My favorite parts from "Lovely Me: The Life of Jacqueline Susann":
1) From pp. 54-55, about her early life:
"After [walking in on her father doing his mistress in her art studio], four-year-old Jackie developed an almost obsessive curiosity about the mechanics of sex. She experimented with her dolls and stuffed animals, modeling penises from clay and attaching them to her Hans Brinker doll and her teddy bear...
"She then turned to her girl dolls, using scissors to make slits between their legs from which the sawdust filling oozed out...
"Flossie [the maid] began to patrol the doll collection with a needle and thread, sewing up the latest slits before [Jackie's mother] discovered them. She also collected all the household's hand mirrors, which Jackie was using in an attempt to examine her own pubic area, and returned them to their proper bureaus."
2)From pp. 246-247, about the consequences of her giving Ethel Merman a private striptease to teach her how to dance for Gypsy:
"It was a highly erotic performance, and whether it taught Ethel how to strip or not, it certainly turned Jackie on... They attended a party together at Lynn Loesser's in the Beresford on Central Park West, and both had quite a lot to drink. As Benay Venuta recalls the evening, 'Everybody was very drunk. Jackie and Ethel were very drunk, and they lay down on a couch and they just made out in front of everyone.'"
3)From p. 296, an excerpt from an interview with her editor on "Valley of the Dolls":
"[Jackie] had the most trouble with her so-called sex scenes... I don't think Jackie understood sex, even if she slept with a hundred men, and I don't think she knew how to write about it. I mean, she knew the facts, she knew all the four-letter words. She just didn't understand what the hell people were doing and why they were doing it...
"She couldn't write a romantic sex scene between a woman and a man... Her lesbian scenes were more tender. She was more free then to romanticize and idealize...
"Her references to sex were always very graphic. 'He was humping her,' things like that, always in animal, phyiscal term. She always used words like 'fucking' and 'humping'..."
4) From pp. 427-428, about the editing of a scene "The Love Machine", her second novel:
"In an earlier version [of the novel the fictional character] Linda had described this tender scene to January, assuring her that the man had filled a milk carton [with semen so she could use it for facials]. [Editor] Landis had questioned it, and a rather delicate discussion ensued. At last Jackie impatiently asked what he was getting at. 'Jackie, men don't produce so much ejaculate,' Landis said..."
5) Even though this is not a quote -- p. 436 --
She became a judge for the Miss Universe pageant in Puerto Rico so she could understand virgins better for the psychology of a character who was a virgin in her novel "Once is Not Enough".
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3 comments:
Why Puerto Rico? Higher virgin percentage?
I have no idea. Do Puerto Rican women have the reputation of being virgins, and if so, do they deserve it?
Of course they deserve it. Don't forget, you were born there.
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