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,
Dolores (Susann novel) attorney who likes rich women, but doesn't consider Dolores--with just $30,000 a year--quite rich enough. Finally, Dolores agrees to marry a fabulously wealthy shipping tycoon, who leaves her on their wedding night to go to his mistress. The book, in actuality a novella, is by far the shortest fiction of Susann's career, at just 201 pages. Susann wrote the story for the "Ladies' Home Journal", and it was first published in that magazine's February 1974 issue. "Journal" editor Lenore Hershey had asked Susann to write a piece about Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis ("Jackie S on Jackie O"), but Susann was unwilling