The title character of The Lonely Lady, JeriLee Randall, is a lady only for alliterative purposes.

For all other purposes she’s, at best, a slut.
JeriLee is beautiful and brilliant, as are all Harold Robbins’ protagonists unless they are men, in which case they are handsome and brilliant.
JeriLee is a small town girl who wants to be a writer. She marries a writer. They divorce.
JeriLee lacks the business savvy and connections to make it as a writer on her own.
She falls back on acting, then on dancing, finally ends up in a nude review.
She drinks heavily and uses drugs. Although she’s not selling drugs, she gets caught when the guy with whom she’s living gets caught dealing.
She ends up in a mental institution, from which she’s rescued by the police detective who arrested her. Surprisingly, she neither marries him nor has sex with him.
What she does is write a screenplay that wins an Academy Award and lets a stoned JeriLee tell off the world as the TV cameras role.
Robbins is a great storyteller, but his stories aren’t worthy of his talent.
With Lady, as always with Robbins’ novels, I had forgotten the title character’s name within 15 minutes of laying down the book.
The Lonely Lady by Harold Robbins
Pocket Books ©1976 [paper] 421 p.
1976 bestseller #8. My grade: C+
© 2018 Linda Gorton Aragoni