Wallflower at the Orgy

by Nora Ephron

  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.

  There was a time when Rod McKuen might modestly have agreed with Shapiro. Ten years or so ago, when he was scrounging in New York, living on West Fifty-fifth Street with Sloopy the cat and trying to make ends meet, McKuen might gladly have admitted to being just a songwriter. Even recently, after only two of his books had appeared, he told a reporter, “I’m not a poet—I’m a stringer of words.” But then it happened: the early success mushroomed. “I don’t think it’s irrelevant to speak of me as a poet,” McKuen says today. “If I can sell five million books of poetry, I must be a poet.” Three million, Rod. “If my poetry can be taught in more than twenty-five hundred colleges, seminaries and high schools throughout the United States, if it can be hailed in countries throughout the world as something important, I must be a poet. In France, one newspaper wrote, ‘Rod McKuen is the best poet America has to offer and we should listen to him and mark him well.’ ”

  The saga of Rod McKuen and his rise to the top is a story so full of bad times and hard knocks that it almost serves as a parody of such tales. Rodney Marvin John Michael James McKuen was born in 1933 in a Salvation Army Hospital in Oakland, California. His mother was a dime-a-dance girl; his father deserted her just before their son was born and McKuen has never met him. “I remember hearing children/ in the street outside.…/ They had their world/ I had my room/ I envied them only/ for the day long sunshine/ of their lives/ and their fathers./ Mine I never knew.”

  McKuen’s mother, Clarice, worked as a barmaid, scrubbed floors and operated a switchboard to pay bills. Then she married his stepfather, who drove tractors to level dirt for highways; the family moved from one construction site to the next in California and Nevada. “My stepfather used to get drunk and come home in the middle of the night and yank me out of bed and beat me up,” McKuen recalled. “That was kind of traumatic.”

  At eleven, McKuen dropped out of school and went to work as a lumberjack, ditchdigger, ranch hand, shoe salesman and cookie puncher. At fifteen, he received his first serious rejection from a young lady. At eighteen, he became a disc jockey with San Francisco’s station KROW, dispensing advice to the lovelorn. After a stint in Korea writing psychological-warfare material for radio, he returned to San Francisco and was booked into the Purple Onion. A screen test followed and in the mid-Fifties he worked at Universal on such films as Rock, Pretty Baby and Summer Love. In what must have been a move of some distinction, he walked out on the filming of The Haunted House on Hot Rod Hill. For his film career, McKuen had a dermabrasian, which partially removed his adolescent acne scars; he also has a long scar across his chin, the result of an automobile accident.

  In 1959 McKuen moved to New York and before beginning to compose music for the CBS Television Workshop, he sold blood for money and crashed parties for food. Then in 1961, after the CBS job folded, he helped compose a rock song called Oliver Twist, which was noteworthy mainly in that it rhymed “chickens” with “Dickens.” When no one famous could be found to record it, Rod did it himself; when the record took off, he began touring the country with a back-up group (he does not play a musical instrument and has only recently learned formal composition). As Mr. Oliver Twist he played Trude Heller’s, the Copacabana lounge, and did a twelve-week tour of bowling alleys around the country. “He was a pretty big act,” said his then-manager Ron Gittman. “He wasn’t your Ricky Nelson or your Everly Brothers, but he pulled people.” The constant performing six nights a week proved too much for McKuen’s voice: his vocal cords swelled, he could not speak, and after six weeks in bed the old tenor voice was gone and a new froggy one had emerged.

  McKuen moved back to Los Angeles, played the Troubadour, and continued to set his lyrics to the simple music he composed in his head. In 1965 he opened at The Bitter End and was praised by The New York Times and compared to Charles Aznavour and Jacques Brel. Eddy Arnold, Johnny Cash and Glenn Yarbrough began to record his songs of love and loneliness. The market had changed. “In the Fifties and early Sixties there were formulas,” said rock publicist Connie de Nave, who handled Rod when he was doing the Oliver Twist. “Your group wore certain colors, sweaters over pants, their hair had to be well-groomed, no smoking or drinking onstage. In the mid-Sixties suddenly the individual could wear what he wanted. He didn’t have to spend $18,000 on arrangements for nightclub acts. All the outlets where Rod had to do the Oliver Twist died. The college market began. The change made things ripe for Rod. Before lyrics had been simple and uncomplicated. Now they wanted depth. No one could come out and go, ‘Oo, wa, oo wa.’ You came out with your stool and you sang, and you didn’t even have to sing that great. You just had to feel. And as Rod was growing, the market came around.”

  Stanyan Street and Other Sorrows, McKuen’s first book of poetry and songs, was an accidental by-product of a Glenn Yarbrough recording. When requests about the song began to pour into the record company, McKuen decided to publish a book containing it. With his own money, he paid for the printing, stored the books in his garage, and put the covers on and mailed them out in Jiffy bags. “I was very unsophisticated about it,” McKuen recalled. “I didn’t know what sort of discount you gave bookstores. I made them all pay cash and pay in advance. We had no salesmen, so I called the telephone company and got the yellow pages of all the major cities. We sent mailers to every bookstore. I knew people were asking for it and it wasn’t listed in Publishers’ Weekly or the guide to books. No one knew where it was from or how to get it.” In a year, Stanyan Street so
ld 60,000 copies—about 120 times what the average book of poetry sells in a lifetime. Random House took over the distribution, signed McKuen to his next book, and gave him a Mercedes-Benz.

  Today Rod McKuen lives in a thirty-room house on a hill facing Beverly Hills, which has a pool, orange trees, four in help, several sheepdogs and cats, and a barbershop for Rod and his streaky blond hair. He spends about half the year on the road and in Europe; he has an illegitimate son in France whom he sees frequently. When he is in Los Angeles, he rarely leaves his house except for a recording session or a trip to his office on Sunset Boulevard. “I have about fifteen people who work for me there,” said McKuen. “I don’t like to think they work for me. They work with me.”

  McKuen is sitting now in the music room of his house. He is wearing a yellow pullover sweater and the ever-present sneakers and Levi’s and he is talking about the return to romance he feels the country is in the midst of. “I paved the way for Erich Segal,” he says. “It’s been my strange lot to have preceded all sorts of things for some time now. I told everybody that folk music was going to come in very big three years before it happened and nobody believed me and of course it did happen. And I went around telling people there was going to be a romantic revival and nobody believed that either. I think it’s a reaction people are having against so much insanity in the world. I mean, people are really all we’ve got. You know it sounds kind of corny and I suppose it’s a cliché, but it’s really true, that’s just the way it is.”