Jacqueline Susann plan of treatment and subsequent prognosis. Despite the grueling treatment, Susann's cancer spread, and she entered Doctors Hospital for the last time, on August 20, 1974, her fifty-sixth birthday. After days lapsing in and out of a coma, she died on September 21. Her last words to Mansfield were, "Hey, doll, let's get the hell out of here." She was survived by her husband, her son, and her mother. Jacqueline Susann is acknowledged to be the first "brand-name" novelist, a novelist who sells independent of critical attention. With her husband, Irving Mansfield, Susann revolutionized book promotion, and they are widely
Valley of the Dolls publication of her third novel, Susann said, "They can keep calling it that ["roman à clef"]. It'll only make my books sell. I don't care." Susann insisted that she began each book with a theme: "Then I start asking, what kind of a personality? And because I have a good ear, I unconsciously pick up certain people." Susann dedicated the book to her poodle Josephine, and to her husband Irving Mansfield. The book was published by Bernard Geis Associates on February 10, 1966, and "took off like a Cape Canaveral space shot." Although "Publishers Weekly", in an advance review, called