Valley of the Dolls (1967)

Anne (Barbara Parkins) moves from a small town to New York City to chase her dream of doing office work. There she falls for a lady’s man, and makes friends with singer Neely (Patty Duke) and pretty no-talent Jennifer (Sharon Tate). Their lives go in unexpected directions and their paths occasionally cross. The one thing that ties them together is their love of dolls. Pills, that is. Dolls are pills. Dolophine, specifically.

Perkins’ pretty Anne is the moral center of the film. Not swayed by fame, she steers (mostly) clear of the pitfalls that trap her friends. Twenty year old Patty Duke took the controversial role of the pill-popping prima donna hoping it would help the public see her as an adult. She did mostly TV in the years following so it's unclear how well that worked.

I’ve known something of Sharon Tate’s story since forever but I wouldn’t have been able to pick her out of a lineup. She was quite striking. She appeared in fifteen episodes of The Beverly Hillbillies, so I must have seen her at some point. Judy Garland was initially cast as an older, ruthless star but the substance abuse story element played itself out in real life. Judy would beat Sharon to the grave by 49 days. And so it goes.

The story of who was cast, what happened, and how much of a jerk director Mark Robson was may be a more salacious story than the Jacqueline Susann story itself. Many big names were offered roles only to turn them down, horrified by the script. You could go down a serious rabbit hole with behind the scenes stuff. On screen, however, the film is mildly interesting, soap-opera adjacent, and very 1960’s. AMRU 3.

"Boobies, boobies, boobies. Nothin' but boobies!"