Thursday, March 27, 2014

With Friends Like Jackie...

"I'm the only one in the book who doesn't take pills!" -- Judy Garland on being cast as "Helen Lawson" in the film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966)

"I just read the most marvelous book. It's called Valley of the Moon." -- Bette Davis to Johnny Carson

"Karla! At fourteen, he had masturbated with her picture propped up in front of him. His friends had their school lockers filled with pinups of Doris Day...But with him it had always been Karla." -- Jacqueline Susann, writing in Once is Not Enough (1974)
 
"Ethel [Merman] and I have an old score to settle, but she might not realize it because she doesn't read books." -- Jacqueline Susann on modeling the "Helen Lawson" character in Valley of the Dolls on Merman


"Ethel Merman is a lady and a philanthropist compared to Joan [Crawford]. If I had known Joan when I was writing Valley of the Dolls, Helen Lawson would have been a monster." -- Jacqueline Susann

3 comments:

  1. "I'm the only one in the book who doesn't take pills!" -- Judy Garland on being cast as "Helen Lawson" in the film adaptation of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls (1966)

    Poor Judy. Wonder how many pills she was on when she said that???

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  2. If there was a back to stab, the "truck driver in drag" would stab it, it seems...

    We adore the bitch, of course.

    Jx

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  3. "Ethel Merman is a lady and a philanthropist compared to Joan [Crawford]. If I had known Joan when I was writing Valley of the Dolls, Helen Lawson would have been a monster." -- Jacqueline Susann

    If only she had taken on Joan! I would have paid cash money to see it

    Jacqueline was an Andy Warhol kind of modern PR genius . She was the first one to buy truckloads of her own books to raise her ratings on NYT book list and thus create buzz and make such a success as fast as she did . It was lasting because her prose was good solid, bitchy trash, just what people wanted

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