Harvard has produced more than its share of romances, though perhaps none as luminous and, in its own way, as lasting as that of Oliver and Jenny in “Love Story.”
In the 1970 tear-jerker of a book and film, the preppy Oliver proposes to the working-class Jenny on the Weeks footbridge over the Charles River, a location that remains a favorite of lovers young and old.
And in a tradition that began a few years after the film came out, a student-run organization still offers annual viewings of “Love Story” for first-year Harvard students.
In 1978, two of the newcomers who attended the screening of the film were Beth Saidel, an art student and dancer descended from a long line of Ohio dentists, and Joe Profaci, a straight-A student and track star from Staten Island and the grandson of Joe Profaci, a New York Mafia boss.
But Ms. Saidel and Mr. Profaci, now both 55, did not meet during that orientation, or during their years at Harvard.
Mr. Profaci was an English major, Ms. Saidel a studio art major. He lived in Harvard Square, she up by Radcliffe. And she took two years off in the middle of college.
Still, Mr. Profaci is sure that he spotted her that first year. “I must have seen her in the freshman union dining hall,” he said recently. “I must have asked my guardian angel, ‘Hey man, can you do something here?’ And the angel must have replied, ‘Yes, but you’ll have to wait.’”
But how long?
Mr. Profaci went on to receive a law degree from New York University, worked for law firms in Washington, married and had three children, and eventually found his way into Colavita, the Italian foods company of which his father, John Profaci, was a founder. He mastered French and Italian, followed opera and the New York Islanders hockey team, coached Little League baseball, divorced and kept in touch with friends from the schools he attended.
People would ask him every so often about his grandfather. “He died when I was 3,” Mr. Profaci said. “I just remember him picking me up and putting me on the hood of the car and asking me what I wanted for my birthday.”
Ms. Saidel taught at a private girls’ school in Baltimore, moved to Washington and worked at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, and then as a “right hand” for an architect. And she danced part time with the Washington Opera. One evening at the opera, another dancer fell ill and she was thrust into a larger role that she had not prepared to take on.
“She had no idea where she was supposed to be,” said Kristina Windom, head of faculty at the Washington Ballet and a fellow dancer. “So she flitted about the stage. The way she is on stage — theatrical, spontaneous — is the way she is in life.”
Even as she was productive and happy in Washington, she never felt at home there. Deciding to nest in New York, she eventually went to work as the special assistant to the president at Barnard College. She was married for a brief time, and had other romantic relationships. Soon after she turned 44, she woke up one day in a panic and said to herself, “I might never get to be a mom!” she said. She found a fertility doctor, and in November 2005, she gave birth to a boy. She named him Oliver, not after Ryan O’Neal’s character, but because it had never appeared in her family before and she liked how it sounded.
A college friend, Harry Dreizen, said Ms. Saidel always had an adventurous spirit. “She needed to do exotic things,” he said. “She thought of herself as a dancer and an artist, and then she became a mom and a grown-up.”
She spoke with Mr. Profaci for the first time in May 2013. The Harvard class of 1982 had bought a block of tickets for alumni to see a classmate, Courtney Vance, in the play “Lucky Guy” at the Broadhurst Theater in Manhattan. Mr. Profaci, now single, went with his daughter, Catie. Ms. Saidel attended with Mr. Dreizen and his sister Julie. When the play ended, Harvard alums gathered in the theater, and Ms. Saidel waved to a man she knew. But Mr. Profaci was standing in front of the man and thought she was waving to him.
“It took my breath away,” he said. “I said ‘Who is that?’ I hoped she was talking to me. She wasn’t.”
Undeterred, Mr. Profaci persuaded a group of classmates to go to the Harvard Club for drinks after learning that Ms. Saidel was doing the same. They spoke briefly. Friends remember an electric current running through Mr. Profaci that night.
The Harvard Club closed, and the group headed to the Royalton Hotel across the street. There, Mr. Profaci and Ms. Saidel spoke in earnest. “He was just this lovely guy,” Ms. Saidel remembered. Mr. Profaci was charmed: “I was thinking, ‘This is a beautiful woman,’ and it was all kind of cool.”
He emailed her later to wish her a happy Mother’s Day, and they began to date. He took her to Sing Sing, the prison in Ossining, N.Y., where a friend of his directed a play as part of a theater program; she introduced him to aerial yoga (in which a sort of hammock is used); and he cooked for her.
Each year, Ms. Saidel traveled for a week in the summer, often on her own. She asked Mr. Profaci to accompany her in August 2013. It was on that trip, to Paris, that they realized they were in love.
One day, they were sitting in the Musée d’Orsay, Mr. Profaci speaking on the phone in flawless French, when Ms. Saidel had a revelation. “I thought, ‘You’re so great and you’re speaking French and we’re sitting in the Musée d’Orsay and what is happening to me?’” she said. “It was magical and beautiful.”
Mr. Profaci said: “We seem to walk at the same pace. And that fact that we went to Harvard together, that was a ballast that kept us steady, that we had this common experience we could fall back on.”
Marriage entered their conversations. Mr. Profaci asked Ms. Saidel’s son for his blessing. Then he made a plan.
In May 2015, when the couple, with Oliver and two of Ms. Saidel’s relatives, visited Harvard for an event, he orchestrated a proposal. He enlisted a friend, Seth Lloyd, an M.I.T. professor who specializes in quantum mechanics and who was part of a team that shot a photon a few billionths of a second back in time, in an early time-travel exploration.
Dr. Lloyd posed as the group’s tour guide. “I was pretty scared,” Dr. Lloyd said. “Then things started to fall apart.” Ms. Saidel recognized him. She said to herself, “Are they paying M.I.T. professors so little they have to work as tour guides at Harvard?”
Still, she was game, and Dr. Lloyd led the group through the campus, pointing out highlights. He showed them Adams House, where Mr. Profaci and Dr. Lloyd lived during their senior year. The tour continued to Dunster House, the dormitory that was once home to the “Love Story” author, Erich Segal, who died in 2010.
Finally, Dr. Lloyd led them to the Weeks footbridge, where Oliver Barrett IV proposed to Jenny Cavilleri (played by Ali MacGraw) in “Love Story.” Once there, everyone but the couple was shooed away. Mr. Profaci dropped to one knee and proposed.
They were married March 19 under a wedding canopy at the Harvard Club. Long-deceased dignitaries of Harvard and Radcliffe observed from their perches on the walls, among them Theodore Roosevelt, Harvard 1880. Music from Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Bruce Springsteen played, and when the ceremony ended, the groom strolled down the aisle accompanied by his new bride, who danced.
“This couldn’t have happened 30 years ago,” said Chris O’Hare, a Harvard friend. “He was from an Italian Catholic family, she was from a Jewish family. Then there’s her baby, his divorce. It’s an interesting reflection of how life has developed, how times have changed.”
Dr. Lloyd, the time-travel professor, watched from the sidelines, smiling. “One of the things that has struck me, going back in time to his former self and now to his wedding, is that he has grown into himself,” he said. “He is still a wonderful, kind, gentle, intelligent person, with a confidence he didn’t have then. This came out of their both growing into their future selves to meet each other, accept each other and love each other.”
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