Bette Midler "Isn't She Great" and "Drowning Mona". In Andrew Bergman's "Isn't She Great", a highly fictionalized account of the life and career of author Jacqueline Susann, she played alongside Nathan Lane and Stockard Channing, portraying Susann with her early struggles as an aspiring actress relentlessly hungry for fame, her relationship with press agent Irving Mansfield, her success as the author of "Valley of the Dolls", and her battle with and subsequent death from breast cancer. The dramedy garnered largely negative reviews by critics, who dismissed it as "bland material [that] produces entirely forgettable comic performances." For her performance in the film,
Jacqueline Susann of the "Ladies' Home Journal" (which became the best-selling issue in the magazine's history). Susann's manuscript, too long for the "Journal", was cut, but the excised material was restored for the book publication on July 8, 1976. Despite harsh reviews and the absence of Susann as a promotional tool, the book spent 25 weeks on the "New York Times" Best Seller List (seven consecutive weeks at #2), and became the third highest-selling novel of 1976. "Yargo", Susann's romantic science fiction novel written during the 1950s, was published in February 1979 as a paperback original by Bantam Books. The novel is