Jackie's Machine

THE LOVE MACHINE by Jacqueline Susann. 51 1 pages. Simon & Schuster. $6.95.

It's only a matter of time before someone designs a thin, 9-in. by 6-in. portable TV set that opens like a book. Since 90% of all contemporary writers of fiction can do little more with language than concoct dialogue and make wordy pictures, Televolume might benefit writer and reader alike. Novels that normally take six to eight hours to read could be transformed into two hours of viewing simply by eliminating the need to read descriptions of aquiline noses, snowy breasts, silken haunches, the interminable lighting of cigarettes, pouring of drinks and brewing of coffee. Once liberated from the vestigial sanctity of hard covers, the popular novel could be promoted with the same big budgets and honest enthusiasm as any other mass entertainment.

One author who is not waiting for such technological innovations is Jacqueline Susann, a former utility actress and semicelebrity who finally got her share of limelight and lettuce (more than $1,000,000) by writing a book called Valley of the Dolls. Miss Susann's latest excitement is The Love Machine. A preposterously engaging sex-and-power fantasy targeted mainly at middle-aged females, The Love Machine is already nudging Portnoy's Complaint off the top of the bestseller lists, and should gross at least $2,000,000. In it, Miss Susann once again demonstrates her remarkable instinct for the varicose vein.

Valley was a pharmacological and gynecological nightmare. Reader interest, soaring along on a series of drug ingestions, couplings and nervous breakdowns, finally hit an apogee with breast cancer. Love Machine lacks Valley's primitive vigor but equals its obsession with pathology: leukemia, gall-bladder trouble, heart disease, neurasthenia and nymphomania play important roles. One man is terrified of losing his genitalia; another surrenders them gladly in order to become a woman. The central character, a power-mad television executive with a superhuman capacity for vodka and coitus, is mysteriously incapable of love and marriage. The explanation is only a cut above those delivered in Hollywood psychodramas of the 1940s in which a white-coated mental hygienist resolved the plot with a five-minute dissertation on the Oedipus complex.

As a novelist, Miss Susann unwittingly gravitates toward a caricature of naturalism, a relatively uncomplicated form of literary life born in the seminal spillage of Darwin's The Origin of Species and kept alive by public demand. Naturalism at best tends to project the human animal as an unappetizing accumulation of nerve endings and appetites. But in Miss Susann's handling, appetites consume the characters they inhabit, leaving nothing behind but a bad taste.

In a Delicatessen. With two huge successes in less than four years, Jacqueline Susann is thrusting past such bestseller fabricators as Harold Robbins, Arthur Hailey and Leon Uris. She is now in a commercial sphere where fame matches fortune as a spur to effort.

"Money is applause," Miss Susann sums it up with characteristic baldness--and that must be the case.

What sets her apart from competing fast-buck writers is her extraordinary show-business savvy and an almost unlimited fondness for self-promotion. When it comes to flogging the product personally, the others are plodding dilettantes by comparison.

With a natural merchandiser's instinct, she pushed her first book Every Night, Josephine!--a bonbon about walking her poodle--by putting it on display in Manhattan restaurants and even a delicatessen. Today, helped by her publicist-manager-husband Irving Mansfield, she is still at it. With inexhaustible energy and boundless enthusiasm, she assaults and attracts the public in a succession of day-by-day, city-by-city publicity campaigns. A typical day recently began at 8 a.m. It included a TV show, four radio talks, two newspaper interviews, a general press conference, and a visit with Beatle John Lennon and his wife Yoko Ono.

As the most public of authors, "Jackie " makes most of the network gab shows. Her picture appears on London buses and in New York subways. Raven-wigged and smoky-eyed, she gazes down from between the Preparation H and mail-order-diploma ads like an Egyptian love goddess who was unfortunate enough to have been caught with her head turned full front.

Fortunately, Jackie's other qualities include a thick skin and the killer reflexes of a mongoose. In a recent taped TV interview--later judiciously edited --she drew first and last blood from a female reporter.

Interviewer: Don't you ever wake up in the middle of the night and realize you haven't done anything that is really artistic?

Jackie: Do you wake up and think you're not Huntley-Brinkley? Interviewer: Look at your competition. Updike. Roth.

Jackie: Do you believe in masturbation? Interviewer: But the point of Roth to me was the language. Jackie: Yes. Shlong. That's a new word to me. You're so uptight. Why are you uptight? I'm relaxed. Life is fun. Great fun is high art. What do you read? Interviewer: Well, I just read I Am Mary Dunne, by Brian Moore. Jackie: I am what? Mary Hun? Never heard of it. Do you have children? Interviewer: I have three. Jackie: I know your type. You have French records on while you're feeding the baby and someone else telling you about the opera. But I'm glad you have three children because now at least I know you've done something.

Secure in the publicist's truth that out of the mouths of stars comes hot copy, Jackie strews absurdities, inconsistencies, generalities, banalities and wisecracks with calculated sincerity: Critics. Egghead-doubledomes! There are about eight influential critics and all they want is books that only they can understand.

Novels. There is no room for literature in the novel today. The competition is too great. People want to read a novel in bed at night, and there's Johnny Carson and great old movies on The Late Show.

Vladimir Nabokov. I'm in his league, and I see myself as the best man. Philip Roth. I liked the book but I'd hate to shake his hand. Fashion. My favorite designers are St. Laurent, Valentino and Pucci. But I can't wear Pucci's op prints. My boobs are too big.

Reviews. I've had a lot of bad reviews and I honestly don't mind them as long as they're witty and don't give the plot away.

Pot. I don't advise smoking it. Cigarettes give you cancer, heart trouble and everything else. But pot has a built-in safety device: three cigarettes and you gotta pass out.

Life. People start out good. Dillinger even was good once. Life and loneliness change people. Orgies. They go on all the time. It's not a question of "I'm going to have an orgy tonight." You have your choice to do it or not. In certain groups it goes on frequently.

In Jackie's business, truly, nothing succeeds like excess.

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