How the ‘scandalous’ Jackie Collins and Jacqueline Susann revolutionized the publishing world

Gill Paul hadn’t read “Valley of the Dolls” before deciding on its author, Jacqueline Susann, as one of the subjects for her new novel, “Scandalous Women.”

“I was vaguely aware that Jacqueline Susann had quite a difficult backstory, which is something I’m looking for in my work,” Paul tells The Times from London, where she lives.

Susann was an actress before turning to writing later in life. She gave birth to her only child, who had severe autism — at a time when little was known about the disorder and even less support was available — and was herself diagnosed with breast cancer. Her drive to excel in publishing and become a bestselling author, which she achieved with “Valley of the Dolls” — credited with inventing the modern book tour — was spurred on by making sure she was able to provide for her son when her cancer returned. Susann died in 1974 at age 56.

The other titular scandalous woman is another Jacqueline, who preferred to go by Jackie, the prolific pulp fiction author and sister to “Dynasty” actress Joan Collins. The two grew up in a violent home, and Jackie Collins’ first husband was an abusive drug addict who died by suicide after the dissolution of their marriage. Collins’ 32 novels — all New York Times bestsellers — have sold more than 500 million copies worldwide. Collins died in 2015. She was 77.

Still, for Paul, “It’s not just about what they achieve; there’s got to be some kind of struggle.”

In Paul’s historical fiction, which includes books about Jackie Kennedy and Maria Callas (2020’s “Jackie and Maria”), the Romanovs (“The Lost Daughter,” 2018) and Dorothy Parker (“The Manhattan Girls,” 2022), Paul is “looking for women who have maybe been misjudged by historians. They’re not necessarily behind the scenes, but perhaps historians have put them there. They did great things and didn’t get the credit for it.”

Despite the commercial successes of Susann and Collins, their work has been widely dismissed. “Valley of the Dolls” was panned upon its release in 1966, and Collins’ output has been derided as beach reads and chick lit.

“They both popularized this idea that books could be entertainment for busy people who don’t have time to sit down with really difficult books that you have to dissect the metaphors [of] and figure out the themes,” Paul says. “You can just be entertained by a story. You could read ‘Valley of the Dolls’ or [Collins’] ‘The World Is Full of Married Men’ on [the subway] and be proud that this was a book that people were talking about.”

Paul worked in publishing straight out of college in the 1980s before writing historical fiction in the early 2010s. It “had always been this old boys’ network of long lunches, men who supported their male authors and published literature with a capital L.” In the 1960s, with Susann and Collins, “It was all beginning to change and people were starting to realize the value of women’s books. Women did read and they didn’t necessarily want to read dusty classics by pompous old men.

“I wanted to show what it was like in publishing companies behind the scenes,” Paul continues. “To an extent, it was autobiographical. It was still an era where I had misogynist male bosses. I had male authors who thought it was part of my job description to sleep with them.” Let’s just say the fireman’s pole that Susann’s publisher Bernard Geis makes new female hires slither down to gauge their willingness to put up with on-the-job sexual harassment is not a figment of Paul’s editorial license in “Scandalous Women” — out Tuesday. “You couldn’t make that up! We mustn’t ever backslide.”

(William Morrow & Company)

That’s where the character of Nancy White comes in. An ambitious young college graduate who comes to work at Susann’s publishing house and quickly notices women’s hunger for “gritty books about romances that don’t have happy endings — and for glamour, too,” writes Paul in Nancy’s voice. “Women like stories that transport them out of their everyday lives.”

But the aforementioned old boys’ club of publishing keeps her in her place, fetching coffee and taking minutes for meetings — when she’s allowed into them — despite pulling Collins’ “The World Is Full of Married Men” from the slush pile and helping make it a success.

Paul could have just as easily crafted Susann and Collins to hate each other, as in her previous novel, last year’s “A Beautiful Rival” about competitors Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein. Though there’s no evidence that the two Jackies ever met, Paul was partly thinking of her own author friendships and the lack of envy and resentment therein when writing the one that emerges between her subjects. “Just because someone buys one book doesn’t mean they won’t buy yours as well. In fact, a bestseller creates more readers.”

The throughline to today is taut, with genres by and marketed to women, particularly romance, gaining popularity on BookTok and thus seeping into the meatspace. Several romance-themed bookshops have sprung up in recent years, and authors such as Emily Henry, Sarah J. Maas and Colleen Hoover owe their dominance on bestseller lists to the path Susann and Collins paved.

“They gave women permission to write about sex,” says Paul. “They stood up and took all the flak so that women could go on and write sex scenes.

“It’s said that there’s a whole generation of girls who got their sex education from Jackie Collins novels,” Paul continues. “It’s not very realistic,” but nor is porn or other mainstream portrayals of sex that show women in subservient roles, she says. “If entertaining, widely read books have sex scenes in which women are equal partners, or more than equal — women are the dominant partners — then that’s great. That’s redressing the imbalance a little bit.”

As for the historical hidden figures Paul will turn her pen to next, she stays mum but says there’s no shortage of subjects “who made big achievements in the 20th century who were denied their place in the history books — there’s plenty to choose from.”