Retro Review: Valley of the Dolls

I found this one at a sweet Little Free Library in Harrison, Arkansas on our road trip. Published in 1967, Valley of the Dolls is one of those retro novels that I’ve been meaning to read for ages.

So, I’m going to assume that everyone else has read this one, and let some spoilers into my reaction.

In 1945, beautiful young Anne Welles leaves her stifling hometown in Lawrenceville, Mass. for a new life in New York City. She is beautiful and smart, a teenage Radcliffe grad, with an inheritance to support herself, just in case Manhattan isn’t perfect. But it is,  of course. She immediately finds a nice, affordable room,  and lands a well-paid, interesting job as a more-than-secretary to a firm of entertainment lawyers. Anne becomes besties with a girl in her building, Neely, and starts dating a nice guy, who turns out to be a secret millionaire. I rolled my eyes extremely hard here, but I went with it.

A character needs to struggle and want things before I can really care about them, and for large parts of the book, Anne’s only real want is live in NYC. She moves there a couple pages into the book, and then money, opportunities, men, jewelry, and success rain down on her for the rest of the book, so, ok. Anne’s not really an unlikable character, simply because there wasn’t enough character to like or dislike. Her main traits are being pretty and having good things happen to her.

Jennifer North, an aspiring actress, is also extremely pretty. Unlike Anne, she constantly works at it, and works to turn her beauty to security, which made her a much more engaging character. Even if that meant I spent large sections of the book mentally screaming Jennifer, no! Don’t do that! You can do better!  She knows she’s incredibly gorgeous and a fairly average actress, so she frequently relies on “gifts” from lovers. It’s very dramatic, since she has to take of herself without ever looking greedy or calculating. I was never entirely clear if she was bad with money, or if she was supporting too many relatives with her gifts, or both.

Valley of the Dolls is a retro story, where a 30-year-old woman is basically a withered old hag, but fortunately Jennifer is able to take the sleep cure,  a magical system where you sleep for 10 days and wake up slim. And surgeries to look younger, of course. She also starts taking the “dolls”, pills to make you sleep and pills to lose weight and just take the edge off. There are loads of pills and loads of doctors to prescribe them, in a retro soap opera way. And yes, the ending of her storyline is obviously tragic (see previous re: retro soap) and yes, you can kind of see it coming.

The third girl is Anne’s friend, Neely, although this begs the question of what they actually have in common or if Anne is even capable of friendship. Neely’s an ambitious performer, an average vaudeville dancer and an amazing singer. I knew this book was going to be about show business ups and downs, and Neely’s storyline has some great shocks and reversals. I always think struggles are more interesting than insta-success, and I was absolutely here for Neely’s rocky career and dramatic personal life.

I mostly enjoyed the retro style, but there’s a part when Neely has gained weight, and everyone is stunned. SO MUCH WEIGHT! She’s huge! Her career is over and no man will ever love her again! She’s just so fat! ! She’s massive! She’s… about 10 pounds heavier than I am?!?!? Geez, Jacqueline Susann is giving me a weight complex now. I kinda wish the sleep cure was real.

By the end, I was so sick of perfect Anne getting everything that I was kind of glad when her husband turned out to be unfaithful. (Is “turned out” the right phrase? Because he might have been screwing around the whole time.) So that sort of detracted from a dramatic ending. Still, I had fun with the old Hollywood hijinks and the gossipy drama of this retro novel.