Marilyn Michaels

SINGER
ACTRESS
CELEBRITY IMPRESSIONIST
SONGWRITER
AUTHOR

In 1966, you were enjoying a red hot career as a singer, actress, comic, celebrity impressionist and the star of the national tour of Funny Girl, handpicked by composer Jule Styne. No wonder you got caught up in the casting frenzy surrounding Valley of the Dolls. 

Jacqueline Susann’s book was a happening thing. Publicity-wise, it was kind of a Gone with the Wind. Everybody was reading it. It’s not like it was ponderous or difficult to read. It was easy and fun. And she told a fun story. It was very obvious that these characters of Neely O’Hara and Helen Lawson were based on Judy Garland, Ethel Merman, and so on, even when the characters were compilations of several real-life people. That was part of the fun of reading the book – ‘Oh, is Judy Garland or so-and-so really like that?’ The book was a satire in some ways but it also reflected what was happening at the time with pill-taking. Reading it, you know that Jacqueline Susann was there, that she knew what she was talking about and that she knew all of these people.

So the book’s depictions of drug use struck you as “insider” stuff? 

At that time, when you needed sleeping medication – and didn’t we all? – you took what Jacqueline Susann called ‘dolls.’  They were extremely intense and hypnotic; you went out, just as though you’d taken Sodium Pentothal. You took Nembutal, Seconal, barbiturates --  especially in our business, which is not a 9 to 5. You have to rev up to what we do, particularly if you’re working in Las Vegas as I did. By the time the second show was over, I was so up from that audience, that experience, that you didn’t just put your head on a pillow and go to sleep. So we took pills. Those are out of favor now. OK, we have Ambien but mostly what we have now is Tylenol P.M. or ‘Oooh, how about some nice chamomile tea?’   No, thanks, actually I’m having a nervous breakdown, I want to go to sleep!  (laughing)

What particularly drew the makers of Valley of the Dolls to you?

At that time, there were maybe 10 New York newspapers and many, many gossip columns. I was in those columns and they were full of stories about a movie to be based on Valley of the Dolls. At the time of the movie being cast, I’d been chosen by Jule Styne to do the national company of Funny Girl while Barbra was on Broadway. It was a very heady time and it was a very successful national company. I made a lot of money for them. My dressing rooms were so full of elaborate flower arrangements, they looked like a funeral and every night. I had big names like Helen Hayes coming to congratulate me. Lillian Roth was in it playing Fanny’s mother.  She had written the book “I’ll Cry Tomorrow” about her struggle with alcoholism and they made a movie of it with Susan Hayward. Lillian was drunk so I had a very difficult time there. Anyway, the very nice George Steinbrenner was the money behind the show and he was my champion. When we made it to L.A with the show, it was Hollywood-or-Bust and that run was the dream of stardom. I was very young and my life at the time was mirroring so much of what was in the show, like, ‘Oh, gawd, I’m a stahhh!’  For the seven or eight weeks I was performing, you couldn’t walk down a street without seeing my face on a poster or hearing people talk about me and the show. 

Heady stuff, as you said. 

At the time my manager was Jerry Weintraub and I was with the William Morris Agency and, as an actor, my concern then was getting your ass on the stage every night and doing the performance as Fannie Brice in “Funny Girl.” But some unnamed William Morris agent calls you and says, “Listen, they want to see you for the role of Neely O’Hara in Valley of the Dolls,” and you go. It was just me and Mark Robson for a meet. He seemed a very nice guy, laid back, an almost nondescript personality. He had nothing invested in me. It was just a ‘Hey, look me over’ meeting. Don’t get me wrong, it was exciting. It was Hollywood!  But compared to what was going on for this newcomer making a big, huge splash with “Funny Girl” – being front and center working for that audience of 3000 every night – it was a kind of dream. 

Anyway, I was perfect for Neely and I should have done it. He was wrong. I would have been better on every level. I’m going to be bitchy now but I’ve been waiting for years to say this. Patty was a wonderful actress but she overacted that thing far beyond anything I’ve seen. Even Judy Garland at her worst wasn’t anything like the performance that Patty gave.

Did you ever get any sort of reputation for being difficult like Neely?

I can say that Jacqueline Susann and I were the only two people who walked off The Tonight Show. I was on many times and then they moved to L.A. Rich Little was hosting for Johnny and they ran out of time or cut my time and said, ‘You’ve got 5 minutes but we’ll have you back,’ that kind of thing. I just walked out of NBC. I’d fallen in love and wanted to go home to whoever the guy was. I didn’t care. I shouldn’t have done that. I should have played ball and done it and been asked back. But I go through periods like that. The business is very frustrating and demoralizing. 

How did you react when you heard that Patty Duke got the job?

I knew it was wrong but I understood the choice. Patty Duke was the safe choice to make. She was incredibly brilliant in The Miracle Worker – I mean, bordering on genius. She had a TV series about two sisters or whatever the hell it was. This is an actress who had paid her dues and she was young. Because Mark Robson was such a bland, nice guy, I can understand why he went the safe choice rather than to discover someone new and have a shot at batting it out of the park. Look what Mr. Coppola did with Al Pacino in The Godfather despite how many other big actors were up for that role. But Mr. Coppola is so far beyond Mark Robson, of course, because he could see an actor who could honestly embody the role, not just be a safe choice. That’s the kind of decision-making and vision that puts someone like Coppola in the genius category. 

Who knows what Patty Duke went through working with him, but her performance registers as an extremely angry one through the whole thing. You could read into it that he was trying to make her angry  Directors have been known to do terrible things to evoke certain things out of a performer. It didn’t turn out to be a very good movie but it surely suffered because of that performance. Now, I don’t know if Patty Duke’s was completely to blame for it because you need direction. For some reason, she wasn’t getting any or if she was, she wasn’t getting the right direction. Nobody plays that shit – the worst addict, the worst alcoholic – so over-the-top all the time. And she gave a completely unsympathetic portrayal as well. In retrospect, whenever she spoke about it, she tried not to come down too hard on it but I saw that she couldn’t stand the whole thing. It’s possible that they made her do it that way – like, ‘Oh, this character is like this.’ It was awful. No vulnerability. The thing about Judy Garland and the thing about Neely, as neurotic and crummy as she is, you need to be able to embrace her, to feel sorry for her. And I just didn’t.

Fans of the movie talk about which other actresses could have played Neely – a super-charismatic singing supernova on the rise -- but they almost never mention actual singers.

Exactly. This was supposed to be a Judy Garland type belting Judy Garland-worthy songs. They should have used a singer. And the voice they used to dub Patty Duke’s singing was mediocre at best as was the original score for the film -- it was not good. The theme song Dionne Warwick sang was all right -- Dionne Warwick who, rumor has it, in Atlantic City wanted the M&M’s separated by color. Being a singer and composer myself, when I heard that score – ugh. Part of Judy Garland’s great success in movies was her material – she had Harold Arlen, Gershwin. A lot of people don’t take into consideration how important it is to have good material. Without it, you’re lost. So, with Valley of the Dolls, you had situation where the score was mediocre where an actress – such a good actress – was possibly encouraged to overact in this unsympathetic portrait. I remember that the audience didn’t care about her and didn’t like her. She was irredeemable. So you have all these liabilities going on and they contributed tremendously. Just think what would have happened if the Neely character had been played by a singer who played in a way that was more defined, with more variations, more subtlety. Even the shock value of her ripping off Helen Lawson’s wig would have been greater. Whatever it was, whatever the reasons for that performance, it was mistake. Patty Duke’s career in movies didn’t recover. The same thing was true with my friend Barbara Parkins. 

You were close?

At the time that I did “Funny Girl” in L.A., I became very friendly with Barbara Parkins. She didn’t know at the time that she was going to be the lead in Valley of the Dolls. It would have been very important to her career if that movie had been respected as a film. We were hanging out together during that whole run. We had become best friends. We were introduced by a press agent whose father’s agency represented John Wayne, Maureen O’Hara and so many others – the heavyweights of the heavyweights. Barbara had seen me in the show and this press agent introduced us. He was like one of the characters in Valley of the Dolls. He was in love with me and he had my name in the paper daily. Why didn’t I go with him?  What an imbecile I was. Anyway, Barbara and I were girlfriends. She was very sweet, just darling, and had no pretensions. She was the most gorgeous thing you’ve ever seen in your life. I was not chopped liver at that time. I was 23. I was hot. But Barbara’s face? Give me a fucking break. I was  like, Fuck this!  So that I would feel better, I was trying to find something – anything – about her that wasn’t that pretty. I scanned her every time we were together, thinking, There’s got to be something about her that isn’t perfect. All I got was that her calves were a little too thick. I felt so happy about that!

It was so nice to have a girlfriend in L.A. and we’d just talk and talk. She’d tell me about Eddie Fisher, who was coming on to her and who kept telling her how she reminded him of Elizabeth [Taylor, from whom he had been divorced for several years]. Pills were prevalent in Hollywood at the time but it’s not like Barbara and I were discussing what pills we were or weren’t taking. Nobody talked about it. We’d much rather talk about Warren Beatty – and, oh, we did. 

What did you think when you saw the movie?

I saw the movie in New York and when I saw what Mark Robson had done with the material, when I heard the songs that Neely and the other characters had to sing, I said, ‘Oh, dear, it’s just as well.’  It is just completely unwatchable. All of Mark Robson’s choices were lousy. The same thing could be said of my friend Barbara Parkins. She was okay in the movie. She didn’t really have to act or do very much of anything in it because he was just so beautiful. And then the tragedy of that gorgeous Sharon Tate. Ay-yi-yi, that poor beautiful girl. 

What are your thoughts on Judy Garland being and fired from the movie?

Whatever Judy Garland’s problems were, she knew good material and she was an absolute genius. Once she got on that set, she knew that movie was going to be shit. And that’s why she isn’t it. She fucking left and she was right to do it.