The
Ranger Who Told All About Anais Nin's Wild Life

By
Elaine Woo, Times Staff Writer
July 26, 2006

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 uncensored diaries
overseen by Pole sold thousands of copies and introduced Nin's work to a broader audience. Writer Erica Jong, a latter-day advocate of women's sexual freedom,
called them "one of the landmarks of 20th century literature." That they would
be ushered into literary history by an actor-cum-forest ranger, who later taught
science for many years at Thomas Starr King Middle School in Silver Lake, gave a
uniquely Los Angeles tale an unexpected twist.

Pole, born in Los
Angeles, was the son of actors Helen Taggart and Reginald Pole. Young Rupert
spent his early childhood living among Native Americans in an adobe house in
Palm Springs, where his father had moved to obtain treatment for a respiratory
problem.

After divorcing his father, Taggart married Lloyd Wright, the
architect-son of Frank Lloyd Wright. The younger Wright had designed a house for
Taggart's mother in Griffith Park, where Pole lived before moving into Lloyd
Wright's house in Beverly Hills about 1929.

A music lover who played the
guitar and viola, Pole studied at Harvard University and earned a degree in
music in 1940. He was briefly married to a Wright cousin, Jane Lloyd-Jones, and
performed in USO shows with her.

According to Nin biographer Noel Riley Fitch, Pole had just completed a
run on Broadway in "The Duchess of Malfi" and was
working as a printer when he met Nin in the elevator.
Both were heading to a party given by Hazel Guggenheim McKinley, an heir to the
Guggenheim fortune.

Nin chatted all evening
with Pole, who was "stunningly handsome, with the finely chiseled facial
features and slim, muscular body found more frequently on Greek statuary than
human beings," wrote Deirdre Bair, another Nin
biographer. Not only did Nin find him physically
irresistible but she was impressed by his emotional sensitivity and knowledge of
Eastern philosophies. The night she met him, Nin, who
was 44 to his 28, wrote in her diary: "Danger! He is probably
homosexual."

To her vast relief, she soon discovered that Pole was not
only thoroughly heterosexual but far more adept in bed than Hugh "Hugo" Guiler, the New York banker whom she had married in 1923.
When Pole, who was under the impression that Nin was
divorced, asked her to go west with him, she told Guiler that she was going to help a friend drive to Las
Vegas. That pretense was her first step toward bicoastal bigamy.

She
accompanied Pole to Los Angeles, where he enrolled at UCLA to study forestry.
After a year, he transferred to UC Berkeley and lived with Nin in a San Francisco apartment. Upon graduation, he joined
the forest service and was assigned to a station in the San Gabriel Mountains.
In contrast to her pampered life in New York, Nin lived
with Pole in a cabin in Sierra Madre, where she scrubbed the floors, baby-sat the neighbors' children and was known as "Mrs. Anais Pole," though she and Rupert were not yet married.


Still legally Mrs. Guiler, Nin juggled both relationships by shuttling between the two
coasts every few weeks. She told Guiler that she
needed to spend time on the West Coast to escape the pressures of New York. She
told Pole that she had to go to New York on writing assignments.

Once,
when Pole called her at the New York apartment she shared with Guiler, she convinced Guiler that
Pole was a deranged admirer.

Both men apparently chose to believe her
lies, which became so numerous that she wrote them down on index cards and
locked them in a box so that she could keep her stories straight. She referred
to the web of lies as her "trapeze."

She often said that her first
marriage was an "imprisonment" and she was loath to take on a second. When she
finally married Pole in 1955, she said she had "exhausted all the defenses I
could invent," according to a diary passage quoted by Bair. The ceremony took
place before a justice of the peace in the tiny Arizona town of
Quartzsite.

"She thought it ironic that the huge book on the ceremonial
table between her and Rupert was 'The Arizona Criminal Record' and laughed
silently, thinking her name should be on the very first page," Bair
wrote.

She was Mrs. Pole for 11 years, until she grew too fearful of the
legal consequences of having two husbands who claimed her as a dependent on
their tax returns. Before invalidating their marriage in 1966, she told Pole
about Guiler, explaining that she could not divorce
the banker because of his decades of financial support and remarkable tolerance
of her many absences and indiscretions.

Eric Lloyd Wright, Pole's half
brother and grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright, said his family was never sure of
the couple's legal status. "Rupert and Anais were very
secretive with our family about the marital arrangements," Wright, a Malibu
architect, said in an interview last week. "It was difficult at first…. My
mother and father felt it was a very sort of bohemian life. But after a couple
of years, we felt she was really part of the family."

Ultimately, Pole
was the man with whom Nin chose to spend her last
years. After scrimping from his salary as a forest ranger and later as a
teacher, he built a small house in Silver Lake that he hoped would entice Nin to stay with him permanently in California. Designed by
Eric Lloyd Wright in 1962, it featured an open floor plan, with the master
bedroom flowing into the living room, a Japanese garden and a sandbox where
Nin liked to make sand art. When she was diagnosed
with terminal cancer in the mid-1970s, she gave up her bicoastal shuffle and
lived exclusively with Pole until her death in 1977 at age 73.

Love
Nest

(Family
Archive of Eric Lloyd Wright)

July
25, 2006

Lovers

(Christian
DuBois Larsen)

July
25, 2006