A complicated soap opera, Susan Slade features Connie Stevens as the title character, a naïve 17-year-old who is at a mountain resort in Alaska when she falls in love with a climber (Grant Williams). They have an affair, and she ends up pregnant, but her lover falls off Mount McKinley and dies. Her parents take her to Guatemala to have the child. The plan is that her mother Leah (Dorothy McGuire) will pretend that the child is hers upon their return to the U.S. a year later. Susan's father Roger (Lloyd Nolan) suffers a fatal heart attack while they are abroad. Mother and daughter return with the baby to San Francisco, where the son of Roger's boss, Wells Corbett (Bert Convy), proposes to Susan. She is also pursued by Hoyt Brecker (Troy Donahue), an aspiring novelist whose father committed suicide after embezzling funds from Corbett's father. When Susan's baby is badly burned in an accident, she admits that the child is hers and prepares to deal with the consequences of the previous statements she had made to her two suitors.