And are the themes of the book still current today? Without doubt yes, in Burston’s view. “It’s the original blockbuster novel and still the best by far. The themes are as relevant now as ever. Our obsession with celebrity shows no signs of abating. If anything, it’s become more pronounced. . . Talent doesn’t seem to come into it. It was Warhol who said that in the future everyone would be famous for 15 minutes, but I think Susann saw it coming too. She was a contemporary of Warhol’s, an industry insider, someone who’d tried and failed to make it as an actress, and who then channeled everything she’d learned about the fame game into her books. ‘Valley’ is incredibly knowing about the nature of celebrity. In some ways it’s quite prophetic. There are many ‘celebrities’ around now who could be characters from a Jacqueline Susann novel.”

Claws out

Valley of the Dolls makes for brutal reading, and its candid, unflinching depiction of the female experience was certainly ahead of its time in 1966, before the Women’s Liberation Movement had taken off. Playwright and author Samantha Ellis writes about the novel in her book How to be a Heroine: Or What I’ve Learned from Reading Too Much, and joins a panel at the Cheltenham Literature Festival to discuss the book. So which character of the novel is her heroine? “When I was a teenager it was Anne Welles, and the book is structured with her as the heroine,” says Ellis. “But then when I re-read it in my thirties Anne seemed so obsessed with being classy and didn’t have much fun, and for me Neely came out as the heroine. She is ruthless but she knows how to have a good time, she is a brazen ‘take me as I am’ woman, she has talent and wants to explore and nurture that, she is bolder and tougher, and not afraid to make a noise. She has purpose.” Or, as Neely herself puts it in the book: “I didn’t have dough handed to me because of my good cheekbones, I had to work for it.”

She is also a “man stealer,” says Ellis, which makes her not quite the proto-feminist heroine. “If you look at Shirley Conran’s Lace [published 16 years later], it’s an absolute revelation because the women in it are supportive emotionally and in their careers.” But then none of the characters in Valley of the Dolls, male or female, are without serious flaws – and arguably it is this that makes them believable. The fading, older star Helen Lawson (said to be based on Judy Garland) is monstrous, but also vivid. It is Helen who gets some of the book’s most melodramatic and frequently quoted lines. “The only hit that comes out of a Helen Lawson show is Helen Lawson, and that’s ME, baby, remember?” is one. Then there’s the put-down to her young rival: “They drummed you out of Hollywood, so you come crawling back to Broadway. But Broadway doesn’t go for booze and dope. Now get out of my way, I’ve got a man waiting for me.”