“The Producers wish to state that any similarity between any person, living or dead, and the characters portrayed in this film is purely coincidental and not intended.” “Leave the Children Home!” “The Motion Picture That Shows What America’s All Time #1 Best Seller First Put Into Words!” Other posters offered teasing glimpses of a half-clad Patty Duke and kitteny Miss Peyton Place Barbara Parkins. Gigantic lobby posters blared the hard sell. Outside the opulent Savoy Theatre, opened in 1928 and today the Boston Opera House, my friends and I queued up with several hundred other rain-pelted fellow stalwarts and thrill seekers. Hoo boy, this is going to be a weird, hot ride, we thought. Valley of the Dolls promised to be a sizzling, steamy, check-your-brains-at-the-door blast. My regular worship of moviemaking idols like Fellini, Lean, Hitchcock, Penn, Antonioni, Wilder, Bergman, and Kubrick would have to be put on hold for a bit. So, three pals and I piled into my heatless VW bug and drove 50 miles through freezing rain to Boston for a look-see at the notorious film that critics were shredding but audiences were seeing in droves. The way people talked back then about Valley of the Dolls-on TV and radio, blasting it from church pulpits, whispering about it over the back fence, and sniggering about it at parties for grown-ups-a movie version just had to be inevitable. And for me-a kid aching to bust loose from a leafy, straitlaced, idyllic, Lawrenceville-like New England small town-it was a road map. The book was terrible, irresistible, hokey, hot, and, in its way, transgressive. No wonder Valley of the Dolls became a straight-up pop cultural phenom, the most talked-about, record-breaking bestseller of its era. With Susann at the wheel, show business schadenfreude felt alluring, voyeuristic, and deliciously inside. Boozers! Pill-heads! Lesbians! Sex! Heartbreak! More sex! Homosexuals! Catfights! Incurable diseases! Wig snatching! Handsome caddish and spineless wonders! Still more heartbreak! Still more sex! And, for kicks, hey, aren’t those characters pretty transparently based on Judy Garland, Ethel Merman, Marilyn Monroe, and Grace Kelly?
But from all I had heard, Jacqueline Susann’s novel promised to be those novels squared. Having been a precocious kid and an insatiable reader, I’d already been to the sex/sin/salvation literary rodeo thanks to Harold Robbins’s The Carpetbaggers, Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place, and Rona Jaffe’s The Best of Everything. My obsession with all things Valley began when I secretly rummaged through my mom’s dresser for her (carefully hidden between her slips and a hot water bottle) paperback copy of Jacqueline Susann’s notorious Hollywood and Broadway roman à clef. How do I love thee, V a ll e y o f t h e D o l l s? Let me count the whys.
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