I had an offer to play the leading man’s hovering, tightly wound sister in Valley of the Dolls. It had been a huge success as a book, as Peyton Place had been in its time. It made its writer, Jacqueline Susann, the most ubiquitous guest on TV interview shows of the day. The setting was Hollywood, steaming and corrupt; the “dolls” were the pills, shortly before drugs and cocaine became the norm. This was Patty Duke’s big career break as a grown-up after The Miracle Worker. She was to play the nice, innocent song and dance girl who swallows too many dolls and becomes an unbearable, relationship-wrecking, spoiled bitch, who literally ends up in the gutter after a night in a bar in San Francisco. Gay Heaven!
Just before filming was scheduled to start, I realized I’d missed a period, then two. Shooting was only a few weeks away, and I needed the money. I didn’t know where to go or who to ask about an abortion. Joey said one of his friends in Delaware knew a doctor. Afterward I’d fly back to Malibu, rest, and go to work. Dinah stayed with her friend Tootie.
Joey and I flew to Philadelphia, rented a car, and drove to the doctor’s house. I remember standing in a converted kitchen. A long padded table was in front of me, the wall paint was old, yellow, the linoleum on the floor cracking, and the foot-pedaled garbage tin was overflowing. I felt liquid begin to trickle down the inside of my thigh. It was pee or blood. I sat nervously on the padded table while the doctor looked. It was blood. A protective pour, as it turned out. I had a New York physician check me into a nice sterile hospital to be cleaned out. I was not pregnant. The hospital doctor thought it was the hormone shots I’d been getting that screwed up the cycle. I stared at my skinny legs hanging over the hospital bed and thought about how lucky I was, and how interesting my body’s reaction, protecting itself immediately in response to my fear and horror of that room and that doctor.
The story of Valley of the Dolls skidding downhill to win the laughingstock prize of 1967 is legendary. It was an unbelievable, laugh-out-loud disaster. I remember coming back from my New York trip and watching the very young, very talented Patty Duke cavorting on the green lawn at Warner Bros. with Marty Mull, her love interest in the film, and my sweet girlfriend from Peyton Place, Barbara Parkins, actresses breathing the golden breath of success and impending superstardom, as if to say, This is it, this is it. Don’t you wish you were me?
No. I was never that brave. Especially in Hollywood, I never wanted the leaden, overwhelming responsibility of carrying a film, or a budget.
How long is the life of a star? How long is the life of an actor? Longer. Longer is all I wanted. I wanted protection against the short life of Hollywood stardom. I was thirty-four when I landed back there, more than a decade after Detective Story. By Hollywood standards I was already over the hill. I was neurotic enough about this new life, post-blacklist, instinctively waiting for the hand on my shoulder telling me it was over, it had all been a bureaucratic mistake.
Or that I was no longer young enough or pretty enough for my next job. I was hungry to act, hungry to work, as hungry as a rabid dog.
Most of my scenes were with Sharon Tate—this was three years before her young life was cut down by the Manson family and her death became a grim part of Hollywood history. She was lovely in the part, the only one I really believed on-screen, including myself. She was shockingly beautiful, but she also had an element of victimhood that was right for the part. She sank like a woman drowning in her role. I never saw Roman Polanski; he was away working. Her companion and confidant during the film was Jay Sebring, on whom Warren Beatty’s character in Shampoo would be based years later.
The director of the film was Mark Robson, who was basically an editor. There is a scene, if I remember correctly, where I’m given the news that my brother’s sickness, Huntington’s chorea, is recurring. It meant his wife, Sharon, and I would lose him forever. He would have to live the rest of his life in a mental institution. I prepared for the scene and did it. The director tiptoed over to me with his stopwatch.
“You did that in three minutes, forty-two seconds. Do you think you can do it in two minutes and thirty seconds?”
“You want it shorter and faster?” I asked.
“Yes, I’m editing as we go along, and that’s the time I gave this scene.”
“Oh.”
One morning I did a scene with Sharon on a Monday that was a pickup of a scene we’d half finished on Friday. It was a scene that had called for emotion on Friday night, and it had to be carried over to Monday morning with the same feeling. After we’d filmed the scene, the director said he wanted to talk to me. He led me through the whole lot, past sets, trailers, till we climbed the stairs to his trailer.
“How did you do that?” he asked.
“What?”
“You know, carry over that feeling from Friday and bring that same feeling on Monday?”
“Well,” I said, “it wasn’t a big deal. I’d found something real for me, and I could leave it Friday and find it again when I came back into the situation.”
“Yeah, but how?”
I looked at him to see if he meant it.
“It’s called acting,” I said. We left the trailer together and walked silently back to the set.
Years later I was invited to a fair-sized theater production of Valley of the Dolls. Everyone in it was gay. The lines were absolutely the same as in the film, and everyone played it straight, the way we did. It was foot-stompingly funny; as farce, it really worked. The whole audience knew every line. Maybe if John Waters, the writer-director of Hairspray, had had a shot at it . . . Who knows, but then it wouldn’t have been Jacqueline Susann’s Valley of the Dolls.