VALLEY OF THE DOLL

A sizzling biography of “Valley of the Dolls” author Jacqueline Susann, due out March 19, is sending her widower, Irving Mansfield, running to his lawyers.

Author Barbara Seaman, with a six-figure William Morrow advance, told Outtakes that “Jackie created her steamy best-sellers out of the raw materials of her life”--which Seaman has used as the basis of “Lovely Me,” also the title of a Susann stage play.

Seaman claims that “Jackie almost went down the tubes with drugs and alcohol” and that Susann was a “failed bisexual or pansexual actress who used the casting couch. She got crushes on men, women--anyone who could help her career. She was salty, tough and even slugged men.”

But Mansfield retorted in an interview: “The book’s vicious and inaccurate. My wife was not a drug addict. She didn’t have lesbian affairs. Publishers will do anything to make a buck.”

The book purports to detail Susann’s chemical abuse as well as her alleged affairs with Eddie Cantor, Joe E. Lewis, Carole Landis and Ethel Merman.

Ironically, Jackie’s supposed friend, Sherry Arden, now president of William Morrow (Susann’s last publisher), commissioned Seaman, a medical writer (“Women and the Crisis in Sex Hormones”), to chronicle Susann’s gutsy 12-year bout with breast cancer, a period when she reached her fame as a writer of steamy best sellers.

But during her six years of research, Seaman said, she learned about Susann’s “breezy, sleazy, glitzy life.” Seaman’s eyebrow-raiser has been cleared by “at least six lawyers,” said the author, who’s preparing for a publicity tour.

Meanwhile, Mansfield, who authored his own Susann bio (“Life with Jackie,” 1983), said: “I’m consulting lawyers. There’s nothing accurate in the whole book.”