Jacqueline Susann's Shadow of the Dolls

by Rae Lawrence

  Copyright © 2001 by Rae Lawrence and Tiger, LLC

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published by Crown Publishers, New York, New York.

  Member of the Crown Publishing Group.

  Random House, Inc. New York, Toronto, London, Sydney, Auckland

  www.randomhouse.com

  CROWN is a trademark and the Crown colophon is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Lawrence, Rae.

  Jacqueline Susann’s Shadow of the dolls / by Rae Lawrence.

  1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. I. Title: Shadow of the dolls. II. Susann,

  Jacqueline. III. Title.

  PS3562.A915 J34 2001

  813’.54—dc21

  2001028297

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81550-7

  v3.1

  FOR THE SHADOW GANG:

  Madeleine R., Angelina P., Ian S., Lola B., and Spike R.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Note on Chronology

  Chapter 1 - Prologue, 1987.

  Chapter 2 - 1987.

  Chapter 3 - 1988.

  Chapter 4 - 1989.

  Chapter 5 - 1990.

  Chapter 6 - 1991.

  Chapter 7 - 1992.

  Chapter 8 - 1993.

  Chapter 9 - 1994.

  Chapter 10 - 1995.

  Chapter 11 - 1996.

  Chapter 12 - 1997.

  Chapter 13 - 1999.

  Epilogue, 2001.

  About the Author

  NOTE ON CHRONOLOGY

  Valley of the Dolls was first published in 1966. Before her death in 1974, Jacqueline Susann wrote a treatment for a sequel.

  This incomplete first draft was never published. Its pages were contemporary in setting and spirit. It was this material that provided the inspiration for Shadow of the Dolls.

  The stories of Anne Welles and Neely O’Hara have been re-imagined and updated for a contemporary setting. This choice was made in order to keep the spirit of Susann’s work. Fans of Valley of the Dolls will notice that liberties have been taken with the ages of Jacqueline Susann’s characters and various other details of time and place.

  The author is deeply grateful to Lisa Bishop, Jacqueline Susann’s literary manager and “keeper of the Jackie Susann flame,” for her encouragement and help in bringing Anne and Neely into contemporary times.

  Prologue, 1987.

  Whatever happened to Anne Welles? people used to ask.

  It was a parlor game played at parties, after the dishes were cleared and the fresh bottle of vodka came out, after everyone had drunk too much but no one wanted to go home yet. Whatever happened to that sitcom star who got arrested for carrying the gun onto the airplane? Whatever happened to that rock-and-roll singer who married the swimsuit model? Whatever happened to that talk-show host, that child actress, that overweight comedian? And, Whatever happened to Anne Welles?

  No one ever had to ask what happened to Neely O’Hara.

  Everyone knew. She was still in the tabloids at least once a month.

  The pictures were always the same: Neely caught off-guard, looking grim and puffy in her signature oversize dark blue sunglasses, wearing a thousand-dollar designer version of sweatshirt and track pants, her hair tucked up into a baseball cap, her hands covered with jewelry.

  The headlines screamed from supermarket checkout stands: Neely O’Hara hires live-in psychic after third marriage fails! Neely and Liz make bizarre rehab pact! Neely O’Hara threatens suicide after record-company lawsuit! Neely O’Hara’s Comeback Diet!

  But whatever happened to Anne Welles?

  Women recalled her Gillian Girl commercials almost word for word. They could recite the names of the products they had bought because of her. Candlelight Beige lipstick. Summersong perfume. Forever Roses nail polish.

  What the men remembered was something else: a beautiful girl dancing across the television screen, her long dark hair streaming out behind her. Sometimes she wore an evening gown and swirled to an old Cole Porter tune. Sometimes she wore a little white bikini and kept the beat of a current disco hit. At the end of each commercial, she looked straight into the camera, looked straight into their eyes, and winked.

  Where was she now?

  She married some rich guy and moved to Europe, someone would say. Or: She went into rehab, my cousin’s best friend is married to someone in Hollywood who saw the medical charts. Or: She invested in a chain of restaurants and lost almost all her money. No one really knew. To most of the country, it seemed that she had disappeared into thin air.

  In New York, no one had to ask what happened to Anne Welles.

  She still made the columns, she still went to parties, she still could be seen jogging around the Central Park Reservoir in the early mornings, her thick brown hair held back with red velvet ribbon. At thirty-four she was still beautiful, though the only photographs that appeared of her anymore were the grainy black-and-white pictures taken at charity events for the Sunday society pages.

  She had married Lyon Burke and moved into a ten-room apartment on Fifth Avenue with a glorious view of the park. The Bellamy, Bellows and Burke Agency represented some of the highest-paid movie talent, so there was no need for her to work. Her only daughter, Jennifer, went to the most exclusive girls’ school in the city. Anne filled her days the way so many other women did on the Upper East Side: exercising, shopping, getting facials and manicures, redecorating her apartment, entertaining her husband’s business friends. Anne and Lyon were one of the most sought-after couples in the city, and every day’s mail brought at least half a dozen invitations: to dinner parties, to museum galas, to weekends in the country, to charity events, to gallery and film openings.

  Anne Welles Burke had gotten everything she dreamed of. She had married the man of her dreams, the first man she had fallen in love with. She had the child she always wanted, a sweet girl with Lyon’s blue eyes and Anne’s fine Yankee bone structure. She lived in the apartment she had always fantasized about, surrounded by the best furniture, the best carpets, the best paintings. She had come to New York with nothing, and now the city belonged to her.

  New York! New York! In the early spring evenings, after Jenn had gone to her room to do her homework and before Lyon came home from the office, she took a glass of Chardonnay onto the balcony. She looked down into Central Park, full of pink and white blossoms. She looked west across Manhattan, where another spectacular sunset streaked the sky. She looked south at the skyline, still as breathtaking as when she had first arrived fifteen years before. And she said to herself: Mine, mine, mine.

  Sometimes she poured a second glass of wine. Music wafted in from the open windows of a neighboring apartment, a strand of Joni Mitchell, or early Van Morrison, or an old Dionne Warwick hit she had forgotten the name of.

  But she still remembered the words, and she still remembered the girl she had been when she sang them aloud to herself, dancing around her first New York apartment, a tiny studio in a West Fifties tenement building, with broken-down plumbing and linoleum floors. It came back to her now, how happy she had been in those days when she had nothing to speak of except a pretty face and a degree from a pretty college and all her pretty dreams. Everything was ahead of her then. She’d felt as though the whole city were whispering to her at night: If, if, if.

&nbs
p; The second glass of wine never tasted as good as the first, but she always drank it faster. Mine: The perfect apartment filled with perfect things (who knew a throw pillow could cost three hundred dollars?), but no matter what the decorators bought it never felt finished or quite full enough.

  Mine: The perfect husband, who had had so many affairs that she had stopped counting, stopped even caring. Lyon loved her as best he could; maybe it wasn’t his fault that his love ran out a few yards short of fidelity. Mine: A perfect child, Jenn was everything to her, so why did she still feel half-empty inside?

  And then she wondered: Whatever happened to Anne Welles?

  1987.

  Neely and her exercise instructor were in the sunroom, torturing each other.

  “Kick! Kick! Kick!” cried Samantha. Neely was on all fours, her left leg stretched out behind her. The only thing she hated more than donkey kicks were stomach crunches, and stomach crunches were next.

  “It hurts!” cried Neely. “I’m gonna throw out my back!” She rolled over and folded her hands across her chest. “That’s it, I can’t do any more today.”

  “We have another half hour to go,” Samantha said. “Crunches, then cardio.”

  “No cardio. I’m beat.”

  “You won’t lose any of that weight if you don’t do cardio.”

  “Cardio, schmardio. Who has time.” She grabbed her thighs. “I’m gonna go to Palm Springs and just have them suck it all out. Vvvhhhhzzz,” she hummed, imitating a vacuum cleaner. “Vvvhhhzzzz! Vvvhhhzzz! All gone!”

  After Samantha left, Neely treated herself to her traditional post-exercise snack: a tall glass of fresh-squeezed orange juice and two hazelnut truffles from Godiva.

  She looked at herself in the mirror. Zaftig, but not fat. Maybe fifteen pounds over her ideal weight at most, and what was fifteen pounds? But the weight didn’t go to the same places anymore, it all went a little lower. On stage they were able to hide everything, with custom-made undergarments that compressed and lifted and pushed every last extra ounce.

  But here in the living room of her Las Vegas hotel suite, with the harsh desert sun streaming through the picture windows, wearing just a cotton tank top and leggings, here it was different. She turned to the side and examined her profile. Fifteen pounds would do it. The first ten she would have to do herself, and the last few pounds—the really hard ones—a little lipo would take care of those. She didn’t look nearly so bad as those pictures they loved to print in the tabloids. She swore some of those photographers shot her from the least flattering angles on purpose, to make her look fatter than she really was.

  Everyone knew the worse someone looked, the more the photographer got paid. Neely was careful not to eat in public anymore, ever since that one photograph of her sitting on a bench at Disney World holding a double-scoop ice-cream cone in each hand. She had been holding one of the cones for her manager’s eight-year-old niece, but the photographer had cropped the child out of the picture.

  Neely’s manager arrived with the new outfit for her opening number.

  “If I told you once, I told you a million times: no sequins on my ass!” Neely shrieked, throwing the costume across the room.

  “Just try it on,” he whispered. “Just try it, just to humor me. I promise you’ll look fabulous in it.”

  “I’ll look fat. Why are you trying to make me look fat? I hate Las Vegas. I hate every damn person in this town. Gordon, did you see the audience last night? Fat, fat, fat! It’s like a convention of fat people out there.”

  Gordon Stein picked up the dress and laid it gently across the top of the couch. Managing Neely O’Hara was surely one of the most difficult jobs on earth. He had been doing it for almost two years, and in that time he had developed high blood pressure, the beginnings of a stomach ulcer, and a skin condition that forced him to wear long sleeves even here in the desert, where the temperature most days went well into the nineties.

  “Fat people with fat wallets,” Gordon said. Neely’s one-woman show was the most expensive ticket in Vegas, and her three-week run was entirely sold out. No matter what mistakes Neely made—bad marriages, bad television movies, even a bad exercise video that became a running joke on every late-night talk show for much of last year—she could still sell out Vegas, at top dollar, for as many weeks as Gordon could talk her into.

  “Well, I can’t take it anymore,” Neely said. “You’re working me to death. Meanwhile, Barbra Streisand is getting pedicures and having tea with senators. How come I never get to have tea with a senator?”

  “Neely, you don’t know any senators.”

  “Well, I want to know one. Not one of these local guys, either. One of those handsome ones from back east who looks good on the tennis court. A Democrat, maybe. Don’t you know any Democrats who need a girl to sing at their parties?”

  “I’ll ask around.”

  “I’m serious, Gordo,” Neely said, her voice dropping to a kittenish whisper. “I got to hook up with one of these candidates. I got to get taken seriously again.”

  “Neely, you are well on your way to record earnings. You are entirely out of debt for the first time in five years. You are one of the most popular performers on the planet.”

  “I am, amn’t I.” Neely sighed. “I guess I should try on the dress, just to be nice.”

  Five minutes later she returned from the bedroom. The dress fit perfectly. The top was made of cherry-red satin, cut like a tuxedo, with swirls of beading all along the lapels. The bottom was sheer red chiffon covered in red sequins.

  Gordon clapped his hands.

  Neely ran her hands across her chest. “Not bad for thirty-three,” she said.

  “Not bad for twenty-three,” Gordon said. “Neely, the hotel wants to book you for four weeks next Christmas.”

  “No way.”

  “I can get you a higher percentage. Do the arithmetic, Neely. We can’t say no to money like this.”

  “Gordon, you’re not listening to me. I’m doing Vegas instead of a classy theater in New York because I haven’t had a hit song in over four years. I haven’t had a hit song because the top writers don’t send me their top material anymore. The top writers don’t send me their top material because they want someone classy, like Barbra Streisand is classy.

  “And it’s not fair! I’ve got a better voice than her! And a better face! And I’m ten years younger than her! But she’s the one with the movie-star boyfriends and all the political connections. I know way more about politics than she does!”

  “Neely, you don’t even read the newspaper. What do you know about politics?”

  “I’m Irish, I could learn in ten minutes. I need a mentor. A senator would be perfect. Or maybe one of those movie moguls. Preferably one of those faggot movie moguls.”

  Gordon raised his eyebrows.

  “I’m thirty-three. On stage I might look twenty-three, but my knees feel more like fifty-three. So, you gonna make some phone calls for me or what?”

  Gordon sighed.

  “I’m thinking about next Christmas,” Neely said. “I’m thinking it doesn’t sound so bad. I’m thinking maybe I’ll think about it a little more.” Neely did the arithmetic. If she was getting a higher percentage, so was Gordon. He knew all kinds of people who knew all kinds of people. He was Jewish, and his brother was a fancy criminal lawyer in Los Angeles, so Neely figured he knew how to make this happen.

  “And get me a subscription to one of the Washington papers.”

  “The Post.”

  “Yeah, that one. Have it delivered to my dressing room, I can read it between sets,” she said. “Man, I am beat. Gimme some ginseng, will ya?”

  There were at least thirty dark brown bottles on Neely’s dressing table. Vitamin C, vitamin E, vitamin A, six different B supplements, calcium supplements, iron supplements, a multivitamin for the morning, another one for the evening, lecithin, echinacea, vitamins to fight stress, herbs for energy, L-tryptophan for sleep, and at least a dozen things Gordon had never heard
of.

  Neely had hired a nutritionist she had read about in Vogue, and after a forty-minute consultation Neely had ordered up three thousand dollars’ worth of pills and powders. The nutritionist had given Neely a chart of what she was supposed to take when, but Neely liked to improvise or, as she called it, “listen to what my body has to say.”

  This morning Neely’s body was telling her she needed about a week’s worth of a very special kind of herb that was grown only in Asia.

  Gordon handed her the pills. She closed her eyes and washed them down with bottled water. It occurred to Gordon that the very act of taking the pill—hearing the reassuring shake of a half-full bottle, feeling the soft tickle as the capsules fell into her waiting palm, readying her throat with a preliminary sip of water, running the pills up from her palm to her fingers, dropping them into the crease of her tongue, swallowing, swallowing again, feeling them go down, opening her eyes and seeing she was still surrounded by bottles, that there were always more pills—was satisfying to Neely, that she loved pills, any kind of pills, the way other women loved chocolate or expensive Italian shoes.

  “I killed them last night, didn’t I,” Neely said.

  “You killed them.”

  The assistant to Neely’s personal assistant came in, waving a copy of People magazine over his head.

  “We’re in it, we’re in it!”

  Neely’s eyes widened. “Let me see that.” She grabbed the magazine and flipped the pages in a rush, front to back, back to front. There she was, a tiny photograph no more than two inches high, on a page with at least ten other people.

  “I’m supposed to be happy about this?” she asked. “Gordon, did you know about this?”

  “I had no idea,” Gordon lied. He had spent two hours that morning buying up every copy of People that Neely might run across, covering every gift shop and newsstand in their hotel and the next four hotels down the strip.

  “Look at me! I look like a big joke! I can’t believe they got a picture of me in that ridiculous headdress!”