The ending of “Isn’t She Great” presents Jacqueline Susann’s final years through a carefully constructed montage that interweaves her battle with breast cancer, diagnosed in 1962, alongside the triumphant premiere of the film adaptation of her bestselling novel “Valley of the Dolls.” Rather than dwelling on her illness as a tragedy, the film emphasizes Susann’s refusal to let her condition stop her—a deliberate narrative choice that attempts to position her determination as inseparable from her professional success. The closing scenes showcase intimate moments between Susann and her devoted husband Irving Mansfield, including a symbolic return to a Central Park tree (a recurring motif throughout the film), where the couple reaffirms their bond while Susann achieves the heights of cultural recognition she pursued throughout her life.
The film’s tagline, “Talent isn’t everything,” finds its fullest expression in these final moments, where director Frank Oz suggests that Susann’s rise to fame depended equally on Irving’s unwavering support and his constant affirmation of her worth. Irving’s repeated assertion that she is remarkable—his way of making her “larger than life”—becomes the emotional anchor of the ending, transforming what could have been a bleak portrayal of illness into something more complex: a love story where one person’s belief in another sustains them through both triumph and suffering. The ending also includes imagery of Susann on Aristotle Onassis’ yacht, a visual representation of the social status she had fought to achieve throughout her career.
Table of Contents
- How Does the Film Handle Jacqueline Susann’s Illness Without Overshadowing Her Achievements?
- The Significance of Irving Mansfield’s Devotion in the Final Scene
- The Valley of the Dolls Premiere as Career Vindication
- Visual Symbolism and the Geography of Success
- Why Critics and Audiences Rejected the Film’s Ending
- The Performance Contrast Between Bette Midler and the Material
- What the Ending Reveals About Hollywood’s Approach to Female Ambition
How Does the Film Handle Jacqueline Susann’s Illness Without Overshadowing Her Achievements?
The film’s approach to Susann’s cancer diagnosis represents a significant creative decision—rather than making illness the central dramatic focus of the ending, the filmmakers chose to frame her disease as something she managed alongside her continuing professional activities. This stands in contrast to many biographical films that treat illness as a narrative pivot point that redirects the entire story toward decline and mortality. “Isn’t She Great” instead maintains its celebratory tone even as Susann faces her diagnosis, showing her attending the “Valley of the Dolls” premiere and continuing to exercise her influence within the entertainment industry despite her deteriorating health. This choice carries both strengths and limitations.
The strength lies in honoring Susann’s apparent resilience and refusal to be defined solely by her medical condition. The limitation, however, is that it can read to viewers as emotionally evasive—glossing over genuine suffering in favor of maintaining a upbeat narrative about willpower. Roger Ebert, in his review of the film, was critical of this sanitized approach, arguing that the ending didn’t fully reckon with the human cost of Susann’s ambition or the pain of her illness. The film essentially asks viewers to celebrate Susann’s persistence without fully acknowledging what that persistence required her to endure.
The Significance of Irving Mansfield’s Devotion in the Final Scene
Irving Mansfield emerges as the emotional linchpin of the film’s conclusion, with Nathan Lane’s performance emphasizing Irving’s role as Susann’s primary cheerleader and the person who sustained her through both her rise and her decline. The ending repeatedly returns to Irving’s affirmation of Jacqueline—his insistence that she is remarkable, talented, and worthy of recognition—suggesting that this constant validation was as essential to her success as her own talent or ambition. In one key scene, the couple returns to a Central Park location that has held symbolic weight throughout the film, where Irving reaffirms his faith in her, transforming what might otherwise be a scene about mortality into an affirmation of their partnership.
This dynamic raises an important but uncomfortable question about the nature of Susann’s achievements and how they are framed by the film. If Irving’s belief in her is presented as central to her accomplishments, does this suggestion diminish her own agency and talent? A comparison to other biographical films reveals the potential pitfall here: many films about women’s success inadvertently center the men who supported them, inadvertently making the woman’s achievement secondary to the relationship. Some critics have noted that the film’s framing, particularly in these final scenes, risks positioning Irving’s love as more important than Susann’s own professional skill and vision. The film wants to celebrate both their partnership and Susann’s independence, but the ending’s emphasis on Irving’s role in validating her suggests an imbalance in how their contributions are weighted.
The Valley of the Dolls Premiere as Career Vindication
The film’s ending includes the premiere of the movie adaptation of Susann’s breakthrough novel “Valley of the Dolls,” a moment that represents the pinnacle of her career success and cultural influence. The choice to include this premiere in the final montage serves multiple purposes: it reminds viewers of Susann’s extraordinary professional achievement (her novel was a cultural phenomenon), it provides visual evidence of her triumph, and it creates a temporal frame in which both her success and her illness exist simultaneously. The premiere scenes offer a counterweight to the cancer diagnosis, showing Susann at a moment of maximum visibility and influence. However, the historical record complicates this neat narrative structure.
While Susann was indeed alive and partially involved in the development of the “Valley of the Dolls” film adaptation, the movie was a commercial and critical disaster compared to the novel’s runaway success. The adaptation, released in 1967, has become a cult film viewed more for its unintentional camp value than for artistic merit—a limitation the film “Isn’t She Great” does not acknowledge. By presenting the premiere as a moment of unambiguous triumph, the film glosses over the reality that not all of Susann’s professional ventures achieved the success she sought. Her novel was a phenomenon, but translating that into a successful film proved far more difficult.
Visual Symbolism and the Geography of Success
The Central Park tree appears throughout “Isn’t She Great” as a recurring visual motif tied to Susann and Irving’s relationship, and its reappearance in the final scene carries symbolic weight—it represents continuity, rootedness, and the enduring nature of their partnership even as external circumstances change dramatically. The tree scenes function as emotional anchors, moments where the couple steps outside the frenetic world of show business and publishing to reaffirm their commitment to each other. This visual language suggests that their relationship, not professional success, is the true foundation of Susann’s ability to persist and thrive.
The film also includes imagery of Susann aboard Aristotle Onassis’ yacht, which operates as a visual symbol of achieved status and entry into elite social circles. The yacht represents the kind of glamorous, exclusive world that Susann explicitly pursued throughout her life—her novels and her public persona were constructed around access to wealth, celebrity, and power. By including this image in the ending, the film suggests that Susann’s ambitions were ultimately fulfilled. However, this image also highlights a limitation in the film’s presentation: the emphasis on material symbols of success (yachts, premieres, luxury) may obscure the more complex emotional and psychological dimensions of what Susann’s ambition actually meant to her and cost her.
Why Critics and Audiences Rejected the Film’s Ending
“Isn’t She Great” encountered severe resistance from critics and audiences alike, with a 25% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 34/100 score on Metacritic. The film’s domestic box office performance was catastrophic—it earned only $3.0 million against a $36 million budget and was pulled from theaters after just four weeks. Part of this failure can be traced to critical dissatisfaction with how the film handled its emotional trajectory, including its ending. Critics noted that the film’s tone throughout was overly sanitized, failing to engage with the genuine contradictions and complexities in Susann’s personality and career.
The ending, in particular, received criticism for feeling dishonest about the nature of Susann’s achievement and her illness. Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times noted that the film’s overall approach was sanitized, which suggests the ending’s refusal to reckon more directly with Susann’s suffering contributed to the sense that the film was avoiding difficult truths. Roger Ebert’s review criticized the film’s handling of serious material with insufficient gravity. The warning here is that audiences can often sense when a film is being evasive about difficult subjects, and the attempt to maintain an upbeat tone about illness and mortality while simultaneously celebrating professional achievement can feel emotionally manipulative rather than genuinely moving. The ending’s failure to resonate with critics suggests that the film’s attempt to balance celebration with acceptance of illness left viewers feeling unsatisfied by either dimension.
The Performance Contrast Between Bette Midler and the Material
Bette Midler’s interpretation of Jacqueline Susann in the final scenes relies heavily on her charisma and star power to compensate for the script’s emotional limitations. Midler’s performance emphasizes Susann’s defiance and resilience, with her delivery suggesting a woman determined not to be diminished by circumstance. However, even Midler’s considerable talents cannot fully overcome the material’s tendency toward sentimentality and oversimplification.
The ending asks Midler to embody a version of Susann who is simultaneously fighting cancer, celebrating professional triumph, and recommitting to her marriage—multiple emotional states that the film’s narrative structure struggles to hold in tension simultaneously. Nathan Lane’s performance as Irving provides a counterpoint, with Lane emphasizing the character’s devotion and optimism. The chemistry between Midler and Lane in these final scenes is genuine, and their scenes together in Central Park do generate authentic emotional resonance. Yet even this chemistry cannot fully overcome the broader problem: the film’s ending attempts to make Susann’s illness a minor subplot to her larger story of professional success and personal devotion, a choice that viewers and critics recognized as fundamentally inauthentic to the actual complexity of her life.
What the Ending Reveals About Hollywood’s Approach to Female Ambition
The ending of “Isn’t She Great” encapsulates a particular Hollywood approach to depicting ambitious women—the tendency to frame female ambition as ultimately validated by romantic partnership and male affirmation rather than by achievement alone. The film’s repeated emphasis on Irving’s role in sustaining Susann’s confidence and belief in herself positions their relationship, rather than her own talent or work ethic, as the engine of her success. This narrative choice reflects a broader pattern in biographical films where women’s professional accomplishments are presented as dependent on or made possible by men’s support.
Jacqueline Susann was, by historical accounts, a woman with genuine literary ambition and professional savvy who built her career through shrewd understanding of publicity, audience taste, and the publishing industry’s mechanics. “Isn’t She Great” presents her as talented, yes, but ultimately sustained by Irving’s constant validation rather than by her own strategic intelligence or artistic vision. The ending’s final imagery—the couple reunited in Central Park, affirming their bond—suggests that what matters most is not what Susann accomplished professionally or how she navigated the entertainment industry, but rather that she was loved. This reframing, however well-intentioned, reflects the limitations of how Hollywood often handles female ambition, particularly in biographical narratives.
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