February 10, 1966: "Valley of the Dolls" Is Published

February 10, 1966: Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann is published. It becomes the biggest-selling novel in American history.

Jacqueline Susann (no middle name) was born on August 20, 1918 in Philadelphia. She acted on early TV, but said, "I got cast as what I looked like: A glamorous divorcée who gets stabbed or strangled." Then she did a lot of commercials, but saw that 25 years of hard work had culminated only in recognition as “the Schiffli girl."

So, having written TV shows and commercials, she turned to fiction. She didn’t get her 1st novel published until she was 45. And she died at 56, from her 2nd bout with cancer, having published only 4 novels. (There was 2 more, posthumously.) But her 2nd novel was Valley of the Dolls, and it sold 17 million copies in her lifetime – now, 31 million.

She was played by Michele Lee in Scandalous Me: The Jacqueline Susann Story in 1998, and Bette Midler in Isn’t She Great? in 2000.

In the 1986 film Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, James T. Kirk (played by William Shatner) jokes that the novels of Susann and Harold Robbins were full of "colorful metaphors," leading Spock (Leonard Nimoy) to sarcastically call them "the giants."

Valley of the Dolls was filmed in 1967, directed by Mark Robson, starring Barbara Parkins, Patty Duke, Susan Hayward, Paul Burke, Lee Grant, and the ill-fated Sharon Tate. Critics panned the film, but it was a hit at the box office. The 1970 film Beyond the Valley of the Dolls went a lot further it terms of sex and drug scenes, and bears no connection to either the previous film or the book on which it was based, other than title.

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February 10, 1966 was a Thursday. Football star turned announcer Daryl "Moose" Johnston was born.

Baseball and football were out of season. One game was played in the NBA: The San Francisco Warriors beat the Boston Celtics, 128-117 -- a home game for the Celtics, but instead of the Boston Garden, it was at the Rhode Island Auditorium in Providence, Rhode Island. Rick Barry scored 36 points for the Warriors.

Two games were played in the NHL. The New York Rangers lost to the Detroit Red Wings, 6-2 at the Olympia Stadium in Detroit. And the Boston Bruins beat the Montreal Canadiens, 2-0 at the Boston Garden.