“began her program by saying: ‘I was up most of the night reading a book I couldn’t put down, and when I finished it, I was sobbing. I cried and cried’,” recalled Mel Zerman, a former Harper & Row executive, in an interview with the American Legends website. Network TV hostess Barbara Walters mentioned Love Story on air one morning. At the last minute, plans changed to 7,500 copies. Segal did just that.Īnd so Harper & Row decided to print 5,000 copies of Love Story in time for Valentine’s Day 1970. Finally, his agent suggested he turn it into a book.

And as a film, its producer thought it might make a small profit.Īt first, Segal couldn’t interest anyone in his screenplay. But as a book, its publisher thought it might sell a few thousand copies. Love Story came as a shock – not because of sex or nudity, there was none. Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore, Segal added.

“Gore] was always under pressure to follow in his father’s footsteps and that was the conflict, to keep up the family tradition,” Segal explained to a New York Times reporter in 1997. Then at Harvard he earned a master’s the next year and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1965. He graduated as class poet and Latin salutatorian in 1958, something only T.S. Segal did win election as class president and the Latin prize, so naturally he went to Harvard. On afternoons he took the subway to the Jewish Theological Seminary, and in summer he took classes in Switzerland. So Erich studied Greek, Latin and Hebrew at Midwood High School. He wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. His father, an orthodox rabbi, wouldn’t hear of it. Even as a child, Erich Segal wanted to be a writer. He was born June 16, 1937, in Brooklyn, N.Y., one of three boys. Critics trashed the book, Yale denied him tenure and students at the Ezra Stiles College, where he lived as a resident scholar, campaigned to eject him.īut Love Story also made him a world-famous millionaire who hobnobbed with celebrities. “On football weekends they’d bring their dates around to Ezra Stiles and reverently point out the window of the study in which I’d written Yellow Submarine.”īut then Harper & Row published Love Story, his 131-page tearjerker about a rich Harvard jock and a poor brainy Cliffie who dies. “I became a figure of awe to the kids here,” he told an interviewer. Segal’s celebrity helped fill a 600-seat hall for his lectures on classical civilization. Not because he taught ancient Greek and Latin literature, but because he co-wrote the screenplay to the Beatles movie, Yellow Submarine. Before he wrote Love Story in 1968, Professor Erich Segal was a star on Yale’s campus.

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