The biggest problem with "Isn't She Great," an otherwise entertaining glimpse into the world of author Jacqueline Susann, is that Paul Rudnick's screenplay omits some of the best bits about its subject.
For instance, in 1963 Susann published "Every Night, Josephine," a book about the adventures of her poodle in Manhattan (both owner and pet frequently went out on the town in matching outfits, to give you some idea of where Jackie's head was at). During Susann's tour to promote "Josephine," President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, plunging the country into a week of chaos and mourning. But not Jackie: She fumed to her friends about how unfair it was that the Kennedy family was getting all kinds of media coverage. After all, they'd only experienced a death in the family; she had a book to sell.
There's another story about how Susann became obsessed with the ancient Egyptian symbol of the ankh while on the road to promote her novel "The Love Machine." She insisted on passing out silver and gold ankhs to almost everyone she met, including the people in her publishing house, all of whom accepted the gifts and thanked her for her generosity. It wasn't until later that the recipients learned Susann had billed all those pricey charms on her expense account and had been buying the publishers presents with their own money.
That kind of behind-the-scenes dirt is conspicuously absent from "Isn't She Great," which gives its heroine all the rough edges of a throw pillow, but manages to be frequently funny nevertheless. Impersonating the queen of the pantsuits is Bette Midler, who has Susann's chutzpah and charm, if not her strikingly offbeat looks. Nathan Lane plays Irving Mansfield, Susann's devoted husband and partner in crime.
When it comes to the facts about Susann's life, Rudnick's screenplay couldn't care less, and perhaps that's how it should be: Certainly Susann would never have had a problem with twisting and tweaking the truth if it made for a better story. She would, however, almost certainly have trimmed the movie's slightly sticky sequences about Irving and Jackie's autistic son and Jackie's battle with cancer. Susann couldn't write sentiment convincingly and neither can Rudnick.
Most of "Great" centers on the creation and promotion of Susan's most enduring work, "Valley of the Dolls," a tawdry tale of three young women who ricochet from bed to bed and coast to coast in between bouts of alcoholism, pill-popping and cosmetic surgery. Although Susann's prose could best be described as overripe ("Come here, you beautiful golden wench!" her hero Lyon Burke cries just before bedding the virginal Anne in the book), "Dolls" was a mind-bogglingly huge success upon its publication in 1966 because of Susann's skills as both a storyteller and a provocateur. The heroines of her novel indulged in malicious backstabbing, performed unspeakable sexual acts, destroyed their bodies and slept around in the hopes of scoring fur coats or wedding rings. It may have been "chocolate-covered trash," as one character in "Great" calls it, but millions upon millions of readers gleefully ate it up.
But writing was only part of what Jacqueline Susann was all about. She never forgot her real product was herself. From the mid-1960s until her death in 1974, Susann was a staple on TV talk shows, always bedecked in a flashy frock and equipped with a few choice wisecracks. Mansfield, a successful producer and press agent who eventually gave up his own career to coordinate hers, was her one-man pep squad, constantly urging her on.
Midler and Lane both seem to have quite a bit of fun as these larger than life lovers, as do Stockard Channing as Flo, Jackie's gin-guzzling confidante (on the subject of authors, she says, "You think about Hemingway and Dickens and, well, I'm sure there are others") and John Cleese in an all too brief appearance as the so-hip-it-hurts publisher who takes a chance on "Dolls." The production design team has done a groovy job of recreating the Age of Aquarius, particularly Julie Weiss' suitably loud and showy costumes, and the whipped creamy Burt Bacharach score, featuring blissful voices murmuring over the melodies and the ageless Dionne Warwick delivering the theme song, will make you feel as if 1966 never really ended. James Sanford
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