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Jews — the Jews, often, hoping to
pass as WASPs.
Thus there was perhaps some anti-
Semitism in the response to Jackie, a
feeling that she was "too brash, too
colorful, too Jewish," Rudnick says.
But if publishing was not a Jewish
milieu, Jackie helped "to explode the
barriers," he adds. "She turned herself
into a brand name, a commodity. She
didn't need the critics. She was like
Coca-Cola in a hardcover."
Rudnick remembers Susann and
her big hair from her talk show
appearances in the '60s and early '70s.
Like Jackie, the aspiring writer
yearned for a glittering showbiz world
far from his Jewish family home in

Addams Family Values; and the off-
Broadway biblical spoof The Most
Fabulous Story Ever Told, featuring first
couple Adam and Steve.
Rudnick still writes Premiere maga-
zine columns that poke fun. at "high
art" under the pseudonym of "yenta"
film critic Libby Gelman-Waxner.
His last screenplay, In 6- Out, about
a Midwestern teacher forced to con-
front the possibility that he is gay,
shares something with Isn't She Great,
he says. "It's an attempt.to find come-
dy in a very high stakes, potentially
tragic situation," the writer explains.
After all, Susann, as Rudnick dis-
covered in Michael Korda's New Yorker
memoir that spurred Isn't She Great,

-

suburban New Jersey. "I remember
being hugely entertained by Jackie,"
Rudnick says. "You could always
count on her to say something
raunchy and outrageous and terrific."
Valley of the Dolls, he recalls, was
the first "forbidden" book to grace his
Piscataway, N.J., neighborhood,
though his parents worried more
about Philip Roth than Jacqueline
Susann. "They had a distinct nervous-
ness about Portnoys Complaint,"
Rudnick quips, "a book they thought
might not be so good for the Jews."
The openly gay, aspiring writer,
now 42, attended Yale and moved to
New York, where he made a career of
deliberately raising eyebrows. Not
unlike Susann, he gleefully pushed the
limits of good taste, in his case with
an impudent, subversive wit, turning
out irreverent romps on his IBM
Selectric typewriter (gray, not pink).
There was the 1991 Broadway
comedy I Hate Hamlet, for those who
secretly think the classics can be "a big
bloody bore"; the hit play Jeffrey, an
AIDS comedy; the screenplay for

Naomi Pfefferman is entertainment
editor at the Jewish Journal of Greater
Los Angeles.

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Bette Midler, right,
as Jacqueline Susann;
Nathan Lane, center,
as her husband,
Irving Mansfielch. and
David Hyde Pierce
as Jackie's WASP-y
book editor,
Michael Hastings,
at a New York
restaurant with
a mostly Jewish
clientele: "Two
adults and a gentile,"
quips Mansfield.

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endured more than her share of
tragedy. She had a severely autistic son
who was institutionalized since age 4,
and she battled breast cancer at the
peak of her success.
Susann fastidiously hid these
unglamorous aspects of her life, fearing
they would hurt book sales. For similar
reasons she hid her Jewishness, during a
time when to be Jewish was to feel
unwelcome in America, Rudnick says.
Her Jewish father, however,
remained her idol; he was a devastat-
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whom Susann once caught in bed with
one of his models. The flashy woman-
izer was, apparently, the model for
many of Susann's cruel, sexy heroes.
Rudnick, who quips that Libby
Gelman-Waxner "absolutely adores
Jackie," has a theory about why
Susann is enjoying a cult revival, espe-
cially in the gay drag world. "Jackie
was someone with a certain outsider's
status who became a great, flaming
diva," Rudnick says. "What's not to
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