Go On...

...Sparkle, Jackie, sparkle.

Through A Lens Darkly

Blaze Starr



Madame Alix Grès



Brenda Frazier



Lillian and Dorothy Gish



Mae West



Jacqueline Susann and husband Irving Mansfield



Jayne Mansfield and daughter Jayne Marie



Sunday Styles by Diane Arbus.

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

I Could Go On Planting My Own Tree

"Do you think Barbara Parkins can make me sing??? Do you think YOU can...Do you think Ted Casablanca can make me sing??? You can build a crappy mobile, SURE, but can you make me SING under it???"

Literary Drive

Law of Desire

JOHN PHILLIP LAW
September 7, 1938 - May 13, 2008

Any man who can play Sinbad, Diabolik, the Blind Angel and the Love Machine deserves our respect.

Through a Celebrity Lens, Darkly

Celebrity Portraits by Diane Arbus

Let's Be Buddies

One of the most fascinating minor characters in birthday girl Jackie Susann's The Love Machine is Dip Nelson, a second-string hack actor with a barely-contained homoerotic, symbiotic friendship with Robin Stone, the head of a CBS-like television station. In this case, Susann barely applied a veneer of fictional gloss; Jackie might as well have kept the character's actual name: Keefe Brasselle.



Brasselle was known throughout Hollywood for his brash, cocky, overbearing manner; he'd hoped to get his big break by starring in The Eddie Cantor Story in 1953, but the film was so bad (and Brasselle's performance even worse) that his movie career was finished before it really began. In 1963, without any prior experience in the field, Brasselle was suddenly named to producer status at CBS, and three of his expensive projects were given prestigious slots in the 1963-64 season. All failed miserably, including his own Keefe Brasselle Show, which was ridiculed as a masterpiece of mediocrity.

Oh, incidentally, Brasselle and CBS president James Aubrey were inseparable buddies at the time.



Aubrey's sobriquet, "The Smiling Cobra," was apparently well-deserved: not simply a ruthless executive, Aubrey seemed to take sadistic delight in purposely being cruel to others, particularly the cast and crews of shows he cancelled. A notorious womanizer, rumors swirled about his physical mistreatment of his many girlfriends.

So, were the real-life Aubrey and Brasselle involved? No one involved is still alive; but it's a tantalizing mystery nonetheless. Their thick and fast friendship certainly was curious to even casual onlookers: there were never two more polar opposites. And for all her sensationalism, Jackie Susann was a gal who probably knew more true dirt on the subjects of her romans a clef than they would care to admit.

Our fascination with this proposed liason stems from two facts: 1) Gossip about who was gay or bisexual in Old Hollywood makes us wet ourselves; and 2) We think James Aubrey was sexy in that totally early 1960's Mad Men kind of way.

So sue us.

Jackie, Oh!

She was a failure as a Broadway actress and television hostess; she battled breast cancer and the devastation of committing her mentally disabled son to a sanitarium. But Jacqueline Susann had a story burning inside of her that only she could tell, and her seamy, sordid expose of Hollywood pill-poppers made Valley of the Dolls (1966) the most-read book on the planet. Despite universally sneering reviews, the public adored Jackie's romans a clef -- she managed a hat trick when The Love Machine (1969) and Once is Not Enough (1973) both soared to #1 on the New York Times bestseller list.


JACKIE & JUDY


JACKIE WITH PATTY DUKE & LEE GRANT ON THE SET OF VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1967)

The second-most-famous Jackie in the world succumbed to cancer in 1974; she was only 56 years old.

JACQUELINE SUSANN
(August 20, 1918 - September 21, 1974)