"UNA VEZ NO BASTA" (ONCE IS NOT ENOUGH) - THE SPANISH MOVIE - "JANUARY" & JAQUELINE 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 that the life cycle of predecessors from time immemorial, including prehistoric, Vedic, and mythological eras, has shrouded human life 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 the hope that tomorrow will be a better day and crave another day of life.

 

 

One can’t help but sing like Lobo in the 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 are expected out of a teenager or from a student. A person, when he becomes the breadwinner as well as a responsible family man, wishes that student life had never ended.

In 1975, when the movie “Once Is Not Enough” was released, the heroine’s name, “January,” was inspired by the calendar month and caught 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 storyline 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 were known for, including that of the Hippies. However, due to the innovations and inventions that followed, as well as the shift in culture towards modernity, its charm was lost. This may be due to the human tendency to compare the outdated immediate past—namely, the last few decades—with the present. However, one must admit that many vintage classics continue to portray human life without losing their 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, Pennsylvania, United States. She died in 1974 after having spent 7 weeks in a 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 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, published in over 30 languages.

 

 

Jacqueline Susann’s novel “Once Is Not Enough” was published in 1973 and adapted into a blockbuster motion picture in 1975, also titled “Once Is Not Enough.” The movie was also released with a Spanish title.

 

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

 

 

Along with Harold Robbins, Susann ruled the world of mainstream fiction in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and like Robbins, she has been mostly forgotten in recent years. However, 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 Susann. The 500 pages could have easily been summarized to 150 pages, and others are just monotonous pulp fiction. The Mallu writer of the ‘60s & ‘70s, “Muttathu Varkey” was comparable to Harold Robbins for the number of pages of pulp fiction written, which would have been easily abridged to 1/3rd 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 praiseworthy to examine the love of a dad and daughter in Jacqueline Susann’s novel “Once Is Not Enough”. A dad always wanted to gift her the best in the world, and for her 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 appears to have walked out of a category romance. January Wayne is our hero, and despite being in her early 20s at the height of the free love era, she possesses 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 give way to the '70s, and the world changes in numerous ways, though January is unaware of this. When she can finally walk again and leaves the clinic, she finds the world vastly different than the one she knew.

 

 

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 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 run by an old school friend named Lisa. Really, though the novel plays out like a soap opera, 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 her 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 fashion, lives his roughneck, boozer lifestyle 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.

 

 

The UFO stuff is even better. Still frazzled on drugs, January goes to the beach and sees one in the night sky. Throughout 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 falls out of her sky-line apartment to be with him. And now he appears to her on the beach, beckoning her into the waves… possibly getting drowned…

 

 

The Spanish version of the movie was titled “Una Vez No Basta”. The movie duration 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 can no longer get a new Hollywood project.
 
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 a shrewd, bossy woman who has already been through multiple marriages and demands that things be done her way. She is also 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 also her nephew. David, too, usually gets his own way, finally persuading January to go 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's 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, even though he ill-treats her.
 
 

 

 

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, 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 wandering the streets of New York after dark, but with hope that tomorrow will be a better day.

 

 

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

 

 
                   

My best is yet to come, and to embrace tomorrow to accomplish dreams 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 weekend, we don’t want 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…!!