Jacqueline Susann plan of treatment and subsequent prognosis. Despite the grueling treatment, Susann's cancer spread, and she entered Doctors Hospital for the last time, on August 20, 1974, her fifty-sixth birthday. After days lapsing in and out of a coma, she died on September 21. Her last words to Mansfield were, "Hey, doll, let's get the hell out of here." She was survived by her husband, her son, and her mother. Jacqueline Susann is acknowledged to be the first "brand-name" novelist, a novelist who sells independent of critical attention. With her husband, Irving Mansfield, Susann revolutionized book promotion, and they are widely
Jacqueline Susann that it was one of "mental and spiritual incest." After her death, film critic Andrew Sarris pointed out that "If there is any single key to the oeuvre of Jacqueline Susann it is to be found in an extended Electra complex." As with her previous novels, reviews were negative (a writer for "The New York Times" complained of the book's "nearly 500 steadily monotonous pages"), but sales were spectacular: the book spent 36 weeks on the "New York Times" Best Seller List, eight of which were at #1, and became the second highest-selling novel of 1973. Susann, with this book,