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Rest in Peace - Rupert Pole
Jul. 27th, 2006 09:30 amRupert Pole, the "West Coast Husband" of writer Anais Nin, and served as her literary executor after her death in 1977 aged 73, died July 15th in Silver Lake, California, of a stroke. He was 87.
The Ranger Who Told All About Anais Nin's Wild Life (LA Times)
The story goes that their love affair began the moment they laid eyes on one another, in the elevator of a swank Manhattan apartment building in 1947. A few weeks later, the exotic-looking writer and the strapping young actor were driving to California on an adventure that would eventually lead to marriage.
There was one problem: Anais Nin, the prolific diarist who would become a feminist heroine, already was married. Rupert Pole, the actor who left New York to become a forest ranger — and eventually guardian of one of literature's most labyrinthine legacies — spent years pretending not to care that his wife was a bigamist.
"We had a wonderful, deep relationship," Pole, who was 16 years younger than Nin, told the Vancouver Sun several years ago, "and that is what counted."
Pole, 87, who was found dead in his Silver Lake home July 15 after a recent stroke, was Nin's literary executor. After her death in 1977, he oversaw the publication of four unexpurgated volumes of her erotic journals, which exuberantly detail her affairs with such men as novelist Henry Miller, psychoanalyst Otto Rank and her own father, Spanish composer Joaquin Nin. Seven previous volumes, which had been purged of much of the salacious material — as well as most references to her husbands — had established Nin as a cult figure, revered by many in the women's movement for her embrace of sexual freedom and exploration of the female psyche.
The Ranger Who Told All About Anais Nin's Wild Life (LA Times)
The story goes that their love affair began the moment they laid eyes on one another, in the elevator of a swank Manhattan apartment building in 1947. A few weeks later, the exotic-looking writer and the strapping young actor were driving to California on an adventure that would eventually lead to marriage.
There was one problem: Anais Nin, the prolific diarist who would become a feminist heroine, already was married. Rupert Pole, the actor who left New York to become a forest ranger — and eventually guardian of one of literature's most labyrinthine legacies — spent years pretending not to care that his wife was a bigamist.
"We had a wonderful, deep relationship," Pole, who was 16 years younger than Nin, told the Vancouver Sun several years ago, "and that is what counted."
Pole, 87, who was found dead in his Silver Lake home July 15 after a recent stroke, was Nin's literary executor. After her death in 1977, he oversaw the publication of four unexpurgated volumes of her erotic journals, which exuberantly detail her affairs with such men as novelist Henry Miller, psychoanalyst Otto Rank and her own father, Spanish composer Joaquin Nin. Seven previous volumes, which had been purged of much of the salacious material — as well as most references to her husbands — had established Nin as a cult figure, revered by many in the women's movement for her embrace of sexual freedom and exploration of the female psyche.
