Feminism, but not as we know it … 50 years of Valley of the Dolls

Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 novel encapsulated an essence of the female experience, but is it worth reading today?

The first thing you notice, rereading Valley of the Dolls is how badly it functions as fiction. First published in 1966, it has a status in the Virago canon that means many of us will have read it young, as a necessary classic, in that interim phase as a reader where you consume books like air, not stopping to interrogate their quality. I didn’t realise how bad it was. It covers the fortunes and friendship, but mainly the drug addiction, of three women: the prim but outrageously beautiful Anne Welles; the Judy Garland-inspired vaudeville star Neely O’Hara; and the busty airhead Jennifer North.

The characterisation is flaky, and the relationships two-dimensional. Anne leaves Lawrenceville to escape her petty, judgmental mother, and yet their dialogue – “Did you ever kiss any other boy?” … “Oh, a few years back, when Willie and I first started dating, we’d play Spin the Bottle” – is trusting and open, as if between two friends, with no trace of the secrecy and resentment that such a harsh and punitive mother-daughter dyad would create. The plot is just preposterous: Jennifer, the talentless showgirl, falls in love with Tony Polar without noticing that he has a mental age of 12, which she discovers via his malicious half-sister, and without demur aborts the foetus that five minutes before she had invested with all her hopes for future intimacy. How could she have fallen for him in the first place? And if he has passed through life as an effortless heart-winner, why would that have been such an untenable legacy for an unborn child? It makes literally no sense. The scene-setting – particularly all the gory details, the sex, the drugs – is extremely sketchy. Compare Jennifer’s abortion – “the nurse jabbed her arm with a needle – sodium pentothal, it was called, and it was a greater sensation than even Seconals. When she woke, it was over” – with the termination scene in Hollywood Wives. Sure, Jackie Collins was writing nearly two decades later, having arguably had the way cleared for her by Valley, but the granular physicality, the microscopic menace, is simply and in every way superior.

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