Mr. Segal said he knew the two of them at Harvard when he was on sabbatical there in 1968, and knew Mrs. Gore as well. But the character of the cool, smart-mouthed Radcliffe musician, Jenny Cavilleri, was in no way based on Mrs. Gore, Mr. Segal said, and the wild romance in the novel was not inspired by the couple.

''I did not draw a thing from Tipper,'' he said. ''I knew her only as Al's date.''

Mr. Segal said he had been ''befuddled'' by the report, which was published in Time magazine this week, and had called the Vice President to find out what had happened. Mr. Gore told Mr. Segal that the whole thing was a misunderstanding. Then, Mr. Segal said, Mr. Gore told him, ''Let's remember what happened.'' And, he said, ''It's important now.''

On Friday, in interviews with the New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, a spokeswoman for Mr. Gore, Ginny Terzano, not only did not challenge the story but also confirmed that the novel was ''loosely based'' on the Gores. She also added some details, saying that the Gores and Mr. Jones had socialized with Mr. Segal when the three men lived in Dunster House at Harvard. When asked how Mr. Gore felt about the story, Ms. Terzano said he thought it was ''cute.'' And, asked why such an appealing fact had never come to light during his years of public life, Ms. Terzano said: ''Because they're shy people, those Gores. They don't talk about themselves.''

But Ms. Terzano said today that Mr. Gore had not bothered to correct the story because he had more important things to do. She said that she simply had not checked with Mr. Gore about the story on Friday and had based the confirmation on his comment on the plane. Ms. Terzano said that she, and not the Vice President, thought it was a cute story. ''I still do,'' she said.

In 1970, Mr. Segal told The Times that the novel's basic story came from one of his students at Yale, whose wife had died, and that the model for Jenny was a woman Mr. Segal had dated in his Harvard days. Mr. Segal said Mr. Gore told him on the phone this week that he knew that Mrs. Gore was not Jenny and had never said she was.