"Una Vez No Basta" (Once Is Not Enough) - The Spanish Movie - "January" & Jacqueline Susann

“Una Vez No Basta” (Once Is Not Enough) - The Spanish Movie -   “January” & Jacqueline Susann  

One human life is not enough to uncork  the mystery of the universe.  It is so abundant and vast ,the life cycle of the predecessors from the  time immemorial such as pre-historic, the vedic and  the mythological eras the human life is shrouded in mystery.

The title attracted me more than the book and the movie.   You live only once and once is not enough. You always dream about tomorrow and it is a never ending, never satiated hope of tomorrow. We all live with hope that tomorrow will be a better day and craves for another day of life.

One can’t help but sing like Lobo in bollywood flick “3 Idiots” to give me another chance to grow up once again.

“Give me some Sunshine,

  Give me some rain,

  Give me another chance

  I want to grow up once again.”

The best time of a human being is considered to be the childhood days, wherein no personal responsibilities of life and livelihood is not expected out of a teenager or from a student.  A person when he becomes the breadwinner as well as responsible family man wishes that student life must have never ended.

In 1975 when the movie “Once Is Not Enough” was released the heroine’s name “January” named after the calendar month attracted my fancy. Her father says that  she was born on New Year's Day and I swore I'd give her the world. The January’s role essayed by pretty and vivacious Doborrah Raffin - really a tongue-twisting name - was talk of the town and influenced me for quite some time.  January was the centrifugal character of Jacqueline Susann’s fiction and the movie.  She is the main character and the story line revolves around the pivotal character of January.

"January"  provoked me to write this Blog more than anything else.

The novel and movie had the required pep and glamour of the kind of era that the late 1960s and early 1970s used to be including that of the Hippies.  However, due to the innovation and inventions thereafter and the change of culture for modernity lost its charm. This may be due to human tendency to compare the outdated immediate past - last few decades - with the present.  But, one must admit that there are many vintage classics bleeding human life without losing its old world charm.

The other famous works of Jacqueline Susann are “Valley of the Dolls” and “The Love Machine”.

Biography  -

Jacqueline Susann (August 20, 1918 – September 21, 1974) was an American author. She was born in Philadelphia, Pensylvania, United States.  She died in 1974 after having spent 7 weeks in Coma in a New York hospital due to Cancer aged 56.  Her first novel Valley of the Dolls is one of the best selling books of all time. Its success was fueled by an innovative worldwide promotional tour conceived by Susann and her husband, press agent Irving Mansfield. Susann's follow-up bestsellers, The Love Machine and Once Is Not Enough, made Susann the first author in history to have three #1 consecutive bestsellers on The New York Times Best Seller List.   

  
All the three books were made into successful blockbuster movies.

Jacqueline Susann was an extraordinarily successful writer who turned her dynamic charm, chutzpah, and personality into a formidable marketing machine. Thus, Jacqueline Susann became America’s first brand-name author.

After her mastectomy, she apparently ended her philandering, but became even more determined to find fame. By the time of her death, she had become one of the cultural icons of the 1960s and had set numerous publishing records.  Jackie has sold more than 50 million books and been published in over 30 languages.

Jacqueline Susann’s novel “Once Is Not Enough” was published in 1973 and made into a blockbuster motion picture in 1975 with the same name.  The movie was released with a Spanish title as well.

By midsummer every beach, poolside, backyard and bedroom in America will be littered with copies of Jacqueline Suzann’s work waiting to be picked up.

The comparison of  Jacqueline Susann to Harold Robbins   -

Along with Harold Robbins, Susann ruled the world of mainstream fiction in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and like Robbins she’s been mostly forgotten in the past years – though unlike Robbins  her  novels  have recently been reprinted by a major publisher.

After nearly 500 steadily monotonous pages it all ends very unhappily.  There is always this comparison with Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Suzann.  The 500 pages could have easily be summarized to 150 pages and others are just monotonous pulp fiction.  The Mallu contemporary writer of ‘60s & ‘70s “Muttathu Varkey” was comparable to Harold Robins for the several number of pages of pulp fiction written which would have been easily abridged to 1/3^rd of the book.

Jacqueline Susann serves to draw you in enough that you care about January throughout the book, something that can rarely be said about Harold Robbins’s protagonists.

Father’s Day  -

When we celebrate Father’s Day  this month, it is all that praiseworthy to examine the love of dad and daughter in Jacqueline Susann’s novel “Once Is Note Enough”.   A dad always wanted to gift her the best in the world and for the daughter her dad was the cult figure and the much admired matinee idol OR  movie mogul. 

                               

                                                                     Jacqueline Susann                                                                

Plot of the Novel & Review :  

January, the main protagonist, who herself appears to have walked out of a category romance. January Wayne is our hero, and despite being in her early 20s right at the height of the free love era, she has all of the morals and mindsets of a 1950s housewife. This isn’t all her fault, though; coddled by her father Mike, a famous and successful Hollywood producer, January grows up with significant Daddy Issues in that she is so in love with her dad that no other man will ever be able to win her heart.

But this is only one of her issues. Susann opens the novel with a harrowing scene in which January, just turned 18, goes to Italy to spend time with her father, who is shooting on location. Jealous of the Sophia Loren-type actress who is hanging on her father (January’s mother committed suicide years before, jealous herself over her husband’s frequent affairs), January grudgingly goes on a date with an Italian gigolo. When the guy tries to sleep with January but discovers with shock that she’s still a virgin, he races her home on his motorcycle and crashes, and January is seriously injured.

At any rate, she spends a handful of years in some exclusive rehab center in Switzerland, effectively cut off from the rest of the world. While she’s away the ‘60s become the ‘70s and the world changes in numerous ways, though January doesn’t know this. When she can finally walk again and leaves the clinic, she finds the world vastly different than the one she new.

Meanwhile her father has fallen on rough times and has married uber-wealthy Dee, so now he’s a kept man. He’s done all of this so as to save up a nest egg so January can have a nice life – turns out Mike’s luck ran dry right after January’s accident, and after diminishing returns on his next films he found himself without any more jobs in Hollywood so has had to take desperate measures to continue living the lifestyle he’s grown accustomed to.

January wants to make her own way in the world, and gets a job at an up and coming magazine which is run by an old school friend named Lisa. Really though the novel plays out like a soap opera, and January is very much in the vein of a romance comic book heroine. Everything shocks her, she just wants to find true love, and she’s completely in love with daddy. This is the other theme Susann plays up in the book, the true love story being between January and her father, but like the characters this theme comes and goes; Susann often introduces concepts or characters and then drops them for a few hundred pages. 

                              
         American Hippies in late 1960’s (1)                                 American Hippies in late 1960’s (2)

The ritual orgy is lots of lurid fun, with January attending a Hippie party,getting blitzed on LSD-spiked punch, and having sex with some random dude while she and he are hoisted up in the arms of the other hippies, with chanting and clapping going on all about them. I should mention that this random guy is only the third man January has ever had sex with, the other two being David (a one-time only deal), and Tom Holt (who, in pure let’s-skewer-Hemingway’s-rep fashion, lives his roughneck, boozer lifestyle in order to overcome the fact that he has the equipment of a prepubescent boy). The climax of this sequence is the highlight, with January orgasming, screaming “I love you, Mike!”, and then passing out.  

But the UFO stuff is even better. Still frazzled on drugs, January goes to the beach and sees one in the night sky. Through the final hundred pages of the novel Susann works in this theme where January keeps seeing a blue-eyed man in her dreams, a man who bears a vague resemblance to her father. But this ghost proves dangerous, at one point a dazed January almost falling out of her skyline apartment to be with him. And now he appears to her on the beach, beckoning her into the waves… possibly getting drowned…

Now let us discuss about the movie adaptation. Once upon a time, the entertainment industry was a world that never slept. Magazine editors, models, pop stars, and all the rest visited "vitamin doctors" to get the shots that would allow them to stay up all night and then work all day--in offices decorated with beanbag chairs and Calderesque mobiles.  In that era after an year of death of  Jacqueline Susann,  the movie “Once Is Not Enough” was released.

   

SYNOPSIS   -  

The Spanish version of  the movie was titled “Una Vez No Basta”.  The duration of the movie is 122 minutes.

Mike Wayne (Kirk Douglas) is a divorced, middle-aged, hack motion-picture producer whose career has fallen on hard times. Try as he might, Mike no longer can get a new Hollywood project made.


Accustomed to a lavish lifestyle, Mike has pampered his spoiled daughter, January (Deborah Raffin), providing her with an expensive education in Europe and everything else money can buy. January worships her father and eagerly returns to America to be with him again.


Needing a new way to make a living, Mike enters into a loveless marriage with Deidre Milford Granger (Alexis Smith), a New York socialite and one of the world's wealthiest women. She turns out to be shrewd, bossy woman who has already has been through multiple marriages and demands that things be done her way. She also is secretly carrying on a lesbian affair with another woman, a foreign designer named Karla (Melina Mercouri). January is devastated to learn that Mike is now wed to this rude, arrogant woman.

Deidre attempts to draw January into a relationship with David Milford (George Hamilton), a ladies' man who is the rich woman's nephew. David, too, usually gets his own way, finally persuading January into going to bed with him, only to discover that she is a virgin.

Unsure what to do with her life, January is advised by an old school friend, Linda Riggs (Brenda Vaccaro), now a magazine editor, to write a book based on her life story. Linda enjoys a free-spirit life with many lovers and urges January to do likewise. But due in no small part to her father complex, January instead falls for a much-older man named Tom Colt (David Janssen), an alcoholic, chain-smoking, impotent. novelist.

Mike bitterly resents the affair his daughter is having with this hack writer. He punches Colt upon catching January in a Beverly Hills hotel bungalow with him. Mike orders his daughter to make a choice ("him or me") and Colt gives her the same ultimatum. January chooses her lover, despite the fact that he treats her badly.

 
Deidre's demands and insults finally become too much for Mike, who wants a divorce. They amicably agree to one, but their private airplane they are on crashes en route to Los Angeles and both of them are killed. The devastated January returns to New York and to Tom Colt for comfort, but he turns against her instead, leaving her to go on alone.

After these events, January nevertheless learns that she has inherited $3 million from her father's insurance policy to begin a new life for herself. When she goes to tell the news to Linda, she finds Linda angry and distraught for she was just fired from her job after having sex with her boss who used her. Realizing that nothing is perfect in life, not even in her own way, January is left all alone wondering the streets of New York after dark, but with hope that tomorrow will be a better day.

Tomorrow :  Love -  Hope – Dream .  

Though both Jacqueline Susann’s book and movie considered to be once is enough or only a hit with the lurid fiction lovers, the cravings for student life is desired by one and all for an extension. 


 
                   

                     
My best is yet to come and eager to embrace tomorrow to accomplish the dream is the hope for most of us.  The adolescent age is free of family responsibilities and an extension of the same is much in demand.   Let’s all sing in the same breath as  Lobo …..“give me another chance to grow up once again”.

When we enjoy a week-end we don’t like the Monday to come, likewise we don’t want to end our student life which we enjoy singing and dancing in the paradise of youth amongst flowers and fragrances. 

Tomorrow is another day, make it count…’cause once is not enough…!!