The forward to a new edition of Barbara Seaman's Lovely Me: The Life of Jacqueline Susann locates Valley of the Dolls in the mid '60s cultural mix of The Beatles' Revolver album, Capote's In Cold Blood, and "the high period works of Andy Warhol," but it was not so much the novel itself as its prodigious, innovative marketing campaign that belonged to that specific moment. Valley of the Dolls wrapped that world up and delivered it to the '60s like a coroner's report. She knew intimately the slick, sentimental, sordid world of Walter Winchell, "21," and The Sweet Smell of Success that developed out of vaudeville and radio after World War II. She came from a sophisticated family of Philadelphia Jews (her father was a prominent society portrait artist), and had mixed with the entertainment world's elite throughout the '40s and '50s. Married to publicist Irving Mansfield, Susann had acted on Broadway and been a jacqueline-of-all-trades in the early television industry. Susann, by contrast, was a seasoned survivor long before setting pen to paper.
Metalious was a deeply troubled hick who, only a few years after success struck, sabotaged her career with booze and pills, becoming a dreadful problem guest on talk shows and later a cirrhosis fatality. Valley author Jacqueline Susann seized on Metalious' Harlequin-romance-meets-Zola formula and brought it forward into the early years of megapublishing, a task for which she was infinitely better equipped than her predecessor. Like Allison, Valley's Anne Welles eschews her bucolic New England roots in favor of the big city and falls hard for a powerful man, experiences heartbreak, and learns some bitter lessons. Its Ike-era prototype, Grace Metalious' Peyton Place, describes the adulteries and out-of-wedlock pregnancies of a small New England town in Metalious' sequel, Return to Peyton Place, heroine Allison Mackenzie writes a book very like Peyton Place, finds a New York publisher, and enters a swirling cesspool of Manhattan glamour and corruption. Valley of the dolls, to be reprinted next month by Grove Atlantic, was one kind of quintessential trash novel of the '60s (another kind was Terry Southern and Mason Hoffenberg's Candy), written with an insider's eye on the showbiz of the '50s. 1997 Artforum International Magazine, Inc.
MLA style: "Valley of the Dolls." The Free Library.
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