Inside the the minds of legendary, ‘scandalous’ female authors Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins
In Gill Paul’s latest book, “Scandalous Women,” a historical novel about phenomenally bestselling authors Jacqueline Susann and Jackie Collins — both famous for their sex-driven fiction, and their battles for recognition and critical acceptance in the male-dominated publishing world of the 1960s — there’s a shocking scene that could be right out of the #MeToo scandals of today.
A key character, a recent college graduate named Nancy, desperate for a career as a book editor, finds that in order to secure a job as a lowly assistant in the Manhattan publishing house, Bernard Geis Associates — Susann’s real-life publisher — she must pass a test that has nothing to do with the musty, staid world of books. With her “tight knee-length skirt” hiked up, she’s required to slide down the office’s shiny, slippery fireman’s pole as the company’s male staffers gleefully ogle from below.
“It’s our initiation test to check if you’re the right sort,” a Geis staffer calls out to Nancy as she’s about to begin the career slide of her life. “Come on sweetheart, don’t be afraid,” shouts another office brute. “Prove you’re a good sport.”
Nancy proved it to “general applause, hooting and cheering,” as Bernie Geis himself declares, “I think she’s earned the job.”
The fictional Nancy would go on to edit the real-life former Broadway actress Susann’s first novel, “Valley of the Dolls,” one of the world’s biggest bestsellers which would make Susann a household name. She’d also bring her together with the equally bestselling British writer, Jackie Collins, in this fun read, with a serious theme.
The British bestselling author Gill acknowledges in this pink-jacketed softcover that most everything — dialogue, thoughts, feelings, and many events — are made up, with stories loosely designed to “resemble the kinds of plots found in novels” by Collins and Susann. But she chose to write “Scandalous Women” because she felt the two authors’ “treatment by the publishing industry, the media, and the public in the 1960s was an important story to tell.”
She found it “extraordinary how shocking it was considered for women to write about sex back then, even though the two Jackies’ descriptions were never graphic or detailed.”
Still, Collins and Susann faced barrages of actual hate mail, vicious reviews and nasty critiques by the literati, along with condemnation by feminists many decades before snarky social media.
Next to contemporary erotica like “Fifty Shades of Grey,” also written by a woman, Collins and Susann’s work was “tame by comparison, but both were terrific story tellers, and that’s the key to their phenomenal, continuing success,” writes the author.
“Valley of the Dolls” has sold more than 31 million copies while Collins’s 32 novels have sold more than 500 million copies, which Paul declares, “is not bad for two women with challenges in their private lives, operating in what was still very clearly a man’s world.”
In putting her characters in the Swinging Sixties, Paul had clearly read “several” memoirs by people who had worked in publishing during that period “and gleaned insights from them about the way female staff members were treated.”
But there’s no evidence to support the bizarre slide-for-a-job fireman’s pole scene involving Nancy, except that Geis, who died at 91 in 2001, reportedly did have such a device in his Midtown office, allowing him to slide down it at the end of the workday.
Paul also “invented” the Collins-Susann relationship, with the author stating, “It was wishful thinking on my part.”
Susann “spilled her life” in the pages of “Valley of the Dolls,” having gone through “five separate drafts,” and “included the wisdom she’s acquired about relations between the sexes, based on her own affairs and her long experience of advising friends on their romantic escapades.
And she’s included lust — plenty of steamy explicit sex. She still cringed every time she pictured her mother reading it.”
And Susann, according to the narrative, was even nervous about her showbiz producer husband, Irving Mansfield, having an early read “because of the sex scenes that involved feats they’d never attempted in the marital bed, but he said he loved it. He always had her back, no matter what.”
Among the many presumable fictional scenes was Susann’s appearance on the “Tonight Show” to promote “Valley of the Dolls.” Johnny Carson holds up the book and tells his huge audience, “I know lots of readers love your novel, but it must be disheartening to have received such terrible press reviews.”
Her response: “Let me tell you, Johnny, the more rocks they throw at me, the more copies I will sell.”
While Susann and Collins became wealthy, glitzy stars from what critics considered their trashy novels, their lives ended sadly; both were felled by cancer, Susann at 53, in 1974, Collins at 77, in 2015.
In the author’s acknowledgements, she offers her “eternal gratitude” to Susann and Collins for “everything they did to advance the cause of women’s writing. They were trailblazers for the kinds of novels that millions of readers enjoy worldwide, with glamorous settings, juicy plots, and generous servings of sex.”
