Show Business: Ali MacGraw: A Return to Basics

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semipermanent resting place was the pad of a struggling young actor. He and a Brindle Scottish Terrier named Grounds became her most constant companions. By 1967 she had stopped carrying the cameras and began appearing in front of them. She had in fact become a sensational model—and promptly attracted the attention of a movie agent who had seen her TV commercials for Chanel No. 5 Bath Oil. Ali turned him off—fast. She had met a slew of movie people on location: "I categorically decided I didn't want to be involved in the racket."

Then came the temptation to do Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus. Ali, who loved the book, wanted the part of the central character, Brenda Patimkin, but the part did not want her. When she tried for it, she met a hundred excuses. Ali was not Jewish, she did not have enough experience, there were bigger names who wanted to play the part. Then, after six months, Director Larry Peerce decided that the inexperienced kid was right for it after all. The role earned Ali a fast $10,000 and even faster fame. "When I saw those reviews, I knew I was in over my head," she says. But she had signed a five-picture contract with Paramount and started at last to study acting. She was 30 years old. No recent ingenue had made it so big so late. There was a lot of catching up to do. Like consulting a psychiatrist. "I thought I wasn't worthy of all that attention. I was so unhappy, and scared that what I wanted to be as a person was going to go under."

As with most neoromantic concepts, that "person" had no clear form; it was a filmy outline sketched in innumerable entries in a leather-bound book that Ali keeps at her bedside. It is filled with pressed flowers, insightful quotes, like Amedee Ozenfant's "The Romanticist has in him something of the Exhibitionist," and clippings of poems, like Yevtushenko's on the Kennedy assassination: "Loving freedom with bullets, you shoot at yourself, America!" It is also filled with thin-line sketches of astonishing virtuosity, reminiscent, like the artist, of illustrations in Edwardian children's books.

Ali in Wonderland?

What was a nice, ivy-minded, dreamy kid doing in a place like Hollywood? Maybe it was a case of positive-negative attraction. Maybe it was her postgraduate fascination with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the ultimate Princetonian, fresh from Metro drinking himself to death just one year after Alice MacGraw was born. Fitzgerald wrote: "People in the East pretend to be interested in how pictures are made, but if you tell them anything, they never see the ventriloquist for the doll. Even the intellectuals, who ought to know better, like to hear about the pretensions, extravagances, and vulgarities—tell them pictures have a private grammar and watch the blank look come into their faces."

Paramount Production Chief Robert Evans remembers that blank look. "I shook hands with her for a year and a half. Otherwise she had nothing to do with me. I wasn't her kind of guy. Everything I represented seemed to turn her off." Recalls Ali: "I took one look at that enormous house of Bob's and in my highhanded way said, 'Well, I know what this is about and it's not for me.'" What it was about was 18 rooms and 26 phones, most of them chorusing with jangles from New York.