At 50, these dolls still deliver
Valley of the Dolls, 50th Anniversary Edition, by Jacqueline Susann, Grove Press, 496 pages, $23.50.
Before Sex and the City, there was Valley of the Dolls. This enduring pulp fiction account of female ambition, greed and sexual appetite is set in New York and Hollywood’s entertainment sector from the 1940s to the 1960s.
It’s Fifty Shades of Grey with pill poppers.
When Jacqueline Susann first published it in 1966, Valley of the Dolls was considered a dirty book, a scandal. And, for women, that was all the more reason to read it.
Its breakout popularity — more than 31 million copies sold — made the author rich and famous ... just like her characters. Grove Press has just released a 50th-anniversary edition of this notorious book.
This is vintage beach reading for lovers of ChickLit. Its lurid subject matter and well-drawn characters still hold their appeal in today’s celebrity-obsessed culture.
My introduction to scandalous paperbacks was the 1973 prostitute memoir The Happy Hooker, which I pilfered from my father’s bookshelf.
Valley of the Dolls is in that same vein: a ribald instruction manual suitable for coming-of-age or navigating that dreary mid-life crisis.
The “dolls” of the title are Seconal pills (a.k.a. Little Red Dolls). Jennifer, a hack actress, uses them for her chronic insomnia.
When Jennifer ventures from New York to Hollywood with Tony, her new husband, she’s unhappy. “In fact,” Jennifer observes, “a wife held the same social status as a screenwriter — necessary but anonymous.”
The perils of the other two central characters, Anne and Neely, are told in concert with their friend, Jennifer. The three women meet in New York in the professional circle of Broadway legend Helen Lawson.
Never doubt the power of pulp fiction to reflect society back to itself.
Valley of the Dolls gave voice to women’s collective dissatisfaction in postwar America.
Its fictional heroines lived out the mixture of public ambition and private despair portrayed in Betty Friedan’s non-fiction opus, The Feminine Mystique.
Read Valley of the Dolls and relive a critical juncture in women’s social history .
No wonder it flew off the shelves. It touched a nerve and women’s lives were never the same once the second wave of feminism kicked into gear.