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By Root 689 0

hardcover and mass-market paperback and later a successful movie. Jackie had invented her own unique brand of fiction: shopgirl romance, brought up to date with lots of dirty talk, the suggestion of some pretty rough sex, and an unsentimental view of men. Jackie’s fictional men were not modeled on Heathcliff but on her father: They were tall, handsome, sexy, and as emotionally tough as nails, and her heroines broke their hearts over them. (Amanda, in The Love Machine, was not untypical in that she carried Robin Stone’s soiled face towels around in her handbag.) Jackie had uncovered a deep well of emotional masochism in American women, and far from exploiting it she simply shared it. She also understood, as if by instinct, that her readers were ready for the raw side of love, for abortions, suicide, and crass male behavior. (Christy Lane, for example, talks to his mistress while sitting on the toilet defecating noisily, with the bathroom door open.) She brought to her novels the equivalent of the case histories of Sacher-Masoch (whom she had never read) and a whole lifetime of familiarity with the seamy side of show business and blended it all with the more traditional elements of women’s fiction. As Irving Mansfield liked to say, she “cried all the way to the bank.”

Perhaps more important, Bernard Geis (her publisher), Jackie, and Irving created a new way of selling a novel, a shameless blend of column plants, celebrity appearances, and Hollywood gossip that was new to book publishing but was old hat for the theater and movies. You couldn’t pick up a newspaper or turn on the television set without hearing about Jackie and her novel. Irving Mansfield put the book’s cover in subway advertisements, something that had hitherto been thought more appropriate for hemorrhoid remedies than books, while Jackie actually got up at dawn to visit the warehouses from which her books were shipped to shake hands with the men who put them on the trucks and with the drivers themselves.

Publishers lusted after her sales but hesitated “to get into bed” (a favorite Irving/Jackie phrase) with the Mansfields—so much so that while Random House, somewhat shamefacedly, distributed both Every Night Josephine! and Valley of the Dolls, the books were actually published by Bernard Geis, himself something of an outsider. Geis’s indifference to what was then thought of as good taste had been demonstrated to most of the more conventional publishing hands when he came up with the title of Helen Gurley Brown’s first book, Sex and the Single Girl, in 1962 and shocked the old guard by making a huge best-seller of it.

Geis had a distribution deal with Random House that predated Jackie, so the Random House sales force sold his list. Random House’s honor was saved by this semitransparent fig leaf. The only person who wasn’t satisfied by this arrangement, though nobody knew it at the time, was Jackie herself, who fretted at not being given the same treatment as other best-selling authors, particularly Truman Capote, with whom she had traded insults on TV talk shows. Capote had likened her to “a truck driver in drag”—strong words for the time—and said of her skills as a writer, “She doesn’t write, she types”; Jackie—who had a way with words (she had remarked of Philip Roth, then tasting fame as the author of Portnoy’s Complaint and popularizer of masturbation, “I don’t mind reading his book, but I don’t want to shake his hand!”)—had made savage fun of Capote’s lisp.

Still, Jackie envied writers like Capote, and it was her ambition to be the star author on a major publisher’s list that swept her into my life, changing it forever, not to speak of the industry in which I worked. Of course, I wasn’t the magnet that drew Jackie to S&S. First of all, she wanted money, a ton of it, and a deal that would be the envy of other writers. Above all, she wanted status, the number-one place on a big-time publisher’s fiction list, with first-class treatment all the way. As Irving Mansfield put it, “She just wants her publisher to love her, that’s all.”

Class mattered to her