The literary welcome offered Segal in France was just the opposite. There he is "the new J. D. Sallinger," and he has risen to a plateau just below one of Homer's Greek gods.

Segal admits that to fully appreciate "Love Story," you have to have gone to Harvard. And yet the simplicity of the story has universal appeal. "The little jokes don't really matter to the story," he said. "When it's translated into Korean, there's no end to it."

The New Statemsan once reviewed "Love Story" and declared Segal "sexually anemic." "I just couldn't gross myself out by writing a love scene," he retorts. "If anybody asks me about Oliver and Jenny, clear out. They can check out Irving Wallace and he'll tell them."

The strength of the book, Segal likes to think, is not what is in the book, but what is left out.

"Love Story's" effect has been widespread and varied. Albert Gordon, the chairman of the Harvard College Fund, liked it so well that he sent copies of the book to 593 major donors with best wishes.

Many people feel that "Love Story" has done more to bolster the alumni'sfaith in Harvard than any single thing in the last decade.

But undoubtedly one of the more bizarre incidents involving the book occurred earlier this fall.

As the New York Giants football team was leaving for Boston to play the Patriots in Harvard Stadium, writer Dick Schaap gave a copy of "Love Story" to Fran Tarkenton to read on the plane. After sobbing through the last three chapters, Tarkenton passed it on to his roommate, a mammoth lineman. Same result.

After the book had circulated through the squad that afternoon and the night before the game, with predictable results, Tarkenton telephoned Schaap and told him that the book was "destroying the team when they were supposed to be getting psyched up for the Pats."

Last Saturday night, Stiles staged a "Segal Marathon," which consisted of two films for which he wrote the screenplay- The Games and The Yellow Submarine -and out-takes from the movie, Love Story.

It was an appropriate juxtaposition. In The Games, Ryan O'Neal-Oliver in Love Story -plays a Yale distance runner who ends up collapsing into a concrete monolith during the Olympic marathon.

Then in Love Story, which, judging from the out-takes, is certain to be a real tear-jerker, O'Neal plays the preppie hockey star from Winthrop House.

Yale-Harvard, Harvard-Yale, it all returns to The Game. The difference? "Obviously, the difference is that Harvard men are better looking than Yale men, or vice-versa," Segal mused.