Helen Lawson she has left to play a "character role" in a television series. For the 1967 film adaptation, author Susann hoped that the Bette Davis would play the role, but Judy Garland was hired instead. Garland was replaced by Susan Hayward. Lawson made another appearance in the 2008 novel "Candy Everybody Wants" by Josh Kilmer-Purcell, where she acts as a mentor to the protagonist, 15-year-old Jayson Blocher, as he is beginning his career in Hollywood. Helen Lawson Helen Lawson is a fictional character from Jacqueline Susann's best-selling 1966 novel "Valley of the Dolls", said to be based largely on legendary stage
Naked Came the Stranger year, further spurring the book's popularity. Mike McGrady was convinced that popular American literary culture had become so base—with the best-seller lists dominated by the likes of Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann—that any book could succeed if enough sex was thrown in. To test his theory, in 1966 McGrady recruited a team of "Newsday" colleagues (according to Andreas Schroder, nineteen men and five women) to collaborate on a sexually explicit novel with no literary or social value whatsoever. McGrady co-edited the project with his "Newsday" colleague Harvey Aronson, and among the other collaborators were well-known writers including 1965 Pulitzer Prize