The 60’s Loved Snow and Radcliffe?

Google will never spit me up in the first 500,000 pages of search results for “Valley of the Dolls” so there’s really no reason for me to write on it and if I do I can write whatever I want and not worry about coherency or having any point to make, though it’s not like I worry that much anyway. Or I do but I I’m then able to ignore the impulse to worry.

I’ve got great huge black holes in my education that drag me damn close to cultural illiteracy. Such as I’d not seen “Valley of the Dolls” until recently. Which is not as much fun as Russ Meyer’s “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” which I only stumbled upon–I’m ashamed to admit–just a few short months ago. And having seen “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls”, I decided I should watch what inspired that incredible film, and having now seen “Valley of the Dolls”, well, I can say that “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” is even better than I thought, and I already thought it a work of pure genius and there’s every reason that Russ Meyer should have considered it the highlight of his career.

I’ve not read “Valley of the Dolls” except for trying to make sense out of a few chapters of it when I was nine years of age and came across it in our basement. The cover had brightly colored pills on it, I think. And I was very confused, at first, by the love of these women for their dolls. Dolls, dolls and more dolls. Sex and dolls. I visualized scantily clad women on heart-shaped beds with gold or pink satin sheets and in their naughty little nothing negligees they were surrounded by dolls, clasping dolls, weeping over their dolls, nightly falling asleep with their dolls. Because there was something odd about this, I was forced to start at the beginning of the book and my reading comprehension abilities probably took a leap that summer.

My favorite book when I was eight was “Bambi”. I think I must have read it 50 times.

Big difference between “Bambi” and “Valley of the Dolls”.

I had thought well this will give me an introduction to the real world of adult literature (as in for adults, not pornographic) and so it’s kind of sad that way, that Jacqueline Susann was perhaps the first adult author that I read. Seriously, I had thought of this as personal growth. I stood in the basement looking at this book which I happened to find either on top of the black spinet piano or in the seat of the spinet piano (what happened to that spinet, anyway) and the paperback had small print which meant it was adult and it had pills on the front which meant it was adult and I thought to myself well I’m a good enough reader that it’s time to exercise those reading skills with a step into adult fiction.

How did I make it to 2008 without having seen “Valley of the Dolls”?

Do I feel any more complete for having seen “Valley of the Dolls”?

Is my world a little fuller?

Will the songs of the birds in the morning be brighter?

Will spring be fresher?

Will the Easter chick be fluffier?

Will the Spring Peepers sound peepier?

A year from now will I look back on this time with gratitude for this little pebble tossed into my big black hole of cultural negligence, which doesn’t make for a bridge across but leaves one less rock to trip me up on the sidewalk?

I’d thought I’d take fun notes of the film but then I saw it opened with snow and Radcliffe and haven’t not long before seen “Love Story” I got sidetracked with wondering instead about just what American fantasy was being addressed, in the 60s and 70s, with snow and Radcliffe and doe-legged young women stepping out into the big world, such that between when “Valley of the Dolls” was released and “Love Story” hit the theaters, those women had gone from surviving the heady, trashy bite-of-the-apple world to protesting from their youthful deathbeds that it was better to have loved and lost their careers than to have thrown away Ryan O’Neal for Paris and Bach.

I lie. The reality is I was too startled to write anything that first trip around the Valley.

No, the reality is I just wasn’t that inspired.