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ABSTRACT
This article explores the career and stardom of Jacqueline Susann, the celebrity author of the bestselling showbiz romans-à-clef Valley of the Dolls, The Love Machine, and Once Is Not Enough. Susann remained a subject of numerous star narratives, including the protagonists of her novels, Barbara Seaman’s biography Lovely Me, the biopics Isn’t She Great and Scandalous Me, and the dyke zine (and eventual website) Dead Jackie Susann Quarterly. Historical reception analysis, queer theory, and emerging approaches to star analysis help illuminate Susann’s enduring appeal to queer and feminist audiences, and related to that the ‘failure’/‘success’ binary structuring star biographies, cultural value systems, and social hierarchies. From her initial rise to superstardom to her resurgence 30 years later, star biographies by and about Jackie Susann engendered and reflected critical gossip and ambivalent fandom, subversive cultural work of women and gay men that delighted in cultural and social failure. The utopian sheen of Susann’s queer, feminist ‘art of failure’ appears more complicated in the context of commodity culture, however, as exemplified by legal struggles that brewed throughout the 1990s over the rights to Susann’s life story.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Among the other guests, poet David Trinidad testified to personal, political, and artistic inspiration provided to him by Valley of the Dolls (Trinidad Citation1997, pp. 1–8). Trinidad had published the poem ‘Things to do in Valley of the Dolls (The Movie)’ in 1989, and with Lynn Crosbie (also quoted in the 1997 Carvajal Times story) and Jeffrey Conway penned poetic tributes to Susann and Valley in Phoebe 2002 (Conway et al. Citation2003, pp. 237–254, 283–285 and 287–288). Trinidad collaborated later with Jeffery Conway and Gillian McCain on the poem ‘Descent of the Dolls’.
2. This article is dedicated to Patty Duke (1946–2016), whose performance as Neely O’Hara remains a key ingredient of the film’s enduring charms.
3. I remain grateful to Michael DeAngelis for suggesting this source.
4. I discovered Ken Gelder’s Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field, in which he anticipates key elements of my argument: connections among Susann, Valley of the Dolls, Hollywood scandal (including reference to Hollywood Babylon), and feminist camp. I was unaware of Gelder’s clever analysis, and should note that our discussions vastly differ with respect to my attention to historical reception, female and queer reading formations, extensive focus on Susann (Gelder’s main subject is Jackie Collins), consideration of representations of Susann, and concentration on star biography. See Ken Gelder, Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field. New York: Routledge, 2004.
5. My argument springs from an idea first suggested by Matthew Tinkcom, who introduced Valley of the Dolls to me in 1993 as an example of New Hollywood filmmaking based on its incorporation of Pop art aesthetics, female cast, and star scandal narrative.
6. Robin Stone should be acknowledged as a predecessor to Don Draper, the ingenious and troubled advert executive in the TV masterpiece Mad Men (Citation2007–2015). Both are sex-hungry, iconoclastic innovators of mass culture, hard-drinking, and promiscuous; sons of sex workers and an impoverished background, each suspends a façade of respectability. Although Don disguises his past while Robin discovers his origins towards the end of Love Machine, numerous episodes of Mad Men in which Don rediscovers his history resemble those in which Robin journeys to Rome and Berlin to uncover his parentage.
7. Seaman (1996, p. 156) surmises that Susann’s love affair with actress Carole Landis was the basis for Jennifer’s affair with Maria.
8. A chorus of female and gay male fans indicate the campy silliness of this scene in special features for the 2006 edition of the DVD release.
9. Patricia White’s (Citation1991) analysis of the film adaptation of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting (Wise 1963) has helped considerably with my work on the film version of Valley of the Dolls. Parenthetically, a line of dialogue in Jan de Bont’s (Citation1999) remake of The Haunting likens Catherine Zeta-Jones’ bisexual, drug-using, jet-setting character Theo to ‘Jackie Susann’.
10. Besides Valley of the Dolls and The Love Machine, Once Is Not Enough (1997b) ‘harbours covert and overt queer worlds’ with the Garbo-inspired character Karla, a glamorous bisexual movie star, as well as the critique of machismo in the Norman Mailer-like writer Tom Colt, whose manly posturing masks a diminutive penis and sex drive.
11. Barbara Seaman could have begun her story about male interference in her biographical work on Susann in the 1980s, when Irving Mansfield rescinded his offer to permit Seaman access to Susann’s private papers and diaries. Upon deciding to write his own book on Jackie, he also asked Jackie’s friends not to speak with Seaman (1996, p. 14).
12. I am indebted to Sara M. Hutcheon at the Radcliffe Institute’s Schlesinger Library for help navigating the Barbara Seaman collection. I also need to thank Michael S. Keane and Stoughton Keane-Feil for their invaluable research assistance.
13. Seaman also suggested her misgivings over Korda’s failure to cite her in his article, despite his participation as an interviewee for Lovely Me, and for getting the bulk of the credit for launching the Jackie Susann revival.
14. Seaman might have found some satisfaction in the virtual obliteration of Isn’t She Great from the 2006 Special Edition DVD release of Valley of the Dolls, the ultimate mass-market tribute. The DVD lovingly equips consumers with special features in which experts, friends, and fans celebrate Susann and the film adaptation. Seaman appears, as does Michelle Lee (who produced the TV biopic Scandalous Me [1998] and played Jackie), in addition to cast members of the 1967 film and legions of gay male fans (the DVD release was timed to coincide with gay pride celebrations) (Feil 2013, pp. 149–150).Isn’t She Great and anyone involved in it remain absent in this treasure trove for Susann fans, curious given the film’s big budget as well as the star power and gay credibility afforded by its cast and screenwriter. This negation might reflect many variables, from competing studios to licensing rights, but including Seaman and referencing the TV movie adaptation of Lovely Me while utterly absenting Isn’t She Great also conveys (intentionally or not) an unspoken boycott of ‘bad’ biographical and historical resources.
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Ken Feil
Ken Feil is Senior Scholar-In-Residence in Emerson College’s Visual and Media Arts Department, Boston, MA, USA. Author of Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In (Wayne State UP, 2014) and Dying for a Laugh: Disaster Movies and the Camp Imagination (Wesleyan UP, 2005), Ken also contributed to Queer Love in Film and Television (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), Reading the Bromance (Wayne State UP, 2014), and Representing 9/11 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2015). Ken is currently developing a global comedy course through a National Endowment for the Humanities ‘Enduring Questions’ grant.