Rupert Pole

Rupert Pole (February 18, 1919 – July 15, 2006) was an American actor, forest ranger, educator, and literary executor best known for his decades-long relationship with author Anaïs Nin. Born in Los Angeles, Pole came from a family with deep artistic roots. His father, Reginald, was a respected Shakespearean actor, and following his parents' divorce, his mother, Helen Taggart, married Lloyd Wright, a son of architect Frank Lloyd Wright. Pole studied music formally, playing both guitar and viola, and earned a degree in music from Harvard University in 1940.

Pole's Broadway career spanned the years 1940 to 1945 and included appearances in The Gondoliers, The Hot Mikado, Trial by Jury, the comedy Mr. Sycamore, and the play Common Ground. During World War II he also performed in USO shows alongside Jane Lloyd-Jones, to whom he was briefly married. His stage work continued beyond those years, and he appeared in a supporting role in The Duchess of Malfi, whose Broadway run concluded in 1947.

It was at the close of that run that Pole met Nin, the two encountering each other in an elevator while both were traveling to a party hosted by an heir to the Guggenheim fortune. He was 28 at the time; Nin was 44. Pole, believing Nin had divorced her first husband, Hugh Parker Guiler, invited her to travel with him to the West Coast. The two eventually settled into a rustic life in a cabin in the Sierra Madre, where Nin presented herself as Mrs. Anaïs Pole despite remaining legally married to Guiler. On March 17, 1955, Pole and Nin were married by a justice of the peace in Quartzsite, Arizona. Nin concealed her marriage to Guiler from Pole for eleven years; concern over tax filings ultimately led her to arrange an annulment of her marriage to Pole in 1966.

Alongside his relationship with Nin, Pole pursued a second career entirely removed from the stage. He earned a degree in forestry from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950 and subsequently joined the U.S. Forest Service. He later worked as a science teacher at Thomas Starr King Junior High School in Los Angeles. With money saved from those positions, Pole built a small house in the Silver Lake neighborhood of Los Angeles, a project designed by his half-brother Eric Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright's grandson. He and Nin lived there together in her final years, even as she remained married to Guiler.

When Nin died in 1977, the two newspapers of record diverged in identifying her spouse: the Los Angeles Times listed Pole as her husband, while the New York Times named Guiler. Following Guiler's own death in 1985, Pole scattered his ashes at a cove on the Santa Monica coast, the same location where Nin's ashes had been placed.

As Nin's literary executor, Pole oversaw the preparation of new posthumous editions of her writings from 1986 to 1996, restoring erotic content that had been softened in editions published during her lifetime. Pole suffered a stroke in 2006 and died two weeks later in his sleep at his Los Angeles home. He was 87.