Once Is Not Enough (film)

Plot

In the film version, Mike Wayne (Kirk Douglas) is a middle-aged 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 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 capital, Mike enters into a loveless marriage with Deidre Milford Granger (Alexis Smith), one of the world's wealthiest women. She has already been through multiple marriages and demands that things be done her way. She also is secretly carrying on a lesbian affair. January is devastated to learn that Mike is now wed to this rude, arrogant woman.

Deidre attempts to draw January into a relationship with her cousin David Milford (George Hamilton), a ladies' man who also usually gets his own way. He finally persuades 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 friend, Linda Riggs (Brenda Vaccaro), now a magazine editor, to author a book. 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 Tom Colt (David Janssen), a hard-drinking, impotent novelist who is an adversary of her father's.

Mike bitterly resents the affair. He punches Colt upon catching January in a Beverly Hills hotel bungalow with him. Mike orders his daughter to make a choice between them, and Colt gives her the same ultimatum. She chooses her lover.

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

The novel includes much more drug use and sexual content, and has quite a different ending. After the events of the film transpire, January tries acid and partakes in an orgy. She then wanders onto the beach where she hallucinates that she sees her father and walks into the ocean after him, presumably drowning.

In the film version's ending, January learns that she has inheritated $3 million from her father's insurance policy to begin a new life for herself. When she goes to tell the good 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 Manhattan after dark, but with hope that tomorrow will be a better day.

Cast