicine chest.”
Susann labored on her manuscript for a year and a half, following a disciplined writing routine that would serve her for the rest of her career. Dressed in trousers, or, if it was warm, her nightgown (to which she would pin a Van Cleef poodle brooch, a gift from Irving to commemorate Every Night, Josephine!’s publication), and with her hair tied into pigtails, she sequestered herself daily from 10 until 5 in her Navarro office—Guy’s former nursery. (When the Mansfields moved to 200 Central Park South in 1970, her office walls were upholstered in pink patent leather and the curtains made up from Pucci fabric.) “It’s like giving up cigarettes or going on a diet,” Susann said of her regime. “Only you have to do it every day.” She pounded out five drafts, on as many different colors of paper stock, a practice appropriated from the theater. The first draft, typed on “inexpensive white paper,” was where she would “spill it out,” she explained in a 1968 WABC-TV documentary. On the yellow paper she worked out the characters, on the pink she focused on “story motivation,” and on the blue she “cut, cut, cut.” The final draft was written on “good white paper.” Coordinating chalk colors to the paper colors, she would diagram the plot on a blackboard.
The origins of her system dated back to the summer of 1963, when producer Joe Cates, his wife, Lily, and the Mansfields were all staying together at the Beverly Hills Hotel. “I would see Jackie with her nose in a Harold Robbins book,” says Lily Naify (the former Lily Cates). “She’d smack her lips and say, ‘I know exactly how he does it and I’m going to do it, too!’ The two of us were having lunch at the Beverly Wilshire and we went to a nearby bookstore and bought three copies of whatever the latest Harold Robbins was. Then we proceeded to scissor it. What I mean is, we spent a week cutting these pieces out of the books, and then reorganizing the snipped pieces by character. Then each character was written up on a different-colored set of index cards. She decided that Harold Robbins had created a formula: give a set of different characters one common denominator. It could be the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, it could be the Titanic. In Valley of the Dolls, it was the pills.”
In January 1965, Berney Geis heard from Annie Laurie Williams. “She told me, ‘Don’t laugh, but Jacqueline Susann is writing a novel,’” Geis says. “I suppressed a chuckle. Then along comes a huge manuscript, and I turned it over to my editorial staff. They marched into my office and begged, ‘Please, don’t publish this book. It’s literary trash.’” The Geis editor who would take on Valley of the Dolls, Don Preston, recalls, “It was a big mess of a book. A cheap soap opera—not a book anyone with any brain cells could take seriously. Why did Berney go to such trouble for something so lousy? Well, when Jackie wanted a full-page ad for Every Night, Josephine! in The New York Times Book Review, and Berney said no, Irving pulled out his checkbook, wrote a check for about $6,000, and said, ‘Let’s just do it.’ So Berney took the book home to do what we called ‘Scarsdale Research.’” Geis, in other words, gave the manuscript to his wife, Darlene, to read. Halfway through it, Geis says, his wife “turned to me and said, ‘I feel like I picked up the phone and I was listening in on a conversation of women talking about how their husbands are in bed. Who would hang up on a conversation like that?’”
What Darlene Geis was responding to was almost exactly that: a dialogue-heavy, highly fictionalized retelling of the checkered careers of the Hockey Club women and their far-flung friends. Anna Sosenko notes, “If you follow Valley of the Dolls closely, it’s very autobiographical.” Gossip columnist Cindy Adams, whom Sosenko once tried to pair with Susann for a radio show, says, “Jackie was the quintessential, the ultimate yenta—by which I mean ‘storyteller.’ Individually, the tales she’d tell over the phone would never have interested me. But she would extract the most delicious, wonderful parts, and with her incredible memory for detail she’d weave stories about the love lives, the chicaneries, the Machiavellian ways, the lies and limitations of the people she knew. You know, anyone could have done Schiffli. As an actress, she was no Meryl Streep. Her plays—anyone could have written them. But no one else could have taken all that dish and put it on the plate. So instead of the phone, it was the typewriter! Jackie was like the grass on the Wailing Wall. It’s stone and six feet thick—but somehow grass finds a way to grow on it. Even if her career was fallow, Jackie would find a way. This woman had to be known, to be seen, to be heard. She would not be a nonentity.”
As she wrote, Susann said, “it was like a Ouija board—characters would spring up.” Valley of the Dolls’ noble-hearted Anne Welles, whom many readers mistook for Grace Kelly (and who shares certain traits with the author), was in basic outline Bea Cole, whom Susann described in her diary as “the mother of the World.” But Anne’s selfless devotion to dashing agent Lyon Burke, even while he is sleeping with her friend Neely O’Hara, comes from the saga of Lee Reynolds, who remained loyal to her talent-agent husband, David Begelman, even after his entanglement with Judy Garland helped destroy their marriage. Lyon Burke’s name was derived from Kenny Lyons, a man whom Penny Bigelow loved when they worked together on Mansfield’s Arthur Godfrey’s Talent Scouts. The castle that Lyon Burke inherits refers to the family seat that Sitwell inhabited during her marriage to a British aristocrat. “Jackie,” Mansfield noted, “didn’t waste a thing.”
Though the early Neely resembles Elfie, Susann’s hapless ragamuffin friend from Kenmore Hall, the later Neely was based, a little too close for comfort, on Judy Garland, as readers suspected. Beautiful, vulnerable, pill-popping Jennifer was not Marilyn Monroe, as many supposed. Rather, she was a composite of Susann (the breast cancer), Carole Landis (the moneygrubbing mother, the extraordinary figure, the bisexuality, and the suicide), and Joyce Mathews, the cream-puff showgirl twice married to both Milton Berle and Billy Rose. Mathews, whose raison d’être, Susann wrote in a diary entry, was striving “to be the prettiest girl in [E1] Morocco,” was “the biggest pill taker of everybody,” a friend says. “She hid pills all around the house, in chandeliers, in candy boxes. She even worked in a hospital as a nurse’s aide. Everyone said, ‘Oh, how noble.’ But it was really just to get pills!” Mathews’s ex-husband Milton Berle says, “Jackie milked that friendship for all it was worth.” Tony Polar, the intellectually deficient crooner who performs anal sex on Jennifer, was Susann’s revenge on one of her longtime infatuations, Dean Martin, Seaman says. When she finally met him, Martin barely looked up from the comic book he was reading. Tony’s protective big sister Miriam’s fears that his brain disorder could be genetic, and her worries that he would end up in a public institution if she didn’t watch his money carefully, parallels Susann’s concerns about Guy. It was hardly a secret that the aging, loudmouthed, ill-tempered, egomaniacal—but preternaturally talented—singer Helen Law-son was Ethel Merman. About the character, Susann said, “I loved Helen Lawson. . . . She could emasculate men with her strength.” And about “the Merm,” Susann said, “We didn’t speak before the book came out. Let’s just say that now we’re not speaking louder.”
Editor Don Preston says, “Berney sent me home with the manuscript and told me not to come back to the office until I was finished. I holed up in Rockland County with the thing, and I cut about a third out.” Next, Preston had “a lot of meetings” with Susann to troubleshoot particular problems with the story. “I talked her into writing some scenes,” he says. “For example, initially Neely and Helen Lawson didn’t meet at any point during the book, which wasn’t right. Both were flamboyant, spark-spitting characters. Readers would have wanted them to lock horns. So I said, ‘Ladies are always going to the bathroom together. Why not have them meet in the ladies’ room and get into an argument?’” Out of that grew the classic passage in which Neely yanks off Helen Lawson’s wig and tries to flush it down the toilet. It’s a camp catfight that echoes the climactic confrontation in the play that earned Susann her Equity card, The Women.
Preston continues, “Jackie didn’t understand the emotional side of sex—which she always called ‘humping.’ All she understood was the physical act. When Anne loses her virginity to Lyon, I suggested that she set it in this tawdry hotel room with a naked lightbulb. She still loves him, but she’s left wondering, How did it get kind of ugly when I thought it would be beautiful? But Jackie objected: ‘Can’t I just write, “and then they fucked,” and leave it at that?’ Jackie had far more sensitivity writing the sex scenes between women.”
In February 1966, Valley of the Dolls—wrapped in a slick, spare jacket showing colored pills scattered against a white background—“exploded like a land mine in a placid landscape,” says Letty Cottin Pogrebin. A primer for adults about pre-marital sex, adultery, lesbianism, drugs, abortion, and the domination of women by men, Valley of the Dolls “got at very lurid stuff that was then still subsurface,” Liz Smith remembers. Geis Associates, which had already sold the paperback rights to Bantam for more than $200,000—enabling Mansfield to broker the movie rights to Twentieth Century Fox for ultimately around the same amount—cautiously ordered an initial printing of 20,000. Thanks to Bantam’s money, the publicity campaign was budgeted at a hefty $50,000. Pogrebin kicked it off with the kind of splashy mailings, previously alien to book publishing, which had become a Geis trademark. The first, written on a prescription pad, advised, “Take 3 yellow ‘dolls’ before bedtime for a broken love affair; take 2 red dolls and a shot of scotch for a shattered career; take Valley of the Dolls in heavy doses for the truth about the glamour set on the pill kick.” Fifteen hundred advance copies were dispatched to anyone who might help publicize it, including celebrities. Pasted in one of Susann’s Valley of the Dolls scrapbooks are a charming thank-you letter, dated February 15, 1966, from Senator Robert Kennedy’s press assistant, and a terse reply, dated February 20, from Norman Mailer’s secretary, stating that Mailer “won’t have time to read Valley of the Dolls.” This was an admission Mailer may have come to regret, because Susann consigned him to the fate of becoming Once Is Not Enough’s Tom Colt—a hard-drinking, pugnacious writer with a child-size penis.
Mansfield by now had left television to manage his wife’s career full-time. This gesture represented “Jackie’s romantic ideal,” says Lily Naify. “To her it was like the King of England giving up his throne for Wallis Simpson.” 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.”
Before embarking on her national tour—which never really stopped until she began hawking The Love Machine in 1969—Susann consulted a notebook she had kept while plugging Every Night, Josephine! Into it went minute notations about every reporter, bookshop clerk, and talk-show host she had encountered. Wives’ and kids’ names were recorded, as were birth dates, hobbies, and comments on their importance, personality, and physical appearance. “She studied it, memorized it, wrote the people on it letters,” says Love Machine publicist Abby Hirsch. “She was a politician.”
Advertisements for Valley of the Dolls were placed not just in the usual newspaper book pages but in entertainment sections as well. 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.”
Somehow, says talent manager Arnold Stiefel (then a Bantam P.R. assistant), Mansfield managed to obtain the names of the 125 bookstores that The New York Times polled when compiling its all-powerful best-seller list. Like a general spearheading a battle, Mansfield recruited friends for his strategic book-buying campaign. “Irving would say, ‘You’re going to San Francisco to visit your mother,’” Lily Naify recalls. “‘Go to this bookstore on Post Street and buy every copy of the book you see. Then order five more.’ In New York he’d want you to go into Doubleday or Coliseum and say, ‘You only have four? I need 12 for Christmas.’ And then we had to make sure the book was displayed up front. I had stacks of them in my closet.” Twentieth Century Fox apparently also pitched in; it was in the studio’s interest to be able to trumpet in its ads the exhilarating words “based on the best-seller.”
Mansfield may have stirred up a lot of activity with his book-buying crusade, but the couple’s real secret weapon was television, a medium each of them knew intimately. “All you had to do was point a TV camera at Jackie and she’d light up like a pinball machine,” Don Preston says. Early in the game Mansfield had even borrowed CBS cameras and monitors to color-test Valley of the Dolls’cover. Television was a very different instrument in 1966—with just three networks, no cable, no channel-surfing, no competition from videos or computers, and no splinter demographics, America was one monolithic audience tuning in coast to coast to the same entertainment at the same time. And, Bernard Geis recalls, “Jackie knew how to manipulate every conversation right back to the book. It got to the point where you could not turn on a water faucet without getting Jacqueline Susann.”
All told, Susann made about 250 appearances, visiting as many as 11 cities in 10 days and conducting up to 30 interviews a week. “I took amphetamine pills when I was on tour,” she told Pageant magazine in February 1967. “I felt that I owed it to people to be bright. Rather than droop on television . . . I was suddenly awake, could give my best.” Barbara Seaman says, “All Jackie’s life she had been in training for this great, glorious explosion. Who else had spent 25 years learning to be a TV pitchwoman?—the soap, the bras, the sewing machines, Schiffli, and then the books.”
On April 29, 1966, while she was in Florida, Susann left a note for Mansfield, who was out playing golf. “Our man in New York just called,” she reported. “He said I’m Number One on the bestseller list in the New York Times next Sunday—WOW!!! Irv, it’s finally happened! . . . I couldn’t have done it without you. . .. I’ll give up smoking and pills and never take more than two drinks. Anyway, tonight we’ll bust out the Dom Perignon (see, I’ve already forgotten about the two drinks). . . . I love you. . . . Jackie.” The book officially entered the top slot on May 8, its ninth week on the list, and stayed there for 28 consecutive weeks.
Though there was hardly a newspaper or magazine in the country that hadn’t run a feature on Jacqueline Susann, there was a paucity of actual Valley of the Dolls reviews. One exception was a notice in the New York Herald Tribune by Gloria Steinem (who, David Brown says, sensibly turned down a Fox offer to write the novel’s screenplay). In Steinem’s opinion, compared with Jacqueline Susann, Harold Robbins wrote like Proust. But Susann had a ready defense for the “double-domed,” “artsy-craftsy” critics. “So if I’m selling millions,” she said, “I must be good.” The results of the Mansfields’ efforts on behalf of the Geis hard-back were staggeringly impressive. Valley of the Dolls remained on the best-seller list for 65 weeks and sold close to 400,000 copies. And for each $5.95 book sold, Susann received about $1.35.
For Bantam’s July 4, 1967, Valley of the Dolls paperback release, C.E.O. Oscar Dystel ordered a first printing of two million—with the goal of a Labor Day sellout. Unlike the staff at Geis, everyone at Bantam had immediately liked Valley of the Dolls and its author. “She had a sincerity, an almost naïve directness,” Dystel says. “She wanted to know everything about how our business worked—the paper, the typography, the distribution mechanisms. Other publishers thought that was meddlesome. But we welcomed it—Jackie saw the big picture.”
Thanks in no small part to Esther Margolis’s endless P.R. ingenuity, her boss need not have worried. Not only did Valley of the Dolls in paperback become No. 1, it became the fastest-selling book in history, with a peak volume, The Saturday Evening Post reported, of 100,000 per day. “We sold between six and eight million copies in six months,” Oscar Dystel states. “With a sale of that velocity, it had to be reaching men and younger people too, not just women.” Margolis says the gargantuan sales of Valley of the Dolls even helped “bring suitors into Bantam,” which had been put on the market by its owner, Grosset & Dunlap. National General Corporation, the parent company of a chain of movie theaters, ended up making the purchase. “So Jackie definitely played a role in merging publishing with the entertainment industry and turning it into really big business,” Margolis says.
Eddie Cantor had once advised Susann, “Never go to Hollywood; make them send for you.” With a major motion picture of Valley of the Dolls in the works, Hollywood now beckoned. Hoping for the kind of control over the film that she had exercised over her book, she tried to muscle her way into Twentieth Century Fox’s casting, writing, and scoring decisions. The director, Mark Robson, was already on board, but Susann had assembled her wish list for the cast: Ursula Andress as Jennifer; Grace Kelly, “if she’d lose 10 to 15 pounds,” as Anne; Shirley MacLaine as Neely; Bette Davis as Helen Lawson; and Elvis Presley as Tony Polar. She even wrote a theme song with Bob Gaudio and recorded it with the Arbors, a male quartet. “She was furious that they didn’t use it,” says Arnold Stiefel.
Though none of Susann’s favorites made it into the picture, she became satisfied with some of the studio’s choices. Barbara Parkins, already powerful at Fox because of her part in the TV show Peyton Place, was cast as Anne Welles. Sharon Tate was an ideal Jennifer; Patty Duke as Neely O’Hara was more problematic. But the most irksome casting dilemma concerned Helen Lawson. In a stunt-casting coup de théâtre the studio chose “a fast-fading Judy Garland,” David Brown says. Susann and Garland teamed up for a press conference, at which reporters couldn’t resist interrogating Garland about Valley of the Dolls’ depiction of pill abuse among entertainers. “I find it prevalent among newspaper people,” Garland snapped.
In April 1967, Parkins was called upon to do her first scene with Garland, in which she brings contracts to Helen Lawson backstage. “I was so scared I called Jackie,” Parkins says. “She told me, ‘Just go and enjoy her.’ The first day Judy did fine, but as time passed she forgot her lines and smoked a lot. The director was not gentle with her.” Finally, Garland locked herself in her trailer and refused to budge. She was given two weeks’ respite to decide whether to stay or go. After the 14 days passed, the studio said, “We decided for you—you’re fired,” Parkins says. Susan Hayward was brought in to replace her, and, Parkins says, Garland “walked out of the studio with all the costumes.” A few weeks later, Arnold Stiefel says, Garland performed at the Westbury Music Fair, glittering and twinkling in one of Fox designer Travilla’s beaded pantsuits.
Fox held a sneak preview at San Francisco’s Orpheum Theatre. The marquee, which could not give away the title, instead teased passersby with the come-on “the biggest book of the year.” Those words alone attracted “a huge preview audience,” David Brown recalls. “And the film was so campy, everyone roared with laughter. One patron was so irate he poured his Coke all over Fox president Dick Zanuck in the lobby. And we knew we had a hit. Why? Because of the size of the audience—the book would bring them in.”
Susann’s own reaction was not so different from the outraged cola tosser’s. Fox publicity had orchestrated a snazzy, monthlong floating premiere aboard the luxury liner M.V. Princess Italia. At each port of call there would be press screenings with the stars and the author. At the first screening, in Venice, Susann “was appalled,” Barbara Parkins remembers. With its happy ending, lackluster male leads, incongruous casting, and $1,300 worth of false hair, the movie “had ruined her book. Jackie demanded to be flown off the boat.”
When she had overcome her anger, Susann rejoined the junket in Miami—and kept quiet, for fear of damaging book sales. Despite the predictably nasty reviews, the movie, which opened in New York at the Criterion and Festival theaters on December 15, 1967, broke studio box-office records, grossing a total of around $70 million.
The picture was still playing in theaters in August 1969 when the Mansfields were at the Beverly Hills Hotel, this time hustling The Love Machine. On the eighth of the month, Sharon Tate invited Susann to her house for a small dinner party. But when critic Rex Reed dropped in for a surprise visit at the hotel, Susann and he decided to stay in for the evening. The next morning at the pool, where the Mansfields customarily held court at Cabana 8, “Jackie was crying her eyes out,” recalls Svend Petersen, pool manager since 1963. “She had just found out that Sharon Tate was murdered the night before.” Several years later when Susann was terminally ill, she said to Reed, “It could all have happened a lot sooner if we’d gone to Sharon’s that night.”
Why was Valley of the Dolls, movie and book, such an extraordinary success? Don Preston believes the answer lies in the Mansfields’ peerless promotional skills. Clearly, it could not just have been the risqué subject matter; more prurient books were available, although maybe not ones a secretary could safely read on the subway. Without doubt Susann had an authentic, almost evangelical empathy for female emotional experience, at the exact moment when women’s place in the world was about to undergo a seismic upheaval. Above all, she knew her audience. Before People or Hollywood Babylon had ripped the scales from the public’s eyes, “Valley of the Dolls showed that a woman in a ranch house with three kids had a better life,” Susann said, “than what happened up there at the top.”
Just as Susann had begun Valley of the Dolls before Every Night, Josephine! was accepted by Geis, so The Love Machine was already germinating while she was peddling the first novel. In the August 19, 1966, issue of Life, Susann revealed that she had already finished the first draft of the new book. It would be called The Love Machine, she told reporter Jane Howard. And its hero would be “like the most exciting man in television. The title has a dual meaning, you see, the man is like a machine and so is the television box, a machine selling the love of the actors and love of the sponsors.” Though he bore the initials of Susann’s rogue father, The Love Machine’s protagonist, Robin Stone, was in fact “like” the Mansfields’ friend James Aubrey, the handsome, depraved head of CBS. Nicknamed “the smiling cobra,” he abused women, drugs, animals, and his power until CBS chairman William Paley finally ejected him from the network in 1965. Liz Smith, who worked as an associate producer at CBS during Aubrey’s reign of terror, recalls, “Aubrey was a mean, hateful, truly scary, bad, outré guy.” Yet in 1969 he rebounded to become head of MGM studios. There he was known to refer to himself as “trisexual—I’ll try anything,” and to have at his disposal a dog trained to perform sex acts with women. Aubrey, fully aware of what Susann was up to, implored her to “make me mean, a real son of a bitch.”
Rather than pills, the Beverly Hills Hotel pool, or the Titanic, the link this time among the heroines was hopeless love for Robin Stone; in her Times review, Nora Ephron called the female characters “the most willing group of masochists assembled outside the pages of de Sade.” Model Amanda was based on the exquisitely elegant fashion journalist Carol Bjorkman. A muse of Halston’s, a friend of Truman Capote’s, and the mistress of Seventh Avenue mogul Seymour Fox, Bjorkman, like Amanda, died of leukemia at the height of her beauty, in July 1967. Susann, who worshiped Bjorkman’s style, was a fixture in the dying woman’s hospital room, and even dedicated The Love Machine to her. “Call it a crush if you want,” says Anna Sosenko. “But don’t put them in bed together.”
Though legally Geis owned The Love Machine, the Mansfields maneuvered their way out of their contract with the little publishing house and into a much more lucrative arrangement with Simon & Schuster. “Essandess” (as Susann playfully called a publishing house in The Love Machine) plied the Mansfields with a $250,000 advance, a $200,000 promotional budget, and guarantees of suites and limousines. The Mansfields forged a completely separate agreement with Bantam, to whom they remained loyal, and from whom they extracted a 100-percent-royalties sweetheart deal.
Launched in May 1969, The Love Machine (to use one newsman’s metaphor) was “a heat-seeking missile” headed “straight for first place on the bestseller list.” It arrived at its intended destination on June 24, toppling Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint from the highest spot. About her rival Roth, Susann said, “He’s a fine writer, but I wouldn’t want to shake hands with him.” Mansfield sold the movie rights to Columbia Pictures’ Mike Frankovich for $1.5 million, a percentage of the gross, and a producer’s credit. This embarrassment of riches was just a little more than some members of the literary establishment could bear.
On July 23, 1969, Mansfield’s 61st birthday, Susann arrived at a studio to tape the David Frost show with a panel of friendly journalists: Rex Reed, Nora Ephron, and Jimmy Breslin. At the last minute and with-out Susann’s knowledge, critic John Simon was brought in to replace Breslin. Simon went for the jugular, lashing out at Susann for “writing trash” and smiling “through false teeth.” Rex Reed recalls, “It was terrible. Simon was spitting all over Nora Ephron’s arm and Nora was sitting there like a caged animal. It was the only time I ever saw Jackie lose her cool.”
Later that evening at Danny’s Hide-A-Way, Susann simmered down over Mansfield’s birthday dinner. Back at home, the couple was drowsily viewing Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show in bed. Susann suddenly jolted to attention at the sound of Truman Capote mentioning her name. He was calling her “a born transvestite” who “should have been cast in the title role of Myra Breckinridge” because, with her “sleazy wigs and gowns,” she resembles “a truckdriver in drag.” Susann dumped water on her dozing spouse, who, awakened, sprang into action. He called lawyer Louis Nizer, who advised against a suit. Instead, Mansfield extracted from NBC an agreement to place Susann on The Tonight Show and Today, as well as a daytime game show. And Susann took care of her vendetta by the usual means. Capote became an incidental figure in Once Is Not Enough, a pudgy “little capon” who “hadn’t written anything” for years but had made “a whore” of himself “going on talk shows and attending celebrity parties.” And he returned in Dolores, a 1974 novella Susann wrote forLadies’ Home Journal, this time as the viperish gossip Horatio Capon. As for Capote, he issued an apology—to the truckdrivers.
The Love Machine in paperback exceeded Valley of the Dolls in swiftness of sales; Susann’s statistics moved David Frost to remark that the writer typed “on a cash register.” From these first two novels, Barbara Seaman calculates, Susann earned $8 million between 1966 and 1972 (about $30 million today). Vigilant about Guy’s future security, she cautiously invested the windfall in municipal bonds and blue-chip stocks. And the frustrated thespian who only a decade before had longed to be identified at Sardi’s as more than “just the Schiffli girl” now found herself seated ahead of Henry Fonda at Mateo’s, the Beverly Hills restaurant. “No one ever said, ‘Hey, you look familiar,’” publicist Abby Hirsch recalls. ”It was always ‘There goes Jacqueline Susann!’”
Susann, again, was at work on her third novel while still on tour with her second. IfThe Love Machine had been an “attempt to get inside of men’s ids,” then, Susann announced, Once Is Not Enough was all about “mental incest. I think it happens to every girl who has a great father.” Bantam already owned the paperback rights to Susann’s story of heiress January Wayne’s efforts to find a man who measures up to her high-roller father, Mike Wayne. But, as before, Susann “felt she might be better off with another” hardback publisher, Mansfield wrote. Sherry Arden, whom Susann knew from the WABCValley of the Dolls documentary, suggested Morrow, where Arden had become publicity director. Larry Hughes, then head of Morrow, says, “Jackie was a pretty shrewd person. She knew they laughed behind her back at Simon & Schuster. Jackie told a good story, and that’s an art of its own. She’s too easy a mark for derision.”
Susann’s editor at Morrow, Jim Landis, remembers, “Jackie would listen very carefully to your suggestions, and then revise. Other No. Is stopped listening after a while, but never Jackie. Her books were driven by what happens to characters, and how they dealt with each other. The sex was just a part of that.” One scurrilous episode that Landis asked Susann to rewrite made him wonder about the nature of Susann’s own sexual experience. Linda Riggs, the raunchy nymphomaniac who edits Gloss magazine, at one point teaches the virginal January Wayne how to make a “facial mask” out of a lover’s semen. “Linda originally told January that she had just collected ‘a milk-cartonful’ of semen from a ‘hand job,’” Landis recounts. “And I said, ‘Jackie, what size milk carton is this?’ And she asked me, ‘Well, what size should it be, Jim—a gallon, a quart, a pint?’ It was strange how naïve she was.”
Susann, in turn, found Landis naïve. “Jackie wasn’t a good speller. I came across an unrecognizable word one day and asked her what it was. She said, ‘You poor darling, you don’t know.’” She led Landis into the kitchen and opened the door to her refrigerator. It was empty except for a bottle of champagne, but when she opened the vegetable bin, inside there was also “something like an egg carton,” Landis says. Angrily, she slammed the drawer shut and grabbed the kitchen phone, “a Touch-Tone, one of the first I’d ever seen,” Landis recalls. After punching in the number of Mansfield’s office, where her old friend Bea Cole now worked, she screamed into the receiver, “Bea! Where is he?!” And when Mansfield got on, she shouted, “Goddamnit, every night when you said you were getting out of bed for water, you were sneaking one of the Nembutal suppositories! You son of a bitch! There’s only one left!” Susann banged the phone down and explained to her editor that Nembutal suppositories were what “rich people brought back for each other from Europe—they were sold over the counter there.” And she said, “Do you know what you do with this? You get in your bed, shove it up your ass, and then you fall asleep—from your feet up.” Landis concludes, “The word she couldn’t spell was suppositories!”
Landis remembers that in the fall of 1972, while he was editing Susann, a former three-pack-a-day smoker, she had “a little cough. Irving kept telling me that I was working her too hard.” And when Susann and Mansfield traveled to Paris in the summer of 1973 to spread the gospel about The Love Machine, which had just been published in France, Sylvie Messinger, Susann’s subsidiary director at Éditions Belfond, paid a call at the Mansfields’ Ritz suite. “I asked to use the bathroom,” Messinger says. “There were bottles and bottles of pills everywhere. I didn’t understand, so I asked Jackie, ‘How many pills do you take a day?’ And she told me, ‘Oh, they’re all vitamins.’ I thought that maybe this was a new American fashion.” What Landis had noticed in the fall of 1972 and Messinger stumbled upon the next summer were both symptoms of a problem the Mansfields had at first dared not suspect. On January 18, 1973—just as Susann’s 10-year pact with God was expiring—her internist informed her that she had developed “metastatic breast carcinoma.” In other words, her breast cancer had spread to her lungs and was so advanced she probably had only a few months to live. 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. Again, she kept her condition under wraps. She feared for her glamorous image—she could not bear “eyes of pity,” she said—she feared for her book contracts, and, most of all, she feared for Guy.
Besides, Susann had a book to promote. “Grab every brass ring you can,” Susann wrote inOnce Is Not Enough, “because when you look back, it seems like a hell of a short ride.” No longer just fashion statements, her Korean-hair wigs and theatrical makeup were now necessities. Even when she began sprouting a beard, she faced down the cameras. “She had hair all over her chin, and up the sides of her face,” says Anna Sosenko, who was privy to her illness. “But her pride in her looks was so great that she went through this devastating procedure of electrolysis so that on the air she could still be ‘a tearing beauty.’”
Not surprisingly, the reviews of Once Is Not Enough were cruel, and as always she toured incessantly, nationally and internationally, from April to October 1973, when she collapsed. Somehow, amid all these promotional efforts and harrowing medical treatments, she found time to write the novella Dolores for Ladies’ Home Journal during the summer and fall of 1973. And the issue in which it appeared, February 1974, was the most successful in the magazine’s history. But all that was just an upbeat footnote to the big news that had come months earlier. Once Is Not Enough had claimed top place on the Times best-seller list, pushing Frederick Forsyth’s The Odessa File down to No. 2—making her the first author in publishing history to hit No. 1 three times in a row.
In the late spring and early summer of 1974 the Mansfields were back in L.A., where Howard Koch’s Paramount movie version of Once Is Not Enough was wrapping. From the West Coast, Mansfield kept stalling Esther Margolis and Oscar Dystel, who were gearing up for the traditional July Fourth Bantam paperback launch. Finally, Mansfield told them they had better fly out for a meeting. Margolis says, “Irving made an early dinner reservation, six o’clock at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Jackie came in, looking thin, and joined us at the booth. And she told Oscar and me about her cancer. She was fabulous, matter-of-fact, and optimistic. She was deciding which book she should write next. Jackie went back to their room, Suite 135–136, and Irving stayed with us. He told us that her cancer had spread all over her body and it was unlikely she’d be able to do any of the books she talked about.”
On her 56th birthday, August 20, 1974, Susann was admitted to Doctors Hospital for the last of her 18 stays there. In her final days Susann said to her husband, “Maybe we’ve had too many secrets. Guy, my illness earlier, my illness now.” Mansfield told Oscar Dystel that shortly before she died, Susann, in the throes of a delusion, ripped off her turban and commanded her husband, “Let’s blow this joint!”—which she finally did at 9:02 P.M. on September 21, 1974. The secret of Susann’s terminal illness had been so rigorously guarded, the press—wary of yet another publicity stunt—called 200 Central Park South repeatedly for confirmation.
After a service at Frank E. Campbell’s, Mansfield had Susann’s body cremated and her ashes deposited in a bronze vessel the size and shape of a book. He placed it on a shelf, among the many rows of editions of his wife’s books. The metallic volume, like all the No. 1 books into which Susann poured the substance of her being, was a work of fiction. Its cover was inscribed, not with the actual year of her birth, 1918, but with 1921, “the birthdate Jackie had chosen for herself,” Mansfield said.
Susann died with several unwritten books in her. At the dinner three months before she expired during which she confessed her condition to Esther Margolis and Oscar Dystel, the author had spoken of her plans for a sequel to Every Night, Josephine! She had also mentioned the possibility of a roman à clef about a Cantor-like comedian—possibly a reworking of Cock of the Walk, the play she and Bea Cole had co-authored in 1950 right after Guy was taken to Bradley. But Susann’s greatest aspiration, Oscar Dystel intimated in his eulogy, was to write what she called the “Real Book.” In the rediscovered journal pages in Lisa Bishop’s possession (Mansfield burned virtually all his wife’s diaries immediately after her death), Susann resolved, “I am writing my autobiography first,” rather than the “three more novels” for which she had ideas, “because I don’t know how much time I’ve got. I don’t know whether I’ll live to finish the book. But it’s important to me to set the facts straight.” Her deathbed remarks to Mansfield about Guy and her fatal disease suggest some of the “facts” festering in her mind. New Millennium Entertainment’s Michael Viner, who with his wife, Deborah Raffin (who played January inOnce Is Not Enough), remained close to Mansfield until his 1988 death, says, “She definitely would have matured into writing a serious book about her experiences with autism and cancer.” Sosenko is also convinced that “her plan was to become a really fine writer. She was already studying Dostoyevsky, all the Russians.” Joan Castle Sitwell recollects, “Jackie would say, ‘I don’t want the Pulitzer Prize. I want the Nobel Prize. I’m not going to settle!’ Was that dream any more unlikely than what had already happened to her?”
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. When she finally got it, she appreciated it, was grateful for it, loved everything about it. And Irving basked in her glory. They were two pigs in shit.” Sosenko, a fellow insomniac who routinely received nocturnal calls from Susann, says that “one night shortly before she died Jackie became tragically philosophical. ‘Jackie,’ I said, ‘you’ve been going through so much with your sickness. Do you think the whole thing was worth it?’ And she said, ‘Porky’—that’s what she called me—‘I want to tell you something. These last 10 years were the 10 most meaningful of my life. I’ve been everywhere, met everyone, done it all. I’ve been successful beyond my fondest hopes.’” David Brown concludes, “Jackie had started out a star-fucker, starved for love. But she was saved by a talent she never knew she had.” The choice she presented to Neely O’Hara, “between mass love and a private life,” was, for Susann, no contest. If Jacqueline Susann was not precisely the “voice of the 60s,” then she was its aching female heart.
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