Wallflower at the Orgy (12 page)

Exactly what has made
Love Story
so phenomenally successful is something of a mystery. There are theories, but none of them fully explains what happened. Yes, it makes readers cry. Yes, it has nothing whatsoever to do with life today and encourages people to believe the world has not changed. Yes, as Segal points out, the book has almost no description; people tend to read themselves into it. And yes, it has come at a time when young people are returning to earlier ways. As the critic for Yale’s
New Journal
pointed out:

“Segal has perceived that the revolution we all talk of being in the midst of is in large part a romantic one, a movement not so much forward as backward, away from technology and organization and toward nature and people.…
Love Story
is a trick, a joke, a pun on those among us to whom an alliance with the fortyish-matron set would be anathema. Segal has tricked us into reading a novel about youth today that has little sex, no drugs, and a tear-jerking ending; and worse, he has made us love it, ponder it, and feel it to be completely contemporary. We are, deep down, no better than the sentimental slobs who sit under the hair dryers every Friday afternoon. It’s all the same underneath. Segal has our number.”

When
Love Story
was first published, Segal himself seemed to possess a measure of self-deprecation. He admitted that his book was banal and cliché-ridden. But as time
went on, he began to relax, the self-deprecation turned to false humility, and he took his success seriously. He acknowledged in a recent interview that he might well be the F. Scott Fitzgerald of his generation. He says that he has been compared to Dostoyevsky. He claims that his novel is in the tradition of the
roman nouveau
developed in France by Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute. He implies that people who hate his book are merely offended by its success. When
Love Story
took off in France, he called an associate long distance and said, “We are no longer a movement. We are a religion.”

Can you blame him? Can you honestly say that you would have reacted any differently to such extraordinary success? Three, four years ago Erich Segal was just another academic with show-biz connections. “I lived for the day I would see my name in
Variety,”
he recalled. He was born in Brooklyn in 1937, the eldest son of a well-known New York rabbi who presided over a Reform synagogue but kept a kosher home. “He dominated me,” said Segal. “From the time I was the littlest boy I wanted to be a writer. My mother says that when I was two I used to dictate epic dramas to her. I believe her. I used to dictate tunes to my music teacher. I was that kind of spoiled child. But I came from a nice Jewish family. What kind of job was it being a writer? There was no security. My father wanted me to be a professional person.” Rabbi Segal sent his son to Yeshiva, made him take Latin, and insisted he attend night classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan after he finished track practice at Midwood High School in Brooklyn. “I was always odd man out,” said Segal. “It is true that I ended Midwood as president of the school and won the Latin prize, but those were isolated. What kind of social life could I have had? I spent my life on the subway.”

At Harvard, which he attended because his father told him to, Erich was salutatorian and class poet. He ran every year in the Boston marathon and ran every day to keep in shape—a practice he continues. He also wrote two musicals, one of which had a short run Off-Broadway, and performed in the Dunster Dunces, a singing group that often sang a Segal original,
Winter is the Time to Snow Your Girl
. Despite his activity, he always reminded his friends not of Larry Hart but of Noel Airman. (The influence of
Marjorie Morningstar
on Jewish adolescents in the 1950s has yet to be seriously acknowledged.)

Segal got his Ph.D. in comparative literature and began teaching at Yale, where no one took his show-business talk much more seriously than they had at Harvard. Yes, Erich was collaborating with Richard Rodgers, but the show never got off the ground. Yes, Erich had a credit on
Yellow Submarine
, but how much of that was writing anyway? And then came
Love Story
. Script first. Erich’s agents didn’t even want to handle it. Howard Minsky, who decided to produce it, received rejections from every major studio. Then Ali McGraw committed herself to it, Paramount bought it, and Erich started work on the novel, the slender story of a poor Catholic girl named Jenny who marries a rich WASP named Oliver and dies after several idyllic, smart-talking, poverty-stricken years.

Not a single eye was dry, everybody had to cry. Even Erich Segal burst into tears when he wrote it. “In this very room,” Segal said one day in his living room at Yale, “in that very chair at that very typewriter. When I got to the end of the book, it really hit me. I said, ‘Omigod,’ and I came and sat in that very chair and I cried and I cried and I cried. And I said to myself, ‘All right, Segal, hold thyself. Why are you
crying? I don’t understand why you are crying. When was the last time you cried?’ And I said, ‘The only time I’ve cried in my adult life was at my father’s funeral.’ Now it’s stretching a lot to make any kind of connection whatsoever. So I finally concluded, after all the honesty I could muster after forty-five minutes of crying and introspection, that I was crying for Jenny. I mean, I really was crying for Jenny. I got up and wiped my face and finished the thing.”

Segal’s apartment, in a Saarinen-designed dormitory, is a simply furnished, messy one filled with copies of
Variety
, unopened mail, and half-packed suitcases—Segal is rarely at Yale more than three or four days a week. He spends the rest of his time on promotion tours or in conference in Hollywood. (Two other Segal scripts have been produced:
The Games
, about marathon runners, and
R.P.M.
, about a campus revolt.) His icebox has nothing in it but yogurt, and Segal is relaxing in his living room, eating a container of the stuff and saying that he is happy with the lecture on
Phaedra
he delivered that morning because it convinced one of his students that Hippolytus was in fact a tragic hero. Student opinion of Segal at Yale ranges from those who dislike his book and his huckstering to those who rather like it and envy him for his success in what is referred to in cloistered environments as the real world. But most agree that whatever failings Segal has as a personality are overcome by his ability as a teacher. He teaches classics with great verve—in suede pants, he paces back and forth onstage, waves his hands, speaks quickly, gulps down a cup of coffee a student has given him, and generates enormous excitement. Segal has written several scholarly works, one a book on Plautus called
Roman Laughter
.

“It’s a tremendous relief to be able to walk into a classroom and speak freely,” Segal is saying. “I don’t mean your
mind. I mean your vocabulary. I don’t go in for Buckleyish sesquipedalian terms, but I do go in for
le mot juste
. Even to be able to say, ‘Aristotelian catharsis’.… On a podium, if I said that, they’d say who is this pompous bastard. This to me is a normal way of speaking. This is the existence whence I emanate. This is the way I really am.” But if this is the way you really are, Erich, who is that traveling around the country delivering those speeches? And why?

“What am I going to say to them?” he replies. “I don’t know. I had to sell books. I mean, do you know what I mean? I’m embarrassed but I’m not sorry, because the end justifies the means, you know. Three or four
yentas
who buy the book will get it to the readers who have never bought a book before, and get the readership I really cherish, which is the readership of the young people.” He paused. “Do you think I was pandering to them?”

No. Not really. Because Erich Segal really believes in what he is saying, is really offended by sex in literature, is really glad he wrote
Love Story
instead of
Portnoy’s Complaint
, thinks that—however accidentally—he has stumbled onto something important. Don’t be fooled by the academic credentials: a man who can translate Ovid cannot be expected to know better—or know anything at all, for that matter—when it comes to his own work. “You see, I wrote the book in a kind of
faux naïf
style,” Segal explained. “And if you think it’s easy to write as simply as that, well, you’re wrong. But little did I know that I was creating a whole style that’s perfect for the Seventies. Let’s face it. Movies are the big thing now, and this is the style that’s right for the age of—as McLuhan called it—electronic literature. Writing should be shorthand, understated, no wasting time describing things. I had no idea that I was solving the whole
problem of style this way. But I like it. I’m going to keep it for all my other novels.” Can you blame him?

It is a well-dressed, well-behaved group, this crowd of young men and women, lots of young women, who are waiting patiently in Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., for the concert to begin. You won’t see any of your freaks here, no sir, any of your tie-dye people, any of your long-haired kids in jeans lighting joints. This is middle America. The couples are holding hands, nuzzling, sitting still, waiting like well-brought-up young people are supposed to, and here he is, the man they’ve been waiting for, Rod McKuen. Let’s have a nice but polite round of applause for Rod, in his Levi’s and black sneakers. You won’t see any of your crazy groupies here, squealing and jumping onstage and trying for a grab at the performer’s parts. No sir. Here they are not groupies but fans, and they carry Instamatics with flash attachments and line up afterward with every one of Rod’s books for him to autograph. The kids you never hear about. They love the Beatles, they love Dylan, but they also love Rod. “He’s so sensitive,” one young man explains. “I just hope that he reads a lot of his poetry tonight.”

They want to hear the poetry. They gasp in expectation when he picks up a book and flips it open in preparation. And onstage, about to give them what they want in his gravelly voice (“It sounds like I gargle with Dutch Cleanser,” he says), is America’s leading poet and Random House’s leading author. “I’ve sold five million books of poetry since 1967,” says Rod, “but who’s counting?” As a matter of fact, Random House is counting and places the figure at three million. Nevertheless, it is a staggering figure—and the
poetry is only the beginning. There are records of Rod reciting his poetry, records of Rod’s music, records of Rod singing Rod’s lyrics to Rod’s music, records of Rod’s friends singing Rod’s songs—much of this on records produced by Rod’s record company. There are the concerts, television specials, film sound tracks and a movie company formed with Rock Hudson. There are the Stanyan Books, a special line of thirty-one books Rod publishes and Random House distributes, with
Caught in the Quiet
its biggest seller, followed by
God’s Greatest Hits
, compiled from the moments He speaks in the Bible. McKuen’s income can be conservatively estimated at $3,000,000 a year.

That literary critics and poets think nothing whatsoever of McKuen’s talent as a poet matters not a bit to his followers, who are willing to be as unabashedly soppy as their bard and are not, in any event, at all rigid in their distinctions between song lyrics and poetry. “I’m often hit by critics and accused of being overly sentimental,” Rod is saying to his concert audience. “To those critics I say tough. Because I write about boys and girls and men and women and summer and spring and winter and fall and love and hate. If you don’t write about those things there isn’t much to write about.” And now Rod will read a poem. “This poem,” he says, “is about a marvelous cat I once knew.…”

McKuen’s poetry also covers—in addition to the subjects he lists above—live dogs, lost cats, freight trains, missed connections, one-night stands, remembered loved ones and remembered streets, and loneliness. The poem about the cat, which is among his most famous, concerns a faithful feline named Sloopy who deserted McKuen after he stayed out too late one night with a woman. Her loss brings the poet to the following conclusion:
“Looking back/ perhaps she’s been/
the only human thing/ that ever gave back love to me.”
McKuen’s poetry, which he reads to background instrumental accompaniment, is a kind of stream-of-consciousness free verse filled with mundane images (“raped by Muzak in an elevator,” for example) and with adjectives used as nouns (“listen to the warm,” “caught in the quiet,” etc.). A recent McKuen parody in the
National Lampoon
sums up his style as well as anything; it begins,
“The lone$ome choo choo of my mind/ i$ warm like drippy treacle$/ on the wind$wept beach.”

Occasionally McKuen can be genuinely piquant and even witty.
“I wrote Paul this morning/ after reading his poem,/ I told him
, it’s okay to drop your pants/ to old men sometimes/but I wouldn’t recommend it/ as a way of life.
I didn’t mail the letter.”
But for the most part, McKuen’s poems are superficial and platitudinous and frequently silly. “It is irrelevant to speak of McKuen as a poet,” says Pulitzer prize winning poet Karl Shapiro.