She was one of the biggest film stars of the 1970s - a Time magazine cover girl so famous and so admired she needed only her first name, Ali, for instant recognition.
But earlier, in the 1950s, in the little New York town where we both grew up, she was known only as a very beautiful but very strange and mysterious girl named Alice MacGraw.The town, Bedford Village, then a two-centuries-old enclave of the rural gentry set in the sylvan hills of upper Westchester County along the Connecticut border, was a perfect backdrop for such a girl.
Few of us boys who hung out on the village green knew anything about Alice. She was a seldom seen, almost ethereal figure, glimpsed only rarely along the sidewalk or in the library or one of the little village shops, never at parties or any place else we frequented - unfortunately.
Her parents were said to be artists, and the family lived in a house in the woods. Alice went to Choate Rosemary Hall, an exclusive school across the line in Wallingford, Conn., and went on to Wellesley College, while we went to a public high school she referred to as "the Blackboard Jungle," although, like her, most of us lived on the uncomfortable margin between the middle and upper classes.
At the time it was assumed that she was very rich. Some thought of her as "aloof" or "stuck up." Boys fantasized about meeting her but would have been terrified by any real prospect of that. She was that beautiful, that "perfect," that mysterious.
More than a decade later, plunking down $1.50 or so at a downtown Chicago movie theater, I took in a film, "Goodbye, Columbus," and saw more of Alice MacGraw than anyone in Bedford could have imagined possible - especially when it came to the astonishingly steamy nude shower scene, which left absolutely nothing to mystery.
After "Columbus," Alice - name shortened to Ali - became about as public a figure as there was in America. The film was followed by the 1970 megahit "Love Story," and Ali became the star of the early 1970s. Time magazine ran a huge cover story, as a blizzard of fashion and movie magazines had done. Her casual style - headbands, long dark hair parted down the middle, boarding school simple but still very hip dresses, short-short shorts revealing the sleekest of long, tanned legs - was copied throughout the country.
Though some questioned her acting ability, she had more class, glamor and natural beauty than any other star of the time. We boys from the village green felt intensely hometown-proud.
Little was known about her brief, unsuccessful first marriage to a young man in New York during her time in the fashion business, but her glittering second marriage to Hollywood's Robert Evans, the handsome Garment District mogul turned actor turned big-time producer, was all over the movie mags and tabloids. Though a known ladies' man, Evans dominated her life and career as Svengali did Trilby's, and could claim credit for making her a star.
But then came Steve McQueen, the swaggering, brooding, motorcycle-macho, wrong-side-of-the-tracks rebel of a movie hero who was the biggest male box office star of the time. He came to Evans wanting Ali for a picture, "The Getaway," and they agreed. Once the project got under way, he wanted her for something else, and she agreed, though she was by then the mother of a year-old son.
As she recalled later, "I was obsessed with Steve from the moment he stepped into my world, and there was never enough air for me to breathe to change that feeling."
The flames of that affair consumed her. She left Evans and married McQueen, and, after a time, left movies. Willingly submitting herself to the crude, bizarre, sometimes cruel and always egocentric life McQueen demanded for them, she stayed off the screen for nearly six years, with one notable and horrible exception - "Convoy," a box office bowwow of a film.
The love endured, but the life became intolerable. Finally, she left McQueen to try to pick up her career in Hollywood. He died in 1980 after a long, desperate, forlorn fight against lung cancer.
She was then 41, and no longer a star - or much in demand.
In 1985, Ali had a role in "Dynasty" and was one of some 300 "stars" making a brief appearance on a television special, "Night of 100 Stars."
Except for occasional participation in those spurious late-night talk shows dedicated to selling cosmetics and other mail-order products, she hasn't worked in the business since, supporting herself mostly with interior decorating and jewelry design.
As we boys on the village green had for so long dreamed of doing, I finally met Alice "Ali" MacGraw last year, at a black-tie charity gala in Washington. I thoughtlessly and humiliatingly asked her what her next movie project was. She reflexively changed the subject, in the process telling me her age.
"I'm older than you are (by four months)," she said. "I was born in March 1939."
And that was absolutely all I ever knew about the mystery girl turned movie star from our village - until a few weeks ago, when two things happened.
Her 228-page autobiography, "Moving Pictures" (Bantam Books, $20), was published. And she had lunch with me to talk about it in the Palm Court of New York's Plaza Hotel.
"Aloof?" she said, of the impression she had made in our youth. "Scared is more to the point. No dates. No nothing. Just the brilliant little student doing perfect prep school."
As she explained in her book, the facade she presented to Bedford Village, Rosemary Hall and later to Time magazine - that of a typical well-to-do, well-bred girl from a loving, close-knit family - was painfully spurious in parts.
Her parents were highly educated artists.
"Certainly we were loved, and certainly there were a lot of books in the house," she wrote. But the family had no money. Her mother supported them doing brochures and other advertising work. They lived in the country to save money, renting two bedrooms and a tiny living space in a house they shared with two "revolting elderly alcoholics," including the house's kitchen and sole bathroom.
Her father was an alcoholic who stopped drinking until Ali and her brother reached maturity, but who was given to violent mood swings. Their fear of his predatory spankings was such that "for years I suffered from acute insomnia and a spastic colon."
She had her brother, a "walk in the pasture friend" from down the road and no one else. A wealthy woman in the village took note of her and arranged for her to attend Rosemary Hall on a scholarship, but that little changed her reclusive life.
"I wasn't lonely for friends," she told me. "I was lonely because I didn't feel I fit in. And I didn't. It was this immensely wealthy school. I didn't know how to behave. I knew how to be perfect and have good manners and be tidy and all that stuff, and be intelligent. But I didn't have ease. That's what I didn't have, and I didn't have it for a long time."
As a student at Wellesley, in love with a Harvard man whose country club-set family made her feel insecure, she discovered ease in the form of drink. Her first weekend at his house she drank so much she threw up in the hedge and had to be carried upstairs.
"From the instant I took my first drink, I loved it," she wrote. "I felt pretty and witty and bright. Not phony and uncomfortable. And I gave myself permission to be something I never dared to be sober: uninhibited, even promiscuous and out of control."
She stayed that way until just recently. She is extremely proud of and serene in her newfound sobriety.
After college, Ali found work in fashion photography, taking a job with the legendary Diana Vreeland, among others. She also did modeling, appearing on the cover of Mademoiselle when she was 19. Evans took note of her and had her flown out to Hollywood for a career talk that turned into an elaborate seduction. But he made her his wife, and despite her lack of acting experience, a star.
Life with Evans, with all its pampering, opulence, designer clothing, flits back and forth across the Atlantic and the euphoria of fame, was realized fantasy. Life with McQueen was realized hell. Abandoned by his father, left in a Chino, Calif., reform school by his mother, McQueen had a loveless, terrifying childhood, which he failed to come to terms with the rest of his life.
McQueen was a domineering, jealous, self-centered man who kept them in a life on the edge that could not long endure. Still, she found much joy in it - too often in the wrong way.
"I wish I had understood, then, all that I have since learned about alcoholism," she wrote. "Today, 15 years later, it is clear to me that both of us were not only adult children of alcoholics, but we were ourselves carrying our own disease."
Even in the romantic early days, her relationship with McQueen was a feminist's nightmare:
"One night we went together to a small local party. Halfway through the evening, sufficiently loaded, he began carrying on with two local beauties right in front of me. I was livid, and left the party. Later that night, Steve returned, and I could hear him in his apartment next door with the two girls. It was excruciating. The next morning he sauntered out onto his front step and casually asked if I wanted to come and make him breakfast. And the amazing thing is, I went in and cooked it. He had a kind of spell over me. He liked to call me his Old Lady, a phrase I could live my whole life without hearing again. No, thank you."
Ali learned she was being fired from a role in "Dynasty" only when an associate producer, calling her "stupid," squirted stage blood all over her in a scene and informed her she was "dead."
Her subsequent humiliations were gentler, but continuing.
"I feel that I'm being judged all the time," she told me, "and that's a position I don't like. Someone says, `Hi. . . . You look wonderful. . . . What are you doing now?'
"If you don't have the answer - which in Hollywood is, `I'm juggling a lot of projects, and I've got a three-picture commitment' - I long ago learned to say to people who said that, `I'm living my life.' Because I don't have the pat answer of the next week's gig, which defines me. As, am I doing OK or not? And I think the next answer for me is going to be `Fine, thank you.' `What're you doing now?' `Fine, thank you.'
"They don't listen anyway, so what's the difference?"
Having moved from Malibu, Calif., Ali lives in a rented house in Pacific Palisades with a view of the ocean. She feels intensely uncomfortable in Los Angeles but wants to remain awhile because her grown son, Josh, lives there and because there's a chance that widespread interest in her autobiography might prompt some sort of film offer.
She has a little hideaway house in Santa Fe and still spends time in New York and New England. She would like to travel more to her favorite places in Europe - London, Paris, Venice - and explore new locales, such as Iceland.
As we sat at our little corner table at the Plaza, the movie-star aura quickly and completely fell away. It was as though we were back in that Bedford Village of nearly four decades ago - sitting one summer evening on the stone wall of the old churchyard that overlooks the village green, and catching up with ourselves. She was so wistful, so full of honesty.
"There remains the interesting question of what am I going to do," she said. "I don't know what the job is, what's the next comma after my name - you know, wife of, star of. And that's kind of a relief because it eliminates scratching, clawing and disappointment. I know, because I've survived Hollywood. Whether I'm ever there again is irrelevant. I've survived it. Therefore, I can survive it.
"So I'm going to work. I have to. I'm not being kept by anybody. I hope I'm going to do work I love. I hope I don't have to do something I hate, but I can. I really can.
"I've had horrific experiences in the last five years. It hasn't been this dream train. I really have the knowledge now that, with all the bumps, the bleak, bottomless despair is not something I have to deal with. And I used to. Not suicidal because I never was suicidal in a conscious level, but the kind of despair, the kind of crying behind my eyes.
"What I want is a quality of my present moment. I want that the walk in the morning with my dogs is an overwhelmingly powerful event in my day."
She leaned close, and I thought how marvelous she would look at this moment on the screen.
"I have a sense I'm standing on a diving board right now," she said, "and I'm about to dive into an astonishing swimming pool. I just know it."