10 Things I Learned: Valley of the Dolls and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

Hoping to exercise some creative control over the film adaptation of her best seller Valley of the Dolls, novelist Jacqueline Susann expressed her own ideas about who should be cast. She wanted Ursula Andress for the role of Jennifer, Bette Davis for Helen Lawson, Shirley MacLaine for Neely, and Elvis Presley for Tony Polar. Grace Kelly was on the writer’s wish list for Anne—but only “if she lost ten to fifteen pounds.” Susann was overruled by producer David Weisbart, who wanted to be more conservative in casting and ultimately hired actors who were less established in Hollywood, like TV star Barbara Parkins and fashion model Sharon Tate. Susann’s displeasure with some of the final casting decisions led her to dismiss the film as “a piece of shit.” Above: Susann in a meeting with Mark Robson, who went on to direct the film, and Twentieth Century-Fox president Richard Zanuck on the Fox lot (left); Susann with Patty Duke and Lee Grant (right).

The exquisite wardrobes in Mark Robson’s Valley of the Dolls were created by Travilla, who worked on over a hundred original designs for the film. In June of 1967, months before the film was released, Travilla and several cast members—including Sharon Tate, Susan Hayward, Patty Duke, and Barbara Parkins—brought sixty costumes to the Plaza Hotel in New York to display to the press and drum up anticipation for the release.

To promote Valley of the Dolls, members of the cast and crew boarded the SS Princess Italia together for its maiden voyage. Starting in Venice and ending in California, the twenty-thousand-mile journey lasted about twenty-eight days, with stops in Miami and Mexico. Mark Robson, Jacqueline Susann, Travilla, Barbara Parkins, Tony Scotti, Patty Duke, Sharon Tate, Susan Hayward, and Paul Burke were all onboard.

At Barbara Parkins’s suggestion, Dionne Warwick was enlisted to perform the Valley of the Dolls theme song after Judy Garland was fired from the film. Written by André and Dory Previn and produced by Burt Bacharach and Hal David, the song became a hit as the B side on Warwick’s “I Say a Little Prayer” single, which sold more than a million units and peaked at number two on the Billboard charts.

In a segment of a 1967 promotional film about the novel and screen adaptation of Valley of the Dolls, Jacqueline Susann addresses a group of wannabe actresses on the Fox lot. Among the sea of beautiful faces is a young Edy Williams, who had previously appeared in Samuel Fuller’s The Naked Kiss. Williams would later go on to appear in Beyond the Valley of the Dolls and marry its director, Russ Meyer, at the Playboy mansion. Above right: Williams pictured with Barbi Benton, who was Hugh Hefner’s wife at the time.

Though Russ Meyer had been making films for nearly two decades, it was only after the success of his X-rated 1968 hit Vixen, starring Erica Gavin, that he began garnering attention from major Hollywood studios, who took note of his ability to turn an $8 million profit from a film whose budget was only $73 thousand. After executives Richard Zanuck and David Brown read an article about Meyer in the Wall Street Journal in 1968, Twentieth Century-Fox approached the director and eventually offered him the budget to bring his vision for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls to the screen.

Although Russ Meyer’s Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (1970) is only an unofficial companion to Mark Robson’s Valley of the Dolls (1967), the former features a number of visual nods to its predecessor, thanks in large part to art director Jack Martin Smith, who worked on both films. Perhaps the most overt connection is the fitted jumper worn by Dolly Read in Beyond’s Z-Man party scene, which first appeared as a part of Sharon Tate’s wardrobe in Valley. This sartorial homage was filmed just months after Tate’s tragic death.

Due to financial troubles, Twentieth Century-Fox hoped to make Beyond the Valley of the Dolls as cheaply as possible. The film was shot on the studio lot and utilized sets from a previous production, the Gore Vidal adaptation Myra Breckinridge, which was released a week after Beyond and also garnered an X rating.

In February of 1970, the Yale Law School Film Society honored Russ Meyer with its first-ever film festival. The two-day retrospective showcased eight of his films and included a panel on sex in American cinema. Meyer attended the festival with several of his actors, including Beyond the Valley of the Dolls star Cynthia Myers and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! star Haji.

In his 1981 film Polyester, John Waters paid homage to the idyllic ending of Beyond the Valley of the Dolls by depicting Divine and Tab Hunter running in slow motion across a field. Previously, Waters had referenced Meyer in the 1974 film Female Trouble with a Vixen-inspired scene featuring Divine dancing with a fish.