An Embarrassment of Bitches

Valley of the Dolls

1967 Drama
From 20th Century Fox
Directed by Mark Robson

Starring
Barbara Parkins
Patty Duke
Paul Burke
Sharon Tate
Lee Grant
Tony Scotti
Martin Milner
Robert Emhardt
Susan Hayward


OMG where to begin.  How does one capture one of the dumbest, cheesiest, lowlife, mawkish, hackneyed pieces of junk to come out of Hollywood in the 1960s?  Well, I certainly do want to bring it some justice. 

I confess to wondering whether history might not repeat itself in a few months with the release of 50 Shades of Grey.  I didn't read the book but it seems so many women did.  Will the film be a box office bonanza?  Sure it will.  Just like Dolls was.  Will Grey be as cheesy as Dolls was?  Well, we don't have long to find out.

Well, class, those of us of a certain age went through this in the mid-60s with the publication of Jacqueline Susann's Valley of the Dolls, a potboiler of a quasi-dirty book about taking drugs and the machinations of behind-the-scenes show business.  It's been said it's about the rise and fall of three lookers trying to make it in the business.  I think it's about five women, three of whom are complete bitches.  I think it's ok to say that since I used it in the title, don't you? 

The Dolls of the film's title refers to drugs, uppers and downers, but I must admit that I had never heard of all those little red and yellow and blue pills being called dolls.  Did Susann just make that up?  Is that how they talked in Manhattan?  I lived in L.A. then and I don't recall the use of that word for pills.  Maybe I just didn't hang around in enough of the wrong places.

Not everyone read Valley of the Dolls, just most.  I can think of some folks who didn't and wouldn't.  Once I got out of school, I pretty much canned reading fiction but I got all caught up in the Dolls frenzy and jumped in there.  I am here to tell you that Susann was no writer.  She was a titillator with editors.  Without question she was jealous of and hoped to repeat the success of Grace Metalious, who a few years earlier had written Peyton Place.  Funny thing is that Metalious wasn't exactly Louisa May Alcott  herself, but her book didn't suffer quite the slings and arrows that Dolls did.  And the film of Peyton Place is highly regarded as a superior soap opera with a number of good performances resulting in several Oscar nominations.  The irony is not lost on me that Mark Robson directed both films.  Had he lost his touch in the 10 years between the two films?

Anne Welles is the focus of most of the film.  She's the good girl who leaves her charming New England town for a bite of the Big Apple.  She gets a job with a theatrical lawyer and quickly falls for the office dreamboat, Lyon Burke, with an embarrassing scene that involves her becoming tongue-tied and dropping the contents of her purse all over the floor.  It was my first cringe.

Anne is immediately hired (trust me, it's because she's a looker and nothing else... eeuux) and sent over to a theater to have Broadway viper, Helen Lawson, sign some papers.  Helen has up-and-comer Neely O'Hara fired (because she's threatened by the neophyte's super singing) from the show and Anne cringes.  Oh my, what has she gotten herself into?  New York has pretty mean people.  We see Jennifer North, a fairly talentless showgirl who soon finds the only work available to her is French porn, who will become Anne's friend.

The long, arduous romance of Anne and Lyon chiefly concerns whether they will marry... she wants to, he doesn't.  By the time we get to the end, he wants to and she doesn't.

Neely is a ball-buster of the highest order, without a single redeeming feature.  (Poor writing.)  The only way she relates to human beings is in how they can do something for her.  She is the main doll swallower... the husbands require too much of her, the producers do, the directors do, the publicists do, the photographers do.  She hardly has any time for herself, to laugh, to think, to regroup. She can't take it anymore so she slams down the dolls and the booze like it's got a shelf life and she must hurry.

Jennifer marries a singer, Tony Polar, whom she quickly discovers is lorded over by a depressing control freak of a sister.  That is because he could inherit some sort of loss of muscular control that has no cure and that will result in hallucinations and a physical and mental degeneration.  And then, of course, it happens.

There are no words to say how bad Patty Duke's acting is.  But allow me to try.  Her body movements as she lipsynchs her songs begs the question:  did she rehearse?  Did she notice how Susan Hayward moved when she lipsynched her own songs?  Did Duke see a difference?  She has most of the musical numbers and butchers most all of them.  I watched in horror as I hear the other actors, who are watching her in the scene, say how wonderful she is.  Duke's constant screeching and bellowing was most unbecoming.  Did no one ever tell her less is more?  Had she ever heard about displaying the essence of something rather than histrionics at every turn?  When Neely is really down and out, washed up, alone in an alley behind the theater, she breaks down, hand clenched in the air, calling for Anne, Jennifer, Lyon, her first husband and God.  It is the single most embarrassing piece of acting I have ever seen.  How Duke attends Valley of the Dolls film retros and speaks to an audience after reviewing the film is absolutely beyond me.

Do let me add that I thought she was stunning as a child actress in The Miracle Worker (for which she won an Oscar) and quite good in a number of television films.  But she so missed the boat in Valley of the Dolls that I believe the film completely derailed her movie career.

Equally cringe-worthy to her back alley scene is one that takes place in a sanitarium where she has gone to dry out and where Tony Polar is now a virtual vegetable in a wheelchair.  Duke is not as bad in this scene as the scene itself.  In a large room full of patients, she starts singing a song Tony once sang.  Somehow, miracle of miracles, he comes out of his state and belts out the tune with her.  As soon as it's over, he slumps back in his chair and resumes his tragic life.

One of the three things I actually did enjoy about this film was seeing Sharon Tate.  It was too early to determine her prospects as an actress but her looks were dazzling.  When her Jennifer finds the going gets rough, she turns to dolls as well, although never as far gone as Neely.  But when she discovers she has breast cancer, she kills herself.

Valley of the Dolls seems to be in bed with Peyton Place in even more ways.  Both Barbara Parkins and Lee Grant are alumni of the television version of Peyton Place.  Parkins, never much of an actress nor with much of a career, was surely given this role because of her fame from the television show.  Her Anne, clearly the heroine of the piece, is just a bit dull.  But after her mother dies and she breaks up with Lyon and wrestles with Jennifer's suicide, she, too, gets on dolls.  Briefly.  Parkins always physically reminded me of my wife, so that's a good thing.  If it weren't for Valley of the Dolls, Parkins would barely be remembered at all.  I'm not so sure that's a good thing.

Grant overplayed her role and as written, she, too, had hardly a redeeming quality.  Manipulation was her character's strong suit.  Most unpleasant.

Most of the male characters are weak and there were plenty of unpleasant homophobic slurs to help describe them.  Paul Burke, playing Lyon Burke, was kind of a hunk but his movie career went nowhere.  And Tony Scotti, who played Tony Polar, can claim this as his only film.  I wonder why.  I didn't think he was so bad.

Going for the wig

Another of my pleasantries about this film was Susan Hayward as Helen Lawson.  I always enjoyed her acting and she's not at all bad here in a very brief role.  Her tussle with Duke in a ladies room resulting in Hayward's wig being flushed down the toilet was a highlight for me.  On the opposite end was a silly pony tail they give her and a horrendously cheesy set involving a revolving mobile while she lipsynchs the best of the film's poor songs.

Hayward, as you cinemaphiles know, replaced Judy Garland, who was fired after a few days for-- imagine this-- pills and booze.  It gets weirder when one adds to the stack that Neely O'Hara is said to be based on Garland, although I've heard Ethel Merman, Frances Farmer and Betty Hutton as well... all famously temperamental actresses.  Actually, Hayward was no slouch in the temperament department either.

The third great joy for me was its theme song, called simply Theme from Valley of the Dolls.  I thought it was a gorgeous song, like a mournful poem, written by Dory and Andre Previn, and recorded by Dionne Warwick.  I play it to this day. 

Well, the film became a monster financial success.  Despite the gaudy sets, the sophomoric writing, the acting, both the wooden variety and the cringe-worthy embarrassing kind, and let's include the oh-so-wrong costumes, it achieved some sort of camp classic status.  Campy?  Doesn't that mean a spoof, perhaps a sophisticated one, something that involves humor?  There's nothing funny about this film.  I'm betting no one making it thought it was a spoof.  They were all deadly serious.

Ok, here's a laugh before you go... you know who really hated this movie?  Jacqueline Susann.



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Newman in the 60s