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,
The Valley of Decision (novel) The Valley of Decision (novel) The Valley of Decision is an historical novel by the American writer Marcia Davenport (1903–1996). It was a national bestseller in the 1940s and adapted into a film, "The Valley of Decision", in 1945. During the late 1930s Davenport, best known for her biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, spent several years in Pittsburgh, her imagination caught by the drama of American industry. In 1942, Charles Scribner's Sons published her Pittsburgh novel, "The Valley of Decision". It was an instant success, and its story of four generations of the Scott family—owners and operators of a Pittsburgh