Breathtakingly beautiful
As we boys on the village green had for so long dreamed of doing, I finally met Alice ”Ali” MacGraw last year, at a black-tie charity gala in Washington. I thoughtlessly and humiliatingly asked her what her next movie project was. She reflexively changed the subject, in the process telling me her age.
”I`m older than you are (by four months),” she said. ”I was born in March 1939.”
And that was absolutely all I ever knew about the mystery girl turned movie star from our village-until a few weeks ago, when two things happened.
Her 228-page autobiography, ”Moving Pictures” (Bantam Books, $20), was published. And she had lunch with me to talk about it in the Palm Court of New York`s Plaza Hotel, a uniquely appropriate rendezvous for two people who came of age in the sophistication of that city.
A piano was gently playing ”You Are Too Beautiful,” and that was apt, too. With her large, luminous dark eyes and unusually fine bones, the very unretouched Ali MacGraw is still a breathtakingly beautiful woman. The only hint of her age is in her hands and neck and a little around the mouth. Women 10 years younger couldn`t achieve her look with a dozen surgical procedures. She wears her dark hair short and with bangs. She`s very trim, tall and slender, and dresses still with chic simplicity.
Falling in love with her wouldn`t take very long.
Breaking down the facade
”Aloof?” she said, of the impression she had made in our youth.
”Scared is more to the point. No dates. No nothing. Just the brilliant little student doing perfect prep school. I was terrified of everything that was normal teenage, like boys, dates, dances.”
As she explained in her book, the facade she presented to Bedford Village, Rosemary Hall and later to Time magazine-that of a typical well-to-do, well-bred girl from a loving, close-knit family-was painfully spurious in parts.
Her parents were highly educated artists. Ali learned to draw and spent many solitary childhood hours sketching ballet dancers and imagining herself a ballerina in Czarist Russia at the turn of the century.
”Certainly we were loved, and certainly there were a lot of books in the house,” she wrote. But the family had no money. Her mother supported them doing brochures and other advertising work. They lived in the country to save money, renting two bedrooms and a tiny living space in a house they shared with two ”revolting elderly alcoholics,” including the house`s kitchen and sole bathroom.
Her father was an alcoholic who stopped drinking until Ali and her brother reached maturity, but who was given to violent mood swings. Their fear of his predatory spankings was such that ”for years I suffered from acute insomnia and a spastic colon.”
She had her brother, a ”walk in the pasture friend” from down the road and no one else. A wealthy woman in the village took note of her and arranged for her to attend Rosemary Hall on a scholarship, but that little changed her reclusive life.
”I wasn`t lonely for friends,” she told me. ”I was lonely because I didn`t feel I fit in. And I didn`t. It was this immensely wealthy school. I didn`t know how to behave. I knew how to be perfect and have good manners and be tidy and all that stuff, and be intelligent. But I didn`t have ease. That`s what I didn`t have, and I didn`t have it for a long time.”
Security in a bottle
As a student at Wellesley, in love with a Harvard man whose country club- set family made her feel insecure, she discovered ease in the form of drink. Her first weekend at his house she drank so much she threw up in the hedge and had to be carried upstairs.
”From the instant I took my first drink, I loved it,” she wrote. ”I felt pretty and witty and bright. Not phony and uncomfortable. And I gave myself permission to be something I never dared to be sober: uninhibited, even promiscuous and out of control.”
She stayed that way until just recently. She is extremely proud of and serene in her newfound sobriety.
After college, Ali found work in fashion photography, taking a job with the legendary Diana Vreeland, among others. She also did modeling, appearing on the cover of Mademoiselle when she was 19. Evans took note of her and had her flown out to Hollywood for a career talk that turned into an elaborate seduction. But he made her his wife, and despite her lack of acting experience, a star.
Life with Evans, with all its pampering, opulence, designer clothing, flits back and forth across the Atlantic and the euphoria of fame, was realized fantasy. Life with McQueen was realized hell. Abandoned by his father, left in a Chino, Calif., reform school by his mother, McQueen had a loveless, terrifying childhood, which he failed to come to terms with the rest of his life.
On the edge-with Steve
McQueen was a domineering, jealous, self-centered man who kept them in a life on the edge that could not long endure. Still, she found much joy in it- too often in the wrong way.
”I wish I had understood, then, all that I have since learned about alcoholism,” she wrote. ”Today, 15 years later, it is clear to me that both of us were not only adult children of alcoholics, but we were ourselves carrying our own disease.
”I was completely ignorant of the garbage I was carrying on my own back. It was easy to count the Old Milwaukee beer cans and joints in the ashtrays and come up with the obvious fact that Steve was stoned every day of our almost six-year relationship …. Whether or not I drank a lot during that time, I had my own illness.”
One of her recent horrors has been to look through journals she kept, discovering that her once-perfect New England schoolgirl handwriting had become ”this insane scrawl.”
Even in the romantic early days, her relationship with McQueen was a feminist`s nightmare:
”One night we went together to a small local party. Halfway through the evening, sufficiently loaded, he began carrying on with two local beauties right in front of me. I was livid, and left the party. Later that night, Steve returned, and I could hear him in his apartment next door with the two girls. It was excruciating. The next morning he sauntered out onto his front step and casually asked if I wanted to come and make him breakfast. And the amazing thing is, I went in and cooked it. He had a kind of spell over me, with all of his macho swaggering. He liked to call me his Old Lady, a phrase I could live my whole life without hearing again. Today it conjures up an image of a steel- haired crazy woman on a Harley Davidson, out by the barn with some chickens running around and beer cans everywhere. No, thank you.”
`I`m living my life`
Ali learned she was being fired from ”Dynasty” only when an associate producer, calling her ”stupid,” squirted stage blood all over her in a scene and informed her she was ”dead.”
Her subsequent humiliations were gentler, but continuing.
”I feel that I`m being judged all the time,” she told me, ”and that`s a position I don`t like. Someone says, `Hi. … You look wonderful. … What are you doing now?`
”If you don`t have the answer-which in Hollywood is, `God, I`m juggling a lot of projects, and I`ve got a three-picture commitment`-I long ago learned to say to people who said that, `I`m living my life.` Because I don`t have the pat answer of the next week`s gig, which defines me. As, am I doing OK or not? And I think the next answer for me is going to be `Fine, thank you.` `What`re you doing now?` `Fine, thank you.`
”They don`t listen anyway, so what`s the difference?
Having moved from Malibu, Calif., Ali lives in a rented house in Pacific Palisades with a view of the ocean. She feels intensely uncomfortable in Los Angeles but wants to remain awhile because her grown son, Josh, lives there and because there`s a chance that widespread interest in her autobiography might prompt some sort of film offer.
She has a little hideaway house in Santa Fe and still spends time in New York and New England. She would like to travel more to her favorite places in Europe-London, Paris, Venice-and explore new locales, such as Iceland. She enjoyed the experience of writing and may turn her hand to a novel.
The next comma
As we sat at our little corner table at the Plaza, the movie-star aura quickly and completely fell away. It was as though we were back in that Bedford Village of nearly four decades ago-sitting one summer evening on the stone wall of the old churchyard that overlooks the village green, and catching up with ourselves. She was so wistful, so full of honesty.
”There remains the interesting question of what am I going to do,” she said. ”I don`t know what the job is, what`s the next comma after my name-you know, wife of, star of. And that`s kind of a relief because it eliminates scratching, clawing and disappointment. I know, because I`ve survived Hollywood. Whether I`m ever there again is irrelevant. I`ve survived it. Therefore, I can survive it.
”I have to pay my bills. I like to live a certain way-with freedom, and money means freedom. The expense-account life of a movie star has spoiled me. For 20 years I`ve been in a million places and been treated wonderfully. I`ve paid for it in my life. That`s fine.
”So I`m going to work. I have to. I`m not being kept by anybody. I hope I`m going to do work I love. I hope I don`t have to do something I hate, but I can. I really can.
”I`ve had horrific experiences in the last five years. It hasn`t been this dream train. I really have the knowledge now that, with all the bumps, the bleak, bottomless despair is not something I have to deal with. And I used to. Not suicidal because I never was suicidal in a conscious level, but the kind of despair, the kind of crying behind my eyes.
”What I want is a quality of my present moment. I want that the walk in the morning with my dogs is an overwhelmingly powerful event in my day.”
She leaned close, and I thought how marvelous she would look at this moment on the screen.
”I have a sense I`m standing on a diving board right now,” she said,
”and I`m about to dive into an astonishing swimming pool. I just know it.”
