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) Dolores (Susann novel) Dolores is the final novel of American writer Jacqueline Susann. Published by William Morrow in 1976, it is a "roman à clef" based on the life of Jacqueline Kennedy. It first appeared in the February 1974 issue of the "Ladies' Home Journal", seven months before Susann's death from cancer. The beautiful and fashionable Dolores Cortez Ryan is widowed when her husband, U.S. President James Ryan, is gunned down in New Orleans. After a year in seclusion, Dolores takes tentative steps back into the world, by having affairs first with a screenwriter, and then with Barry Haines, an