UNLOVELY JACKIE S.

Beyond the valleys of the new Jacqueline Susann biography lies the seedy milieu of the old trouper

JAMES WOLCOTT

Mixed Media

In Star Trek TV: The Voyage Home, Admiral Kirk attempts to acclimate Mr. Spock to our strange orb by invoking the names of the late-twentieth-century novelists Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann. To which Spock responds with a gong of recognition: "Ah, the giants." Of the two giants astride our age, Harold Robbins is still around, crapping out best-sellers. Connoisseurs of fine literature the world over await the latest bomb from his septic brain. But Jacqueline Susann, who died in 1974, has shrunk in legend to little more than a Pop memento from the miniskirt era, a wax relic in a glossy wig. In her prime she was quite a queenie. She adopted the ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life, as her publicity logo, and did herself up as a dingdong Cleopatra, eyelashes out to here. Now she is but a ghost beneath the studio lights where she once schmoozed with Johnny and Merv. Or is she? Today there is an effort afoot to make Jacqueline Susann not merely a representative woman of her period but a flinty heroine. Before her admirers are through she'll be the Ayn Rand of Day-Glo sainthood. Willpower personified.

After an icky-poo mash note to her pet poodle entitled Every Night, Josephine! (Babykins want a bite of Mommy's eclair?), Susann grabbed America's joystick with her pillhead classic Valley of the Dolls, which sold 10 million copies just like that. For an encore she followed with The Love Machine (more pills: "Dip brandished a bottle of gleaming red capsules") and Once Is Not Enough. A hazy drift of innuendo about Mrs. Onassis called Dolores, published posthumously, was also a best-seller. Daintiness she abhorred.

Until Dolores, Susann dumped the whole bag of popcorn into the action. "To be a truly lousy writer takes energy," the critic Clive James observed of Judith Krantz, and it was on Susann that Krantz, Jackie Collins, Danielle Steel, Sidney Sheldon, and Michael Korda (. . .the giants!) modeled their metabolic blaze. Emboldened by her example, they flail at the typewriter with ten thumbs and mildewed brows, conjuring up tempests in a D cup. Jackie Susann is the patron saint of the shop/bed-hop/and/name-drop novel, the genre that knows no shame. But in her case there was a special pathos tucked within the cellophane crinkle of her trashy tales. The asp that slayed this dingdong Cleopatra uncoiled slowly in her bosom. It claimed a breast, laid siege to the rest. The asp, of course, was cancer.

At least that is how Susann's grief is being packaged for posterity. Cancer is the augural chord struck by Barbara Seaman in her big-deal, 100,000-copy-firstprinting biography of Jacqueline Susann, Lovely Me (William Morrow). The book seems valedictory even before it's begun. Not that Seaman, whose previous credits include two studies of women's health issues, is breaking any news. In his 1983 memoir, Life with Jackie, Susann's widower, Irving Mansfield, opened with a vignette in which his wife was an apparition at her own party, passing among the living. Unbeknownst to her guests, Susann was undergoing chemotherapy. Only he perceived the goblin beneath the glamour. "Under her artfully applied makeup, she is chalky white," he wrote in italics. "Beneath her smartly styled black wig, her scalp is nearly bare." Mansfield also recounted the time he kissed his wife's mastectomy scar in the bathtub, a wincing anecdote he later repeated on The Merv Griffin Show, to everyone's dismay. (The dismay was not over the kiss itself but over the way Mansfield turned this private gesture into a ghoulish production.)

Unlike Mansfield, Seaman doesn't 11 try to wring teardrops out of SuU sann's plight, but she does milk it for soap-opera uplift. It's Susann's discovery of her cancer in 1962 that commissions her to flush her life of impurities—"She made a deal with God that if the cyst collapsed she would never be unfaithful to Irving again"—and pursue her dream of becoming a popular writer. That she became one is less a tribute to her talent than to her buzzard sense of where the real pickings were. Jackie Susann wasn't a fantasist, dreaming about sheikhs in hot sands or handsome lords limping across the moors. She was a career monster with a ringside seat. As an actress, TV hostess, and spokesmodel, she had taken a few trots around the track, and hardened into one tough broad.

I use "broad" as a moniker of respect for a woman who knew how to throw a mean right—who dumped ice on her husband's head, doused Johnny Carson with a drink, leveled the drama critic Douglas Watt, and threatened to spin Gloria Steinem's eyeballs with a mighty blow. A woman who said of Philip Roth after his success with that comic encyclopedia of masturbation Portnoy's Complaint, "He's a fine writer, but I wouldn't want to shake hands with him." Only when Susann went for the humble, common touch did she play herself false. For a brief glimmer in the Golden Age of Television, she actually hosted a program called Jacqueline Susann's Open Door, in which the huddled masses yearning to breathe free sought celebrity advice for their troubles. Cue magazine reported, "When a recent guest declared she was on relief, Jackie said, 'Goodness, then you don't make much money, do you?' " More typical was Susann's hissy fit when President Kennedy had the poor taste to be assassinated shortly after the release of her poodle book. Arriving at a publicity meeting, "she found the entire staff, like so many other Americans, clustered around a television set, watching the nonstop coverage from Texas in silent, stunned disbelief. She glanced at the television and blurted, 'Why the fuck does this have to happen to me? This is gonna ruin my tour!' " It's an indication of Seaman's Girl Scout approach to her subject that she thinks this boorish spasm earns Brownie points for candor. "Other writers might have felt like that but only Jackie would have said it aloud." But then, Seaman is so awash in moonbeams that she even includes a condensed version of Susann's horoscope in Lovely Me. "Mars ruled her money house which made her a big spender." What, no messages on the Ouija board?

As a biographer Barbara Seaman is too much of a mouseburger (to use a word coined by Susann's friend Helen Gurley Brown) to bring a lot of spark to the seance. The ideal Jackie Susann biographer, if you can imagine such a horrible thing escaping from the laboratory, would be someone at home in the stale lungs of a nightclub at closing time and capable of scaling the steep cleavage of a Broadway cattle call. This was the vital, seedy milieu that Susann knew, and you can't investigate it wearing a lobster bib. Seaman, however, does dish out inside dope about Susann's rolls in the greasepaint, which help explain the tawdry peel of her fiction. Susann was a groupie at heart, flexible in her infatuations. After a string of affairs with oldpro Jewish comics ranging from Eddie Cantor to George Jessel (later designated America's toastmaster general—have toupee, will travel), Susann developed a super-atomic swoon over that howitzer of song Ethel Merman. It isn't clear how reciprocal this crush was, but still: Ethel Merman! Belt it, big mama! In search of raucous company, Susann sexually zigged and zagged, and over the years acquired a tough hide along with a butch reputation. It was this butch reputation that Truman Capote tattooed on The Tonight Show when he called Susann "a bom transvestite," and cruelly gibed, "She looks like a truckdriver in drag." (Susann handled her rebuttal suavely. Asked later by Johnny Carson what she thought of Truman, she said she considered him one of our finest presidents.) Yet there's a spittle of insight in Capote's cobra juice. Jackie Susann's novels are draped in transvestism. There's solid meat under all that chiffon, and it's shot from a cannon.

Psychology is pretty rudimentary in Susann's novels. Robin Stone, the bionic penis of The Love Machine, has a queen-size mother fixation. (Achieving climax, he cries, "Mutter! Mother! Mother!") January Wayne, the Daisy Miller of Once Is Not Enough, has a king-size father fixation. But propelling this desire for Mommy's womb and Daddy's cock is a need for acclaim that goes beyond sex. Fame for Susann is the only orgasm, the only true validation. Sex by its lonesome is too private an act to be sustaining. "A woman is dull if she lives for love," Susann wrote in her diary under the first pall of cancer, and her novels convey this naked craving for mass adulation.

Susann's triumph as a truly lousy writer ¾ was that she found an expressive form U for her compulsive drive. Her novels have no frills or friction; they're locomotives of neurotic need lubed for fast motion. You don't so much read a Jackie Susann novel as hop aboard and enter the blur. The only rest stops occur when her characters crash at the sanitarium, their psyches a twisted heap of velour and chrome, or take time out for a facial. (Facials are to Jackie Susann what jumble sales are to Barbara Pym: opportunities to chat.) Such colossal fuss! The reader soon requires toothpicks to prop open his baggy eyes. Yet because her presentations of addictive personalities are all enameled grimaces and zero depth, a Kabuki theater of cobweb evil in the executive suite, there isn't much to retain from her books except a thin film of tension. When I think of Valley of the Dolls, for example, what comes to mind more than the book is the movie version, in which a crazed Patty Duke flung Susan Hayward's wig down the toilet, then tried to flush it. A camp fury that anticipated the swank catfights of Alexis and Krystle on Dynasty. The hairdressy hauteur of Dynasty derives from Jackie Susann, as does the gauche bliss of Robin Leach as he tours the sacred burial grounds of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, not to mention the oily populism of Rex Reed (her protege). Jacqueline Susann enlarged the peephole into the private lives of the R. & F. to the size of a telephoto lens. Her influence, like her talent, was subliterary.

So it's not a coincidence, I think, that the year Jackie Susann died was also the year People magazine was bom. If anything, it was a continuation. People made a slick pageant out of the barrage of blind items that constituted the gossipy thrust of Susann's fiction. With its coverage of media heavies, People was like a microwave edition of The Love Machine; it had a softer pop. (Susann was more of a New York Post primitive, beating out her tom-tom emotions in boldface.) Susann's existence in that final year was an unspooling nightmare of chemotherapy, cobalt treatments, bone scans, and antibiotics. She became a riddled scarecrow, persevering as best she could. "Jackie Susann was not an artist," concludes Barbara Seaman in Lovely Me, "but in dying she mastered the art of living." One needn't agree with that fuzzy formulation to recognize that whatever else Susann was, the woman was a trouper. She could barely let go of the chores that came from being a celebrity author. Probably the last part of her to die was the hand that signed autographs. □