Valley of the Dolls will never die

In literature, there's Shylock, and Sherlock,and just plain schlock, but all are delightful in their own ways:

In April 1966, when New York Times book reviewer Martin Levin called Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls “a collector’s delight”, he probably never imagined himself a prophet. Fifty years on, the original, hand-corrected, typed manuscript for the bestselling novel is headed to auction in California, where it is estimated to sell for between $25,000 and $50,000.

“This manuscript will appeal to both the literary collector as well as the collector of pop culture,” said Brian Chanes of Profiles in History, the auction house that will offer the unbound 598-page manuscript on 18 April, alongside presidential autographs, Mark Twain letters and a René Magritte archive.

Valley of the Dolls was released in February 1966, hit the bestseller list a month later, and reached No 1 in May. It has since sold 31m copies, according to a website run by the estate of Jacqueline Susann.

For Susann, a struggling actress who wanted nothing more than to see her name in lights, writing was an afterthought. She had landed a few minor roles on Broadway and on television in the 1940s and early 50s, but neither she nor her press agent/producer husband, Irving Mansfield, could generate enough star power. She was 45 when she published her first book, Every Night, Josephine! (1963), about her pet poodle. It was an unexpected hit. She returned to her pink typewriter and wrote Valley of the Dolls, a novel about the sordid lives of three young women seeking fame and fortune in postwar New York City.

The novel was deemed sensational and crude, even within the context of 1960s America. Not only is it crammed with sex and drugs – “dolls” being the nickname for pills – but Susann’s characters, based on her own experiences in show business, are vicious. The world hidden behind marquees and movie sets, Susann intimates, is sleazy.

Her literary agents, Annie Laurie Williams and Maurice Crain, received several rejections from New York’s top publishers. The legendary Simon & Schuster editor Michael Korda, who would edit Susann’s next novel, The Love Machine (1969), recalls in his memoir, Another Life, that Valley “seemed to many of the old guard of book publishing like the beginning of the end, Hollywood vulgarity at the door of the temple of culture”.

Finally, Bernard Geis offered Susann a contract for Valley of the Dolls. Having previously published Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl (1962), he was nonplussed by Susann’s “dirty” prose. (His office, according to the New York Times, “was the kind of Swinging Sixties office whose two floors were joined by a fire pole”.) Because Susann and her husband were expert self-promoters, the novel took off. She had “reinvented the woman’s novel”, writes Korda.

The book was quickly adapted into a 1967 film starring Barbara Parkins, Sharon Tate and Patty Duke that is now considered a cult classic.

To fete the novel’s 50th anniversary this year, Grove Press will issue a new edition of Valley in July, with an introduction by fashion commentator and Barneys New York creative ambassador Simon Doonan. Writing about the novel as a cultural phenomenon for Slate, Doonan argues that Susann’s novel is so hot, it may require trigger warnings even after five decades.

The anniversary also brings with it the opportunity for selling promotional merch: various editions of Susann’s three bestsellers, a “special edition” DVD of the film, a notebook and mug set, and a designer pillbox.

The California auction appears to be unrelated to anniversary events, though good timing all the same. The Valley manuscript has been in private hands since it was sold at Sotheby’s to a book dealer in 1984. This is the first manuscript of Susann’s that Profiles in History has ever seen or handled, said Chanes.

Typed on onionskin (not the colored paper Susann would become known for), the manuscript shows annotations and editorial proofreading marks in multiple hands, “which would include agents, editors and Jacqueline Susann herself”, said Chanes. It also bears the ink stamp of her literary agency.

Whether the book’s blockbuster history will be enough to arouse collector interest is unclear. But, said Chanes: “This is the manuscript of one of the most successful books of all time. Although some might consider the book innocuous by today’s standards, it set a precedent and became a pattern for a genre of fiction which concentrates on the personal lives of the very famous and successful.”