Erich Segal Love Story
Bharath Capelle
That she was beautiful. And brilliant. That she loved Mozart and Bach. And the Beatles. And me. Once, when she specifically lumped me with those musical types, I asked her what the order was, and she replied, smiling, "Alphabetical." At the time I smiled too. But now I sit and wonder whether she was listing me by my first name -- in which case I would trail Mozart -- or by my last name, in which case I would edge in there between Bach and the Beatles. Either way I don't come first, which for some stupid reason bothers hell out of me, having grown up with the notion that I always had to be number one. Family heritage, don't you know?
In the fall of my senior year, I got into the habit of studying at the Radcliffe library. Not just to eye the cheese, although I admit that I liked to look. The place was quiet, nobody knew me, and the reserve books were less in demand. The day before one of my history hour exams, I still hadn't gotten around to reading the first book on the list, an endemic Harvard disease. I ambled over to the reserve desk to get one of the tomes that would bail me out on the morrow. There were two girls working there. One a tall tennis-anyone type, the other a bespectacled mouse type. I opted for Minnie Four-Eyes.
Christ, a superior-being type! The kind who think since the ratio of Radcliffe to Harvard is five to one, the girls must be five times as smart. I normally cut these types to ribbons, but just then I badly needed that goddamn book.
Let me explain why I took her for coffee. By shrewdly capitulating at the crucial moment -- i.e., by pretending that I suddenly wanted to -- I got my book. And since she couldn't leave until the library closed, I had plenty oftime to absorb some pithy phrases about the shift of royal dependence from cleric to lawyer in the late eleventh century. I got an A minus on the exam, coincidentally the same grade I assigned to Jenny's legs when she first walked from behind that desk. I can't say I gave her costume an honor grade, however; it was a bit too Boho for my taste. I especially loathed that Indian thing she carried for a handbag. Fortunately I didn't mention this, as I later discovered it was of her own design.
In the pause that ensued, I gave inward thanks that she hadn't come up with the usual distressing question: "Barrett, like the hall?" For it is my special albatross to be related to the guy that built Barrett Hall, the largest and ugliest structure in Harvard Yard, a colossal monument to my family's money, vanity and flagrant Harvardism.
After that, she was pretty quiet. Could we have run out of conversation so quickly? Had I turned her off by not being related to the poet? What? She simply sat there, semi-smiling at me. For something to do, I checked out her notebooks. Her handwriting was curious -- small sharp little letters with no capitals (who did she think she was, e. e. cummings?). And she was taking some pretty snowy courses: Comp.Lit. 105, Music 150, Music 201 --
This was my first time reading Love Story by Erich Segal, a classic considered to be the embodiment of romance. I had the vague idea it would be a sweet, innocent clich of a book. Like its title, it would be the epitome of a sad love story with the heroine dying with her hero vowing to live on for her.
The author does not treat marriage lightly, either: another thing I respect about the book. It described the struggle of trying to make ends meet while keeping their friendships alive, the difficulty of keeping in touch with parents, sparking the first genuine fight between the couple. In doing so, Segal illustrates the kind of relationship that is imperfect yet beautiful, with all the love needed for a reconciliation afterward, no matter how intense a fight.
Above all, I think, as Francesca Segal put it in the introduction, Love Story contained a second love story: between father and son. The love of a father was expressed in two polar opposite ways through Phil Cavilleri and Oliver Barret III. The final reconciliation took place between a father and his son, closing the breach that had opened between them, the breach that Jenny had desperately wanted to bridge. This book was a love story between a man and a woman and between a family, the main reason I found it so unique and endearing. I now know why Love Story is so adored by the world.
Fifty years ago, a simple but tragic love story became a global sensation that stunned the entertainment industry. Love Story, the romantic tearjerker starring Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw, broke box office records and the book it was based on was a bestseller that was translated into more than 30 languages.
Erich Segal was 30 years old and a professor at Yale when he wrote the 131-page Love Story. The idea came when he learned that one of his former students was just 25 when he lost his wife to cancer. Oliver Barrett IV, played by Ryan O'Neal in the movie, is a sensitive, rich kid and a Harvard hockey player. The inspiration for Oliver has been the source of intrigue and even controversy. Segal said Oliver was partly modeled after Al Gore, but mostly after Tommy Lee Jones (who also has a part in the movie). Segal got to know both men when they were all students at Harvard together. Some years later, Segal said he modeled Oliver after Watergate investigator Terry Lenzner.
Jenny, played by MacGraw, is a sassy, working-class baker's daughter who goes to Radcliffe and works in the library. In 1970, Segal told The New York Times Jenny was modeled after a woman he dated while he was a student at Harvard.
They were gorgeous to look at as they frolic in the snow, argue, fall deeply in love and marry, despite the disapproval of Oliver's father. Just as they start a new life together, Jenny learns she has a fatal blood disease and dies. (Only in the book is the disease identified as leukemia.)
People flocked to see Love Story when it was released widely on Christmas Day, with numerous accounts of people waiting in long lines at the box office. Movie attendance had been down in 1970. The Los Angeles Times called Love Story a "phenomenon" that was a "boon" to the "embattled" studio Paramount and "evidence people ... still want to go to the movies in vast numbers." The film, directed by Arthur Hiller, was nominated for seven Oscars, winning one for Francis Lai's original score. It won five Golden Globes, including Best Drama and Best Actress and Actor for MacGraw and O'Neal respectively. MacGraw quickly became a fashion icon.
"I remember when I read it, of course dissolving in tears," says Phillips. "I read it to my boyfriend at the time, read it out loud to him, sobbing through the whole thing. We've now been married for 50 years." Phillips says her husband doesn't remember any of this. "So that's a blessing," she jokes.
As for Love Story's very famous, oft-ridiculed line, "Love means never having to say you're sorry," even MacGraw says she didn't know what it meant at the time. But now, years later, she finds truth in it: "Saying sorry isn't what it's about. It's about really feeling badly for the hurt ... and then absolutely trying never to do it again. So there's a lot of work more than, 'Gee, I'm sorry,' and then scooting outside to get on your bike and ride into the fall leaves or whatever."
MacGraw also lives with the many parodies Love Story inspired. Her personal favorite is by Carol Burnett and Harvey Korman. "Fabulous," says MacGraw. In an episode of The Simpsons, Homer and Marge are big fans of the movie and force their kids to watch it. They don't get it at all. When Bart hears the opening line, "What can you say about a 25-year-old girl who dies," he blurts out, "I say bury her before she starts to smell!" Homer and Marge are appalled.
Many a Simpson writer attended Harvard where Love Story was filmed and where it is still lampooned to this day. The school's Crimson Key Society puts on an annual, Rocky Horror-style screening for first-year students (this year's was canceled due to the pandemic). Older students dress up like hippies and heckle the screen from beginning to end. Junior Davis Bailey, president of the Crimson Key Society, says they make fun of everything about it. "Basically every ten seconds or so we have a line that, collectively or individually, some of us will shout out at the screen or we do something that we act out," says Bailey. "Because the movie is definitely very sappy."
Segal, the son of a rabbi, grew up in New York. While Love Story was embraced by the masses, Segal also wrote scholarly works on Plato and Plautus and his lectures at Yale were hugely popular. "Electrifying" is how one of his students, Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, described him. But in 1972, Segal was denied tenure at Yale. "It wasn't fair," Trudeau told the Yale Alumni Magazine in 2010, shortly after Segal's death, "but you can't dress up in tight leather pants to chat with starlets on Johnny Carson Friday night and expect to be taken seriously in a classroom Monday morning." Yale denies that the popular and commercial success of Segal's Love Story's had anything to do with its decision.
Francesca Segal says her father was, "for a long time, completely and absolutely devastated and heartbroken that he didn't make tenure at Yale." She believes one of the reasons Love Story touched so many people is because her father "didn't have a cynical bone in his body," and that he wrote from his heart.
Romance fiction writer Susan Elizabeth Phillips says critics back in 1970 had an aversion to just about anything that was embraced by the masses. "The fact that a work of art, which that book is, evokes this strong emotion was something that the literati at the time looked down on," says Phillips. "The experience was supposed to be cerebral. It wasn't supposed to be emotional."
If nothing else, Love Story is definitely emotional. Reviewing the film, Roger Ebert called it a "a three-, four-or five-handkerchief movie." Le Monde wrote it was the novel that "no one dared to write, but everyone was waiting to read."
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