Powerful Lessons From Susann Fuel USA Movie About Her Life

The “heart of the woman,” actress Michele Lee is saying of famed “Valley of the Dolls” author Jacqueline Susann, whom she plays in her latest television movie, is perseverance.

Persevere is precisely what Lee did to make sure that “Scandalous Me: The Jacqueline Susann Story” airing Wednesday night on USA made it to television. And before “Isn’t She Great,” starring Bette Midler and Nathan Lane, makes it to the big screen as Universal Studios plans, in the fall.

“When doors closed in [Susann’s] face, she found ways of opening them,” Lee says from New York, where she is making the rounds of daytime talk shows. “When people said, ‘You can’t sell that kind of garbage, your books are not literary masterpieces’ or ‘this publishing house will not have anything to do with trash,’ ” she convinced the publishing world that her words would sell.

Sell, she did. With “Valley of the Dolls” (1966), then “The Love Machine” (1969) and “Once Is Not Enough” (1973)--published the year before she died of breast cancer at 56--Susann became the first novelist to have three consecutive No. 1 bestsellers. She reeled in readers, particularly women, linking Hollywood and celebrity to drugs and sex in all its infinite variety. All three books were made into movies.

“She understood mass psychology,” notes Lee, “and found a way to change the publishing world, turn it upside down and on its ear,” while readers found that “the glamorous life was not all it was fantasized to be.”

In turning Susann’s life into a movie, Lee had to find her way around more than a few closed doors too. The first hurdle was getting the rights to even tell the story.

Lee glommed onto Susann with Michael Korda’s 1995 New Yorker article “Wasn’t She Great?” After Korda, editor in chief at Simon & Schuster, appeared on “CBS This Morning,” a friend and former CBS executive told Lee she’d be perfect as Susann. But Lee says that TriStar, the studio that originally was going to do the feature, got the rights for about $750,000. “I wasn’t in that [league],” she says. “I was interested in doing it for Michele Lee on the TV screen.”

As an alternative, Lee snagged the rights to Barbara Seaman’s 1987 biography, “Lovely Me: The Life of Jacqueline Susann.” “There’s a difference between $75,000 and $750,000,” she says, laughing.

Initially CBS, which has been Lee’s creative home for years, began developing the movie. From 1979 to 1993, Lee played the stalwart Karen Fairgate MacKenzie on CBS’ popular prime-time drama “Knots Landing.”

But when the network temporarily dropped its Tuesday night movie slot, the project’s fate slipped into limbo. The choice Lee said she faced was either staying with CBS and waiting in line behind the other suddenly displaced projects--many of which had already been produced--or taking the project elsewhere. “I chose not to wait,” Lee says. “Leslie Moonves [CBS Television president] allowed me to do the movie outside.”

Lee then struck a deal with Alliance Atlantis of Toronto, where “Scandalous Me” was filmed. Besides, she found, Alliance was creatively in tune with the project.

Finding the right creative partner is critical for Lee, who since leaving series television has found another career behind the camera--as producer and director. It was a pragmatic reaction to the changes she witnessed in the industry at large.

“There’s a mania now in the ad agencies for younger audiences, that’s forcing all networks to become narrow-casters, not broadcasters,” says Lee, who is 56. “When I was 40, on my birthday, I was on the cover of TV Guide. At that time, the only women you could find on television, as stars, were in their 40s.”

In 1996, Lee began expanding her role on projects, serving as producer, director, co-writer and star of Lifetime’s “Color Me Perfect.” No such feat this time--”it almost killed me.”

From an actor’s perspective, she found Susann--”The Character”--to be rich. “She had a complicated relationship with her father that drove her. The male figure in her books always had her father’s initials--R.S.,” says Lee. “She had an unconventional marriage with her husband”--publicist Irving Mansfield (Peter Riegert)--and an “obsession with sexuality. She had more than one partner [in her younger years], and of more than one gender.”

Susann and Mansfield had a son who was autistic, and her writing career didn’t take off until after her cancer diagnosis. “There was a work ethic there. She never gave up,” Lee says. “She worked her little behind off when she was very frail and ill, and nobody knew.”

Lee wanted to strike a balance between sanitizing and sensationalizing Susann. Yes, Susann took pills, the so-called dolls, from diet pills to pain-killers. “There was a whole blurring of the issue of drugs and alcohol in my movie,” Lee says. “Deliberate. I didn’t want to just say, ‘Life is a party, let’s get drunk.’ ”

Somewhat uneasy with USA’s ad campaign--”Before she wrote ‘Valley of the Dolls,’ Jacqueline Susann lived it”--Lee has another take: “This is a woman who took her own power at that point in time when men were in charge. As she says to her husband, ‘I don’t want your money, I want my own.’ ”