Love means never having to say ...

My wife and I disagree about politics, vegetables, and TV programming. She likes cop shows. I favor WWII movies.

So lately we’ve been compromising and watching old movies on Netflix – Carrie, Five Easy Pieces, The Graduate and, last night, Love Story. We saw Carrie together in 1976. The others came out years before we met.

A 1970 blockbuster starring Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal, Love Story is the tale of an impossibly good-looking couple from disparate backgrounds. She is a baker’s daughter from Cranston, he’s a Boston Brahmin.

I agreed to watch it because I assumed my wife, who is every bit as cynical as I am – more even – would find it as hilarious as I did 44 years ago and we’d yuk it up. In case you’ve forgotten, here’s the plot.

Harvard student O’Neal meets MacGraw at a library, where she’s working to put herself through Radcliffe. She insults him repeatedly, which turns him on big-time. He invites her to watch him play hockey. Afterwards they throw snowballs at each other and make snow angels – there's lots of snow in this movie – and they fall head-over-heels as she continues to insult him at every opportunity, flaring her nostrils whenever she perceives she’s landed a particularly nasty jab. He allows her to do this because he has low self-esteem – he feels terrible because he was born rich; there are buildings at Harvard bearing the family name that have caused him considerable angst.

One wintry day he drives her in his vintage MG convertible with the top down to meet his stuffy parents. He then asks her to marry him, knowing it will send his parents to the moon, and they recite ridiculous vows at their wedding.

She gives up a scholarship to study in Paris in order to put him through law school because his father has wisely cut off the money spigot. (What father wouldn’t refuse to support a son as arrogant and ungrateful as O’Neal?)  The couple gets in an argument (over his parents, naturally – they’re otherwise perfectly suited), she runs out into the cold, he searches all over for her and returns to find her shivering on the front porch where, when he apologizes, she utters the immortal words, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.”

After three years of poverty he graduates, lands a cushy job in New York and, because this is 1970 when women still had babies in their twenties or thirties, they immediately start trying to conceive a kid they refer to as “Bozo” but have no luck.

He is called into her doctor’s office and assumes the doc is going to tell him one of them has a plumbing issue. But the doc has even worse news: MacGraw is dying. O’Neal doesn’t bother to ask what disease she has – it should be obvious to anyone with half a brain that she caught some bug from being cold all the time – but they agree not to tell her.

A few days later O’Neal buys tickets to Paris, figuring she’s been pissed all these years that she didn’t get to go, but when he presents them she tells him she knows she’s toast.

Wanting to provide quality medical treatment – Obamacare, the brainchild of another Harvard Law grad, is more than 40 years in the future – O’Neal flies to Boston and tells his father he needs $5,000, no questions asked. The old man writes him a check.

O’Neal goes back to New York and forces his terminally ill wife to sit outside in freezing weather, watching him ice-skate. She finally announces she needs to go to the hospital. He drags her through waist-deep snow across Central Park (one would think someone as highly educated as O'Neal would have had enough common sense to use a sidewalk since they are always cleared off almost instantly in New York), hails a cab and off they go to Mt. Sinai.

MacGraw, in her final moments on earth, looks ravishing as opposed to ravished by her illness; she is wearing full make up and has just had her hair done. Perhaps more important, for the first time since she met O’Neal, she is warm. Her nostrils flaring one last time, she tells him to screw Paris and exits stage left.

On his way out of the hospital O’Neal meets his father who says he learned the truth about why he borrowed the money and is sorry. O’Neal tells him, “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” trudges off in the snow and sits on a bench.

The movie was exactly as I remembered it – silly, pretentious and unbelievable – and I started making wise-ass remarks from the get-go.

To my surprise, my wife, who, despite her inexplicable penchant for Brussels sprouts, is otherwise intelligent, disagreed. She said she found it romantic and beautiful and finally told me to shut my mouth and let her enjoy it.

Perhaps I should have told her I was sorry.

But ...


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