The story goes that their love affair began the moment they laid eyes on one another, in the elevator of a swank Manhattan apartment building in 1947. A few weeks later, the exotic-looking writer and the strapping young actor were driving to California on an adventure that would eventually lead to marriage.

There was one problem: Anais Nin, the prolific diarist who would become a feminist heroine, already was married. Rupert Pole, the actor who left New York to become a forest ranger — and eventually guardian of one of literature’s most labyrinthian legacies –spent years pretending not to care that his wife was a bigamist.

“We had a wonderful, deep relationship,” Pole, who was 16 years younger than Nin, told the Vancouver Sun several years ago, “and that is what counted.”

Pole, 87, who was found dead July 15 in his home in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles after a recent stroke, was Nin’s literary executor. After her death in 1977, he oversaw the publication of four “unexpurgated” volumes of her erotic journals, which exuberantly detail her affairs with such men as novelist Henry Miller, psychoanalyst Otto Rank and her own father, Spanish composer Joaquin Nin. Seven previous volumes, which had been purged of much of the salacious material — as well as most references to her husbands — had established Nin as a cult figure, revered by many in the women’s movement for her embrace of sexual freedom and exploration of the female psyche.

The uncensored diaries overseen by Pole sold thousands of copies and introduced Nin’s work to a broader audience. That they would be ushered into literary history by an actor-cum-forest ranger who later taught science for many years at a suburban middle school gave the tale an unexpected twist.

Pole, born in Los Angeles, was the son of actors Helen Taggart and Reginald Pole. Young Rupert spent his early childhood living among American Indians in an adobe house in Palm Springs, where his father had moved to obtain treatment for a respiratory problem.

A music lover who played the guitar and viola, Pole studied at Harvard and earned a degree in music in 1940. He married a niece of Frank Lloyd Wright, and performed in USO shows with her.

According to Nin biographer Noel Riley Fitch, Pole had just completed a run on Broadway as Tonio in “The Duchess of Malfi” and was working as a printer when he met Nin in the elevator on the way to a party.

Nin conversed all evening with the stunningly handsome Not only did she find him physically irresistible, she was impressed by his emotional sensitivity and knowledge of Eastern philosophies. The night she met him, Nin, who was 44 to his 28, wrote in her diary: “Danger! He is probably homosexual.”

To her vast relief, she soon discovered that Pole was not only thoroughly heterosexual but far more adept in bed than Hugh “Hugo” Guiler, the New York banker whom she had married in 1923. Pole thought Nin was divorced, and asked her to go west with him.

She accompanied Pole to Los Angeles, where he studied forestry. Upon graduation, he joined the forest service and was assigned to a station in the San Gabriel Mountains. In contrast to her pampered life in New York, Nin lived with Pole in a cabin in Sierra Madre, where she scrubbed the floors, baby-sat the neighbors’ children and was known as “Mrs. Anais Pole,” though she and Rupert were not yet married.

Still legally Mrs. Guiler, Nin juggled relationships by shuttling between coasts every few weeks. She told Guiler that she needed to spend time on the West Coast to escape the pressures of New York. She told Pole that she had to go to New York on writing assignments.

Both men apparently chose to believe her lies, which became so voluminous that she wrote them down on index cards and locked them in a box so that she could keep her stories straight. She referred to the web of lies as her “trapeze.”

She often referred to her first marriage as an “imprisonment,” but finally married Pole in 1955. She was Mrs. Pole for 11 years, until she finally grew too fearful of the legal consequences of having two husbands who claimed her as a dependent on their tax returns. She told Pole about Guiler, and the marriage was annulled. Accounts vary as to whether she ever admitted her bigamy to Guiler.

Still, Nin spent her last years with him at a small house he built from savings scrimped from his salary as a forest ranger and later as a teacher. She died of cancer in 1977 at age 73.

Asked once how he endured such an unorthodox relationship for 30 years, Pole acknowledged that he had often felt jealous. Nin had bifurcated her life so successfully that her obituary in the Los Angeles Times named Pole as her husband, while The New York Times named Guiler. Yet Pole appeared to hold no grudges.

“Her heart was her life, she would say, and that was true. Her life was her masterpiece, and I am honored to have been a part of it,” he told the Vancouver Sun in 1998.

The uncensored diaries, collectively titled Nin’s “Journal of Love,” received mixed reviews, with some critics questioning their reliability. Pole denied tampering with the material and invited skeptics to check the original diaries, housed in a special collection at UCLA.

Pole apparently completed work on another unexpurgated volume — one that covers Nin’s last years — but arrangements for its publication have yet to be made.

Pole finally met Guiler a few years after Nin’s death.

When Guiler died in 1985, Pole honored his wishes and sprinkled his ashes in Santa Monica Bay, not far from where Pole had scattered Nin’s remains eight years earlier.