Jackie’s Peaks and Valleys

Not too many comedies are based on the lives of people who can come across as obnoxious, boorish and unappealing because not too many people will pay to see them. One subject who at least partly fits this description is the late Jacqueline Susann, celebrated and reviled author of heavy-breathing immorality tales that turned the stuffy publishing business on its ear some 30 years ago.

The problem with chronicling the life of Susann--pill addict, cancer victim, mother of an autistic son and gossipy author who in reality could be aggressively overbearing and uncouth, insecure and frequently unpleasant to be around--was coming up with a script and an actor who could convey the brashness and somehow manage to keep the character sympathetic, and funny.

The makers of “Isn’t She Great” think they found just the actor in Bette Midler, who has made a career of being aggressively overbearing and uncouth--and above all, very funny.

In the hands of Midler, Nathan Lane, David Hyde Pierce, John Cleese, Stockard Channing and director Andrew Bergman, the hard-bitten, foul-mouthed and ultimately courageous Susann of “Isn’t She Great,” which opens Friday, has become sweeter and funnier than she ever dreamed of being in real life.

A visit to the set during filming in Montreal in the summer of 1998 proved instructive. Cultures collide in a scene in which Hyde Pierce’s fictional character, buttoned-down editor Michael Hastings, calls on Susann and her doting husband, Irving Mansfield, played by Nathan Lane, in their palatial apartment overlooking Central Park.

“Mike!” blurts out Lane as publicist and producer Mansfield. “Come in, take a load off. Jackie, it’s Mike!”

A hallucination of powder-blue feather marabou and navy blue dressing gown, dangling pink velvet eyeshades, Midler’s Jackie bursts out of the bedroom.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” she bellows. “It’s [expletive] dawn!”

Hastings gingerly picks his way forward. “Miss Susann? I’m Michael Hastings, your editor. We have to get to work. I have a great many comprehensive notes.”

“Notes?” asks Jackie, bristling. “Whaddaya mean, notes?”

“Miss Susann, your manuscript is presently nigh onto incoherent,” Hastings replies.

“And that’s bad?” she asks ingenuously. “Yes!” he answers, exploding in exasperation.

“Well, Mr. Picky! Buster, you just hold on,” retorts Jackie, stalking out to change into another of many gloriously psychedelic Pucci concoctions, ready to do battle with the supercilious Connecticut Yankee publisher in Queen Jackie’s court.

“Isn’t she great?” chuckles Irving. “She’s so excited. Thrilled. She’s never been edited before.”

Cut.

Between shots, Hyde Pierce says of his character, “It’s essentially like I’ve gone to Mars. I have never met people like this. The book that she’s trying to publish is a complete mess, and they’re talking about what kind of limousines they should be getting and what the cover of the book jacket is going to look like.”

Part wise-cracking comedy of manners, part rags-to-riches romance, Paul Rudnick’s script captures what Midler calls “the Ed Sullivan of it all, the Stork Club, El Morocco and Delmonico’s, that Broadway life” that Jackie and Irving lived for. They invented themselves as characters in a Runyonesque universe, holding court in Lindy’s delicatessen and other show biz haunts.

With the media now bristling with tell-all confessionals that Jackie’s novels helped pioneer, something of a Susann renaissance is in the works. Her books--”Valley of the Dolls,” “The Love Machine” and “Once Is Not Enough,” all No. 1 bestsellers in the ‘60s and ‘70s--are back in print. In addition to the Universal feature with Midler and Lane, Fox has in development a remake of “Valley of the Dolls” with Betty Thomas attached to produce and direct, and USA Network has already aired (in December 1998) a small-screen biopic about Susann starring Michele Lee.

Susann couldn’t sing, she couldn’t act, she couldn’t dance, and she tried them all. Many would argue she couldn’t construct a plot if her life depended on it and, in a way, it did. But, boy, could she schmooze.

Up at dawn to bring coffee and doughnuts to the Teamsters, Jackie made sure the truck drivers got her books to the bookstores on time. Armed with a Rolodex listing bookseller names, birthdays, the names of their children and pets, she and Irving toured the country, greeting salespeople like old friends, shamelessly enlisting a loyal following to flog her scandalous, hugely popular potboilers.

Rewriting the American Novel

According to Michael Korda, Susann’s post-”Valley of the Dolls” editor at Simon & Schuster, she reinvented that mainstay of the publishing business, the romance novel, making room for both “tears and oral sex,” drug-addicted beauties and Hollywood heels and paving the way for the likes of Danielle Steel, Jackie Collins and Judith Krantz.

“She reinvented the way books were sold, the marketing and packaging, which may or may not be good for the literary establishment, but it was a reality of the changing times,” explains Mike Lobell, the film’s producer.

A beauty-contest winner from Philadelphia, Jackie hit New York at age 18, hungry for fame. She was so self-absorbed that when the Japanese had the effrontery to bomb Pearl Harbor during an ill-timed audition, she flew into a rage, incensed that no one was paying any attention to her husky, off-key baritone. She tried modeling, acting, writing plays, appearing in radio and television commercials, forming a singing group--proving a rousing failure in everything.

A Public Persona, a Very Private Life

Ultimately she found her gimmick. Her books sold in unprecedented numbers, film tie-ins were box-office successes and she became a household name.

With characteristic gall, she claimed that the ‘60s would be remembered for three landmarks: Andy Warhol, the Beatles and Jackie Susann. Yet by the ‘80s, the books were out of print and the self-declared icon was remembered vaguely for her big hair, big lips and heavy, raccoon-eye makeup.

Had Susann been only a tough-talking, Machiavellian creature of celebrity, she would have proved as one-dimensional as the pill-popping heroines in her novels.

She was not. Beneath her carefully constructed illusion of the glamorous high life were two tragedies she kept deeply private. Part of the reason she drove herself so hard to achieve fame was to pay for institutionalizing the Mansfields’ autistic son, Guy, whose existence she and Irving hid from all but their closest friends. To overcome her depression over Guy, Irving suggested she write a book. Eventually she produced “Every Night, Josephine!” a dog’s-eye view of life with Jackie. In yet another blow, however, on the eve of the book’s publication in 1963, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, at the time nearly always a fatal disease. She had mastectomies, underwent radiation therapy that forced her to wear a series of trademark wigs, and became addicted to sedatives, the cause of her slow-motion speech. Not until after her ultimate death from the disease in 1974 at age 56 did the public learn of her cancer and the existence of the couple’s autistic son (who remains institutionalized at an undisclosed facility).

“Her attitude was: ‘Who’s gonna buy a sexy book from someone who has cancer?’ and I think she was right,” director Bergman explains.

While her novels peeled away glamorous facades to reveal her characters’ hidden miseries, she felt the same candor about her own suffering was out of the question.

“In an age where people make whole careers about going public about their private lives, it’s ironic that someone so bold, flashy, upfront and in-your-face as Jackie was really completely private,” says Channing, who plays Susann’s best friend. “Jackie and her crowd had a kind of nobility because they kept up a front. They put on the makeup, the hair, they went out into the world and had fun and entertained other people and didn’t moan and groan. There was something fabulous about that.”

Based largely on Korda’s alternately painful and hilarious account of working with Jackie, published in August 1995 in the New Yorker magazine, the film also draws on background from Irving’s own sanitized biography and Barbara Seaman’s less than flattering portrait of the Mansfields in “Lovely Me.”

While Rudnick’s script sticks closely to anecdotes in the Korda article and from other sources, it is far from purist biography. The film version tones down some of the couple’s grasping nastiness and the more sordid details of their life together, skipping Susann’s numerous affairs, principally with Borscht Belt comics and, more scandalously, with Ethel Merman.

“Rudnick captures what made their marriage work and concentrates on the most charming aspects of Irving and Jackie, who I think could be a handful in reality and a little less than charming,” says Lane.

Although still brassy enough to fill Carnegie Hall, Midler’s Jackie is a far more sympathetic character.

“In reality, Jackie was a tough, foul-mouthed woman and totally controlling,” says Bergman. “Bette is a far more bravura kind of personality than Jackie was and has much more humor than she did.”

“People said things about her that if they had said them about me, I would’ve just died,” says Midler. “She must’ve had a hide like an elephant.”

It’s nearly midnight on the set in Montreal, but the Mansfields are still waiting for breakfast. A punchy Midler and Channing sing Kurt Weill songs between takes to keep themselves alert.

A Sort of Ballet, Performed Double-Time

When filming resumes, Channing’s Flo, a tipsy, blissfully self-centered actress, charges into the room for the seventh time, trailing a fur stole over her pink sequined dress, her hair staying as defiantly erect as the Chrysler Building in a towering bouffant.

“They fired me!” she rages. Suddenly, Jackie materializes in flamboyant Pucci gown, wig curls bobbing.

“Flo!” brays Jackie. “Jackie!” booms Flo, rushing to her, nearly knocking over the banister from the landing.

From offstage, the director yells cut. “Stockard, you got to her too soon,” he says. In this double-time ballet, it’s a wonder everyone isn’t crashing into one another more often.

Once again, Flo sweeps in, Jackie flutters in, and this time, the choreographed blocking runs like clockwork.

“You wanted changes?” Jackie challenges a dumbfounded Hastings. “How’s this for editing?” she says, thrusting her head triumphantly to the ceiling, swishing the gown dramatically.

“They fired me,” Flo repeats. “They fired ya?” parrots Jackie, who commiserates, loudly and vulgarly unprintable.

Her outburst finished, Jackie pauses to reflect. “This is wrong. Too subtle,” she says, looking down disapprovingly at her dress, and turns on her heel to change. Ruthless and bereft of talent as this fairy tale Jackie is, she may not be great, but there’s no doubt she’s an original, down to her pink IBM Selectric, insults as colorful as her endless costumes and her own wacky brand of bygone dignity.