On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
ON TELEVISION By Marvin Kitman The New York outlet of the American Broadcasting Company, wabc-tv, has been winning something of a reputation this season for a number of locally produced...
...This was an honest show in that the cameras told it to us the way it was...
...I saw a picture of Jayne Mansfield and got the idea of giving Jennifer extra-large breasts...
...Comedian Milt Kamen tried to make out with model Heather Hewett...
...The wardrobe room during the making of Valley of the Dolls...
...I can accomplish anything," she proclaimed, "as long as Irving Mansfield is my husband...
...They treated Miss Susann as if she were a publishing phenomenon, the one-book author...
...It was this gift that really started her writing career: "You know what I told him the other day...
...Eddie Cantor, Miss Susann remembered in one emotional scene, told her never to go to Hollywood "unless they really wanted you...
...Miss Susann knocks off work and goes to a gym...
...After a hard day at the typewriter...
...Miss Susan believes it's the novelist's job to write about the things she knows...
...ON TELEVISION By Marvin Kitman The New York outlet of the American Broadcasting Company, wabc-tv, has been winning something of a reputation this season for a number of locally produced specials—soon to be syndicated nationally—in a field that might be called "popular anthropology...
...As you may have heard, Jacqueline Susann is the woman who in her middle years gave up an unpromising career as an actress and glamour girl to write a novel...
...You just have to force yourself to go to the typewriter...
...We heard the unrehearsed conversation of celebrities, writers, mini-dressed debs and models...
...What made this special a document of lasting significance to belles-lettres was the advice Miss Susann gave about the craft of writing a best seller...
...There's a Jennifer at every country club...
...heard wrong...
...Ever since writing began...
...Valley of the Dolls, which exposes the seamier side of the movie business, immediately established her as a muckraking social historian in the tradition of Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser and Rona Jaffe...
...I pass along her instructions for what they are worth...
...In Miss Susann's case, it sounds like a sex dream...
...Everest," are the first words in her novel...
...Today millions of American teenage girls who have read nothing but Valley of the Dolls are educated enough to know it is necessary to have talent to achieve lasting success in the movie industry...
...She explained the metaphor at the end of the tv show by saying, "Mt...
...They appear, too, on pages 60, 111 and 178 of the Bantam edition of Valley of the Dolls—each time echoed by a different character, giving the impression that her people all belonged to the same mountain climbing club...
...Miss Susann also warns our young females that actresses have trouble sleeping at night and must resort to drugs, which can be habit-forming...
...Michael Dunn explained how things looked from his special vantage point...
...The fault, though, rests as much with the Color Coded Characters cocktail party as a communications medium as with the swingers who talked...
...A typical study, titled The In Crowd, explored the folkways of a strange breed of people who are said to swing...
...There is an even wider prospective audience for another of the wabc-tv experimental anthropological studies, titled Jacqueline Susann and 'Valley of the Dolls.' It should be required viewing in every creative writing class...
...She works seven or eight hours a day, she reassured the tv audience...
...But this, of course, is not yet possible on television...
...Predictably, she turned the conversation to sex...
...When I wrote about Ann I wanted to write about Everygirl...
...Indeed, there is as much useful information in this one novel as in the combined non-fiction of Helen Gurley Brown...
...The set of Peyton Place...
...Well, we're both from Philadelphia...
...that they should not sleep in the same bed at finishing schools in Switzerland because an unnatural relationship can spring up...
...I would have liked Miss Susann to go a little deeper into the meaning of writing—for example, to tell us the best way to handle capital gains, depletion of natural resources, and writing off travel expenses...
...That's really the way Miss Jaffe writes...
...The swine...
...I said, 'Just think Goody what might have happened if you'd given me a piano—by now I'd be in Carnegie Hall.' " Currently she is using a standard office typewriter...
...But the program was produced for a general audience...
...Sometimes I wish Miss Brown would just take a cold shower...
...Victor Lasky observed, "A lot of dirty books aren't making the grade like Jackie's...
...Miss Susann uses a typewriter...
...She writes five drafts of a novel...
...Everest, it sounds wholesome...
...They finally sent for me not as an actress, but as Jacqueline Susann, author...
...My appreciation of The In Crowd was further handicapped by the fact that I felt uncomfortable being at a party I wasn't really invited to—personally, I mean...
...The final draft is on good white paper...
...In other words, the just plain beautiful people...
...The third draft is on pink...
...There were many scenes of what life is really like for an author in Hollywood: The parking lot...
...Everest," she called it...
...she explained, "writers start with a germ of an idea...
...Without him I couldn't be a whole person...
...At any rate, the special traced Miss Susann's climb to the top, from the Schiffli Embroidery girl on television commercials to the day she arrived in Hollywood and found her name stenciled on the blacktop of the 20th Century Fox parking lot...
...Sex can help a girl get into a few dozen pictures, and make a few million dollars, but it all turns to ashes...
...She's certainly as good a writer as Rona Jaffe...
...It's like giving up cigarettes...
...Everest can be anywhere...
...This is important because she finds writing "enlarges the waist of the writer...
...Many people say the character of Ann in Valley of the Dolls," she revealed, "is based on Grace Kelly...
...Hopefully we will read about it at some later date in Lerner's newspaper column...
...Each character's name is in a different colored chalk so that she knows at a glance in which draft a character first appears...
...Betsy von Furstenberg debated lsd with columnist Max Lerner...
...and that handsome men with English accents can have their way with frigid Rad-cliffe girls...
...Miss Jaffe gushed, "I think her success is a real groovy thing...
...And Helen Gurley Brown gave viewers some more of her outrageous opinions...
...No less an authority on the subject than Irving Mansfield, her husband, says she is a serious writer, already hard at work on her second novel...
...Miss Susann is no Flaubert stylistically, but who is these days...
...The abc television special, however, did not explore these major discoveries of Jackie Susann's career...
...you'd think she wrote that book...
...Still, the show can be recommended for anyone who has a psychological need to be a member of an out-group for an hour or less some night...
...It was quite boring...
...When Sir Edmund Hillary describes his early dreams about Mt...
...The fourth on blue...
...Helen Gurley Brown and Rona Jaffe also appeared in cameo roles...
...One blushes anyway...
...I'm surprised that Miss Susann went along with this kind of exploitation of her real talent as a writer...
...These sequences, which may make some people think the whole special was nothing but a cheap publicity gimmick for plugging her movie, proved once again that underneath the tinsel of Hollywood there is tinsel...
...To keep track of her characters, she uses a large blackboard in her writing den, or "torture chamber...
...The first is on "inexpensive white paper...
...Miss Susann explained that she never varies from this ritual...
...Somewhere, something he's seen...
...She doesn't try to develop characters until the second draft, which is on yellow paper...
...Obviously every young struggling novelist should get a muse named Irving...
...I'm sure the television industry executive who claims she heard Irving say recently, "The way Jackie is carrying on...
...I'm sure a show based on the conversation of, say, Betsy von Furstenberg and Max Lerner after the cocktail party would have stirred broader interest...
...You've got to climb to the top of Mt...
...Through the miracle of modern electronics, tv cameras went right into the natural habitat of these people, an "invitation only" cocktail party in the Penthouse East suite of the New York Hilton Hotel...
...The theme repeats itself frequently in her published work...
...Rather, it dealt with her struggles as a woman trying to fulfil herself as a writer...
...One doesn't argue with success...
...Grau-man's Chinese Theater...
...But she isn't a George Plimpton fooling around in publishing...
...But I guess it's better than dreaming about snakes...
...Ever since she was a little girl growing up in Philadelphia, Miss Susann admitted in the special, she had been dreaming of reaching the top...
...Despite all her instructions on writing, which on the whole I found quite sound, Miss Susann ended the special by crediting her success to her husband, Irving...
...The producers found it necessary to interview a number of other writers, most of them members of her literary set, on Miss Susann's qualifications as a novelist...
...The relationship of the author and her husband, who has devoted his life since 1966 to pushing his wife's book, sounds like one of the great love stories of all time...
...Noel Bohn, author of The Kremlin Letters, unhesitatingly declared, "She's damned good...
...That's the technique she follows...
...Before Miss Susann wrote the book, it was commonplace for agents, studio executives and even critics to take advantage of a girl by telling her they could make her a star...
...Thus we were able to observe what they do naturally, which is talk...
...Goodman Ace gave the author her first typewriter, a portable...
...The characters are color coded...
...I don't think the producers of this special really understood their subject...
Vol. 51 • March 1968 • No. 6
