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Though the film has dozens of tertiary characters, only two other actors are worth billing: Ray Milland as Oliver Barrett III, the meanest skinflint since the Grinch who stole Christmas. And John Marley as Mr. Cavilled ("Call me Phil"), an ingratiating performer and a good man around a hospital corridor. Women above a certain age are less likely to weep at Jennifer's plight than at Milland's scalp−for the first time he plays sans toupee. Others who have taken bathos antitoxin may be tempted to paraphrase Oscar Wilde's epigram on Dickens' Old Curiosity Shop: "One must have a heart of stone to read the death of Little Nell without laughing."
...
In retrospect, the making of Love Story makes The Selling of the President look like a pushcart operation. Picture Erich Segal, a ripe 31 back in 1968, asking himself "What hath Roth wrought?" The answer was an award winner, Goodbye, Columbus, and nearly a million bucks. Before Portnoy's Complaint was published, no less. And what hath Segal? Well, he was associate professor of classics at Yale (the student paper described his classes as "presented with the intensity of Marlon Brando and the finesse of Julia Child"). The showman had to emerge somewhere. Segal tried writing off-Broadway−and bombed. He became the last rewrite man on the highly animated and rather charmless Beatles cartoon Yellow Submarine. But was this any way for a Harvard salutatorian ('58) to end?
Brush Strokes. He recalled a girl he had squired years before−and combined her with a story he had been told by one of his graduate students. Result: the film script of Love Story. His agents, William Morris Agency, held it at arm's length. A story about two college kids who get married? You know what's grossing them out at the nabes, Erich? I Am Curious, I, A Woman, Sexual Practices in Sweden, for God's sake.
Movie companies gave the super-sanitary scenario the William Morris treatment−until an old Segal acquaintance from her Wellesley days, Ali MacGraw, dipped into the script and came up wet. After Goodbye, Columbus, she was bankable. Robert Evans, Paramount's production chief, was romantically interested in Ali (they are now Mr. and Mrs.), so Paramount abruptly got interested in Love Story. The property was perfect, Erich, they intimated. Except for maybe a brush stroke here and there. Thirty rewrites later, Jenny had been transformed from a Brooklyn Jewish girl with two parents to a Rhode Island Italian-American with one parent. Characters were excised and added, relationships bolstered, scenes slashed and rebuilt. Directors were hired and let go.
Yale Folk Hero. You've read the novel, now see the movie, was the pitch in the '40s. Today, the tale wags the dog, and someone is usually assigned to turn the film into a paperback book. Evans persuaded Segal to give the book version a try himself, "instead of having some hack do it." The editor at Harper & Row. Jean Young, called the book, with astonishing accuracy, "a reaction against Future Shock." The sentences were terse. Crisp. Self-sealed. It was pure. Four-letter words and all. Erich's mama, in fact, gave the ultimate accolade: "Thank God you wrote a nice book, not like Philip Roth."