So I picked up Jacqueline Susann’s salacious 1966 bestseller, which I’d first read in the sixth form. On the cover of my edition was a photograph of a squat glass pillbox, in sharp focus and, behind it, a woman so blurred it was impossible to tell if she was reaching for the pills or lying there, already dazed and strung-out, or worse. It should have been a warning that this wasn’t a chic, fun, frothy read. The dolls are pills – downers to sleep, uppers to stay skinny – but they are also the heroines, so objectified by men and by each other that they seem more like dolls than women.
At 21, I adored Valley’s non-stop storytelling, the gossipy, succulent, exclamation-mark-studded prose and the glamour. I felt as though I was eavesdropping on the stars – and I more or less was, because Susann spent most of her life chasing fame and knew everyone in showbiz New York, and all their secrets. She spills them all on the page. She holds nothing back. Despite all attempts to drown it in kitsch (Russ Meyer’s soft porn melodrama, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, is a spoof and a travesty), there’s something weird and brilliant and lasting about Susann’s novel.
The heroine I liked best was Anne Welles, an elegant beauty, described as ‘classy’ on practically every page, who can’t wait to leave her stodgy Massachusetts town. She’s getting out of Lawrenceville and she’s never going back! I was back home in London where my parents’ divorce was in its final, painful stages, and I felt more disillusioned with my community and its values than ever. I too wanted to get out and never go back. The novel runs from 1945 to 1965 but Anne had many issues that were also mine. Her mother wants her to marry her childhood sweetheart and become a housewife and mother. She has brought her up to be a lady. But Anne doesn’t want to be a lady. She wants to be a working girl. In New York.
There, she meets Neely, a spitfire of a girl, freckled, clumsy, stubborn and, at seventeen, already a veteran of vaudeville. Endearingly, Neely’s perfect night is an evening in with a quart of milk, a box of cookies and Gone With The Wind. But when she needs a stage name in a pinch, she steals Scarlett’s, and as Neely O’Hara she’ll become just as ruthless as her namesake.
And oh, I wish I’d had the wit to learn from her. Anne gets a job as a secretary in a theatrical law firm, and that is the end of her ambitions in New York. She’s got her good black dress and her good black coat, and her tweed suit, and her nice manners. She’s tasteful, she doesn’t mix business with pleasure, she doesn’t drink too much, or flirt, she spends her money wisely and she always gets enough sleep to save her energy for the office. And maybe because she has no ambitions of her own, she is always attaching herself to careless, driven, charismatic people. First she becomes the person Neely turns to in every crisis, and then Anne falls for her boss like some 1940s dollybird.
His very name indicates he’s trouble. Lyon Burke is a dreamboat – tall, permatanned, with ink-black hair, a clipped English accent, a heroic war record, and sheer animal magnetism. He’s good at his job but he tells Anne that his secret dream is to ‘Be dreadfully rich . . . Sit in some lovely spot in Jamaica, have several beautiful girls who look exactly like you to look after me and knock out a best-selling novel about the war.’ Anne doesn’t find this off-putting and smug. She doesn’t hear the warning klaxon of several beautiful girls. No. She starts egging him on to write, slavishly typing up his manuscripts, and gazing into his sad, tormented eyes as he tells his boring war stories.
She nurtures him in other ways too, and there are compensations: when she has her first orgasm, she squeals, ‘I function, Lyon – I’m a woman!’ But when she inherits her childhood home and he demands that they turn it into his perfect writing retreat, with Anne cooking his meals and washing his socks, she sees that he’s about to perpetrate muse abuse, and she says no (because Anne has left Lawrenceville and she’s never going back!) Lyon promptly crosses the Atlantic, hoping to marry ‘the first plump English maiden who will cook and tend for me’. It gives me great pleasure to report that he doesn’t marry any English women. Perhaps we are immune to his charms. (I confess that I was not immune to Lyon’s charms but I am all grown up now.)
I was astonished when I made a brief foray into internet dating to find how many men contacted me saying they were looking for a muse – even though my profile said I was a writer, which surely would indicate that I might have been looking for a muse of my own. (I wasn’t.) Maybe those men were picking up on something about me, maybe they knew Anne was my heroine at the time. And Anne’s way of doing things was useful in my temping: as a PA, as a receptionist (when we were nominated for Reception Desk of the Year, it was time to leave), and when I got a job in charity communications. In my early twenties, I was doing jobs that required Anne qualities – diligence, punctiliousness, patience – instead of doing what I should have been doing: writing my plays and getting them put on. At the flat I’d moved into with a playwright friend, I often slipped into Anne-like roles. I would cook dinner for everyone, then wash up while they went off to the pub to talk theatre. And when my flatmate and I put on a double bill of our plays, I took the thankless role of producer, which meant I was too busy sourcing props, painting sets and rigging lights to go to rehearsals, or write something new. One rainy afternoon I tramped from charity shop to charity shop, trying to find a cheap wedding dress for the heroine of my play. When finally I found a rack of white dresses, I grabbed the one in my size, which was also the actress’s, and hastily tried it on. I emerged from the changing cubicle, hair soaked, a grim and martyred look on my face, to find the shopkeeper offering me a mug of tea, the use of a hairdryer, a pair of heels, and even a bouquet of silk flowers ‘to get the full effect, dear’. Only then did I realise she thought I was shopping for my own special day. I was so embarrassed I went along with it. But afterwards I had to laugh, because even writing plays had landed me in a wedding dress – and I was still so eager to please that I had ended up lying about it. So much for shrugging off the good girl, the dutiful daughter and the pseudo-wife.
Neely would have given me the same advice she gives Anne. She constantly tries to get Anne to be more savvy and less nice. When Anne prissily worries about pulling strings to get Neely a part, Neely warns, ‘Those fancy manners are gonna stand in your way. You gotta go in a direct line for the thing you want. Come right out and ask for it.’ Neely gets into the show. Anne wants her to dress soberly, but Neely wears purple taffeta so she’ll stand out in rehearsal. And she does – so much so that the star, brassy battleaxe Helen Lawson, feels upstaged and gets her fired. But Neely doesn’t lie down quietly and take it. She turns up at Anne’s office, in floods of tears. Anne wants her to calm down, control herself, stop making such a fuss. Neely’s loud, ugly tears catch the attention of Anne’s boss, who gets her back on the show, in a bigger role than before. It’s a brilliant lesson in negotiation. And while Neely’s tears are genuine, she’s not above faking them if necessary. She knows it’s the squeaky wheel that gets the grease.
Once in the show, Neely’s a sponge, learning everything she can from Helen, while never trusting her an inch. It would be a more heart-warming story if Helen became Neely’s mentor, but Susann isn’t interested in heart-warming, she’s interested in telling the truth about a world in which no star rushes to help a younger ingénue.
While Anne is chasing bad boy Lyon, Neely cunningly marries a good man, a man who will support her career. He’s a press agent, just like Susann’s husband, who made her first book, Every Night, Josephine!, a bestseller, despite the fact that it was an extended love letter to her poodle by a woman famous for wanting to be famous. Neely’s husband gets her to Hollywood.
Once there, she ‘unloads’ him and marries someone even more useful: a costume designer. Work always comes first for Neely. She spends her nights at home, studying scripts with her hair smothered in lanolin and cream slathered over her face, and (for the cameras) puts up with her second husband cheating on her. But when she wins an Oscar she decides she’s earned the right to play the diva. She gets a divorce, goes to work late
or not at all, ignores directives from the studio, feasts on caviar and takes dolls to lose weight, or just to numb the loneliness. For a while, the studio put up with this; after all, she’s very talented. But then they fire her, and she takes an overdose.
Like her tears in Anne’s office, Neely’s overdose is real, but when she comes round a week later, woozy but miraculously alive, she immediately takes charge of her career. She grins when she sees how much weight she’s lost. Still hooked up to a drip, she summons her lawyer and agents to her bedside and soon she’s making threats and demands and fighting her way back. It starts a saga of disastrous crack-ups and glittering comebacks – Susann based Neely on Judy Garland.
In the best scene in the book, Neely runs into Helen again, in the bathroom of a swanky club. Helen has clawed her way back into the limelight more than once, and she doesn’t think Neely’s got her talent or her staying power. When she calls Neely a ‘washed up little has-been’, they have the bitch-fight to end all bitch-fights. Neely wins by grabbing Helen’s lustrous hair, which turns out to be a wig, right off her head. She gleefully dances round with it, then flushes it down a toilet, leaving Helen to sneak out ignominiously, and Neely to prove she’s not washed up by doing what she does best: believing in her talent, putting it first, and clawing her way back to the top.
If only I’d had a fraction of her self-belief. Instead, I did job after job that took me further away from writing. I edited other people’s writing, not even at a proper publishing house but at a vanity press (allegedly the one that inspired Martin Amis’s The Information). It was like the boarding school I never went to – the editors were all young women, mostly Oxbridge blondes, and we’d pad about the office in laddered tights, drinking tea and taking turns on the office phone, swinging our legs, having semi-secret, half-whispered conversations with mysterious men. Each editrix sat in a tiny cubicle with blue padded walls. I found proof-reading soothing. I liked the clean white spaces. I liked the arcane proof marks. I liked making things right. But it was long, laborious work (Anne would have loved it), and I longed to be slapdash, chaotic, creative.
The work also scared the living daylights out of me. A lot of the writing was shockingly bad (they were called vanity presses for a reason). Characters changed sex halfway through (and not in a postmodern way), the poems were all o’ers and e’ens, there were obnoxious far-right political tracts, vainglorious memoirs and anatomically incorrect erotica. We laughed at the howlers, but it was also a glimpse into the abyss. These writers were mostly puffed up and deluded but what if I was too? How did I know I wasn’t fooling myself that I could write?
Valley’s third heroine, the staggeringly beautiful (secretly sad) Jennifer North, is the opposite of Neely. She believes she has no talent but that she can become a famous actor anyway, by telling lies. And she does it too. Jennifer terrified me. What if I had no talent? And what if I made it anyway? Would that mean I was just like Jennifer?
At the start of the novel, she is claiming she’s five years younger than she is, and later she subtracts another decade. She does breast-tightening exercises, massages cocoa butter into her skin and wears frownie plasters to bed, trained by her parasitic mother who warns her that ‘Big breasts like yours are going to drop soon enough, and then they’ll be an eyesore. Make them pay while you have them. Men are animals.’ The men Jennifer meets are animals. She’s only ever enjoyed sex with a Spanish girl she loved way back when. But women don’t have power, so she sleeps with men. She doesn’t enjoy her time on the casting couch. On the night of her wedding, to a sexy Italian crooner, he tells her to turn over. ‘She ground her teeth in agony as he tore in to her. She felt his nails ripping down her back. Smile, Jen, she told herself. You’ve made it – you’re Mrs Tony Polar.’
Jennifer has the worst time of all the Valley women. At the end, she’s 40 but looks 25, and she’s had to resort to more drastic and mendacious methods to look younger – like a sinister-sounding ‘sleep cure’ which involves spending a week sedated in a Swiss clinic to lose weight, as well as a painful facelift and hormone injections to keep her breasts firm. Then she finally thinks she’s found a man who loves her for herself. So when she is diagnosed with cancer she tries to tell him, and she hopes he’ll support her. But as he creepily caresses her breasts and calls them his ‘babies’, she realises there’s no point telling him she’s got to have a mastectomy. He doesn’t love her for herself at all. So she kills herself.
Susann had just been diagnosed with breast cancer when she wrote this, and she’d been told over and over that she had no talent. She writes Jennifer with great tenderness, and gives her all her worst fears. Yet in real life, once she’d decided writing was her talent, Susann never doubted herself. She pushed herself to the limit promoting Valley and its successors, The Love Machine and Once Is Not Enough, schmoozing critics, booksellers and even the truck drivers who delivered her books to shops. She pushed herself, day and night, in her Pucci print frocks and lacquered wigs, caked in kohl, tripping on hairspray, and of course on dolls. She had no shame. About anything. In Once she helpfully explains how to catch semen in a glass and refrigerate it for use as a face mask. But most of all she was fantastically open about her aspirations. She pursued what she wanted with bravado and pizzazz, which makes it all the more perplexing that she structures her book so that apathetic Anne seems to be the top heroine. Looking back, I find it hard to see what I liked about Anne. She’s a WASPy ice queen who gets more and more sanctimonious as the book goes on. She spends most of it pining for Lyon, although when she gets another job, modelling cosmetics, she dates her boss there too, as though it’s all she can think of to do. Even though sex with him is ‘absolutely antiseptic’ she doesn’t leave him until dastardly, squalid Lyon returns, bleating that ‘If I had any character, I wouldn’t see you after tonight’ – and saying it while he’s having an affair with her. And it’s a fling, mind, not a relationship, let alone a marriage, because Lyon is a free spirit who can’t be tied down. God forbid, it might hurt his precious writing.
It makes me sad to see what Anne does next. She loves Lyon so much that she resorts to ugly scheming to keep him in New York, even sneakily buying him a business. She makes sure to get a ring on her finger before he finds out the truth, and seals the deal by getting pregnant. Lyon’s furious. He feels he’s been castrated, and consoles himself by sleeping with more pliable and (Susann is merciless about ageing) younger women.
Worst of all, he sleeps with Neely. Then, I blamed her. I thought Anne was an angel, and Neely was a disloyal man-stealing junkie. Now I’m not so sure. Neely’s got grounds for hating Anne: Anne got her committed to a mental hospital. All right, it got Neely clean, but tough love is never endearing. When Neely gets out, she’s off the drugs but she’s box office poison, and fat. So it’s a kick in the teeth to find Anne loved-up with Lyon, swimming in money and about to have a baby. Neely gets Lyon to manage her comeback tour, and while they’re on the road she gets back on the dolls, loses weight, and takes her revenge. Lyon likes his women skinny as reeds, and can’t understand why his wife seems to have put on a bit of weight having his baby. Soon he and Neely are having a very public affair.
Class is what Anne started with and it’s all she’s left with. Lyon goes back to her, but their marriage has been exposed for the sham it is. When she finds out he’s shagging a teenage starlet, she takes a doll, brushes her hair and freshens her make-up so she can cling on to her dignity.
It’s a bleak ending to a bleak, bleak book. In Valley, love is never equal or mutual or trusting, women are betrayed by their bodies, and men are weak, cruel and shallow. Anne and Jennifer try to escape their mothers’ lives of joyless housewifery, but end up no happier. Neely can’t remember her mother, and she’s not happy either. It isn’t that they make the wrong choices: there are no right choices, the world is unfair, and they can never be happy.
I’m sad that Susann gave her talent – writing – to Lyon. And that she didn’t give any of the dolls a m
arriage like the supportive, sustaining one she had. And that she didn’t find a way to give even one of them a happy ending. In the 1967 film, Anne leaves Lyon. But the Anne of the book is too lovesick, and too stuck on being ‘classy’, to go anywhere.
Susann was clearly terrified she was talentless like Jennifer, and she knew she had Neely’s drive, but I wonder if, when people called her vulgar and brazen, she dreamed of being ‘classy’. Maybe that’s why Anne hogs the first half of the novel. It seems that Susann started finding Anne more and more vapid – what else can explain the vitriol of Neely’s attacks on Anne in the second half? The film critic Pauline Kael famously said a good girl artist was a contradiction in terms. Anne’s a good girl and she’ll never be a star. But Neely thinks her talent justifies any amount of bad behaviour. Told off for sleeping with her friend’s husband, she replies, ‘my talent makes the world happy. And Lyon makes me happy . . . I need Lyon.’ A grown-up, gutsier version of Posy in Ballet Shoes, Neely will behave monstrously if she has to, because she’s just following her talent. Neely delivers what I think is Valley’s real lesson: ‘Guys will leave you, your looks will go, your kids will grow up and leave you, and everything you thought was great will go sour; all you can really count on is yourself and your talent.’ It’s not terrible advice.
Instead, scared of claiming to have theatrical talent, let alone counting on it, I fell into journalism. No one was more surprised than I was when a few days’ filing at the Evening Standard turned into research, which turned into writing, and by the time I was 25, I had my own page. And although it wasn’t what I wanted to do, at least journalism was fun.
Every morning, I’d ride the gleaming escalators through the massive, glass atrium, past palm trees and ponds stocked with koi carp, to the cacophonous office, with clocks on the wall showing the times in New York, Beijing and wherever the most important war was on. There were war reporters in flak jackets, a cigar-chomping editor and a style writer who kept a hatbox on her desk containing a passport, pearls and a little black dress, just in case. It was not unlike the Daily Planet office in the Superman films, and I tried to make my phone manner as quickfire and efficient as Lois Lane’s. Like her, I was a girl reporter. And I loved it. Messing about with words, sparring with the subeditors about whether hip hop was two separate words or one or hip dash hop and what about when it was adjectival?
How To Be A Heroine Page 15