A Secretary's Schmaltz

Riding the subways these days is becoming hazardous. So many people have their noses in the current best-selling book that getting on and off the train is like playing blind man's bluff in a closet--perhaps a watercloset, since what bumps into you is usually dirty. The book is Valley of the Dolls, and its theme, message, plot, and style are sex and Seconals.

At Nini's newsstand, Felix's, and the Out of Town News Agency, and even in the more insulated confines of the Paperback Booksmith and the Coop, Valley is selling up to 30 copies a day--beating the pants of any other book in Harvard Square. According to one bookseller, "every secretary in Cambridge has slurped up the schmaltz."

While its popularity may silence the gloomy critics of the national scene who proclaim that America never reads, the book's success threatens to throw a wench into the social machine. From Philly to Frisco scenes like this one take place: Impatient businessman: "Excuse me." Salesgirl blushes and puts down her copy. "I'm terribly sorry. I usually read only during lunch hour, but this movie star just got breast cancer and I just couldn't tear my self away...." The effect on the economy could be devastating.

Not so the effect on the author's pocketbook. Philadelphian Jacqueline Susann, an advocate of brotherly, sisterly, fatherly, motherly, and potato love, has made it to "the top of Mount Everest" as her dolls have not. Writing in an orange, red, and yellow den which she wittily calls "the chamber of horrors," the former acrtess and five-time winner of the Best-Dressed TV Star award has stirred up a honeypot and attracted all the bees from the shyest bus driver to 20th-Century Fox.

Valley's appeal is hard to pillpoint: The book is dedicated to the author's poodle Josephine, but animal lovers will not find much else to cry over. The story is human--all about the hell of show biz and the perils of excessive mammary development. Anne Welles, a small-town girl and frigid Radcliffe graduate, escapes her destiny of "shrivelling into another New England old maid" by coming to The Big City. In New York she melts into the arms of a handsome English writer and becomes a TV commercial star a la Betty Furness.

Though Anne's rise does not carry her to the chairmanship of a government agency, Miss Susann has made sure that Washington will not feel left out. The second heroine, a blonde sex-goddess called Jennifer North, wriggles from the clutches of a Spanish lesbian and divorces a retarded singing idol named Tony Polar to win the love of a senator named Win. Unfortunately, tragedy intervenes and Jennifer doses off a la Marilyn Monroe.

That leaves Neely O'Hara, the vaudeville brat who becomes a star and then an alienated pillravaged monster who can't keep her weight down or her ratings up. Poor Neely gets shipped from The Head (of the studio) to the headshrinker to the loony bin and back again so many times you could call her the comeback kid a la Judy Garland.

These three ladies and their assorted Steve Stunnings fill 499 and a half pages of super-sado-maso-chistic-hyper-orgiastic drama that is guaranteed to keep any dateless teeny-bopper or frustrated insomniac gasping into the night.