Welcome to my new short series called Hippie Hotties where I plan to talk about a hippie-era movie that stretched the limits of free love and sex by showing off some sexy nudes on the big screen. This era of experimentation led to some pretty far-out films, so let's take a look!
For today's Hippie Hotties we are going to talk about Valley of the Dolls. Don't confuse it for Beyond the Valley of the Dolls which we will definitely touch on another time, but let's take a look at the original film that spawned that spoof. Plus this movie helped to launch the career of blonde nymphette, Sharon Tate. Let's dive into it:
This 1967 film was a strange hit at the time. It was a box office smash, but critics hated it at the time. Directed by Mark Robson and based on a novel released only the year before by Jacqueline Susann, the story follows three struggling young women who aspire to make it in show business. As their careers rise, they also start to develop drug addictions which ruin each of their lives in a different way. The movie is a cult classic for its campy style, especially considering the rise of the counter culture and their openness to drugs. In a lot of ways, this movie was interpreted as a bad PSA to keep young people off of drugs which is part of why this movie became famous. It was over-the-top in its portrayal of endless drama and drug addiction and it simply did not ring true with audiences. It is also why watching it now is so much fun!
Our starlets are Patty Duke as Neely O'Hara, Sharon Tate as Jennifer North, and Barbara Parkins as Anne Welles. This plot is CRAZY. Are you ready to get through it? The melodramatic movie starts off with the character Anne Welles who is a Radcliffe graduate who gets a job at a theater agency to represent Helen Lawson, a Broadway diva played by Susan Hayward. Helen is fearful of rising star Neely O'Hara taking her gigs and wants Neely fired from her upcoming show. This experience opens Anne's eyes to the cruelty of show business, so she wants to quit but her boss convinces her to stay on. They start a romance while they also help Neely get her career off the ground. Neely becomes addicted to pills and alcohol which quickly get in the way of her career and her marriage. Meanwhile, Jennifer gets an abortion after learning that her husband has a hereditary disease. In order to pay for this and her husband's medical expenses, makes "art films" to pay the bills which are basically softcore porn. Then Jennifer gets breast cancer, but she decides to off herself rather than deal with cancer. At the end of the movie, Anne's former boss proposes but she turns him down and lives on as a happily single woman.
Judy Garland was originally cast to play Helen Lawson but ironically was fired due to her drinking. It's believed that she helped inspire the character who was an amalgamation of iconically destructive starlets such as Frances Farmer and Judy herself as well as larger-than-life dives like Ethel Merman. Lucille Ball was even considered for the role! Raquel Welch was screen-tested for the movie and Mary Tyler Moore and Ursula Andress were both considered to play Jennifer North. Other actresses that were offered roles and turned them down were Jane Fonda, Julie Christie, and Marlo Thomas. Every sixties starlet was considered and wanted for this movie because people really believed that this was about to be a massive hit. Here's another fun piece of trivia: Richard Dreyfuss made his film debut as an uncredited stagehand.
There is admittedly not that much nudity in the movie beyond Sharon's breasts and Barbara's sideboob. The book is much more sexually explicit. There is even a scene where Jennifer experiments with another woman. That being said, Patty and Barbara both went nude in other projects after this.
A word on Sharon: it was widely believed that this movie was going to make her a HUGE star. She was already mildly known for her work and relationship with Roman Polanski, but the stunningly beautiful Sharon had yet to really break out on her own. She famously did not like this novel or the script, but she had high hopes for the film. Well, she allegedly wasn't happy about that either. That being said, the movie did make her a star...just not for the reasons that she hoped. Still, she earned a Golden Globe nomination for this performance.
Obviously, Sharon's murder was a tragic event that happened shortly after this film. There was a sequel to the movie in the works, but the murder definitely derailed those plans. The sequel was going to be Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, but the Manson Murders changed the plans for the movie and left the studio to hire the king of smut Russ Meyer (who hired Roger Ebert to write the script) to direct a much campier parody of the original rather than a straight-forward sequel. That movie wound up being a lot more sexually free than the original film due to, of course, Russ's penchant for showing large-breasted women onscreen.
Valley of the Dolls was not really involved in the counter culture nor is it thought of as a "hippie movie" other than its open look at drug use and its strong, complicated female characters who are sexually active. In that sense, the spirit of the 60s was very much in this movie. The movie did make Sharon Tate a style icon whose long-lashed eye makeup was imitated by everyone in the 1960s and became a part of her legacy. In 1969, she was murdered by the Manson Family which is another (horrific) hippie connection that this ethereal actress has and many scholars mark that even as the beginning of the end of the swingin' sixties. It is so tragic to consider what could have been for Sharon who was an undeniable beauty and talent. Check out her nude scene and bask in how gorgeous this starlet was:
