Daily Archives: April 7, 2017

The Boston Globe (Boston, MA)
January 28, 2000 | Jay Carr, Globe Staff

Like any decent, self-respecting American, all Jacqueline Susann wanted was to be a star. She became one by being in the right place at the right time with her sex-pills-and-debauchery novel “Valley of the Dolls” – the dolls of the title being drugs, not women. The more the book was dismissed as trash, the higher up the bestseller list it climbed and the longer it stayed there. It was a zeitgeist book. There’s always a place for trash novels, but this one came along at a time when high and low culture were changing places in America, and it reinforced a dynamic still going strong today. Susann was hardly the only one who assumed that the world is driven by sex, but her years of showbiz experience as a wannabe sniffing around the edges of success enabled her to put a believably lascivious context around the steamy, gossipy prose one observer likened to overhearing a ladies’ room conversation. Read More