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Abstract Page

The New Yorker, August 14, 1995 P. 66

THE PUBLISHING WORLD about writer Jacqueline Susann. When writer joined Simon & Schuster in the late summer of 1958, book publishing still thought of itself as a respectable profession. The business was being run, for the most part, by men in suits or in donnish tweeds, with pipes, who were either Ivy League Wasps or Jews whose highest ambition was to be mistaken for Wasps. Bennett Cerf, the co-owner of Random House, might flutter around the edges of show business as a Broadway groupie, a joke anthologist, and a panel member on the TV, but when it came to his publishing persona, he expected to be taken seriously: he worried about books "in bad taste." Susann created a new way of selling a novel--a shameless blend of promotion, personal appearances, and celebrity tie-ins. This kind of thing was old hat for the theatre and for movies but had been unknown in book publishing. You couldn't pick up a newspaper or turn on the television set without hearing about Jackie and "Valley of the Dolls." Tells how she left Random House (which published her first book under the imprint of Bernard Geis) for Simon & Schuster; she wanted Robert Gottlieb to edit her second novel, "The Love Machine." Mentions her highly favorable conditions for signing a contract ("Valley of the Dolls" had sold over ten million copies and was made into a successful movie). Mentions her dog, Josephine, which she made famous in her first book, "Every Night, Josephine!" She was tall, broad-shouldered, and large bosomed, and she had a deep, husky voice. She wore heavy stage make-up: her face was an improbable dark tan, her lips were a glossy blood-red, and her spiky eyelashes were truly alarming. She also turned out to be a phenomenally hard worker, who took suggestions calmly, provided they were not directed at her view of life or of herself. Writer describes a dinner at Danny's Hide-A-Way with Susann, her husband, Irving Mansfield, comedian Myron Cohen, and actor Peter Lawford. Tells about the 1969 promotional campaign for "The Love Machine," which centered around the ankh (in time, the publishers came to refer to the ankh as "the ancient Egyptian symbol for schlock"), and the disastrous A.B.A. party in which one inebriated bookseller whom Susann was courting (she was the first writer to actively do so) fell into a large promotional cake, after imbibing too many special "Love Machine" cocktails. Her last book, "Once Is Not Enough" (1973) was published by William Morrow. She died in 1974, of breast cancer. She reinvented the romance novel and opened it up to franker sexuality. More important, she taught everybody in book publishing that what many people want to read more than anything else is a good story.
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