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) to devote her time to research as she was seriously ill with cancer. The "Journal" had offered Susann $20,000 for 20,000 words, but the manuscript she turned in was nearly 38,000 words. It was cut by "Journal" editors, but the excisions were restored when the story was published in book form. Certain details were changed in the book (for example, in the original story, Dolores's husband, Jimmy Ryan, is felled by a heart attack, not by an assassin's bullet). Rumors that film critic (and friend of Susann) Rex Reed rewrote the work are unsubstantiated. The book is dedicated to the