Another of the media myths about Al Gore was that he wrongly claimed to have been the model for Oliver Barrett IV in Erich Segal’s wildly successful book (and the Oscar-nominated best picture that followed) Love Story. This was made out as one more example of Gore’s tendency to lie, or at least exaggerate. Gore himself claimed only to have said during a conversation with reporters on a late-night flight in 1997 that a reporter for The Nashville Tennessean had gotten Segal to acknowledge a connection to Gore during a book tour. Whatever Gore actually said, the media told the story through the 2000 election as if it was totally off the wall.
But it wasn’t. In late 1997 Melinda Henneberger in The New York Times, reported:
Those reports were half-true, Mr. Segal said: The character of the preppy Harvard hockey player Oliver Barrett 4th was modeled on both Mr. Gore and his college roommate, the actor Tommy Lee Jones.
But it was Mr. Jones who inspired the half of the character that was a sensitive stud, a macho athlete with the heart of a poet, Mr. Segal said. The author attributed to Mr. Gore only the character’s controlling father and feeling that his family was pressuring him to follow in Dad’s footsteps.
According to Henneberger, Segal stated that, though he knew her, Tipper Gore was not model for the book’s Jenny Cavilleri (played in the film by Ali MacGraw).
Do you remember learning during the 2000 election cycle that the story was in any way true?