(5 of 10)
Of course, the film is a phenomenon —there has been nothing like it in a generation. And nothing like its star, Ali MacGraw, to remind the world of the kind of stars that used to glisten in Hollywood.
Very, Very Loved
Even offscreen, she seems to have been scripted by a nostalgic romanticist. She grew up in New York's Westchester County, amid acres of woods that looked like backdrops for Burne-Jones paintings. Ali lived like one of the foreground figures. "We had rather little money," she recalls. "My parents were artists; for Christmas, my mother used to make me things like a doll's house with chandeliers and wallpaper inside, and dresses for the dolls. In the winter, my brother Dick and I sat in front of the fireplace and talked with my father, surrounded by books. We were very, very loved." There was no cash for private high school but Ali won a scholarship to Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, Conn. "I was a terrific student and a very aggressive little girl," she smiles, "and a righteous little student leader." It was only toward the end of her stretch that she began to be bothered by a small, nagging fact: she had never had a date.
The amalgam of drive and IQ earned her another scholarship—to Wellesley. The gangly figure ungangled and the crooked teeth began to straighten. The boys started turning around when she passed, and the empty social calendar was soon crammed. There was still no money: during her freshman summer Ali waited on tables at the Chalfonte-Haddon Hall hotel in Atlantic City. Brother Dick remembers the pretty 18-year-old with the Irish temper simmering on the back burner. "To me, she really became a human being the time she was waiting on a table with a great bunch of waitress-kidders. They began riding her, and suddenly a whole tray of food landed on them."
At the end of her sophomore year, Ali won Mademoiselle's guest-editor contest; the regulars on the magazine referred her to the Ford modeling agency. But "by the end of my junior year," Ali remembers, "I had gained too much weight for modeling. I didn't care." In 1960 she graduated and—just like Jennifer Cavilieri in Love Story—married her Harvard beau. It lasted a year and a half. "We were children," she says. "We didn't have anything to say to each other except pleasantries."
Something of the Exhibitionist
After a $50-per-week job as editorial assistant to Editor Diana Vreeland at Harper's Bazaar, Ali signed on as a photographer's helper and began to carom around New York. "I never had a hi-fi or even a sofa in those days," she recalls. "I just threw a mattress on the floor most places." One