Jacqueline Susann

Jacqueline Susann (August 20, 1918 – September 21, 1974) was an American actress, playwright, and novelist whose Broadway career spanned from 1936 to 1945 and whose later fiction writing made her one of the most commercially successful authors of the twentieth century. Born at Lankenau Medical Center in Wynnewood, Pennsylvania, she was the only child of Robert Susan, a portrait painter originally from Wilno, Imperial Russia, and Rose Susan, a public school teacher. Her mother added a second "n" to the family surname to aid her students in pronunciation, though Robert Susan never legally adopted the change; his daughter was recorded as Jacqueline Susan in the 1920 and 1930 US census but used her mother's spelling throughout her life. After graduating from West Philadelphia High School in 1936, Susann left for New York to pursue acting, guided by her father's instruction to be a careful observer of people.

Her Broadway debut came on June 2, 1937, when she landed a small role in The Women, Clare Boothe's comedy of manners, which ran for 657 performances. She went on to appear in The Girl from Wyoming (1938), My Fair Ladies (1941), and Banjo Eyes (1941), the Eddie Cantor musical that ran for 126 performances and stood as the sole hit among her post-Women stage appearances. Her subsequent Broadway credits included the musical Blossom Time in a 1943 revival, the musical Jackpot in 1944, and the musical A Lady Says Yes in 1945, the latter featuring Hollywood actress Carole Landis.

Beyond performing, Susann worked as a book writer for the stage. Together with actress Beatrice Cole, she wrote a comedy originally titled The Temporary Mrs. Smith, concerning a former film actress whose ex-husbands complicate her plans to marry a wealthy man. Retitled Lovely Me and directed by Jessie Royce Landis, the play starred Luba Malina and Mischa Auer and opened at the Adelphi Theatre on December 25, 1946, closing after 37 performances. Susann and Cole later wrote a second play, Cock of the Walk, intended for Broadway with actor James Dunn attached, though the production was never mounted. In 1970, Susann made a brief return to the stage in Blanche Yurka's off-Broadway revival of Jean Giraudoux's The Madwoman of Chaillot.

Away from the stage, Susann built a substantial television career. From 1948 to 1950 she appeared on The Morey Amsterdam Show, playing a cigarette girl on the CBS and DuMont comedy series. In 1951 she hosted Jacqueline Susann's Open Door on DuMont, a program designed to help people facing hardship find employment. She also appeared in dramatic series including Danger, Studio One, and Suspense, all on CBS, though she found herself repeatedly cast as glamorous women who met violent ends. In the summer of 1956 she appeared in NBC's revival of the panel show This Is Show Business, produced by her husband. Beginning in 1955, she served as spokesperson for the Schiffli Lace and Embroidery Institute, writing, producing, and starring in commercials that aired on programs including The Mike Wallace Interview and The Ben Hecht Show over the following six years. She later appeared in a 1971 episode of the crime drama Mannix.

During the mid-1950s Susann wrote a science-fiction novel, The Stars Scream, published posthumously under the title Yargo. Her first published book, Every Night, Josephine!, appeared on November 16, 1963, through Bernard Geis Associates. An account of her poodle Josephine, the book sold 35,000 hardcover copies and eventually 1.7 million paperbacks, appearing briefly on Time magazine's best seller list and peaking at number eight. Susann later named it her personal favorite among her own works.

Her novel Valley of the Dolls, published by Bernard Geis on February 10, 1966, followed three young women across two decades as they became entangled with amphetamines and barbiturates — substances Susann referred to collectively as "dolls." Despite largely negative critical reception, including pans from Gloria Steinem in the New York Herald Tribune and the reviewer at The New York Times, the book reached number one on The New York Times Best Seller list on May 8, 1966, remaining there for 28 consecutive weeks and spending a total of 65 weeks on the list. By the time of Susann's death in 1974, it had entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the best-selling novel in publishing history, with more than 17 million copies sold, a figure that had grown to more than 31 million by 2016. With her next two novels, The Love Machine (1969) and Once Is Not Enough (1973), Susann became the first author to have three consecutive novels reach the top of The New York Times Best Seller list. She died on September 21, 1974.