Summer Reading List: ‘Valley of the Dolls’

This summer, instead of curling up with a good book — or, okay, in ADDITION to curling up with a good book — take some time to stream a film based on an acclaimed work of literature. All summer, Decider will be recommending book-to-film adaptations that are available on streaming. All the nourishment of great literature; all the visual pleasures of great cinema. 

This Week’s Movie: Valley of the Dolls

What Book Is It Adapting? Jacqueline Susann’s 1966 novel Valley of the Dolls

Available On: Netflix

While it’s unlikely you ever had the good fortune of getting to read Jacqueline Susann’s legendarily trashy novel for a school reading list, I’m still going to recommend that you curl up with this movie at your earliest convenience. As vehemently as the critical establishments — both literary and cinematic — tried to rub this one out of existence, Valley of the Dolls has stubbornly refused to fade away and thus remains an essential artifact of camp filmmaking, yes, but also 1960s film (particularly as it approached the looming counterculture) and literature.

There’s so much about Valley of the Dolls that exists outside the movie rather than in it. The stories about Judy Garland getting turfed from the film as her addictions got the better of her, replaced by Susan Hayward. Patty Duke had her own problems, most of them with mental health. And of course most notoriously, two years after the film was released, star Sharon Tate would be killed by the Manson family in her Benedict Canyon home. Valley of the Dolls had already attained infamy on its own terms anyway, but the ancillary tragedies surrounding it, of art imitating life in the dark corners of Hollywood, certainly have elevated it beyond mere camp or trash.

The film focuses on three aspiring young women: Neely O’Hara (Duke), a starlet on a rapid rise whose experience (and addiction to uppers and downers) nearly breaks her; Jennifer (Tate), who faces tremendous pressures to stay beautiful or risk obsolescence; and Anne (Barbara Parkins), a small-town girl turned secretary turned model. If Valley of the Dolls doesn’t seem quite so shocking in its depiction of fame’s toxic effects on the famous, it’s probably because it’s seeped into our DNA in the years since then.

Which isn’t to say that Valley of Dolls was ever taken seriously enough to get credit for its contributions to the Hollywood myth. The novel was a massive bestseller, but Susann’s work was brushed off and discredited as trash. The film was even more poorly received, trashed by the likes of Bosley Crowther and Roger Ebert alike (Ebert went on to write the script for the extremely loosely-connected sequel Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, another campy treasure).

Of course, if Valley of the Dolls had been a “better” movie, it’s likely it wouldn’t be remembered nearly so vividly today. Lines like “sparkle, Neely, sparkle!” wouldn’t be the shibboleths they are. The film’s immortality lies in its trashiness, in its salaciousness, and in its inability to reconcile the candy-coated mainstream cinema of the 1960s with the darker themes and explicit sexuality of the new wave to come.

And besides, it was foolish to imagine that a movie where Patty Duke snatches Susan Hayward’s wig off her head in the middle of a catfight over Broadway wasn’t destined to become an immortal classic in its own right.

Differences Between Book and Movie:  Author Jacqueline Susann reportedly hated the film. The novel’s ending was changed, in particular the fate of the Anne character. In the book, she stays in her bad marriage to Lyon and begins taking pills (the “dolls” of the title) to cope. In the film, Anne escapes to Connecticut and serves as the bright spot of optimism in the film’s conclusion.

Reading-List Questions to Answer: 

• Is this the film Patty Duke should have won her Oscar for?
• If you could only pick one of Valley of the Dolls or Beyond the Valley of the Dolls to endure as a camp classic, which would you choose?
• Do we tend to more easily devalue trash entertainment about women as compared to trash entertainment about men?

[You can stream Valley of the Dolls on Netflix.]