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The Story of Love Story: How Erich Segal Won Fame and Lost a Career

Before he wrote Love Story in 1968, Professor Erich Segal was a star on Yale’s campus. Not because he taught ancient Greek and Latin literature, but because he co-wrote the screenplay to the Beatles movie, Yellow Submarine. Segal’s celebrity helped fill a 600-seat hall for his lectures on classical civilization.

“I became a figure of awe to the kids here,” he told an interviewer. “On football weekends they’d bring their dates around to Ezra Stiles [house] and reverently point out the window of the study in which I’d written Yellow Submarine.”

But then Harper & Row published Love Story, his 131-page tearjerker about a rich Harvard jock and a poor brainy Cliffie who dies. 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.

But Love Story also made him a world-famous millionaire who hobnobbed with celebrities.

Erich Segal, Author of Love Story

He was born June 16, 1937, in Brooklyn, N.Y., one of three boys. Even as a child, Erich Segal wanted to be a writer. His father, an orthodox rabbi, wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted his son to follow in his footsteps. So Erich studied Greek, Latin and Hebrew at Midwood High School. On afternoons he took the subway to the Jewish Theological Seminary, and in summer he took classes in Switzerland. He didn’t have much of a social life.

Segal did win election as class president and the Latin prize, so naturally he went to Harvard. He graduated as class poet and Latin salutatorian in 1958, something only T.S. Eliot had done. Then at Harvard he earned a master’s the next year and a doctorate in comparative literature in 1965.

Erich Segal

He had a penchant for pop culture, though. As a senior undergraduate, he wrote a play for the Hasty Pudding theatricals called The Big Fizz, something of a big flop. But then as a graduate student he wrote a spoof on the Iliad called Sing, Muse, performed at Harvard’s Leverett House. A producer saw it, liked it and took it off Broadway, where it ran for 39 shows. Richard Rodgers of Oklahoma! fame noticed it and invited Segal to work with him on a musical. And that’s how he eventually got to collaborate on the animated film, Yellow Submarine, released in 1968.

Back at Harvard

Segal had been teaching classic literature at Yale, but in 1968, he took a sabbatical at Harvard to write a screenplay. He stayed at Dunster House, where he grew friendly with two college roommates who later became famous.

Dunster House

Segal combined the roommates into the character of Oliver Barrett IV, the preppie jock with a poet’s heart. Oliver’s wealthy, powerful father opposes his marriage to Jenny Cavilleri, a baker’s daughter from Cranston, R.I.

In the story, Oliver defies his father and marries Jenny, who gives up a music scholarship to put him through law school. And then, at 25, she dies.

Segal later said he based the character of Jenny on a girl he had dated. And he based Oliver on Tommy Lee Jones, the sensitive jock, and his roommate, Al Gore.

Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones

“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.

Jenny Cavilleri had nothing to do with Tipper Gore, Segal added.

Love Story

Love Story came as a shock – not because of sex or nudity, there was none. But as a book, its publisher thought it might sell a few thousand copies. And as a film, its producer thought it might make a small profit.

At first, Segal couldn’t interest anyone in his screenplay. Finally, his agent suggested he turn it into a book. Segal did just that.

And so Harper & Row decided to print 5,000 copies of Love Story in time for Valentine’s Day 1970. At the last minute, plans changed to 7,500 copies.

Then lightning struck. Network TV hostess Barbara Walters mentioned Love Story on air one morning.

[She] “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.

“That’s all the women of America had to hear,” Zerman said. “By the time bookstores were opening all over the United States they were getting calls for a book called Love Story by someone you never heard of named Erich Segal. Harper went crazy. We were out of stock within hours….”

Love Story rocketed to the top of the New York Times best-seller list and remained there for 41 weeks, ultimately selling 21 million copies.

Love Story, the Movie

As luck would have it, filming ended on Love Story, the movie, three days before Love Story, the book, hit the bookstores. Segal had finally sold his screenplay to Paramount Pictures.

Model-turned-starlet Ali MacGraw had read the script and liked it. She was then married to Robert Evans, the head of Paramount, and persuaded him to produce it. He thought it might make a small profit and gave it a limited budget of $2.2 million. A half-dozen future stars turned down the role of Oliver – including Michael Douglas, Jon Voight and Peter Fonda. Finally Ryan O’Neal took the part. And Tommy Lee Jones made his film debut as Oliver Barrett’s roommate Hank.

Arthur Hiller began directing the film in Massachusetts and New York even before the book came out. Most of the scenes took place in winter, and production at Harvard damaged the campus. Fake snow killed three trees, and the university denied many future requests to film there.

Hiller also shot the movie at the Myopia Hunt Club in Hamilton, Mass., the Boston Public Garden and at the frame house at 119 Oxford St. in Cambridge. There, MacGraw’s character utters the famous words, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” The American Film Institute voted the line as the #13 greatest movie quote of all time. MacGraw later called it “a crock” and O’Neal said, “You better say you’re sorry.”

The film debuted on Dec. 16, 1970 and smashed box office records.

The Critics

From 1955 to 1975, Erich Segal ran the Boston Marathon. After Love Story, a spectator shouted at him, “Hey Segal, You run better than you write.”

“The banality of Love Story makes Peyton Place look like Swann’s Way as it skips from cliche to cliche with an abandon that would chill even the blood of a True Romance editor,” wrote Newsweek.

Love Story was nominated for the National Book Award, but the fiction judges threatened to walk out unless it was withdrawn. It was.

William Styron called it a “banal book which simply doesn’t qualify as literature.”

New York Times film critic Vincent Canby called it “almost unreadable.” He loved the film, though.

“What can you say about a movie about a 25-year-old girl who died?”’ wrote Canby. “That it is beautiful. And romantic…That it looks to be clean and pure and without artifice, even though it is possibly as sophisticated as any commercial American movie ever made.”

Little Richard

John Simon panned Love Story the film in the National Review, and then attacked Segal to his face on the Dick Cavett Show.

Segal compared himself to the Greek playwright Euripedes, loved by the people but hated by the critics. Simon retorted Segal could choose to be a knave or a fool. “You chose the latter, deluded by your own lack of talent,” Simon said.

Another guest, Little Richard, famously ended the debate by screaming at Simon “Shut up!”

Not Scholarly Enough

Unlike Little Richard, Segal could not silence his critics.

For the next decade or so, he continued to seek the limelight. Nothing came close to the success he had with Love Story. He worked as a sportscaster for the 1972 Olympics, wrote more novels, taught at various colleges and edited books about such classic authors as Aristophanes, Menander and Plautus. In a 1970 interview with film critic Roger Ebert he bragged about dating a Playboy model.

Questions arose, though, about the seriousness of his scholarship.

“Suddenly the professor who wrote Love Story found his students and fellow academics questioning his seriousness of purpose,” wrote Linda Pelzner in The Professor Who Wrote Love Story.

Old campus of Yale University

“They were hostile, they were deprecating, they were implying–and sometimes saying explicitly–that I had vulgarized myself, or that in fact I was always vulgar,” Segal told Wendy Smith of the Chicago Tribune.

Segal protested he’d always been an academic. “It’s the most important thing I do.”

For a while, he devoted himself exclusively to academics. It didn’t work. He eventually admitted the doubts of others undermined his confidence.

His colleagues suggested he take a leave of absence from his teaching job at Yale. He did. Never again would academics be his full-time profession. He taught as an adjunct or a visitor.

The End

In 1974, Segal met Karen James, a British children’s book editor. They married a year later and had two daughters, Francesca and Miranda. They lived in London.

When he was in his 40s, Erich Segal contracted Parkinson’s disease. He continued to write and teach. On January 17, 2010, he died of a heart attack.

* * *

Coming soon in paperback. You can order your ebook here.

With thanks to Erich Segal: A Critical Companion by Linda Claycomb Pelzer, ‎Linda De Roche.

Images: Erich Segal By Karen Segal – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18038980. Yellow Submarine https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16104951. Dunster House By Margaret Maloney – Mdmalon at en.wikipedia, CC BY-SA 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2473300. Love Story May be found at the following website: http://www.pophistorydig.com/?tag=erich-segal-yellow-submarine., Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=33459577. Yale campus By Namkota – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=50507969.

This story last updated in 2024.

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Rodman and Ruth Law Take Their Sibling Rivalry to Crazy Heights

Rodman and Ruth Law rocketed to fame just before World War I with daredevil movie stunts and breathtaking aeronautical feats. Their father attributed their success to the strong strain of sailor blood that ran through the family.

Rodman, nicknamed the Unkillable Actor, starred in feature films. Ruth, called the Queen of the Sky, smashed height and distance records set by men.

Their father, Frederick Law, told a newspaper in 1919 that the Laws of New England were noted for their fearlessness in the rigging during the days of sail.

Rodman and Ruth Law.

Rodman Law was born Jan. 21, 1885 in Lynn, Mass. Ruth Bancroft Law came two years later, on May 21, 1887. Even as small children, they brought their father and mother, Sarah Bancroft Breed, to the verge of prostration.

“Rodman and Ruth always were daring one another to do something dangerous. If they were not jumping from a barn or climbing a tall tree they were riding our cattle or doing something equally hair-raising,” their father said.

Rodman Law

As a young man, Rodman worked as a sailor, a detective, an ironworker and a circus rider, but his work as a steeplejack launched him on his path to fame and fortune. In 1909, on a bet with another steeplejack, he climbed the Flatiron Building in New York with his bare hands.

He kept performing daredevil stunts even after he married Florence Kimball. To his wife’s dismay, life insurers wouldn’t cover him. They had three children and lived in Brooklyn.

In 1912 he walked into the Pathe film production company offices in Jersey City and suggested they film him parachuting off the Statue of Liberty.

Rodman Law in 1917

Pathe was then a two-year-old company hungry to fill its silent newsreels. A Pathe executive saw the possibilities in the daredevil stunt and agreed, according to Jacob Smith in The Thrill Makers: Celebrity, Masculinity, and Stunt Performance.

On Feb. 12, 1912, Rodman Law and an assistant climbed to the top of Lady Liberty’s arm. A small crowd of cameramen, reporters and photographers watched from below. Law, who had never used a parachute before, stepped outside the rail and noticed his assistant crying.

Then he looked down. “I must admit that just then I didn’t enjoy the prospect of dropping 345 feet,” he recalled. But he jumped anyway, his chute opened and he landed unhurt on the cold ground. Newspapers and newsreels brought his thrilling stunt to an eager audience around the country.

A film star was born.

Ruth Law

Five months after Rodman jumped off the Statue of Liberty, little sister Ruth flew a plane for the first time. She had tried to enroll in the Wright brothers flying school, but Orville refused her because of her sex. He sold her an airplane, though, a 26-foot-long Wright Model B, which could reach speeds of 45 mph.

She took flying lessons from the Burgess Company in Marblehead, Mass. In August she soloed and in November she earned her commercial pilot’s license. She also took lessons from a German mechanic so she could fix her own plane.

Ruth Law in Daytona Beach

Ruth then went to work in Florida ferrying passengers from the Sea Breeze Hotel and barnstorming in aerial exhibitions.

Her father first saw her fly in an aerial show in Columbus, Ohio. He almost fainted. “I had to hang on to a fence,” he said.

The Unkillable Actor

In one of Ruth’s exhibition flights, she had a passenger – Rodman. Of course he jumped out of the plane. The Ryno Film company recorded the jump, during which he dislocated his neck.

Rodman had quickly made a name for himself, first appearing in newsreels about his exploits and then in feature films as a stunt performer. He scaled skyscrapers and climbed across a ravine on a 250-foot cable. He jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, and his parachute didn’t open until his feet nearly touched the East River.

In 1913, Rodman climbed into the nose of a 44-foot skyrocket loaded with 900 pounds of gunpowder. He planned to shoot himself into the air and parachute to earth. Instead, the rocket blew up and threw him 30 feet, burning him badly and knocking him unconscious.

Rodman the year before had starred in a feature film, At the Risk of His Life. The next year he appeared in the Daredevil Mountaineer, followed by Fighting Death. His daring stunts earned him the nickname “The Unkillable Actor.”

His father disapproved. “I could not see why he should risk his life merely to send cold chills down the backs of spectators and to please ‘movie’ men,” he later said in a 1919 newspaper interview.

The reason was simple: He was making scads of money. And spending it as fast as he made it.

Ruth Law, Queen of the Air

In 1915, Ruth became the first woman to perform an aerial loop the loop—like her brother, on a bet. On the morning of November 19, she took off from Chicago in her new plane, a Curtiss Pusher, and headed to New York. She intended to reach the city in a day, something no aviator had ever done.

People didn’t think she’d make it. No woman could withstand the cold or the long hours in the cramped, exposed cockpit. Plus she got a late start when a strong wind prevented her departure from Grant Park until 8:25 a.m. And in a scene that her brother would recognize, her mechanic started crying as she prepared to take off in her tiny wire-and-stick biplane.

She barely got off the ground in the gusting Chicago winds, but she then flew 590 miles without a stop. At 2:10 p.m., she landed in Hornell, N.Y., smashing the record of 452 miles of continuous flight.

On the ground in Hornell, Ruth was so numb with cold she had to be helped into a waiting automobile. But she ate lunch while her plane was refueled, and then took off from Hornell. Her late start cost her, though, and it got so dark she had to land in Binghamton at 4:20 p.m. She tied her plane to a tree, asked a policeman to watch it and checked into a hotel.

Little Girl

The next morning she took off for New York City, encountering fog so thick she sometimes couldn’t identify any landmarks. She found the Hudson River as she started to run out of fuel, so she glided the last few miles. Finally she landed on Governors Island, where Gen. Leonard Wood and a large crowd greeted her.

“Well done, little girl, you’ve beaten them all,” Wood said to the 29-year-old woman. “We all feel proud of you.”

Arriving on Governors Island

She won a $2,500 prize for breaking the cross-country nonstop record, having gone 884 miles in 8 hours, 55 minutes, something no man or woman had done in America.

Now Ruth was a star, too. She continued to barnstorm and by 1917 she was making as much as $9,000 a week for her stunt flying.

Not So Unkillable

Rodman Law’s career had more or less ended by then. In 1914, he injured himself while parachuting from a balloon in Trenton, N.J.

“Rodman Law, the daredevil aviator whose hazardous feats have thrilled thousands throughout the country, is now paying the price of his recklessness,” reported the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on Feb. 22, 1917.

What money he hadn’t squandered he spent on hospital bills. He had to give up his big home in Brooklyn and move his wife and three children to a furnished rooming house.

Eventually he recovered enough to join the Army Aviation Corps during World War I. He contracted tuberculosis while in the Army. Rodman Law, the unkillable actor, died Oct. 14, 1919 at the age of 34 in a hospital bed in Greenville, S.C.

Ruth Law Returns to Earth

When the United States entered the war, Ruth declared her ambition to join the Army Aviation Corps as well. But the Secretary of War refused to give her a commission. He said, [it would] “let down the bars to women in the United States to seek commissions in the army.”

So Ruth Law instead performed aerial stunts for crowds to raise money for war bonds and the Red Cross. The army allowed her to wear a non-commissioned officer uniform as she flew around the Statue of Liberty and down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. She dropped Liberty Bond pamphlet bombs from her plane.

After the war, she returned to the barnstorming circuit. She started a flight school in Miami and formed Ruth Law’s Flying Circus. Her little aerial circus – a troupe of three planes – thrilled audiences at county fairs and race tracks. They raced cars, flew through fireworks and did stunts like wing walks, plane-to-plane transfers and loop the loops.

The stunts got increasingly dangerous, and in October 1921 a young stuntwoman died in an accident.

Ruth had married a mechanic and motorcycle racer, Charles Augustus Oliver. He supported her flying career—up until that point.

“It’s my husband’s turn now, I’ve been on the limelight long enough, I’m going to let him run things hereafter and me, too,” she told a newspaper reporter.

They moved to Beverly Hills, where she had a nervous breakdown 10 years later. In 1946, they moved to San Francisco. Charles died the next year.

Ruth Law died on December 5, 1970, and was buried in Pine Grove Cemetery in Lynn, Mass.

With thanks to Ruth Law–Queen of the Air: Challenging Stereotypes and Inspiring a Nation by Billie Holladay Skelley and Jacob Smith in The Thrill Makers: Celebrity, Masculinity, and Stunt Performance. This story last updated in 2022.

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Six Mid-Century Modern Homes

Though people usually think of the quintessential New England house as a white clapboard farmhouse or Cape, we actually have quite a few mid-century modern homes. And we have even more of their successors, the ubiquitous ranch house.

Mid-century modern houses typically have big windows, open floor plans, integration with the outdoors and little ornamentation.

Frank Lloyd Wright, an early practitioner of mid-century modern homes, called it ‘Prairie Style’ or ‘Usonian.’ Refugees from Hitler’s Germany such as Walter Gropius and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe brought their own modernist philosophy to America. The Germans called it Bauhaus, and they influenced a generation of architects who designed mid-century modern structures from about 1945-75.

Then mid-century modern fell into disfavor. In 1975, critic Tom Wolfe excoriated mid-century modern style as architecture that nobody liked in his book, From Bauhaus to Our House.

Today, however, mid-century modern homes are popular again and command high prices. In New Canaan, Conn., a 1,500-square-foot house designed by Philip Johnson sold for $2.3 million in 2015.

Here, then, are six mid-century modern homes, one (at least) in each New England state. If you know of others, please share them in the comments section.

The Glass House

The famous Glass House was built in one of Connecticut’s wealthiest towns.

Philip Johnson designed the Glass House in 1949 as a weekend retreat in New Canaan, an upscale suburb of New York. Johnson belonged to a group of modern architects known as the Harvard Five, who lived and worked in the town. They all followed Walter Gropius.

The Glass House is an extreme version of a mid-century modernist home. Johnson designed the kitchen, dining and sleeping areas as one glass room. He enclosed the bathroom in a brick cylinder, the only object to reach floor to ceiling.

Johnson lived in the Glass House – for a while. He could only do it because you can’t see it from the road. The house sits behind a stone wall and overlooks a pond. Johnson viewed the surrounding landscape as his wallpaper, once commenting, “I have very expensive wallpaper.”

Eventually he only used it for entertaining and stayed in another building on the property – a brick guest house.

New Canaan has about 80 other mid-century modern homes built between 1940 and 1960. Not everyone loved them, and tore down about 20. The town now tries to preserve them. You can visit the Glass House in the summer (for information, click here). You can see many of the rest of New Canaan’s mid-century modern homes in the 1997 film The Ice Storm.

Emily Muir Boat House

The Emily Muir Boat House

Deer Isle, a fishing community in Penobscot Bay, has a collection of 48 mid-century modern homes designed by Emily Muir. The Boat House is one of them.

Emily, born in 1904, was an artist who married sculptor William Muir. As a child she summered on Deer Isle and moved there permanently in 1939 with her husband.

She didn’t turn to architecture until she reached her own mid-century. Emily had no training in architecture and designed her first home for her mother. That got her hooked on architecture.
Her homes have exaggerated angles and large windows that let in plenty of light. Many, like the Boat House, are perched on boulders that overlook the water.She tried to use as much local granite and wood as possible.

People who live in them now say they love the views, but Emily didn’t cook and didn’t clean so the kitchens often need renovation and the closet space is limited. She designed the houses to be affordable so fishermen could buy them, but it was summer people who snapped them up.

Emily Muir died in 2003 at the age of 99.

You can rent the Emily Muir Boat House from the Island Agency (click here). Even If you don’t’ love mid-century modern homes, you’ll probably love the views.

Gropius House

The Gropius House stands as a symbol of modern architecture in Lincoln, Mass. But in 1937, Lincoln itself symbolized freedom to Walter Gropius, who settled in the historic town while teaching at Harvard. .

A Lincoln philanthropist, Helen Osborne Storrow, gave Gropius the land on which to build a house.

Gropius built a simple, efficient contemporary home that melded industrial and traditional New England architectural materials. He used a fieldstone foundation, white painted wood, a brick chimney and a screened-in porch. Many of the fixtures were ordered from catalogs. It cost $18,000.

He later said he wanted to take a contemporary approach to traditional New England architecture.

When finished, the Gropius House created a sensation. Composer Igor Stravinsky, lecturing at Harvard, was so anxious to see it that he and his new bride visited it scarcely an hour after their wedding in March 1940. Mrs. Storrow was so pleased with it she allowed other architects to build mid-century modern homes on her land.

For information about visiting the Gropius House, click here.

The Zimmerman House

The Zimmerman House.

Frank Lloyd Wright was designing mid-century modern houses well before mid-century, but he designed the Zimmerman House in Manchester, N.H., smack in the middle of the 20^th. In 1950. Wright didn’t just design the house. He also designed the interiors, the furniture, the gardens and even the mailbox for Isadore J. and Lucille Zimmerman.

The Zimmerman House is one of the few Prairie Style houses in the Northeast. They are typically small, single-story dwellings without a garage or much storage. The Zimmerman House has a carport – a mid-century modern concept and a word Wright came up with.

Like many Wright houses, the Zimmerman House has an L-shape. It also fits around a natural feature – a large rock near the front door.

The Zimmermans meticulously maintained the house, and bequeathed the property to the Currier Museum of Art in 1988. The National Register of Historic Places added it to its list in 1970 partly because of its craftsmanship and detailing.

For information about tours of the Zimmerman House, click here.

Ira Rakatansky Home

Ira Ratansky designed this mid-century modern structure as a synagogue, now the Rhode Island Hindu Temple. Image courtesy Google Maps.

Ira Rakatansky was Rhode Island’s most renowned modernist architect. The son of Russian immigrants, he graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1942. He then studied architecture under Walter Gropius at Harvard.

He subsequently set up his architecture practice back home in Providence, where he worked from 1947 to 1992. Rakatansky designed dozens of mid-century modernist homes, temples, offices, bowling alleys and drive-ins, mostly in New England.

A former student wrote a book about Ira Rakatansky. He noted ‘his brand of mid-century modernism blew a fresh breeze through staid colonial New England.’

He designed his own house on Everett Avenue in Providence. It features soaring ceilings, large windows that bring in the outdoors and open interior space.

Rakatansky died in 2014. You can take a youtube tour of Ira Rakatansky houses here. Sadly, we couldn’t find any Ira Rakatansky homes open to the public. But we did find a temple he designed, then known as Beth Am in Warwick, which became Am David.

Norwich, Vt., Mid-Century Modern Historic District

A mid-century modern home in Norwich, Vt.

You may not think of Vermont as a hot spot of mid-century modern homes, but Norwich has an entire collection of them. Located on Hopson, Pine Tree and Spring Pond Roads, the National Register of Historic Places listed the district in 1991.

The town lies across the Connecticut River from Dartmouth College, which attracted academics open to mid-century modern design.

Norwich’s role in mid-century modern style may have started when another German architect, Walter Curt Behrendt, escaped Nazi Germany, according to the Valley News. He came to the Upper Valley, and Dartmouth made him artist in residence. He built his own home in Norwich in 1945.

Edgar Hayes Hunter and Margaret King Hunter, students of Gropius, taught at Dartmouth and designed several mid-century modern homes in the area.

And Keith and Edna Warner get credit for starting the mid-century modern trend in 1951. They bought a large piece of land and built a house on it. They then sold off parcels to similarly minded people. Many had their home designed by Charles McKirahan of Fort Lauderdale.

Typically they are generally set back from the roads. They also have a horizontal orientation, flat roofs and large glass windows looking out on the hills.

The Norwich Historical Society has an online exhibit called Mad for Mid-Century Modern. You can see it here.

Images: Glass House By Staib – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7797606; Zimmerman House By Jane023 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=21316008; Norwich, Vt. Home By Magicpiano – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=72230045; Emily Muir Boat House courtesy The Island Agency. This story was updated in 2022.

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Varick Frissell: the New England Filmmaker Who Died in the Biggest Hollywood Disaster Ever

In 1930, Varick Frissell traveled north to Canada to make the deadliest movie ever. Twenty-six people would die in the filming, including Varick Frissell himself.

The dramatic film dealt with the friendship and rivalry of two men aboard a fishing vessel in White Bay in Newfoundland. One of the characters thinks he’s a jinx.

As the story plays out, the men must survive the wreck of their ship, the Viking, during the Canadian seal hunt. They then have to struggle to survive while marooned on the ice.

Boston to Canada

Movie Poster for the Viking

Frissell was born in Boston in 1903 into a well-off banking family. He graduated from Yale, and spent time volunteering doing charity work in Newfoundland. On his travels north, Frissell shot footage for two documentary films, The Lure of Labrador and The Swilin’ Racket (a local term for seal hunting).

The films were well-received. The Paramount movie studio then offered to fund a commercial version of the films that would highlight the lives of the fishermen. By 1930, Frissell had completed most of the filming on the movie, with the working title White Thunder. But Frissell wanted to add a few more scenes of the ship at sea.

Varick Frissell

So he and a movie crew traveled to Newfoundland and boarded the Viking to shoot the final frames on White Bay.

It was March 15, 1930. Crew and passengers aboard the ship Viking reported concerns about the way blasting powder was being handled. Some had spilled on deck, and men were smoking near it. As most of the people on the boat were below decks attending a church service and singing Nearer My God to Thee, Frissell was on deck fastening a danger sign to the deck house that stored the explosives.

White Bay, Newfoundland

Frissell and two others had been filling canisters with powder, anticipating that they would be blasting the following day. Ships working in the waters off Newfoundland carried powder to blast through ice jams when they got caught up in them.

Varick Frissell’s Final Moments

A witness later said that one of the men working with the powder was smoking a pipe when an ash fell into some spilled powder. The explosion at the stern of the ship split its hull and toppled the masts. Nine casks of kerosene caught fire. The 27-year-old Frissell was last seen trapped in the rigging of the fallen mizzen mast, shouting for help.

Bernt Balchen’s plane on the ice in Greenland after a rescue.

Word of the disaster reached the United States, and the number of dead was, at first, unclear. A Connecticut short wave radio operator reported that a priest in Newfoundland had radioed that Frissell and the movie crew survived. Newspapers across the country carried the headline: “Frissell Safe.”

However, as survivors began to reach land the fate of Frissell became clearer. One-hundred eighteen passengers and crew on the ship managed to escape to the Horse Islands by walking across the ice. They were rescued by other fishermen, but Frissell was not among them.

Frissell’s father hired daredevil pilot Bernt Balchen, who had experience flying Arctic expeditions, to search for his son. But no signs of Varick Frissell ever surfaced.

Disaster Sells Movie Tickets

In 1932, the studio released Frissell’s film under the title The Viking. The film’s producers used the disaster to promote the release of the film. Newspaper ads and movie posters noted: “This is the picture that cost the lives of Varick Frissell and 25 others in the Sealer Viking Disaster.”

Howard Hughes in 1938.

Howard Hughes promoted the opening of his new chain of movie houses with billboards that announced: “26 men died to open the Hughes-Franklin Studio Theatres.” Critics called the promotion “a hideous attempt to commercialize” the Viking disaster. Hideous but probably quite successful.

The Viking burned to the waterline in the disaster, and it sank. Frissell’s body was never found. A grave memorial for him is located in Middletown, R.I. You can watch The Viking online here.

Image of Varick Frissell: By Screenshot – White Thunder (film) DVD (2002), screen capture made using Snap N’ Drag software, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48496507. White Bay By Adavyd – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=91575485.

This story was updated in 2021.

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The West Indies Send Sugar, Slaves and Red Sox Stars to New England

For four centuries, the West Indies have made an outsized impact on New England. In 2018, West Indian stars and a West Indian manager brought the Boston Red Sox to a World Series championship.

West Indians have come to New England as doctors, teachers, ministers, slaves, farm workers and servants, depending on when they came.

Beginning in the 17^th century, merchants like Connecticut horse jockeys, Rhode Island slavers and Boston banana importers have traded with the West Indies. Well into the 19^th century, retail shops called West India Goods Stores sold items from the Caribbean and all over the world.

And West Indians came to New England in waves – from the British and Spanish West Indies, the French Antilles and the Dutch Caribbean. Some were Afro-Caribbean, like W.E.B. Du Bois’s father, some were Euro-Caribbean, like Oscar de la Renta, Jackie Kennedy’s favorite designer.

Kevin Youkilis, Alex Cora and Dustin Pedroia.

And some came as key players for the Boston Red Sox. Rafael Devers came from the Dominican Republic. Xander Bogaerts came from Aruba. Christian Vazquez and manager Alex Cora came from Puerto Rico.

So when the Red Sox clinched the world championship in Los Angeles, Cora acknowledged a historic relationship when he said, “I can’t imagine what’s going on in Boston, I can’t imagine what’s going on on my island.”

West Indies Trade

Tragically, the first documented West Indians in New England were slaves from Barbados. European slavers bought captured Africans and took them to Barbados in the British West Indies to work on ever-larger sugar plantations.

Because the West Indian planters grew few crops other than sugar cane, New England traders seized the opportunity to sell them farm produce, livestock, salted fish and wood products. They brought back sugar, molasses and some of their slaves on the two- to five-week voyage.

Enslaved Afro-Caribbeans first came to Massachusetts in 1638 and to Connecticut in 1639. At the end of the Pequot War in 1669, the Puritans tried to force captured Indians into slavery. The Indians, though, ‘would not endure the yoke,’ so the Puritans sent them to the West Indies in exchange for captive African laborers.

On the eve of the American Revolution, Massachusetts and Connecticut each had about 5,000 black people living within their borders. Most had lived in or were born in the Caribbean.

As late as 1860, one in five black Bostonians had a Caribbean birthplace. Many West Indians were free, and some quite successful. Prince Hall from Barbados founded the Negro Masonic Order in Boston in 1775. John Brown Russwurm from Jamaica founded the first African-American newspaper after graduating from Bowdoin College in 1826.

W.E.B. Du Bois, born free to a Haitian father in Great Barrington, Mass., in 1868, rose to international prominence as a historian, sociologist and civil rights leader.

An 1855 map of the West Indies

2nd Wave from the West Indies

From 1900 to 1930, a second wave of immigrants from the West Indies arrived, mostly from the English-speaking islands. They were typically literate and skilled, and a significant number had worked as professionals and in offices. Others were dockworkers, porters, laborers and domestic servants.

They came because they suffered tremendous economic hardship due to the decline of the Caribbean sugar plantation during the late 19^th century. And they came to New England for a very specific reason: cheap steamer fares.

During the late 19^th century, a group of Boston merchants called Boston Fruit ran a steamship service between the West Indies and Boston. They imported bananas, coconuts, oranges and lemons, eventually becoming Chiquita Brands International.

Boston Fruit’s steamer also carried passengers, including West Indians coming to Boston, the first port of call. They also settled in New Haven, Cambridge, Mass., and New York. Florida, though, had the highest concentration of Afro-Caribbean immigrants in 1900, just under 22 percent..

In 1924, immigration from the West Indies all but stopped with the Johnson-Reed Immigration Act. The law sharply limited immigration from countries outside of Western Europe.

Then the Great Depression came, and many immigrants returned to the West Indies, forced home by economic hardship and even more restrictive immigration policies.

World War II

Puerto Rican men immigrating to the United States. Photo from the film ‘Puerto Rican Passages.”

In 1900 Puerto Ricans became U.S. citizens, and for the next 45 years about 90,000 Puerto Ricans moved to the continental United States. Some came to work in defense plants during World War II. But it wasn’t until 1945 that the Great Migration of Puerto Ricans started, lasting until 1964.

Half a million people from the islands, 21,000 a year, came to the mainland, many as farm workers. Some stayed in Springfield, Mass., and Hartford, Conn. They were joined by Jamaican contract farm workers picking apples, tobacco, melons and blueberries.

Life was harsh for Puerto Ricans in New England’s declining industrial cities. Young Puerto Ricans rioted from Worcester to Waterbury during the late 1960s through the 1970s. Many returned to the island.

Jamaicans

The flow of West Indian immigrants slowed in 1952, when Congress enacted an immigration law, the McCarran-Walter Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. It aimed to keep out black immigrants, and it worked.

But like a pendulum, immigration laws loosened up in 1968. They let in close to half a million Caribbean immigrants, mostly Cubans, to Florida. The number of Jamaicans rose eightfold, to about 75,000 in the ’60s. Then it almost doubled in the ’70s to 140,000 and rose again in the 1980s to 208,000 in the 1990s.

In New England, Jamaicans concentrated in the Hartford and Bridgeport areas of Connecticut, which has the fifth highest population of Jamaicans in the country. The Blue Hills neighborhood of Hartford, in fact, has the densest concentration of Jamaicans in the United States. Jamaicans have also settled in the Boston area and throughout New England. Jamaican musicians perform at reggae festivals all over the region. Even Brattleboro, Vt., has a Jerk Festival.

Dominicans

Big Papi, David Ortiz

Today, three New England states – Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut – have some of the densest populations of people with West Indies heritage in the country. Only Florida and New York have more.

The arrival of Dominican immigrants from the West Indies contribute heavily to the West Indian presence in New England. Beginning with the assassination of President Trujillo in 1961, a series of political and economic crises drove waves of Dominicans to the United States.

Dominicans comprise the largest Hispanic group in Rhode Island – 35,008 in 2010. They also dominate the Hispanic population in eastern Massachusetts. The Connecticut cities of Danbury, Waterbury and Bridgeport have large Dominican populations.

Only New York City has more Dominicans than Lawrence, Mass., with 30,243 as of 2010. And when Marcos Devers was appointed as Acting Mayor of Lawrence, he became the first Dominican-American mayor of a U.S. city.

Massachusetts, in fact, has the fourth largest Dominican population (103,292 in 2010) in the United States. The Bay State can also claim David Ortiz, the Red Sox legend, now an American citizen living in suburban Boston.

End Notes

Images: David Ortiz By Arturo Pardavila III from Hoboken, NJ, USA – CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52501471; Alex Cora By Eric Kilby – Three Amigos, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=63535958.

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The Rolling Thunder Revue Visits Jack Kerouac’s Gravesite

Bob Dylan returned to some of his most important roots when he came to Massachusetts, particularly Cambridge and Lowell, with his Rolling Thunder Revue in 1975.

Once the king of folk music, he reunited with the queen, Joan Baez, during the rollicking, improvisational concert tour.

Rolling Thunder Revue played Cambridge, where Dylan had once haunted coffeehouses, and Lowell, Mass., so Dylan could visit Jack Kerouac’s grave.

Critics called the Rolling Thunder Revue some of the best live music Dylan ever performed.

Before the Rolling Thunder Revue: Dylan and Baez sing a duet.

Joan Baez

According to the popular legend, Bob Dylan left Hibbing, Minn., at the age of 19 for New York City. He fell in love with Joan Baez, already a star who helped him rocket to fame. But he took an important detour to Massachusetts, where he fell under the influences that shaped his music.

Joan Baez came to Boston when her father, Albert Baez, moved the family there to teach physics at MIT.

(He’s credited with co-inventing the x-ray microscope.) She enrolled in Boston University but got so bored she dropped out after six weeks.

In the late ‘50s, every college town and city seemed to have a coffeehouse scene, where, as writer David Hajdu wrote, ‘coffeehouses modeled upon European cafés emerged with foreign-film festivals and bookstores that sold imports of Henry Miller novels as outposts of intellectual and sensual dissent.’

The folk revival began in such coffeehouses, as did the protest movements of the 1960s.

Cambridge featured coffeehouses like the Club 47 and Tulla’s Coffee Grinder. Across the river, Boston had the Salamander, The Turk’s Head, the Yana, the Unicorn and the Golden Vanity. They featured such young folk musicians as Tom Rush, Bonnie Raitt and Taj Mahal.

Baez started out at the Club 47 in 1958 and quickly achieved stardom, the first of the iconic young folk singers. Later she brought the boy she was dating – and singing duets with — to Cambridge. Club 47 was so well known for launching careers that Dylan played there for free.

Bob Dylan in Cambridge

In Cambridge, Bob Dylan met Eric von Schmidt, Richard Farina and his wife, Carolyn Hester. Farina would later marry Joan Baez’s younger sister, Mimi.

Von Schmidt exposed him to many traditional folk songs, all of which Dylan remembered when he returned to New York.

The Boulevard at Revere Beach

One summer day, von Schmidt invited Dylan and the Farinas to Revere Beach, just north of Boston. According to Hajdu, they talked about coming up with a new kind of music.

“We should start a whole new genre,” Farina said. “Poetry set to music, but not chamber music or beatnik jazz, man. Music with a beat. Poetry you can dance to. Boogie poetry!”

Dylan, stunned by the comment, did exactly that six months later. He played harmonica on Carolyn Hester’s third album, which gave him an entrée to Columbia Records and to his manager, Albert Grossman.

Eventually he broke up with Baez and married another woman. He famously became known as the ‘voice of his generation,’ something he didn’t want. At the height of his fame in 1966 he had a motorcycle accident and didn’t perform for another seven years.

Dylan and Ginsberg during the Rolling Thunder Revue tour. By Elsa Dorfman.

Rolling Thunder Revue

In 1975, Bob Dylan haphazardly recruited musicians like Baez, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot and Mick Ronson to play the Rolling Thunder Revue. Playwright Sam Shepard joined the tour, as did Beat poet Allen Ginsberg and actress Ronee Blakley.

They held the first concert at the Plymouth War Memorial Auditorium on Oct. 30-31, then played at Southeastern Massachusetts University in North Dartmouth. Then the Rolling Thunder Revue went on to Lowell, where Dylan wanted to visit Jack Kerouac’s grave.

Twenty years earlier, Kerouac had written a long poem called Mexico City Blues. According to Ginsberg, Dylan told him someone handed him Kerouac’s poem in St. Paul in 1959. “It blew my mind,” he said.

He said it was the first poetry he read that spoke his own American language, and Beat writing influenced his own.

On November 2, 1975, the Rolling Thunder Revue crammed 14,000 into a gym at the University of Lowell, recently formed from the Lowell Technological Institute and Lowell State College.

Dylan ambled onstage and sang about five songs, dedicating A Hard Rain.to Kerouac. Larry Sloman, who documented the tour, wrote that after the intermission,

…the curtain rose to an incredible sight, Bob and Joan, together again after all these years.

They sang Blowin’ in the Wind to a thunderous response. Then more songs, and a finale with everyone from Allen Ginsberg to Dylan’s mother onstage singing This Land Is Your Land.

Ginsberg, who frequently visited Lowell, hung out with Kerouac’s relatives and drinking buddies. He tried to educate the Rolling Thunder Revue about Jack Kerouac.

The next day, Dylan, Ginsberg and various band members visited Kerouac’s gravesite.

Watch it here.

This story was updated in 2022. Image of Dylan and Ginsberg By Elsa Dorfman – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1724930.

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