Rupert Pole, 87, guarded legacy of writer Anaïs Nin

LOS ANGELES — 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 lead to marriage.

There was one problem: Anaïs Nin, the prolific diarist who would become a feminist heroine, 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," Mr. Pole, who was 16 years younger than Nin, told the Vancouver Sun several years ago, "and that is what counted."

Mr. Pole, 87, who was found dead July 15 in his Los Angeles home after a recent stroke, was Nin's literary executor. After her 1977 death, he oversaw 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 father, Spanish composer Joaquin Nin.

Seven previous volumes, 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 her exploration of the female psyche.

The uncensored diaries overseen by Mr. Pole sold thousands of copies and brought Nin's work to a wider audience.

Nin's work lauded

Writer Erica Jong, a latter-day advocate of women's sexual freedom, called the journals "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.

Mr. Pole, born in Los Angeles, was the son of actors Helen Taggart and Reginald Pole. Young Rupert spent his early childhood in Palm Springs, where his father had moved for treatment of a respiratory problem.

After divorcing his father, his mother 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 Mr. Pole lived before moving into Lloyd Wright's house in Beverly Hills around 1929.

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

According to Nin biographer Noel Riley Fitch, Mr. Pole had just completed a run on Broadway as Tonio 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 conversed all evening with Mr. 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.

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."

She soon discovered that Mr. Pole was far more adept in bed than Hugh "Hugo" Guiler, the New York banker whom she had married in 1923.

When Mr. Pole, who was under the impression 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.

Life of bigamy

She accompanied Mr. Pole to Los Angeles, where he enrolled at the University of California, Los Angeles, to study forestry. After a year, he transferred to UC Berkeley and lived with Nin in a San Francisco apartment.

He joined the forest service upon graduation and was assigned to a station in the San Gabriel Mountains. In contrast to her pampered life in New York, Nin lived with Mr. Pole in a cabin in Sierra Madre.

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

Both men apparently chose to believe her lies.

When she married Mr. 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 Mr. Pole about Guiler.

Ultimately, Mr. 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 Los Angeles house that was designed by Eric Lloyd Wright, Mr. Pole's half-brother and grandson of Frank Lloyd Wright, in 1962.

When Nin was diagnosed with terminal cancer in the mid-1970s, she gave up her bicoastal shuffle and lived exclusively with Mr. Pole until her death in 1977 at age 73.

Mr. Pole is survived by Wright and Wright's sons, Devon and Cory.