Stephen Rebello - Dolls! Dolls! Dolls! Deep Inside Valley of the Dolls, the Most Beloved Bad Book and Movie of All Time

How do I love thee, Valley of the Dolls? Let me count the whys. My magnificent obsession with all things Valley began when I secretly rummaged through my moms dresser for her (carefully hidden between her slips and a hot water bottle) paperback copy of Jacqueline Susanns notorious Hollywood and Broadway roman clef. Having been a precocious kid and an insatiable reader, Id already been to the sex/sin/salvation literary rodeo thanks to Harold Robbinss The Carpetbaggers, Grace Metaliouss Peyton Place, and Rona Jaffes The Best of Everything. But from all I had heard, Jacqueline Susanns novel promised to be those novels squared. It didnt disappoint. I mean, it had everything. It was everything. 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, arent those characters pretty transparently based on Judy Garland, Ethel Merman, Marilyn Monroe, and Grace Kelly?

With Susann at the wheel, show business schadenfreude felt alluring, voyeuristic, and deliciously inside. No wonder Valley of the Dolls became a straight-up pop cultural phenom, the most talked-about, record-breaking bestseller of its era. The book was terrible, irresistible, hokey, hot, and, in its way, transgressive. And for mea kid aching to bust loose from a leafy, straitlaced, idyllic, Lawrenceville-like New England small townit was a road map. And a warning. The way people talked back then about Valley of the Dollson TV and radio, blasting it from church pulpits, whispering about it over the back fence, and sniggering about it at parties for grown-upsa movie version just had to be inevitable. And so, just in time for Christmas 1967, Valley of the Dolls, all glittery and glossy in Panavision and Color by Deluxe, opened, with a hand-painted ticket booth sign screaming Adolts [sic] Only in our neighboring citys most cavernous, slightly faded movie palace. But that misspelled sign meant that the puckered, steely woman sitting in the ticket booth would never let slip past her judgmental gaze the fresh-faced likes of me. Besides, like many locals back in a time when there were such now-quaint notions as shame and when some people took seriously the finger-wagging and dire warnings of the Catholic Church, Id never want to be caught buying a ticket to the dirty movie our parish priest had been warning us about for weeks. So, three pals and I piled into my shimmying, heatless VW bug and drove fifty miles through freezing rain to Boston for a look-see at the notorious film that critics were shredding but audiences were seeing in droves. 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. Valley of the Dolls promised to be a sizzling, steamy, check-your-brains-at-the-door blast.

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. Gigantic lobby posters blared the hard sell. 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 Americas 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. Another photo depicted a fully clad Susan Hayward gritting her teeth and flaring her nostrils while leaning backward as if executing some faintly bizarre interpretative dance position. Hoo boy, this is going to be a weird, hot ride, we thought.

It was. Just not the way wed hoped.

Valley of the Dolls arrived in an era that had already brought us such adult fare as Blow-Up, Alfie, Bonnie and Clyde, Point Blank, Whos Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and Persona, in a pop culture that had already spewed out such satiric gems as Allan Shermans 1964 ditty Pills and the dark, driving anthem Mothers Little Helper, the Rolling Stones finger wag at Valium, the middle-class womans pill of choice. By comparison, Valley turned out to be clumsy, tone-deaf, unhip, quaint, unintentionally hilarious, and strangely unsexy. Aside from a meant-to-be-shocking naughty word dropped here and there, the movie played like a mash-up of dozens of old movies Id already seen on The Late, Late Show starring, oh, say, Doris Day, Ida Lupino, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, or Susan Hayward. Mesmerizingly hapless as it was, though, its gloriously entertaining badness grabbed me by the collar. The movie was funny and sad. Tacky and noble. Hokey and moving. A lovable, irresistible train wreck. It got under my skin and stayed there. And