Rupert Pole

Rupert Pole (February 18, 1919 – July 15, 2006) was an American actor and the husband of author Anaïs Nin, as well as her literary executor.

Early life and education 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, Helen Taggart, 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.

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. She kept her marriage to Guiler secret from Pole for 11 years, but concern about the legal consequences of having two men claim her as a dependent on their tax returns led her to arranging the annulment in 1966 of the marriage with Pole.

As Nin's literary executor, Pole was responsible for supervising the preparation of new posthumous editions of her works for publication from 1986 to 1996, restoring erotic content that had been made less explicit in the versions published while she lived. On Guiler's death in 1985, Pole scattered his ashes in the same place as Nin's, a cove on the coast at Santa Monica.

Death Pole suffered a stroke in 2006, and died in his sleep two weeks later, at his home in Los Angeles. For his obituary in The New York Times Nin's biographer, Deirdre Bair, told a reporter: "He was sort of a great cipher. He was stunningly handsome. Incredibly shy. And just very incredibly self-effacing. [Nin] was his star: everything radiated around her, and he loved being in her background."