On December 4, 1972, Ali MacGraw knelt on the damp concrete of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre forecourt and pressed her bare hands into it. Hers was imprint number 158, an honor she received after starring in only three films. Photographers gathered in a semicircle around her. On Hollywood Boulevard, a small procession of protesters walked slowly, carrying signs with a question no one behind the barriers wanted to answer: “Fair is fair.
Ali MacGraw, who are you? ”
It was a protest over her apparent lack of fame. To be fair, that month she was the world’s top box-office star and the wife of the most powerful producer in American cinema. What almost no one at that ceremony understood, especially not the woman kneeling in the cement, was that the demonstrators had found the only question that truly mattered, one she had been trying to answer ever since.
Born Elizabeth Alice MacGraw on April 1, 1939, in Pound Ridge, New York, she grew up in rural Westchester County among wealthy neighbors who assumed the MacGraw family was rich. They were not. Her mother, Frances, was a commercial artist, the daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants from Budapest, and the family’s main breadwinner. Her father, Richard, was also an artist, a man she later described as a brilliant mind haunted by his past.
Raised in a New Jersey orphanage, he ran away to sea at sixteen and studied painting in Munich. He never got over being abandoned by his parents. Ali said he was deeply fearful and angry, and he was violent. She and her younger brother Dick lived in terror of what she called severe beatings, and that fear settled into her body, causing years of acute insomnia and intestinal issues.
At the height of her fame in January 1971, she told Time magazine a softer version of her childhood, describing parents who were artists, handmade Christmas presents, and a home filled with books and love. Both accounts were true. They were simply two halves of a single childhood, and it took her thirty years to reconcile them. Frances MacGraw kept another secret, even from her husband.
She never told him she was Jewish. Ali later concluded that her father was likely prejudiced. She attended Rosemary Hall in Connecticut on a scholarship arranged by a wealthy local woman, yet she never felt she belonged among the very rich. She was an excellent student but also an aggressive, principled young leader, and by the end of her time there, she noticed an awkward fact: no one had ever asked her on a date.
At Wellesley College, her thin frame straightened, her crooked teeth were corrected, and men began to notice her. She also discovered the pleasure of drinking. At her first weekend at a Harvard club, she got so drunk she vomited over a fence and had to be carried upstairs. She never treated it as a warning.
From the moment she had her first drink, she loved it, feeling beautiful and brilliant for the first time. In her sophomore year, she won a guest editor contest at Mademoiselle magazine, the same position Sylvia Plath had held, and her photo landed on the cover. Ford Modeling Agency reached out. By junior year, she had gained too much weight for modeling.
She graduated in 1960 with a degree in art history and married a Harvard boyfriend, a German-Canadian banker, a marriage that lasted about a year and a half. She later said they had nothing to say to each other beyond pleasantries. She worked at Harper’s Bazaar for six years under Diana Vreeland, earning 50 dollars a week, carrying cameras and coordinating shoots for photographer Melvin Sokolsky. She lived like a graduate student who had wandered into a Fellini film.
During that period she had an abortion, which was a crime at the time, and she did not speak publicly about it for nearly two decades. Her modeling career began by accident. A stranger photographed her crossing a New York street wearing a striking hair ribbon, and the image made the front page of Women’s Wear Daily. By 1966 she had appeared in a Chanel campaign and a series of television commercials.
A Hollywood agent saw the Chanel ad and approached her. She refused him, having concluded that she wanted no part of the movie business. Then Paramount began production on “Goodbye, Columbus,” based on the Philip Roth novel. She wanted the role of Brenda Patimkin so badly she overcame her reservations.
She wasn’t Jewish, she believed, and she had no experience. For six months the studio politely rejected her, until director Larry Peerce reconsidered and decided this inexperienced girl was exactly what he wanted. The film was shot in the summer of 1968 in Westchester, the same polished countryside where she had grown up poor, and it opened on April 3, 1969. It made her an immediate star.
Men loved her, women loved her, and she won the Golden Globe for Most Promising Newcomer. She was 30 years old. Her reaction was less triumphant. Seeing the reviews, she felt she was overestimating her own abilities.
She signed a multi-picture deal with Paramount, began acting lessons, and started seeing a psychiatrist, believing she did not deserve all the attention. Paramount was then run by Robert Evans, a former women’s pants manufacturer from Seventh Avenue who had sold his shares and raised millions to buy into the studio by 1966. Evans wanted MacGraw but could not reach her. She was put off by him and everything he represented.
Six weeks after the premiere, she married him. The wedding was October 24, 1969. Then came the script that made her a legend. Eric Segal, a Yale classics professor she happened to know, had written a tearjerker set at Harvard and Radcliffe that six major studios rejected.
MacGraw read it and wept so hard she thought she was losing her mind. Evans, who loved his wife more than he believed in the script, agreed to produce it as a small counter-programming film with a two-million-dollar budget. Ryan O’Neal took the lead after Robert Redford, Beau Bridges, Jon Voight, Michael York, and others turned it down. “Love Story” premiered on December 16, 1970, and became a phenomenon.
Over the Christmas holiday alone it grossed 2,463,916 dollars, more than its production cost. Teenage girls wrapped their hair around frozen orange juice cans and wore knitted wax caps known as “Ali hats. ” Roger Ebert added a permanent phrase to his cinematic lexicon, “the Ali MacGraw disease,” in which the afflicted only grows more beautiful as death approaches. The film was nominated for seven Academy Awards and pulled Paramount back from the brink of bankruptcy, giving Evans the room to produce “The Godfather.
” Almost everything that followed in Hollywood in the 1970s was financed, in part, by a movie about a girl dying for an unspecified reason. Her son Josh was born on January 16, 1971, in the middle of the frenzy. She lost the Oscar in April to Glenda Jackson for “Women in Love. ” She told anyone who asked that she had achieved everything.
In the spring of 1971, Steve McQueen came to the house on the hill for a meeting. She was in the screening room. He appeared from the other side of the pool, and the next decade was settled within four seconds. She nearly declined their escape together, telling herself the hesitation was about the child.
She later admitted the real reason was that she knew she would be in deep trouble with Steve. Her husband encouraged her to take the job. Principal photography for “The Getaway” began on February 7, 1972, at Huntsville Prison in Texas, directed by Sam Peckinpah from a screenplay by Walter Hill. The affair began almost immediately and was public within a month.
Six weeks into filming, McQueen’s 15-year marriage to Neile Adams was officially over. On March 14, 1972, Robert Evans arrived at the Loew’s State Theatre on Broadway for the premiere of “The Godfather,” with Henry Kissinger on one side and Ali MacGraw on the other. Photographs of that night became some of the most widely circulated in film history. Evans had everything in that moment, but his wife was in love with someone else, and he was the last to know.
He never fully recovered. He had bought the rights to “The Great Gatsby” as a wedding gift, hoping she would play Daisy Buchanan. On November 1, 1972, Variety reported that MacGraw had been withdrawn from consideration. Evans later said he bought the Gatsby rights as a wedding gift for his then-wife and took them back as a divorce gift.
The Grauman’s ceremony on December 4, 1972, was meant to crown her career. Instead, it caught her at a turning point. “The Getaway” premiered later that month and became one of the year’s top ten films, but critic Pauline Kael was harsh, calling the movie long and dull. The Washington Post later reported that Kael went further, calling MacGraw the worst actress in America.
The label followed her for the next twenty years. MacGraw’s own verdict was harsher than any critic’s. She hated her performance and despised her work, though she liked the picture. Her divorce from Evans was finalized on June 7, 1973.
That summer she married Steve McQueen at Holiday Park in Cheyenne, Wyoming, under a cottonwood tree, with about four hours’ notice. McQueen found a judge in the phone book. The witnesses were McQueen’s two children and MacGraw’s two-year-old son Joshua. She did not appear in another film for five years.
What followed instead was a period of turmoil. They lived in a beach house north of Malibu, and fan magazines presented a clean version of their life. The truth was darker. McQueen did not want a working wife.
Abandoned by his father and sent to reform school by his mother, he emerged unable to trust a woman once she had lost her usefulness. He wanted her home every night with dinner ready. She hated being called his wife. Both drank heavily, and both used drugs.
Neither had a name for what they suffered. There was intense jealousy, the dramatic kind. A Spanish conversation with a Chilean man at a public event triggered an interrogation that lasted from a hotel room all the way to Los Angeles. In 1977, after the marriage had fully collapsed, she told him she was going back to work.
The role was in “Convoy,” a trucker film starring Kris Kristofferson, with Sam Peckinpah again directing. McQueen’s response was a single sentence: “In that case, we’ll get a divorce. ” She once arrived on set so drunk on cocaine and tequila that she could not perform. It terrified her enough that she gave up drugs, and eventually alcohol, though only after another decade.
She had signed a prenuptial agreement promising to ask for nothing, and when the divorce was finalized in August 1978, she kept her word. Three marriages and she emerged with no home, no settlement, not even a silver flask. Success no longer favored her. “Convoy” made money, but nothing else did.
“Players” in 1979 was widely considered unwatchable. “Just Tell Me What You Want” was decent, and her performance was strong, but no one went to see it. She had relationships with men for a decade, including a college professor, an entertainment executive, a series of married men, and Mickey Raphael, Willie Nelson’s harmonica player. She also tried an evening with a couple, and later described it with her driest line: she spent most of the time trying not to hurt the girl’s feelings by being too drawn to her husband.
Steve McQueen died on November 7, 1980, of a heart attack in a Ciudad Juárez clinic after surgery for cancer. He was 50. She wanted to see him and reconcile, but it never happened. At 41, she was no longer considered a movie star.
Her mother died that same year. Television embraced her like a Hollywood orphan. She played Natalie Jastrow in “The Winds of War,” the huge adaptation of Herman Wouk’s novel, which aired in February 1983 and drew enormous ratings. She joined “Dynasty” as Lady Ashley Mitchell for the 1984–1985 season and was blunt about why: she was doing it for the money.
She was deeply in debt with no leverage, and her career had become desperate. She lasted only 14 episodes. Then in May 1985 came the season’s final episode, the Moldavian massacre, in which terrorists opened fire on a royal wedding and viewers spent the summer wondering who survived. No one had told her she was among the victims.
She was standing on the set of the wedding church when machine gun fire began, and she was asked to lie on the ground and be sprayed with fake blood. Only then did she understand her fate. She asked a technical question professionally: whether her eyes should be open or closed in the scene. The answer was curt: “Closed, stupid.
You’re dead. ”
Around that time, she began revealing the truth publicly, starting with the hardest part. On August 5, 1985, People magazine published an article under her name about the abortion she had in her twenties. She was not intending to make it a cause.
What pushed her to write was something that happened in 1979. Her mother, then in her late seventies, told her suddenly that she had undergone a similar abortion in her early twenties. Two generations of women in one family, separated by fifty years, in the same illegal room, and neither had told the other until it was almost too late. In 1986 she entered the Betty Ford Center.
She claimed she entered believing she was having a nervous breakdown. Outwardly she was in her best physical shape. Inwardly, she said, it was total chaos. She told a counselor she did not drink, just two glasses of wine most nights.
Then, under pressure, she revealed the truth: sometimes she got drunk alone, painted, and called strangers. She stood in a room in Rancho Mirage and said: “My name is Ali, and I’m an alcoholic and I’m addicted to men. ” She wrote herself a letter there, later published, expressing shame for having acted without sensitivity toward the women whose husbands she had slept with. Her memoir “Moving Pictures” was published in 1991.
It reached number four on the New York Times bestseller list and stayed for three weeks. A Times review was dismissive, calling it silly and reading like a teenager’s diary. The book tour was exhausting. On Larry King’s show, a caller asked whether going to Betty Ford made her a less ordinary alcoholic.
She simply said no. At the time, money was so tight she was doing late-night infomercials for a cosmetics line. But she had figured out what she wanted, and it was not another film. In November 1993, the Malibu firestorm swept through the hills and destroyed more than 200 homes, including hers.
She had moved into the small house on Rambla Pacifico only weeks earlier and arranged everything exactly the way she wanted. She was working in Thailand when it burned. A friend saved her two dogs and a cat. Everything else was gone.
She stood watching the raging ocean and the sky filled with horror and smoke, describing it as a cinematic scene. She spent months wandering the Palisades, street by street, looking for shelter. In 1994 she settled in a village called Tesuque, north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. She never described the period as exile, but she said leaving was a cosmic slap on the wrist.
Her second act was unexpected. She took up Ashtanga yoga in her early fifties and produced a video with American teacher Erich Schiffmann, filmed in White Sands, which sold enormously. Vanity Fair later credited her with helping launch America’s yoga boom. She fought against cockfighting in New Mexico, volunteered with animal welfare organizations, wrote a foreword for a book about rescuing pets after Hurricane Katrina, and became a lifelong caretaker of Scottish terriers, owning six at a time.
She made her Broadway debut in 2006 at age 67 as the grieving mother in “Festend,” the stage adaptation of Thomas Vinterberg’s controversial Danish film about a family dinner in which the eldest son announces his father raped him. It is not a role anyone takes for money. In 2015, she toured with Ryan O’Neal in A. R.
Gurney’s “Love Letters,” two people in their late seventies reading letters spanning 40 years to sold-out audiences, receiving the best reviews either had gotten in decades. Robert Evans died in October 2019 at 89. He never stopped saying MacGraw was the biggest loss of his life. She accompanied him to his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2002.
She turned 87 in 2024, living in Tesuque, where she works with Eebo, an organization marketing craft cooperatives by women around the world, and where she spends her time writing, painting, and caring for animals. She stopped dyeing her hair. She has been committed to sobriety since the late 1980s. Asked whether she would return to her life in 1970 if she could, she answered: “The truth is we are all alive, and there’s a huge difference between leaving and thinking, my God, how boring life is!
I wish it were 1970. No, I don’t. ”
She spent four years at the very height of fame and left an indelible mark, followed by five more decades of living. She was never a great actress and never claimed to be, which is what makes her remarkable.
The protesters on Hollywood Boulevard wanted to know who she was. It took her about 40 years, two failed marriages, one fire, and a month in the desert to find out. The answer was that she was never anyone’s lover at all.