However, the Song: Valley of the Dolls

I woke up this morning with an earworm.

Not an unpleasant one, fortunately. In fact, it was a song I probably hadn’t consciously thought about in decades: Dionne Warwick singing “(Theme from) Valley of the Dolls.”

Which sent me down a rabbit hole.

I was ten years old when Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls was published in 1966, and eleven when the movie arrived the following year. I remember my parents having the book lying around the house.

I was more interested in Star Trek.

This was probably just as well.

Valley of the Dolls was not exactly children’s literature. The “dolls” of the title are pills—uppers, downers, sleeping pills and various other pharmaceuticals swallowed by three women trying to survive careers, relationships, ambition and celebrity in the entertainment business.

Susann herself had spent years around show business as an actress and television personality before turning to novels, and Valley of the Dolls was her great breakthrough. Twentieth Century-Fox thought enough of the project to buy the film rights in October 1965, before the novel was even published, for more than $100,000; later reports put the figure closer to $200,000.

That turned out to be a pretty good bet.

The book reached number one on the New York Times bestseller list in May 1966 and stayed there for 28 consecutive weeks. Altogether it spent 65 weeks on the list. By the time Susann died in 1974, more than 17 million copies had reportedly been sold.

So let us establish something right at the beginning:

Jacqueline Susann did not need my approval.

Nor, apparently, did she need the approval of literary critics.

I finally tried reading Valley of the Dolls many years later. I made it about halfway through before thinking:

Dear God, who told Jacqueline Susann she could write?!

Then I looked up the contemporary reviews and discovered that a great many professional critics had already asked essentially the same question.

Gloria Steinem opened one review with this delightful observation:

“For the reader who has put away comic books but isn’t ready for editorials in The Daily News…”

…Valley of the Dolls might fill the gap.

Time called the novel a “highly effective sedative, a living doll.”

And Gore Vidal supplied the line that may have outlived almost every other review:

“She doesn’t write, she types.”

Ouch.

Even Nora Ephron, who admitted that she couldn’t put the book down, compared the experience to reading a “very, very long, absolutely delicious gossip column.”

That may actually be closer to explaining the phenomenon than the insults do.

Susann might not have written elegant prose, but she knew how to make people keep turning pages. She wrote about sex, pills, ambition, celebrity, betrayal and women being chewed up by the machinery of show business. Readers gobbled it up.

Susann’s own response to literary criticism was refreshingly uncomplicated. She said she wrote for the public rather than for critics. And the public responded by purchasing the book in numbers most writers can only hallucinate about.

As the saying goes, it’s difficult to argue with success.

I remember deciding, when I eventually encountered the book, that I would never write soap opera simply because soap opera might sell books.

I still feel that way.

But I also have to acknowledge the scoreboard.

Jacqueline Susann: millions upon millions of copies.

Andrea: considerably fewer.

Point to Susann.

And Then Hollywood Got Hold of It

The movie adaptation opened in December 1967, directed by Mark Robson and starring Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke and Sharon Tate, with Susan Hayward as the formidable Broadway star Helen Lawson.

The production itself had enough drama to qualify as another Jacqueline Susann novel.

Judy Garland was originally cast as Helen Lawson and had even recorded material for the film before leaving the production. Susan Hayward replaced her and reportedly completed her scenes in four days.

The resulting film was not exactly embraced by critics, either. Nevertheless, audiences came. By March 1969, Valley of the Dolls had grossed about $20 million and had become Fox’s highest-earning film of 1968.

Once again:

The critics said, This is a celluloid atrocity.

The public said, Shut up and take my money.

And in the years since, the movie has achieved something perhaps even stranger than respectability: it has become a camp classic. People don’t necessarily watch Valley of the Dolls despite its excesses anymore.

They watch it for them.

However, the Song

Yes.

The song.

Because somewhere inside this monument to pills, melodrama, celebrity, bad life decisions and critically abused prose is something genuinely beautiful.

André Previn wrote the music and Dory Previn the lyrics for “(Theme from) Valley of the Dolls.” Dionne Warwick recorded it, and her version reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1968.

The song bears almost no resemblance to the lurid reputation of the book.

It is quiet.

Melancholy.

Almost dreamlike.

The lyrics aren’t really about scandal or celebrity. They’re about disorientation—the unsettling realization that you have followed some road without quite knowing how you got there, and the even more unsettling question of whether you can find your way back.

And then there is Dionne Warwick’s voice.

There are singers who demonstrate what a voice can do, and there are singers who make you forget that you’re listening to somebody demonstrate anything.

Warwick does the latter.

She doesn’t attack the song. She doesn’t wring it dry trying to prove how sad it is. She simply lets that extraordinary voice float over the melody, controlled and almost fragile, while the sadness accumulates underneath it.

I think that’s why the song survives independently of the movie.

You don’t need to know who Anne Welles or Neely O’Hara are. You don’t need to know that “dolls” are pills. You don’t need to have read Jacqueline Susann or watched Patty Duke chew great chunks out of the scenery.

The song needs none of that.

It works because sooner or later most of us have looked around at our lives and wondered, in one form or another:

How did I get here?

And is this where I meant to go?

I hadn’t heard the song, as far as I can remember, in decades.

Yet there it was when I woke up this morning, already playing somewhere in my cerebral cortex. Apparently my brain had filed it away sometime around 1967 or 1968 and decided, nearly sixty years later, that today would be a good day to take it off the shelf.

Brains are peculiar things.

Earworms are even more peculiar.

But every once in a while, you get a good one.