Another Life_ A Memoir of Other People - Michael Korda [142]
From Barbara Seaman’s biography of Jackie Susann, we learn that as a child Jackie’s favorite book had been Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm—surprisingly, in view of her adult success as the author of torrid roman à clef potboilers—but although Jackie always claimed to have had writing ambitions even as a child, in fact she came to authorhood late in life, after a checkered career as a stage actress, a model, a disk jockey, and a television personality.
Jackie adored her father and never stopped talking about him. In Barbara Seaman’s biography of her it is alleged that when Jackie was a teenager she actually saw her father “humping” another woman on his studio couch—if true it would explain a lot about the way sex is treated in her fiction—but if so, the incident made her father only more attractive to Jackie. He seems to have treated his gawky, adolescent daughter as if she were a date, taking her to the movies, to fashionable restaurants, and even to speakeasies. One senses a certain collusion between father and daughter that reached its peak when Robert Susann, picked to be a judge at a beauty contest that was to choose the most beautiful girl in Philadelphia, not only encouraged Jackie to enter but made sure she won. Apart from a silver trophy that she held on to for the rest of her life, winning the contest carried with it a trip to New York City and a screen test—opportunities that Jackie was not about to waste and that were shortly to make the college plans her mother had for her superfluous.
She wanted to be an actress (or failing that, a model), but she never quite made it as either. What she got, however—and it was probably what she wanted most—was a chance to lead an independent life in New York City, as a single girl on the fringes of show business, instead of going to college.
Showbiz, as she always called it, attracted her like a magnet; she was an unapologetic star fucker—even in the literal sense: She had an affair with Eddie Cantor, for which she never forgave him, getting her revenge by turning him into the loathsome comedian Christy Lane in her second novel, The Love Machine. It was her passion for Broadway that brought about her marriage to Irving Mansfield, a press agent, promoter, and “producer” (of what, it was somewhat hard to say, or find out), who talked and acted as if he were a character straight out of Guys and Dolls, and was comfortable only at places like Lindy’s, the Stage Delicatessen, and Sardi’s (although late in life he managed to settle into the West Coast equivalent: a bungalow and a cabana at the Beverly Hills Hotel and a table at the Polo Lounge).
Jackie was around celebrities so much that she became a kind of celebrity herself, relentlessly plugged by Irving and the various Broadway gossip columnists of the day. The only thing she didn’t have for full-scale celebrityhood was a talent or even a “gimmick,” but this problem was solved, as if by miracle, in 1953, when she saw a poodle in the window of a Lexington Avenue pet shop. She bought her, named her Josephine, and a star was born—two stars, actually, for Josephine became America’s most famous dog in 1963 when Jackie published Every Night Josephine! Jackie had discovered, after so many false starts, what she could do. Irving Mansfield finally had something to promote.
Between the two of them (or three of them, if you include “Josie,” as Jackie called her, who was very much part of the promotion), they put Jackie’s first book on the map, then went on to make Jackie’s next book, Valley of the Dolls, a brilliant combination of soap opera, show-business gossip, and tearjerker, a worldwide number-one best-seller in