Wallflower at the Orgy (11 page)

The media have been calling it a return to romance, but of course the return is only on the part of the media. The rest of the country never went away. The poems of Kahlil Gibran and books like
A Friend Is Someone Who Likes You
and
Happiness Is A Warm Puppy
have been selling hundreds of thousands of copies in recent years. Heart-shaped satin boxes of chocolate candy, single red American Beauty roses, record albums by Mantovani and the George Melachrino Strings, rhinestone hearts on silver chains—all of it sells to the multitudes out there.

What has changed, however, is that sentimentality is now being peddled by people who seem to lend it an aura of cultural respectability. Take Rod McKuen and Erich Segal. Both of them have hit the jackpot in the romance business: one is a poet, the other a professor. And each thinks of himself as much more than the mush-huckster he is. McKuen, the author of five slim volumes of sentimental poetry and countless songs, is the fastest-selling poet in America; Segal is the author of
Love Story
, which has sold almost 500,000 copies in hard cover, had the largest paperback first printing (4,350,000 copies) in history, and is on the way to being the weepiest and most successful film ever made. All of it is treacle, pure treacle, with a message that is perfect escapism to a country in the throes of future shock: the world has not changed, the old values prevail, kids are the same as ever, love is just like they told us in the movies. This optimism comes in nice small packages that allow for the slowest reader with the shortest concentration span and the smallest vocabulary.

To lump Segal and McKuen together here is not to say that they know each other—they don’t—or that their work is alike. But there are some disarming similarities. Both appeal primarily to women and teen-age girls. Both are bachelors who enjoy referring to themselves as loners. Both belong to professions that rarely lead to commercial success. Both have the habit of repeating compliments others have paid them, and both do it in a manner that is so blatant it almost seems ingenuous. Segal, for instance, speaking on the prototype of his book’s heroine: “JENNY exists and knows she is the inspiration for one of the strongest feminine figures in modern literature—honest to God, that’s really what one critic wrote.” Or McKuen: “There are a lot of people who
take potshots at me because they feel I’m not writing like Keats or Eliot. And yet I’ve been compared to both of them. So figure that out.”

More important, both of them have hit on a formula so slick that it makes mere sentimentality have the force of emotion. Their work is instantly accessible and comprehensible; and when the reader is moved by it, he assumes that it must be art. As a result, Segal and McKuen, each of whom started out rather modest about his achievement, have become convinced that they must be doing something not just right but important. Can you blame them? The money rolls in. The mail arrives by the truckload. The critics outside New York are enthusiastic. And to those who aren’t, Segal and McKuen fall back on sheer numbers. Millions of people have read and loved their work. The stewardess on American Airlines Flight No. 2 from Los Angeles to New York loves every bit of it. “I’m so sick of all the crap in the world,” she says. “All the killings, the violence, the assassinations. This one getting it. That one getting it. I don’t want to read any more about that kind of thing. Romanticism is here to stay.” She really said it. Honest.

I am a big crybaby. I want to tell you that before I tell you anything at all about Erich Segal. I cry at almost everything. I cry when I watch
Marcus Welby, M.D
. on television or when I see movies about funny-looking people who fall in love. Any novel by Dickens sets me off. Dogs dying in the arms of orphans, stories of people who are disabled but ultimately walk/see/hear or speak, having something fall on my foot when I am in a hurry, motion pictures of President Kennedy smiling, and a large number of very silly films (particularly
one called
The West Point Story
) will work me into a regular saltwater dither.

One other thing about me before I begin. I love trash. I have never believed that kitsch kills. I tell you this so you will understand that my antipathy toward
Love Story
is not because I am immune either to sentimentality or garbage—two qualities the book possesses in abundance. When I read
Love Story
(and I cried, in much the same way that I cry from onions, involuntarily and with great irritation), I was deeply offended—a response I never have, for example, with Jacqueline Susann novels. It was not just that the book was witless, stupid and manipulative. It was that I suspected that unlike Miss Susann, Segal knew better. I was wrong to think that, as it happened. I was fooled by his academic credentials. The fact is that
Love Story
is Erich Segal at the top of his form; he knows no better and can do no better. I know that now. I know that I should no longer be offended by the book. And I’m not. What is it that I’m offended by? Perhaps you will begin to see as we go along.

“Dear Mr. Segal: I realize that you are a busy man but I must tell you something that will probably make you inspired and honored. This past summer a very dear friend of mine passed away. She was seventeen and hardly ever unhappy or sad. Leslie had read your book. Not once but three times. She loved it so much. It was funny but everyone related
Love Story
with Leslie. She cried and said the story was so beautiful and realistic. When she was buried a copy of your book was placed next to her.… I wish you knew her. She was so unpredictable. That’s what life is. She had an instant heart failure, and thank G-d she didn’t suffer. I hope you don’t think I’m a foolish college kid. I felt any person who could capture young hearts and old must be sensitive to life.”

That is a typical letter plucked out of a large pile of mail on Erich Segal’s desk. There are thousands more, from old ladies who say they haven’t cried that hard since the Elsie Dinsmore books, from young girls who want to interview Erich for their high-school papers, from young men who have read the book and want to go to Harvard and play hockey and marry a girl who has leukemia. The mail has been coming in in sacks since about Valentine’s Day, 1970 (
Love Story
was published ten days before). The reviews of the book were exultant. The movie is now on the way to being the biggest film in history. And what has happened to Erich Segal as a result of all this? “I always was the way I am,” he says, “only I was less successful at it. The difference being that people used to think I was an idiot ass-hole dilettante and now—you can find a nice adjective.” Yes, Erich was always this way, only now he is more so. You can find a nice adjective.

“Erich, Erich, you’re so pale,” shouts Mrs. Jessie Rhine, a lady from Brooklyn, as Erich Segal, the rabbi’s son, signs an autograph for her and rumples his curly black hair and stubs his toe and rolls his big brown eyes. His aw-shucks thing. Mrs. Rhine loves it, loves Erich, loves his book, and she would very much like to slip him the name of her niece except that there is this huge group of ladies, there must be a hundred of them, who are also surrounding Erich and trying to slip him the names of
their
nieces. The ladies have just heard Erich give a speech to eleven hundred New York women at the Book and Author Luncheon at the Waldorf-Astoria. Robert Ardrey, the anthropologist, who also spoke at the luncheon, is hanging around Erich, trying to soak up some of the attention, but it
does no good. The ladies want Erich and they are all asking him where they can get a copy of his speech.

Erich’s speech. Erich has been giving his speech for months on the book-and-author circuit and he has found that it works. The audience especially responds to the way Erich’s speech praises
Love Story
at the expense of
Portnoy’s Complaint
and then rises to a crescendo in a condemnation of graphic sex in literature. “Have you any doubt,” Segal asks the ladies, “what happened between Romeo and Juliet on their wedding night?” The ladies have no doubt. “Would you feel any better if you had seen it?” No, eleven hundred heads shake, no. “Fortunately,” Segal concludes, “Shakespeare was neither curious nor yellow.” Wild applause. Everyone loves Erich’s speech. Everyone, that is, but Pauline Kael, the film critic, who heard an earlier version of Erich’s speech at a book-and-author luncheon in Richmond, Virginia, and told him afterward that he was knocking freedom of speech and sucking up to his audience. To which Erich replied, “We’re here to sell books, aren’t we?”

The phenomenon of the professor as performer is not a new one: many teachers thrive on exactly the kind of idolatry that characterizes groupies and middle-aged lady fans. Still, there has never been an academician quite as good as Erich at selling books, quite as … you can find a nice adjective. He checks in with his publicists once or twice a day. Is everything being done that could be? What about the Carson show? What about running the Canby review again? What about using Christopher Lehmann-Haupt’s quote in the ad? Is this anecdote right for Leonard Lyons? “I’ve been in this business fourteen years and Erich is the closest thing to what a publicist’s dream would be,” says Harper & Row’s Stuart Harris. “All authors feel they have to make a publicity
tour, but they don’t know how to do it. Erich knows. He knows how to monopolize the time on a talk show without being obvious.
I
would know he’s obvious,
you
would know he’s obvious, but millions listening in don’t know. So many authors don’t know how to say anything about their books. They’re shy. Erich knows how to do it without being blatant. He had to make a speech the week he was number one on the
Time
magazine best-seller list. He wanted to get that over to the audience, that it was number one, so he got up and began, ‘I just flew down and made three stops. Every time the plane landed, I got off and went to the newsstand and bought
Time
magazine to see if I was still number one on the best-seller list.’ The audience adored it.”

We’re here to sell books, aren’t we?
Yes indeed. And Erich knows that every book counts. One night in a restaurant, an out-of-town couple shyly approached Segal and asked him to autograph a menu for a neighbor who had loved his book. “Why a menu?” Segal asked. Because, the couple explained, it was all they had. “I’ll tell you what,” said Segal. “There’s a bookstore around the corner that’s still open. Go in and buy a copy of
Love Story
, bring it back, and I’ll autograph that.”

Erich has been around the country several times, giving his speech, talking about his book, never letting the conversation wander away from its proper focus. “My novel,
Love Story
, and Paramount’s film of it mark, I believe, the turning point in the morals of the younger generation.” Erich said that in New York several weeks after publication. Note how it is self-aggrandizing, but in the cause of public morality. Note how it is reassuring to older people. Note the way the name of the book is plunked into the sentence, along with a plug for the film and a plug for the film studio. Erich got so carried away with slipping these little factual details into his
sentences that Jacqueline Susann, who is no slouch herself in the self-aggrandizement department, felt called upon to advise him against it. “Every time you mention the book’s name,” she told him, “you don’t really have to add that it’s number one on the best-seller list.”