Jacqueline Susann a radical departure from the works which made her famous. During the 1970s, Susann had spoken of future works. They included a novel about brothers who have their show business start in vaudeville, to be called "The Comedy Twins"; a novel about a poetess, "The Heroine"; a continuation of the story of Neely O'Hara's sons; and her autobiography. Jacqueline Susann enjoyed the fame which her books brought. "Confrontational, sassy, [and] entertaining," she appeared frequently on television, especially on talk shows. When asked what Ethel Merman thought of "Valley of the Dolls", Susann responded, "We didn't speak before the book came
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