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What If You Never Come Down?: “(Theme From) ‘Valley Of The Dolls’” by Dionne Warwick

By Marcello Carlin


The song was originally to be performed by Judy Garland, who was going to star in the film of Valley Of The Dolls but turned up drunk on the first day of shooting and was promptly replaced by Susan Hayward – Garland was not the only actress associated with the film who would not live to see the seventies. Then another of the film’s leading actresses, Barbara Parkins, suggested bringing in Dionne Warwick to sing it. It has been suggested that the lyric was changed, either by Warwick herself and/or the author of the source novel, Jacqueline Susann, to make it more relevant to the film’s plot.

Although the song reflects a Bacharach and David influence, Burt Bacharach was only involved in producing what was a re-recording, since Warwick’s contractual obligations meant that the original soundtrack rendition could not be released as a single. The song was actually composed by the then husband-and-wife team of André and Dory Previn and the complexity of the music – the song involves at least four different time signatures – meets its unlikely counterpoint in a distended and near-abstract lyric.

The film of Valley Of The Dolls – “Dolls” meaning prescription drugs, to which all of the leading ladies become addicted – is meretricious dysfunctional trash which at any other time would have been a TV movie (as indeed it became when it was remade in 1981). Although the novel carefully sets the action from the 1940s onward (spanning two decades), the film confines itself to the not-exactly-swinging sixties and moreover changes the novel’s ending so radically that the original screenwriter – Harlan Ellison, no less – asked for his name to be withdrawn from the credits.

But Dionne Warwick’s record can be listened to without knowing anything about either book or film. More than anything, it is a majestically-wrecked song about coming down; Warwick sings it with a kind of hoarse exhaustion, wearied by the trip that the previous year has taken her persona through, as though there is literally nothing left to lose; she grasps at distant realities but mistakes them for dreams, she tries to remember what it was that drove her in the first place, but her search is doomed to be in vain (the unexpected harmonic trapdoor of descent that is the song's "wondering why" appears to entrap the singer for good).

It has hardly been played in the intervening forty years, despite spending a month at number two. It stands as a sort of warning of worse things to come. The production and Pat Williams’ deceptively smooth orchestration again point towards the seventies and, in particular, The Carpenters (one yearns to know what Karen would have done with the song). Its sense of foreboding makes us think of another of the film’s leading actresses, whose character is the only one to die (by her own hand), a role which Raquel Welch was originally approached to play (but Welch rejected it as she was tired of playing “sexpot” characters), the most doomed of all of these performers – and the film made a star out of her. Her name was Sharon Tate.

Date Record Made Number Two: 24 February 1968
Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 4
Records At Number One: “Love Is Blue” by Paul Mauriat and “(Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay” by Otis Redding
UK Chart Position: 28

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