December 2020 marked 50 years since the release of the film “Love Story” in December 1970. This film played a role in the burgeoning romance between me and the astonishing man who became my husband a few months later. I’ll call him Marv.
Part I
We waited in a long line outside the theater in chilly Westwood. The air was nothing like the frigid nighttime air that would have enveloped us in Chicago, or Boston, or Cleveland. But we were in LA, and for LA it was a chilly December night.
We didn’t mind waiting. We were too enthralled with each other, with Westwood, and with the prospect of seeing “Love Story” on the big screen.
I’d met Marv two months earlier at the Chancellor’s Reception on the UCLA campus. The reception was intended for faculty only, but the director of my legal-services support program at the law school was a member of the faculty, and he circulated his invitation to all of us working in the program.
I’d moved from Chicago in late August and was eager to meet new people in LA. The reception was taking place on a Sunday afternoon in October, and I decided to show up. I purposely wore my incredibly fetching black sleeveless miniskirt dress with bright red pockets and made my way to the campus under a radiant California sun.
I looked around. I didn’t know anyone there—I’d been in LA for only six weeks. I wandered over to the “cookie table” and was pondering which cookies to sample when a woman approached me. “Are you by yourself because you want to be, or would you like to meet some other people?” she asked.
I immediately responded that I’d like to meet other people, and she led me to a group of four men. She began by introducing her husband, a bearded middle-aged math professor, who was accompanied by three much younger men. As I glanced at the younger men, I instantly recognized one of them–a good-looking guy I’d seen around my apartment building near the campus.
The professor explained that these young men were there because they were new math faculty, and he asked me why I was there. I told him I was working at the law school. He then asked where I’d gone to law school. When I said Harvard, he turned to the good-looking guy and said, “Marv went to Harvard, too.”
Thus began my bond with Marv. We had Harvard in common.
I’d noticed Marv around our building but, as it turned out, he’d never noticed me. I’d seen him—alone—diving into the building’s small pool, and I’d seen him walking back and forth along a pathway that connected our apartment building (near the corner of Kelton and Gayley) to the campus. Sometimes he’d been smoking a pipe as he walked.
I sometimes wondered: How could he help noticing an adorable redhead like me? But I later decided it was just fine that he never noticed me because that meant he wasn’t noticing any other young women either.
Even later, I figured out why he’d been totally unaware of me. Whenever he was by himself–in this case, walking to and from campus by himself–he was thinking about math. Marv was a brilliant mathematician who almost never stopped thinking about math.
When we began talking at the Chancellor’s Reception, Marv discovered what I already knew—we lived in the same apartment building. He smiled a lot and let me know that he wanted to see me sometime.
Did I give him my phone number? I must have because a day or two later he called and asked me to go to dinner.
We agreed that I would meet him at his apartment and make our dinner plans there. So on Saturday night I walked a short distance from my apartment to his apartment on the same floor.
Marv and I had both searched for a studio apartment in Westwood at the same time. At the end of my search, I decided that I preferred the building on Kelton. Hoping to rent a relatively inexpensive studio there, I returned and learned that the last studio had just been rented. It turned out that the renter was Marv.
So, because someone (namely Marv) had just rented the last available studio in that building, I had to decide whether to rent a one-bedroom I could barely afford. It was a stretch for me, financially. But I decided to go ahead and rent it.
Destiny?
When he answered his door, Marv welcomed me and handed me a copy of a paperback book, “101 Nights in California.” We sat together on his sofa, looking through the book’s list of restaurants, along with their menus. “You pick wherever you want to go,” he said.
My jaw nearly dropped. It was 1970, and it was almost unimaginable that a man would say that to a brand new date, allowing her to choose the restaurant where they’d dine that night. I knew immediately that Marv just might be the right man for me. He was certainly unlike anyone I’d ever dated before.
I’d already dated some pretty good guys. But when men met me during my years at law school, or later learned that I was a lawyer, only the few who were immensely secure chose to date me. Others fell by the wayside.
Marv was completely secure and non-threatened by someone like me. He actually relished having a smart woman in his life. And that never changed.
That evening, I chose a French restaurant in Santa Monica called Le Cellier. How was our dinner there? In short, it was magical. We not only had a splendid French meal, but we also used our time together to learn a lot about each other. My hunch that Marv was possibly the perfect man for me was proving to be correct.
We proceeded to have one promising date after another. Dinner at Mario’s, a small Italian restaurant in Westwood. A Halloween party at a colleague’s home in Pacific Palisades. Viewing the startling film “Joe,” starring Peter Boyle. (We later ran into Boyle when we ate at a health-food restaurant in LA.)
By December we were hovering on the precipice of falling in love. We’d heard the buzz about “Love Story,” and both of us were eager to see it. So there we were, waiting in a long line of moviegoers at the Westwood Village Theater that chilly night.
The plot of “Love Story” wasn’t totally unknown to me. I’d already read Erich Segal’s story shortly before I’d moved to LA from Chicago. I was casually leafing through a magazine when I came across the story.
It grabbed me right away. It was set, after all, in Cambridge, and its leading characters were students at Harvard. I’d spent three years there getting my law degree, and I’d finished just a few years earlier.
The story was sappy and had a terribly sad ending. But I relished the Harvard setting, and I couldn’t wait to see the film based on it. When Marv learned a little bit about it, he wanted to see it too.
We soon found ourselves inside the theater, every seat filled with excited patrons like us, and began watching Hollywood’s “Love Story,” our eyes glued to the screen.
What did we think of the movie that night? I truthfully don’t remember, and Marv is no longer here to recall it with me. So I recently decided to re-watch the film—twice–to reflect on it and what it may have meant to us at the time.
In 1970, enamored with my companion, I most likely loved the film and its countless depictions of student life at Harvard. Marv had graduated from the college in 1963, and I’d finished at the law school in 1967, so we’d attended Harvard at about the same time as author Segal (Harvard class of ‘58, Ph.D. ‘65).
The two lead actors, Ryan O’Neal (playing Oliver) and Ali MacGraw (playing Jenny), were also contemporaries of ours who could have been Harvard students at about the same time. Let’s add Tommy Lee Jones, whose first film role is one of Oliver’s roommates. He was himself a Harvard grad, class of ‘69. (Segal reportedly based Oliver on two of his friends: Harvard roommates Tommy Lee Jones and Al Gore.) By the way, Tommy’s name in the credits is Tom Lee Jones.
Marv and I certainly relished the scenes set in a variety of Harvard locations, including the hockey arena where Oliver stars on the school’s hockey team and where I had skated (badly) with a date from the business school. In another scene, the two leads ecstatically make snow angels on the snow-covered campus.
And I loved watching Oliver searching for Jenny in the Music Building, a building located very close to the law school, where I occasionally escaped from my studies by listening to old 78 LP records in a soundproof booth.
Overall, Marv and I probably found most of the film a lightweight take on life as a Harvard student (although darker days followed as the story moved toward its tragic end). I’m sure we were also moved by the haunting music composed by Francis Lai, an unquestionably brilliant addition to the film that earned its only Oscar (out of seven nominations).
Seeing “Love Story” together that chilly night must have been wonderful.
But watching the film again, 50 years later? I have to be honest: I found it disappointing.
To be continued
susanjustwrites
Susan Just Writes 