Ali MacGraw just turned 80 years old. Behind him, he leaves a star career and a stormy personal life.
Ali MacGraw was born on the outskirts of New York on April 1, 1939. He first stood out as a model. In the cinema, he managed to succeed with a romantic film, the melodrama Love Story, which many viewers still remember. Even the Rolling Stones included the actress's name in one of her songs, "Star Star." In the United States, she is still considered a kind of myth since then, in 1970. Today, she has already retired from the screen and dedicated herself to other pursuits related to fashion. In her modest home, as a child, she suffered disagreements with her parents, especially her father, a drug addict. It is something that, over time, made a dent in her again, because of her third and last husband, and even because she succumbed to that drama for a few years, until she managed to overcome it.
Her first jobs, when she was in her twenties, were as a photography assistant at Harper's Bazaar magazine and later as an assistant to one of the directors of Vogue. Two important publications from which she jumped to her facet as a model in television "spots" and in advertising campaigns for the best brands, in the press and on street posters. This catapulted her into the world of cinema, after also trying as a stylist and decorator. S- complicity was the title of her debut on the big screen, without apparent critical consequences, but a year later she won a Golden Globe for her role in Good by, Columbus. And in 1970 it was when the outbreak of Love Story arose, where she personified a sweet girl, Jenny, a history student, coming from a humble family, who falls in love with a handsome university classmate from the Faculty of Law. They soon celebrate her wedding, and she soon dies of an incurable disease. An authentic serial that the most rigorous critics qualified with ostensible reluctance, while the general public turned it into an indisputable box office success. People left the theaters in tears, as I could see when it was released in Spain.
The star would arrive in Madrid exactly forty years ago and I was lucky enough to chat with her, during an hour of conversation alone, in the "suite" that she occupied in a luxurious hotel on Paseo de la Castellana. She fascinated me because of her physical height: slim, brown skin, bright blue eyes, and jet-black hair. Her naturalness before the photographer who accompanied me was undoubtedly a reflection of her years as a model. Her swaying waist, mischievous smile, with a funny pout when she moved her lips. The only thing that I disliked about her was her very long false nails, which she had only seen on a Spanish artist, the Asturian couplets singer Lilian's CE History. Ali MacGraw responded to my question as to whether it was true that he had disliked Love Story: "What I said has been distorted by the large number of interviews I have undergone. You will remember that Love Story was launched with the slogan "Love means never saying I'm sorry". Well, what I think I have always said and what I maintain is that such a phrase does not seem right to me. There may be people who think that the story told in the film was not deep. Good. But It wasn't a false story for me." Ali MacGraw was charming to me and accessible in the deal. She made an effort to tell me a few phrases in Spanish, no doubt to please, telling me that she already knew our country, although only in a brief, private stay that she made to San Sebastián, years ago, a city that was wonderful for her.
Spontaneous, in a good mood, and exquisitely educated, I left the room half-dazed. From that interview, I remember other traces referring to her married life. Intense, and varied, since she was married three times. The first was with a fellow student named Robin Hoen, who would later become a wealthy banker, although they only lived together for a year, starting in 1961: "I was very young, quite inexperienced in life," Ali confessed to me. The second man in her life turned out to be a major film producer, Robert Evans, her husband from 1969 to 1973. They had a son, Joshua. Evans produced several films in which his wife intervened and it happened that in one of them, The Escape, dated 1972, which by the way it seems that Ali did not really want to shoot at first, she was paired with her protagonist, Steve McQueen, first only in the framework of plot action and later, incarnating in real life, when the star was still married to Robert. To whom she simply cuckolded. Which was never an obstacle for them, after the divorce, to continue being good friends and he continued as a producer of other MacGraw films.
The truth is that except for that withering crush on McQueen, Ali MacGraw had been faithful to Evans, they had a child in common and she was also taking care of a stepson, who was from a previous marriage of the producer, prodigal in his life of many marriages. "I was retired from the cinema for a while, the beautiful actress continued to reveal to me, because I had to take care of Joshua and my stepson, who was twelve years old, at a critical moment in their education." Steve and Ali's marriage happened in 1973 and lasted five years. She was madly in love with the blond hero of so many movies, a skillful gunslinger, a risky car and motorcycle driver, a beau with a cloudy and disturbing look: a "tough" on the screen who, apparently, practiced as such in his private life. After the first days of her passion, Steve began to mistreat her: he forbade her even to work in the cinema. And she, full of fear and love at the same time, obeyed him. She was retired for three years, which was when she dedicated herself to her children (her own and her stepson's) as she personally told me. A furious macho, admired for other reasons Steve McQueen, whom she gave up for drinking uncontrollably and taking all kinds of narcotics. The end of that marriage was that Steve, in one of her angry attacks, threw her out of the house. And Ali MacGraw, submissive or frightened, who knows! left that broken home, desperate, without money, with what she was wearing, and without knowing what to do with her life. For his part, McQueen's pimp got involved with a certain Barbara Minty, whom he later became his new wife.
When I asked Ali MacGraw what she could tell me about her relationship with Steve, she only replied, very seriously: "Every couple is very different. We had good times and bad times." Prudent, not wanting to delve further into the wound that McQueen left forever marked on her: upon finding out that he was at the gates of death, she wanted to get closer to him, accompany him in his last moments, in love as she continued to be with him. But McQueen didn't even want to say goodbye to Ali. Bad luck continued to corner Ali MacGraw afterward, as her Malibu house, her only property, was devoured by a raging forest fire. She went to live in New Mexico. Sam Peckinpah had given her a chance in 1978 for her on-screen reappearance in the film Convoy. Later on, she made a living with films of little or no impact. She would go on a drug maelstrom to escape a riding depression. The one she was able to get out of after a tough stay at the Betty Ford detox clinic. She would tell all of this, along with her triumphs, stark in her bitter memories, in an autobiography entitled Moving Pictures. They spent seven years absent from the artistic world.
But she had not been forgotten because the important magazine People gave her the cover of it in 1991 declaring her "one of the fifty most outstanding beauties in the world." She became fond of practicing yoga. She was hired to shoot some video films showing her exercises. And from now on and up to now, she has been dedicating herself to designing dresses from her own line, part of whose profits she allocates to a foundation that watches over the rights of mistreated animals. She is very active in other charities. She no longer wants to know anything about the cinema. She is very close to her son Josh, who is now forty-eight years old. And she, Ali MacGraw, eighty years old, still shows glimpses of her beauty, with already ashen but beautiful hair.
