The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA)
February 12, 2000
JACQUELINE SUSANN, I can only guess, must have KNOWN that she had no talent and was literally all but illiterate. She did, though, have brass. I reviewed her first novel, “Valley of the Dolls,” (and dutifully recognized it for the trash it was). As a result, she sent me a Christmas card every year until her death – with a picture of her French poodle, Josephine, and inscribed with something like, “Thanks for all you’ve done for my career.”
It was always one of the best laughs of the Christmas season. You couldn’t help but appreciate her gall, even if she did continue to write awful novels like “The Love Machine” and “Once Is Not Enough” (both of which inspired equally trashy movies).
Susann didn’t care what you said about her, just so you spelled her name correctly. “Valley of the Dolls” became the No. 1 best seller and stayed at the top of the list – making her one of the biggest-selling authors of the 1960s and ’70s.
Even the sisters Jackie and Joan Collins, as well as Zsa Zsa Gabor, could have learned a few things from Susann in the art of self-promotion. But to turn her into Auntie Mame is another thing.
“Isn’t She Great,” the new film that stars Bette Midler as Susann and Nathan Lane as Irving Mansfield, her doting husband, works hard to make Susann something of a combination Mame and Dolly Levi – a diva whose spunk we could admire. There is some comfort in the idea that “if she can make it, so could any of us.”
The fact that the film is such a disaster is due primarily to director Andrew Bergman‘s determination to allow his actors to mug to the extreme – as if they were dinner theater performers trying to reach an imaginary second balcony. Everything is so theatrical that you half expect the audience to applaud the entrances of the multi-star cast – all of whom are wasted in this embarrassing effort.
Midler was once the epitome of delightful sleaze. Like country singers who go to the city and make big money, though, it’s difficult to remain sleazy when you’re a big star.
She’s further thwarted by the movie’s attempt to be a drama as well as a comedy. Susann’s ultimately tragic battle with breast cancer and her adjustment to an autistic son are matters that hardly fit into the otherwise bawdy and broad approach.
There hasn’t been anything so embarrassing on screen lately as the repetitive scenes in which Midler and Lane talk to God via a tree in New York’s Central Park – bargaining and complaining.
Lane, a comic who has failed to turn his 1995 hit “The Birdcage” into a viable film career, is left with little to do but stay out of Midler‘s way. She models feathers and sleazy-awful outfits and tries to make the most of the schizophrenic proceedings.
Stockard Channing, looking suspiciously as if she’s had a face lift, is much too good an actress to be relegated to the wisecracking-friend supporting bit. She says things like “Don’t worry, Jackie. Talent isn’t everything” and “Nothing was ever solved by reading.”
Paul Rudnick’s script is surprisingly desperate considering that his lines were so witty in “Jeffrey” and the “Addams Family” films.
David Hyde Pierce is asked to play Susann’s stuffed-shirt editor.
Susann’s early years of struggle as a Broadway bit player are so quickly dismissed that it initially looks as if the film will be a short one. Then it takes forever to edit “Valley of the Dolls” and get her famous. The film stretches to 95 minutes. It seems longer.
“Isn’t She Great” is a curiosity that might just turn out to be a camp pleasure (so bad that it becomes a universal joke) as did 1967’s “Valley of the Dolls.” That film even spawned a hilarious stage spoof that had some success in Los Angeles – as well as a 1981 TV miniseries called “Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls.”
There is some perverse joy in watching just how far “Isn’t She Great” will go, until we realize that it’s going all the way to the bottom – beneath the valley of the dolls.
