Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (110 page)

Jacqueline Susan (Jackie added the final ‘n’ to clarify the pronunciation) was born in 1918, the granddaughter of Jewish immigrants from Lithuania. In the complex caste system of their Philadelphia community, the Susans ranked aristocratically
high. Jackie’s conversion to Catholicism in the late 1950s was less a religious thing than a hankering for ‘class’. Her father, Bob Susan, had lots of class. He was a sought-after painter of society portraits and sophisticated nudes. Handsome Bob was also a philanderer. ‘I could have had all the women whose portraits I painted,’ he boasted, ‘plus all their mothers and their daughters.’ It was no idle boast. Jackie learned the ‘facts of life’ when, aged four, she blundered into her father’s studio and found him ‘humping’ (her word) one of his sitters. She remained incurably curious about ‘humping’ all her life. When she threw away her diaphragm thirty years later to give her husband Irving the child he craved, she set up full-length mirrors in the bedroom so as to observe ‘the miracle of conception’.

A bright schoolgirl with a mind of her own, Jackie decided against college (although in later life she would claim an Ivy League background when it suited her). Like Anne Welles in
Valley of the Dolls
(1966), Jackie found freedom in New York: here she could ‘breathe’. She arrived there at eighteen years old in 1936 and (like Anne Welles again) gravitated straight to Broadway and café society. The Stork Club, Copacabana, El Morocco, and the 21 club called irresistibly to her. But stardom as an actress and cover fame as a model eluded the young Jackie. She was tall, had wonderful legs, a lion’s mane of black hair and good facial bones, but her ‘pores’ were too big: film close-ups magnified them into craters. Nor could she sing. And, as a fashion model, there was the boobs and waistline problem. Diet pills, which she popped by the bottle-full, handled the weight, but not those little but all-important imperfections of shape. Jackie had lots of bit parts, a few supporting roles, was featured in fashion magazines, but never achieved the celebrity she craved. The star was stubbornly not born. As she said, no one would turn and say, ‘Isn’t that Jacqueline Susann?’ when she walked into 21. Of course, she tried the casting couch – any couch. To use one of her own phrases, she was a love machine. One of her friends suggested she should install a revolving door and a cloakroom checkout service outside her bedroom.

Jackie slept with anyone who might help, even after her marriage in 1939 to the complaisant press agent (and her benign Svengali), Irving Mansfield. Coco Chanel, it is said, had a fling with the young Jackie. If true, the bit about the ‘little black dress’ never quite got through to her: Jackie always wore clothes that could blind you close-up and deafen you at ten yards. One persistent rumour was that to pay for those clothes (loud, she may have been, cheap never), Jackie did some discreet high-paid call-girl work in the 1940s. However, making love was in itself of no intrinsic interest to her. One of her intimates recorded that she claimed never in her life to have had an orgasm. The most she ever got out of sex physically was ‘body warmth’; and she probably took more than she gave of that.

In late 1962 she was diagnosed as having cancer and underwent a radical mastectomy. It was to be one of her two best-kept secrets. The other was that her only child, Guy (born 1946), was institutionalised with irreversible autism. She put away the full-length bedroom mirrors and redirected her maternal feelings to her poodle. Jackie, who firmly believed that ‘women own the world only when they are very young’ and that ‘40 is Hiroshima’, felt she was on the terrible brink of menopause – if she were to live that long. A year before her mastectomy, aged forty-three, she had undergone her first face-lift (‘I’m a realist’). Her ‘good years’ had gone: what could she do in the bad years to come? In
Valley of the Dolls
, Jennifer North kills herself with an overdose of ‘dolls’ rather than face a one-breasted middle age. Doubtless the thought crossed Jackie’s mind – to go out like Marilyn (one of the inspirations for Jennifer, along with Carole Landis).

Wisely, in
Valley of the Dolls
, she wrote about what she knew best: Manhattan, show business and, above all, pills. She was a long-time unrepentant prescription junkie. She took ‘tranks’ (Librium by choice) to get through the day; amphetamines (Preludin) to clear the day’s hurdles and suppress the appetite; and to get to sleep at night, lots of barbiturates, or ‘barbies’ (hence ‘dolls’). Jackie’s first thought was to call her novel ‘The Pink Dolls’. The eventual title was a private joke. Although you would never guess it from the book, the author’s favoured form of ‘doll’ was the suppository. It is not difficult to imagine what the ‘doll valley’ is.

Her views on the art of fiction were refreshingly primitive: ‘I don’t think any novelist should be concerned with literature. Literature should be left to the essayists.’ Essayist Gore Vidal famously remarked on reading
Valley of the Dolls
, ‘She doesn’t write, she types!’ But Jackie was not even much of a typist. The first draft of the novel, as one of the publisher’s rewrite team recalled, was ‘hardly written in English’ and it took a lot of labour to bring it up to a standard of ‘readable mediocrity’. Jackie toughed out the snide criticisms as she toughed out everything and by 1967, Susann had made it, at last. People did indeed turn around in 21 and say, ‘Look, there’s Jackie Susann.’ It must have been sweet, but it was as short-lived as her remission from cancer. There were three more novels, written under increasing pressure. They were all bestsellers, but nothing to equal
Valley of the Dolls
, boosted as it was by the 1967 blockbuster film, starring Sharon Tate.

Nobody knew she was ill. The ‘dolls’ helped, but mainly it was willpower and vanity that kept her secret. She died in 1974. On the urn containing her ashes, Irving gallantly took three years off her age. No need to let everyone know.

I knew it was going to be bad getting old … I didn’t know it was going to be this bad.
Kurt Vonnegut,
Slaughterhouse-Five

Anyone who cares to do the demographic stats on this book will note that as the centuries pass the novelists live longer. And long lives mean late-life novels which, in many cases, meditate just that fact – longevity and what it means. Iris Murdoch, the distinguished philosopher and rather more distinguished Booker Prize-winning novelist, was born in Dublin in 1919.
The Sea, The Sea
, her actual Booker Prizewinning novel, was published in 1978. A literary critic putting those dates together, along with the fact that
The Sea, The Sea
was Murdoch’s nineteenth novel and her most widely applauded, will conclude, sagely, that this is to be approached as fruit of the author’s maturity – the crest of her creative wave. An actuary would see it differently. In her sixtieth year, Miss Murdoch was facing state-ordained retirement from the national workforce (men, in those unregenerate days, had to labour another five years to earn their gold watch). Fancifully, if one wanted an alternative title for
The Sea, The Sea
, one could call it ‘Retirement, Retirement’. Not very catchy, one grants, but apropos. The novelist’s life, like drama, has its fifth act.

Retirement – as those who have crossed the actuarial line will attest – is a paradoxical threshold. Viewed from one angle (through the rosy lens of Saga company brochures, for example), retirement is the gateway to a new life. At last the senior citizen will have time to do all those things which have been put off over the years. One is free to enjoy ‘the remains of the day’, as Kazuo Ishiguro puts it, in
his
Booker Prize-winning novel about retirement (written, the date-conscious will note, when that event was a long way off for him). The sun is at its most lustrously golden before nightfall. But retirement – the last ‘
vita nuova
’ – is also the prelude to death. How much time will one have? When will the reaper strike? This is the theme in Kingsley Amis’s (yes, another) Booker Prize-winning novel about retirement.
The Old Devils
(1986) opens, darkly and comically, not with the hero serenely contemplating a glorious sunset, but nervously scrutinising his morning stools in the lavatory pan for the tell-tale flecks of blood, harbingers of cancer. It’s an ironic allusion to the white-haired Falstaff, as we encounter the retired hero in
Henry IV Part 2
, anxiously awaiting the medical report on his urine sample. The smart-mouthed little page who took the flask to the dispensary reports that the surgeon thought it was excellent urine – but he would hate to be the man who passed it. Few golden years in prospect for this old devil, one apprehends.

Murdoch invariably answered ‘
The Tempest
’ when asked, as distinguished
writers routinely are, which was her ‘favourite Shakespeare’. It’s an elemental play and its dominant element is water. It opens with a vividly depicted shipwreck. All on board the vessel are drowned five fathoms deep – and subsequently emerge, Venus-like, reborn from the waves. They drown into life.
The Tempest
is conventionally seen as Shakespeare’s farewell to the London theatre which he had dominated for twenty years: it was his retirement play. Theatrical lore has it that Prospero’s valedictory speech, in which he breaks his staff and departs the island over which he has been sovereign ruler, allegorises the playwright’s formal retirement from his own little world – the Globe. It will be a solemn last few years. After Miranda’s marriage to Ferdinand, Prospero will:

… thence retire me to my Milan, where

Every third thought shall be my grave.

As the biographers tell us, Shakespeare – still a hale fifty-something – was more of the Saga, live-it-up, party. No hair-shirts and hermit’s cave for Will in his retirement. He had left Stratford a humble glove-maker. He would return as a gentleman with a heraldic device over his front door. William Shakespeare
Esquire
had resolved fully to enjoy the remains of his day. Alas, that dreaded contingency intervened – typhoid, it is plausibly assumed, carried him off long ‘before his time’, aged a mere fifty-one. Legend has it that drink too may have played a part.

In
The Sea, The Sea
, Murdoch’s allusion to
The Tempest
is constant but subtle. Charles Arrowby, the bumptious narrator, has an international reputation as director of plays for the London stage. As an actor, his most applauded performance was as Prospero, but Charles has no great fame in the acting department. He is now in his mid-sixties, and still at the top of his profession. But he has determined to retire while he still has life to live and energies to live it. Born in Stratford-upon-Avon, he chooses not to take up retirement there, but in a quiet village, Narrowdean, on the coast (which coast is never quite clear – Murdoch can be frustratingly vague about such details). He will, in the many years of his coastal seclusion, write his memoirs, ‘recollected’, as he fondly intends, in Wordsworthian ‘tranquillity’. ‘Wifeless, childless, brotherless’, Charles is entirely the captain of his fate. He
manages
his life, he likes to say. ‘A theatre director’, he tells us, ‘is a dictator.’ In German, the two terms are the same –
Führer
. Charles, little Hitler that he is (but not, for all that, entirely unlikeable), will direct the fifth act of the Arrowby drama as precisely and authoritatively as he has ruled over the West End theatre. The ‘contingent’ – those factors which not even dictators can control – intervenes. Serenely contemplating the ocean Charles sees a monster ‘rising from the waves’:

I can describe this in no other way. Out of a perfectly calm empty sea, at a distance of perhaps a quarter of a mile (or less), I saw an immense creature break the surface and arch itself upward. At first it looked like a black snake, then a long thickening body with a ridgy spiny back followed the elongated neck … I could also see the head with remarkable clarity, a kind of crested snake’s head, green-eyed, the mouth opening to show teeth and a pink interior.

Commentators of the Freudian persuasion have had a fine time with that last detail: opticians, too, might wonder about an OAP who can discern eye-colour and teeth at 500 yards.

Charles is flummoxed. Is it hallucination, a trick of the eyes? A flashback to a bad trip taken, years ago, on LSD? Is he – horrible thought – losing his mind, and with it his ‘control’ over reality? The novel gives us no answer. Contingency never yields to analysis or explication. The monster returns once more in the narrative, but remains inexplicable. Monstrous contingency continues to invade the carefully blueprinted Arrowby retirement plan. One by one, characters pop up from his old life to plague his new life. They include actress-lovers, Lizzie Scherer and Rosina Vamburgh; theatrical colleagues, such as the servile and gay Gilbert Opian; Pere-grine Arbelow, who Charles callously cuckolded; and Charles’s cousin, James, mysteriously dismissed from the army in which he had risen to the rank of general and now, apparently, a Buddhist guru. Or, possibly, a pro-Tibetan freedom-fighter. Or, as it finally emerges, Charles’s saviour from the hell of himself. Things do not turn out as he plans. This is not a play he is directing – it is life. And life, even those last much-planned, carefully annuitised last years, defies direction.

Alzheimer’s, alas, destroyed the fine mind which created
The Sea, The Sea
. As her husband John Bayley records, poignantly, in her last days she gazed not at the sea, wary of monsters that might rise up, but at the Teletubbies.