Rupert Pole

Who was Rupert Pole?

Rupert Pole was a husband of Anaïs Nin, and her literary executor.

Pole was born in Los Angeles. His father Reginald was a highly regarded Shakespearean actor. His parents divorced when he was a boy, and his mother married Lloyd Wright, a son of noted architect Frank Lloyd Wright.

Pole played both the guitar and viola, and received a degree in music from Harvard University in 1940. During World War II he performed in USO shows with Jane Lloyd-Jones, to whom he was briefly married.

The Broadway run of The Duchess of Malfi, in which Pole had a supporting role, had just ended in 1947 when he met Nin. They met in an elevator as both were en route to a party given by an heir to the Guggenheim fortune. He was 28 and she was 44 at the time. In her diary entry that evening, Nin noted his emotional sensitivity and knowledge of Eastern philosophies and concluded the entry with "Danger! He is probably homosexual."

Pole, who was under the impression that Nin had divorced her first husband Hugh Parker Guiler, asked Nin to accompany him to the West Coast. Nin agreed to do so, but told Guiler she was accompanying a friend on a drive to Las Vegas.

Pole received a degree in forestry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950 and joined the U.S. Forest Service. He and Nin lived a rustic life in a cabin in the Sierra Madre, where Nin introduced herself as Mrs. Anaïs Pole even though she was still married to Guiler.