Valley of the Dolls the Mount Everest of her dreams, only to find herself back in the valley of the dolls. Susann had apparently been thinking about the novel for some time. Some years earlier, she had begun "Underneath the Pancake", a show business novel, with her actress friend Beatrice Cole (c. 1910–1999). Later, she considered writing a novel about drug usage in show business to be called "The Pink Dolls". "Valley of the Dolls" is considered to be a "roman à clef", with its characters based on famous figures such as Judy Garland, Carole Landis, Dean Martin, and Ethel Merman. In 1973, after
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