Scene: Loew's State 1, Manhattan. The innocent moviegoer and his girl head for the box office. Two signs:
TICKET HOLDERS ONLY. TICKET BUYERS
ONLY. Omigod, the temperature is about 19°—but they both have to see Love Story. She wants to see Ryan O'Neal, and he saw Ali MacGraw in Goodbye, Columbus and is hooked. She cried when she read the novel; he choked up. Who could resist Jennifer Cavilleri, the Radcliffe girl, condemned on the first page to a tragic death, then, loving Bach and the Beatles right to the end, expiring in her husband's arms? Leaving Harvard Scion Oliver Barrett IV with nothing but a ticket to Paris and a handful of bittersweet memories—plus about a drillion dollars from the dad who forgives him for marrying a Rhode Island Italian, now that she is dead.
Forty-five minutes later, the show breaks. While the frozen fanatics in line look on in disbelief, only about 20 customers emerge, dry-eyed. What the hell, was the theater empty? Can the film be a bomb after the New York Times called it "perfection"? More waiting, tempers rising. Then, ten minutes later, comes the second wave, the other 95% of the audience. This is more like it. Wet-eyed men looking neither right nor left. Girls carrying men's handkerchiefs, eye makeup gone, gazing at sidewalks. All victims of Erich Segal's Love Story, the five-Kleenex weeper, the marzipan heartbreaker. It has actually taken them ten minutes just to compose themselves enough to face the real world again.
THERE are millions more to come.
Close to 1,000,000 copies of Segal's hardcover book are in print. Love Story is still number one on the bestseller list—while a 95¢ edition is the top-selling paperback. Now comes the celluloid version, manipulating audiences with contrived bathos. Let's see . . . if just the people who bought the book go to the movie and take someone they love, that's 12 million tickets at $3 apiece . . . No wonder Love Story has enjoyed the largest opening-week grosses in the history of American cinema. No wonder that on Christmas Day, when it opened across the country, the movie broke the house record in 159 of 165 locations. In three days it earned $2,463,916—more than it cost to make.
O'Neal does an admirable job of acting, but Ali MacGraw may have performed a miracle for Hollywood. She is an echo of a time when Celluloid City really was the dream factory, when people truly went to the movies every weekend. For Tinsel Town, she represents not only an irretrievable past but a plausible future. To moviemakers, she is the Girl Who Made Love Story Happen after six major studios had turned it down—the actress who was moved, she says, by the script's "straight, basic, clean emotion." She is today's closest approximation of the old-style star, with the Beverly Hills mansion, the burgeoning career, the marriage to the industry and the chance to become very, very rich.
Ali dismisses all this. "I'm not hungry enough to be a star," she says. "Or even an actress." She doesn't have to be hungry or an actress. She just has to stand there, and people buy tickets. The clean-boned, finishing-school face, the large, liquid eyes that cannot express doubt, the barely upholstered model's body, the metallic purr—that is not standard