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Poor Jackie fared less well when her thinly disguised roman à clef was adapted to the screen.

She badly wanted Bette Davis to play fading Broadway legend Helen Lawson, a character Susann created in retaliation against Ethel Merman, with whom she had once had an ill-fated personal relationship. Instead, that role went to Susan Hayward, best known for her performances in a trio of biopics of, respectively, singers-actresses Jane Froman (With a Song in My Heart, 1952) and Lillian Roth (I’ll Cry Tomorrow, 1955), and convicted murderer Barbara Graham (I Want to Live!), the latter garnering her the Best Actress Oscar for 1958.

Susann envisioned Liza Minnelli playing Neely O’Hara, a character modeled after Minnelli’s own mother, Judy Garland. What she got was Patty Duke, whose career had pretty much peaked at age 16, when she won an Oscar for her portrayal of Helen Keller in The Miracle Worker.

(In a strange twist of fate, Judy Garland, who had originally been slated to play Helen Lawson, was replaced by Hayward when Garland – depending on who tells the story – walked off the set or was fired.)

The role of Anne Welles, for whom Susann herself was the prototype, went to Barbara Parkins, whose 15 minutes of fame culminated with her participation in the TV series “Peyton Place: The Next Generation” in the 1980s.

Starlet Sharon Tate seemed tailor-made for the role of Jennifer North Polar, a showgirl-turned-starlet with a great body but no talent. Ms. Tate’s only other notable performance was in The Fearless Vampire Killers, directed by Roman Polanski, whom she later married before being brutally slain, along with her and Polanski’s unborn child, by Charles Manson and his minions. Sadly, it is her horrific demise for which she is best remembered.

Upon viewing the screen adaptation of Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann termed it “shit,” a remarkably apt appraisal of this paean to atrocious acting, puerile screenwriting, and sloppy editing. (It is astonishing to note that editor Dorothy Spencer, whose credits include such classics as My Darling Clementine, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait, couldn’t seem to figure out what to do with an unintentionally hilarious scene featuring a set of wildly swinging beads doing battle with Patty Duke’s tits.)

Luckily for me, I was able to view Valley of the Dolls in the perfect setting in which to fully appreciate its glorious trashiness. Projected on the big screen, in a packed house of predominantly gays and lesbians (several in drag) out for GLAMN (Gay and Lesbian Alternative Movie Night), the experience was even more greatly enhanced by the raucous audience participation and a delightful running commentary by self-proclaimed “Doll-phile” Ron Anders, who asserts the movie changed his life when he first saw it as a boy with his parents in New York, and who professes to having seen it about 200 times.

Thanks to Ron, we were given plenty of caution to plant our feet firmly on the floor and “breathe” just before those moments when the action and/or dialogue turned their most giddily awful – a few representative examples being one in a nursing sanitarium, depicting a tearful duet between Neely O’Hara and a semi-vegetative man in a wheelchair; another in which Neely and Helen Lawson engage in a catfight in a restroom, resulting in the demise of a perfectly lovely red bouffant wig; and (perhaps the pièce de résistance) a soliloquy by Neely (and yes, Patty Duke does have all the “choice” material) invoking all her friends, ex-husbands, and God as she crashes amid the garbage cans (heavy symbolism, that!) in an alley.

Watching Truly Bad Movies doesn’t get much better than this.

Final Grade(s): For artistic merit - 2 Stars / For (not-the-least-bit) guilty pleasure merit - 5 Stars

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originally posted: 01/30/06 04:12:20
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