‘Love Story’: It’s Required

When Erich Segal first began working the talk-show circuit, he performed services for television audiences that had not been rendered since the time of Omnibus: He explained to a confused Shelley Winters the difference between de facto and de jure, translated Sappho’s bisexuality into readily understandable terms (“AC/DC”), delivered one of Catullus’ epigrams in the original Latin without benefit of scansion, and recited a poem from the Greek Anthology.

But soon hubris set in, and when Mike Douglas soberly commented that Love Story was now required reading in Philadelphia (an exaggeration, but not without a kernel of truth), Segal replied with an equally sober rejoinder: “As a Classicist, I’m glad I produced a classic.”

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Bernard F. Dick

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When Erich Segal first began working the talk-show circuit, he performed services for television audiences that had not been rendered since the time of Omnibus: He explained to a confused Shelley Winters the difference between de facto and de jure, translated Sappho’s bisexuality into readily understandable terms (“AC/DC”), delivered one of Catullus’ epigrams in the original Latin without benefit of scansion, and recited a poem from the Greek Anthology.

But soon hubris set in, and when Mike Douglas soberly commented that Love Story was now required reading in Philadelphia (an exaggeration, but not without a kernel of truth), Segal replied with an equally sober rejoinder: “As a Classicist, I’m glad I produced a classic.”