Irving Mansfield Mansfield gave up his career to help his wife promote her book, "Valley of the Dolls", which was published in 1966 and became the best-selling novel of the year. Mansfield continued to work with his wife in promoting her subsequent novels, "The Love Machine" (1969) and "Once Is Not Enough" (1973), both among the top three sellers of their respective years. Mansfield also executive-produced movie versions of his wife's novels "The Love Machine" (1971) and "Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough" (1975), as well as a 1981 television mini-series version of "Valley". Mansfield met Jacqueline Susann, then an aspiring stage
Jacqueline Susann by Bernard Geis on February 10, 1966, and "took off like a Cape Canaveral space shot." The story was said to be a "roman à clef", with characters in the novel reportedly based on real-life celebrities such as Judy Garland, Dean Martin, and Ethel Merman. Although "Publishers Weekly", in an advance review, called the novel "powerful and sometimes fascinating," the book received largely negative reviews. Gloria Steinem panned the book in "The New York Herald Tribune" as did the reviewer in "The New York Times". "Time" magazine called it the "Dirty Book of the Month," and said, "it might more