Visiting with Rupert Pole

Today's feature in the Times on the Silver Lake home where Rupert Pole lived with the writer Anais Nin is the best chance I'll ever get to link to this post by Carolyn Kellogg. She wrote it in July, after Pole died, but I missed it then. She recounts a random encounter with Nin's lover many years ago while walking the hills of Silver Lake soliciting political donations. Sample:

The man is white-haired and shirtless, and has the most beautiful blue eyes I've ever seen. He interrupts me, says he'll give me some money, but I have to come in. He's got asparagus on the stove.

He's listening to NPR and he turns off the asparagus. I think that he must be 70, even though he doesn't seem 70. I go on with the schpiel but I'm distracted by the house. We're standing on the edge of a galley kitchen and beyond it is a great room with a few doors on the opposite wall. I'm transfixed by one wall of the great room that's all windows; beneath the windows is a long reflecting pool. It seems to flow along the very lip of the yard on the hillside. And just beyond it, the next thing you see, is Silver Lake, although there are a few hills between us and it's far below. It's framed as if it was placed there for this house alone. I think Frank Lloyd Wright, but I'm sure I'm wrong.

I drop the schpiel. I don't know how exactly, but we start talking about books. Is this what happens? I think it is that he asks what I have been reading and I say Henry Miller (I'm a punk rock college dropout, of course I'm reading Henry Miller). I think this is when he asks if I know Anais Nin, and I do but I haven't read her writing. I should, he says. He'll give me one of her books, he tells me, then he pauses.

It's pretty racy, he says.

Oh, I can handle racy, I say back.

He goes around a corner and downstairs, I think, and comes back up with Henry and June. He inscribes it to me.

She was almost right. The home was designed by Eric Lloyd Wright, grandson of the more famed architect. Hat tip to Theresa Duncan at Wit of the Staircase for the link.