All This, and Terence Too

"It's awfully short. It's unabashedly sentimental. But before the end I cried and cried and cried--for 45 minutes. Then I washed my face and finished the book." That about sums up what anyone might say after reading Love Story. But coming from the book's author, it is more of a surprise.

Author Erich Segal is 32, and a classics professor at Yale. But he is also a calculating purveyor of tears. He figured that he had to make women cry if the book was going to take off at all, but he is delighted that men cry too. "I can give you a list." he says gleefully, "of all the guys at the New York Times who cried over my book."

The object of all this compassion is Love Story's heroine, Jenny Cavilleri. She is only a baker's daughter from Cranston, R.T., but her brains got her into Radcliffe, where she catches the eye of Oliver Barrett IV, scion of generations of Bostonian bluebloods. When they marry, OIlie is cut off by his father, struggles through his law-school years, finally lands a good job with a Wall Street firm. Then Jenny dies of leukemia. OIlie falls into his father's arms and--that's right--cries.

To the Bone. The book's main charm, and it is considerable, is the character of Jenny. She is brash, forthright and funny. When OIlie gets pompous she calls him "Preppie." When he reaches for a martyr's mantle, she points out that he is probably in love with her "negative social status." Says Segal: "I call it to-the-bone truth. She sees through him, as true love does."

Jenny's vocabulary includes a sprinkling of four-letter words, but there is no explicit sex in the novel. In the age of Portnoy's Complaint and The Adventurers, Segal worried that the omission might even keep the book from being published. "I thought people would say, 'Why, Segal can't even write a sex scene.' But my commitment to my characters overrode my ego and my commercial sense. Two is love. Four--adding the writer and the reader--is an orgy."

It is Segal's luck that his chaste romance turned out to be just what Middle America was yearning for. Love Story now tops the bestseller list and Segal is deluged by offers for movies, plays and more books. But he bridles at any suggestion that he is some kind of Wunderkind. "I worked and learned from flop to flop. Everything I've got has been a hassle."

He is equal to nearly any hassle. He has so much energy that he runs ten miles a day to burn off the excess. He does not drink, eats at what he calls "the antipodes of the day," and works like a Trojan the rest of the time.

Double Duty. The son of a New York rabbi, he graduated from Brooklyn's Midwood High, where Woody Allen was a contemporary. Then came Harvard and graduate school and the first of the flops. It was called Sing Muse, a spoof on the classics that Segal was teaching, and it was written as a Harvard house musical. It was good enough to attract an off-Broadway producer, but outside the congenial connnes of the academic atmosphere it lasted only 39 performances

Thereafter Segal pursued two careers --one as a classics scholar, the other as a show-biz writer and lyricist He acquired an agent, Sylvia Hersher who got him an awesome line of trivial jobs being a play nurse if not a play doctor. "I was the guy who came in when all the percentages were gone. Sylvia would say, 'I've got this kid you can have for $50 and you don't even have to pay him the $50.' But I acquired ars et in-genium--that's Horace."

The Segal saga goes on with scarcely a hitch. "The phone rings. I'm just finishing my Euripides book. It's Big Al Brodax, producer of The Yellow Submarine, begging me to come to London. The script is terrible, and the Beatles are retiring to Ringo's house to meditate their way to a better script All that fall I teach three classes at Yale on Thursday, board Pan Am Flight 2 to London, run around Hyde Park twice, and go right to the studio Fantastic."

And Next. Segal's apprenticeship had finally paid off. Yellow Submarine was a critical and popular success. In addition to the movie version of Love Story, which will star his old friend Ali MacGraw, he has completed scripts for 20th Century-Fox's The Games about runners, and Stanley Kramer's R.P.M., which features Anthony Quinn as a college professor on a rebellious campus. He is working on a play for Broadway called Still Life which he describes as "something between Harold Pinter and Neil Simon." Then, in his scholarly persona, he is finishing an extensive treatise on the Roman playwright Terence.

Though his writing has made him rich, he plans to go on teaching and translating. "I know the works I teach are more important than the ones I write," he says. He appears to have enough drive and discipline to handle both careers. A bachelor, he lives quietly in a flat in Ezra Stiles College at Yale. He has no plans to marry now. The last girl told him he loved his schedule more than he loved her, and Segal knows a to-the-bone truth when he hears one.

What is Segal running so hard to achieve? He likes to answer by quoting Catullus: "Satis superque--enough and then some."

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