Wallflower at the Orgy (16 page)

But if Jacqueline Susann is no literary figure, she is nevertheless an extraordinary publishing phenomenon. Seven years ago, she gave up acting to write a rather charming little book about her poodle. It was called
Every Night, Josephine!
, it was published by Bernard Geis Associates, and it sold quite nicely. Then, in 1966, Geis published her first novel,
Valley of the Dolls
. The story of three young women who
come to New York to find fame and fortune and end up hooked on pills, the book sold three hundred fifty thousand copies in hard cover and, far more astonishing, eight million copies in paperback. It is now among the top all-time best sellers and has just gone into its fifty-third Bantam softcover printing.

“When you think of all those guys out there with pipes and tweed suits who’ve been waiting years to write the great American novel,” said Miss Susann’s husband, “and you think how the one who’s done it is little Jackie who never went to college and lives on Central Park South, well, it’s really fabulous, isn’t it?”

Yes.

As it happens, though, Mansfield’s analysis of his wife’s triumph is not quite accurate. Jacqueline Susann has not beaten out all those guys with pipes and tweeds, whoever they are. She has beaten out all those people who work in big cities, see the wages of sin thriving around them, read best-selling dirty novels, and say, “
I
can write that.” In fact, they can not write that. And neither can all the sloppy imitators of Miss Susann’s style—like Henry Sutton, Morton Cooper, and William Woodfolk, to name a few. Good
kitschy
writers are born, not made. And when Jacqueline Susann sits down at her typewriter on Central Park South, what spills out is first-rate
kitsch
.

What’s more, it is sincere: unlike Sutton, who is slumming at the typewriter, Miss Susann believes every word she writes. And unlike Cooper and Woodfolk, whose novels are barely fictionalized, badly written accounts of celebrity lives, Miss Susann is—well, let her say it: “I am a thematic writer. In other words, I pick a theme and then the characters fall into place. With
Valley
, I never sat down and said, I’m going
to write about a prototype of Judy Garland or Ethel Merman. I sat down and wondered, Why are we with the pills and why are we with the funny farms today? The pills became my theme.” The theme of
The Love Machine
is that power corrupts; the title refers not only to Robin Stone, who becomes a machine as he gains power, but also to television itself.

When
Valley of the Dolls
was published, it was not favorably received by the critics. When it succeeded, most observers gave the credit to Mansfield and Miss Susann for their frenetic promotional efforts. But a book that sells ten million copies in all editions has more than just promotion going for it. And
Valley
had a good deal more. For one thing, it was the kind of book most of its readers (most of whom were women and a large number of whom were teen-agers) could not put down. I, for one, could not: I am an inveterate reader of gossip columns and an occasional reader of movie magazines, and, for me, reading
Valley of the Dolls
was like reading a very, very long, absolutely delicious gossip column full of nothing but blind items. The fact that the names were changed and the characters disguised just made it more fun.

In addition,
Valley
had a theme with an absolutely magnetic appeal for women readers: it described the standard female fantasy—of going to the big city, striking it rich, meeting fabulous men—and went on to show every reader that she was far better off than the heroines in the book—who took pills, killed themselves, and made general messes of their lives. It was, essentially, a morality tale. And despite its reputation, it was not really a dirty book. Most women, I think, do not want to read hardcore pornography. They do not even want to read anything terribly technical about the sex act. What they want to read about is lust. And Jacqueline
Susann gave it to them—just as Grace Metalious did. Hot lust. Quivering lust. High-school lust. Sweaters are always being ripped open in Miss Susann’s books. Pants are always being frantically unzipped. And everyone is always
wanting
everyone else. Take the women in
The Love Machine:

• Ethel Evans, the promiscuous chubby from Hamtramck, who “wanted Robin so bad she physically ached.”
  
• Maggie Stewart, newscaster-turned-actress: “She adored Adam. Then why did she always subconsciously think of Robin? Did she still want him? Yes, dammit, she did!”
  
• Judith Austin, face-lifted wife of the chairman of the board: “Oh God … she wanted him so! She needed someone to hold her and tell her she was lovely. She needed love. She wanted Robin!”
  

The Love Machine
is a far better book than
Valley
—better written, better plotted, better structured. It is still, to be sure, not exactly a literary work. But in its own little subcategory of popularly written
romans à clef
, it shines, like a rhinestone in a trash can. The novel deals primarily with the rise and fall of Robin Stone, who rises and falls from the network presidency. His psychological problems are straight out of Hitchcock (to be specific,
Marnie
). And he runs through the lives of half a dozen women in the course of the book, leaving all of them scarred and mutilated—a couple of them literally so. With the possible exception of
Cosmopolitan
magazine, no one writes about masochism in modern women quite as horribly and accurately as Jacqueline Susann. Here, for example, is Amanda, the high-fashion model, speaking of
her feelings for Robin Stone: “Sometimes I wish I didn’t love him this much. Even after he’s spent the night with me, when he leaves the following morning, I snuggle against the towel he’s used. Sometimes I fold it up and put it in my tote bag and carry it with me all day. And I reach for that towel and touch it. And it almost smells of him … and I get weak.” There is a streak of masochism in most women that should ensure Robin Stone’s becoming one of the most popular characters in modern fiction.

The Love Machine
is the second book in recent months based on the career of a television network president; the first, “The CanniBalS” by actor Keefe Braselle, was unreadable. Incidentally, Miss Susann sent the bound galleys of her book to her friend Aubrey a couple of months ago, but she has not heard a word in response. “I can’t imagine why,” she said. “Can you?”

Yes.

Simon and Schuster paid two hundred fifty thousand dollars for the hardcover rights of
The Love Machine
. (Miss Susann signed with them after buying out her contract with Bernard Geis for four hundred thousand dollars in an out-of-court settlement.) Bantam Books has advanced two hundred fifty thousand dollars for the paperback edition. A one-million-dollar movie offer from 20th Century-Fox has been turned down by the Mansfields, who think it is inadequate. An initial advertising budget of seventy-five thousand dollars is planned—much of it to pay for full-page newspaper spreads of Miss Susann’s face, false eyelashes, and a one-shoulder silver sequined dress—and it is a fraction of what will ultimately be spent promoting the book. Said Simon and Schuster’s Korda, “You have to push this book beyond regular book buyers to people who probably haven’t been in
a bookstore since
Valley of the Dolls
was published in hard cover.”

In the meantime, Miss Susann has already begun her third novel. It is tentatively titled
The Big Man
. The theme, said Miss Susann, “is a girl’s search for the big man. Her father was a big man. I think most girls have a thing for their fathers, don’t you?”

Yes.

This year three hundred fifty thousand Americans—one out of five who travel to Europe—will go with Arthur Frommer. They will eat with Arthur Frommer and, as something of a witticism has it, sleep with Arthur Frommer.

Not content to leave it at that, some five thousand of them will write to Arthur Frommer. They will tell him they could never have done it without him; they will tell him they call his book the Bible; they will tell him they swear by him. Some will write ten-page, hand-written letters on lined paper telling Arthur Frommer every single hotel, restaurant, train, plane, bus, and beaded bag that happened to them on their way through Europe. Not a day passed, writes Mrs. Ray Westgate of Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, that she did not bless Arthur Frommer’s name.

The Arthur Frommer involved is the author and publisher of
Europe on $5 a Day
, a 552-page guide to seventeen European cities, the best seller of the best-selling series of travel books published today. Begun as a modest 50-cent G.I. guide to European travel, it has become a $2.50 paperback written by Frommer and his wife, Hope, with yearly revisions and yearly sales of two hundred thousand copies.

It is the base of a travel-book empire that includes nine $5-a-Day books (Europe, Ireland, Spain, Greece, Israel, New York, Washington, South America, Mexico); six $5-and-$10-a-Day books (England, Scandinavia, Japan, Hawaii, the West Coast, the Caribbean); nine Dollar Wise guides providing cost information on travel for all price ranges; several miscellaneous books, including
Surprising Amsterdam
and
Happy Holland
by Frommer.

The empire also includes a quarterly newsletter,
The Wonderful World of Budget Travel;
the $5-a-Day Travel Club, which provides two $5-a-Day books, a copy of
Surprising Amsterdam
and travel discounts, all for $5 a year; and $5-a-Day Tours, a wholesale travel agency that this year will furnish thirty-five thousand American tourists with bed, breakfast, and guided tours in New York for $5 a you know what.

And coming soon:
America on $5 a Day
, a series of travel guides for senior citizens;
Europe on Five Diapers a Day
, the story of how Arthur and Hope travel with baby Pauline; and the biggest baby of all, the Arthur Frommer Hotels, the first of which will be under construction this summer in surprising Amsterdam.

The hotels, which Frommer describes as “less hotels than machines for sleeping,” will provide no lobby, no convention facilities, no banquet halls, no sun lamps, no vibrators in the
beds—nothing but a simple compartment with bed and sink for $3 a night per person. “I have a dream,” says Arthur Frommer, “that one day in every city there will be a Conrad Hilton on one end of the scale and on the other an Arthur Frommer.”

By the time that construction boom is over, the Bibles and blessings and swearings-by-Arthur-Frommer will probably have mounted to the point that there will be a small religious cult of Frommerites, recognizable—as they rush about saving nickels hither, dimes yon—by the simple aluminum $5 signs they will wear around their necks.

They are visible enough as it is. Today’s Frommerite carries his big red book like a banner, daring natives to cheat him, challenging fellow tourists to underspend him. He worries as much about losing his book as he does his passport; and at least one anxiety dream has been reported: an employee of Paraphernalia claimed to have had a nightmare in which she was on a train going from France to Germany and could not find her Arthur Frommer.

The missionary behind all this is a black-haired, pink-faced, thirty-six-year-old lawyer who began the $5-a-Day books as a side interest eleven years ago. Frommer was raised in Jefferson City, Missouri, has a B.A. from NYU and a law degree from Yale, where he was a member of the Law Journal. During 1954–1955 he traveled widely and economically in Europe on his pay as a private first class in military intelligence in Germany. Before returning to New York and a job with the prestigious law firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton and Garrison, he wrote and published a small pamphlet of travel tips for soldiers in Europe. Its immediate success convinced him there was a market for a book on budget travel.

In 1956 he went to Europe for a month’s vacation to write the first
Europe on $5 a Day
, a 128-page book with a first printing of twenty thousand copies. By 1963 sales of that book and two others he had commissioned—New York and Mexico—and an increasing volume of mail forced him to give up his law practice.

Frommer is zealously devoted to his books. He has been known to telephone money-saving hints to his authors in the middle of the night. He refers to the hotels and restaurants recommended in his book as “my hotels” and “my restaurants.” Once he turned red with rage on the Rue de Rivoli when one of his restaurants changed owners and raised its prices. Though he and Hope and baby Pauline live quite comfortably in a nine-room apartment on Central Park West, they rarely live according to their means abroad, and when they do, says Frommer, it is always a terrible mistake.

Frommer practices what Frommer preaches: the premise of all the $5-a-Day books is that budget travel is not a matter of necessity, it is a matter of choice. The only way. “Know the natives,” shout Frommer and his band of writers. Live as they live on the level they live; eat breakfast in their kitchens; have croissants with their sanitation workers. And as you travel, actively disdain luxury travel, all its amenities, and, above all, the foolish tourists who travel that way, drink Coca-Cola, show pictures of their children to waiters, and meet only other foolish tourists who travel that way.