Living Dolls

To add to a long list of lines I wish I’d written, I read somewhere that Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann was ‘Harlequin romance meets Zola’, and it’s sort of true. It really does manage to compact twenty years’ worth of lurid celebrity magazine scandal between its covers, and to describe the trajectory of stardom as a steady downward descent into artifice and ruin. But if it takes its content from the trashiest end of the spectrum, then it also allows it to unfold with the stately grandeur of Greek tragedy. I can quite see why this novel has the status of a cult classic: it’s powerful and potent and upsetting and gripping. And the disquieting truths it purveys seem to be no less relevant now than they were in the 60s when the novel was first published.

Before the novel begins there’s a verse, much like the kind the Oracle generally offers that makes a dire prediction about climbing to the top of Mount Everest:

The air is so thin you can scarcely breathe.
You’ve made it – and the world says
you’re a hero.
But it was more fun at the bottom when you started,
with nothing more than hope
and the dream of fulfillment.

In a nutshell, this is the premise of the novel which follows the fortunes of three young, beautiful and talented women, Anne, Jennifer and Neely from 1945 to 1965. They meet up at first in New York, where Anne has come to escape the rigid confines of an emotionless New England upbringing. She finds work as a secretary to Henry Bellamy, a lawyer-advisor to showbiz celebrities and quickly falls in love with the job and the city. She finds a room in a shared house where she meets Neely, a young dancer who’s spent her whole life on the road with a touring troupe. And out on the town one night with Henry she gets her first glimpse of Jennifer, a stunning Barbie-doll beauty who is in the throes of divorcing a European prince and who is about to take up a role in a Broadway production in the hope of getting a film contract.

This Broadway production is a fateful event that will draw the three women together. Anne manages to secure Neely an understudy role in it by means of Henry’s good will, and due to the tantruming demands of its main star, the monstrous Helen Lawson who can’t bear to have any competition on stage, Neely gets promoted into a part that will suddenly make her name. For a while, Anne, Jennifer and Neely share an apartment, fulfilling their ambitions together, cementing their friendship. Then Neely heads off to Hollywood and into the demanding, glitzy drudgery of a film studio contract, and Jennifer, who has always been more interested in marriage than career as a route to security, marries a popular singer and follows him west too. Disaster follows; the marriage Jennifer has made is doomed, and Neely is completely unable to handle the money and success that come to her. Jennifer has long been taking ‘red dolls’ to help her sleep at night, and Neely is put on green ones to help her lose weight. It’s the start of a very slippery slope.

Anne’s story is quite different. Remember Austen’s Persuasion and the story of Anne Elliot’s loyal devotion to Captain Wentworth? Yup, it’s the same situation all over again, but transposed into a very different context. Anne meets Lyon Burke at Henry’s office. He is recently returned from the war and everyone at the office is agog to have him back. Henry warns Anne off him right from the start; there’s something about Lyon that makes all the women fall in love with him, and yet Lyon is that scourge of romantic hope – a fundamentally self-contained ladies’ man. It doesn’t prevent Anne from beginning an intense relationship with him, intense for her in any case as he breaks through her previous indifference to all men. And for a while things go well, even if Lyon is adamantly opposed to settling down. But Anne’s mother dies, and she inherits the family home in detested Lawrenceville, the town she was so desperate to leave. When Lyon sees it he falls in love with it (much more than with Anne) and asks her to marry him on the understanding they will live in Lawrenceville while he writes his novel. It’s a deal-breaker, and Anne can’t face the prospect. But in saving herself from provincial incarceration she loses Lyon. He moves to England, and many years will pass before she sees him again. When they are finally reunited, Austen’s script for Persuasion is brutally rewritten. I won’t tell you what happens, but the essential goodness of Anne, her loyalty, her good sense, her compassion, are not rewarded.

The message of the book is one that we’re familiar with: women, when they are beautiful or talented at performance, are rapidly turned into commodities, exploited and objectified. And celebrity exerts a pressure so bulldozing that no one individual can stand up to it without significant emotional and mental support. Jennifer and Neely both come from terrible family backgrounds, Neely having never known a proper family and Jennifer fighting off the demands of an emotionally-blackmailing, cash-greedy mother. They don’t stand a chance in the white-hot glare of the entertainment industry. What’s upsetting is that so little has changed. Success still comes at the same price today – the individual’s life disemboweled and sacrificed to the demands of the business, and self-worth destroyed not enhanced by the adoration of an audience. Few people seem able to negotiate with the tyranny of fame or get the better of it, even though it’s been courted and chased in it present international form for many decades now. That must make this book one of the rare popular novels to remain timely 50 years after publication. I’m glad I read it and it will remain with me – it’s a gripping morality tale that clearly still needs to be heard.

What A Week!

Here in the UK we have finally had a couple of days where the temperature has crawled above freezing and snow has not fallen. And so Mother Nature has been standing with her hands on her ample hips, yelling at the plants ‘Get A Move On!’ It’s almost comical to see the crocuses, small and stunted, struggling to get themselves up and out of the ground in super quick time. They’re saying it might snow again by Sunday, so I fear for their chances.

I also know how they feel. Missing a week of term is a terrible idea, even when you only work two days of it. This week I’ve felt just like those crocuses, struggling to get myself back on track after our family bout of ‘flu. Of course it had to happen just as a new batch of students had appeared with time critical problems. All dissertations have to be handed in at the end of this term, and inevitably supervisors don’t always realize there’s a problem until half the term has passed by. Tuesday I had really hoped to catch up with these students, one of whom had already proved very elusive to get hold of. But you know how it is when you’re rushing, or trying to squeeze things in?  I had the work of one student to read by attachment, and naturally, when I turned to it on Tuesday morning, I couldn’t open any of the files she had sent me. This was a rookie error on my part. Normally I check I can open the file the moment it arrives, only illness had made me put it off and the inevitable had happened. I dropped a hasty email to the student asking whether she could send it in a different format. And once I’d done that, the elusive student finally put her head above the parapet, offering, as she had done once before, at the very last minute to come and see me. I couldn’t let her disappear again and so I agreed, slotting her into the space in the afternoon before the student whose work I couldn’t read. I realized with some chagrin that I now wouldn’t have time to read it, even if she sent it, but I’d at least see them both.

Well, these things are never simple. I went to my college room and waited for the elusive student to appear. And waited. And waited. I don’t have an internet connection in my room as I thought it would be more peaceful that way – and it is, unless I realize I could be using my time more usefully by, say, reading student dissertations. I kicked my heels and twiddled my thumbs. She never came, although my other student did come and we had a good discussion. She apologized for sending the work via a programme she had downloaded that couldn’t be opened on lots of computers, so I felt a little better. But I still had her work waiting to be read, and potentially another meeting with her to arrange to talk it over.

When I got home, the elusive student had emailed. She was sorry, but she’d come to my rooms and found the door locked and gone away again. Whaaat? My room is one of a set containing three fellow’s rooms, a bathroom and kitchen. And so our outer door opens onto a little antechamber, with all the other rooms branching off it. The door is perhaps a little stiff, but it was certainly open. It seemed to me symbolic of my student’s problems that when she finally turned up for help, she was convinced that the door to it was locked. I felt obscurely guilty, as if I’d been negligent towards her fragility and should have been there to coax her in. Although surely it is still the responsibility of the student to get themselves over the threshold? I wrote back to her, saying I’d been there, telling her to give the door a good push next time, offering her times to come again. I haven’t heard a word back since.

It’s been that sort of a week, full of slips and miscommunications and frustrations. On Thursday I managed to make a completely idiotic blunder. A language teacher, not realizing that I am no longer directing studies in French for the college, sent me a concerned email about one student who had skipped almost all her classes this term. I thanked her for the information and said I’d sort it out. Now, this student had been referred to me at the end of last term, and I’d invited her to come round for a chat. Again, she proved an elusive one, never replying to me. I tend not to chase, as it all works better if students are ready and prepared to seek help. But I wrote to her tutor, told him I had already asked her once to come and see me, and offered to email her again if they felt that would be useful.

The tutor sent me an instant reply: the student was working through some problems and just needed space. Okay. Only, in replying, the tutor copied in the language teacher. This would have been fine if, unbeknownst to me, I hadn’t managed to swap round the name of the teacher with the name of the student in the email I wrote to him. I didn’t realize this until the language teacher wrote me an email apologizing for not having come to see me and wondering how my message to her could have gone astray. At first I was completely bewildered. And then I read back over the email I’d sent and realized my ghastly error. I’d had her name in my mind, and unwittingly substituted it for that of the student. It was one of those hold-your-head-in-your-hands moments. I wrote straight back to her, apologizing for my befuddled brain. I don’t think the tutor had noticed a thing. But I haven’t received an email from the language teacher, saying ha-ha, phew, that’s okay then and knowing academics as I do. I imagine she is not best pleased. It’s crazy – I always check emails before sending them, I never make that kind of mistake. Until of course I don’t check the email and write something foolish. Sigh.

So I am glad to see the back of this week, and hopefully next will be less accident strewn. I will try to catch up here over the weekend – lots of reviews to do and Mister Litlove away on a rowing weekend so I will be in need of company. Oh and I should say that bloglines is also acting up again, not telling me that new posts are available until three or  four have built up. So apologies to anyone who thinks I’m not visiting – hopefully it will sort itself out soon and I shall appear regularly at your sites once again. It really has been that kind of a week!