The wet cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre was supposed to be the crowning moment. Instead, it became the stage for a question that would haunt Ali MacGraw for four decades—a question shouted by a small group of picketers while photographers snapped her image into history.
On December 4th, 1972, MacGraw pressed her bare hands into the forecourt as the 158th name immortalized in Hollywood’s pavement. She had made just three movies. She was, that month, the top female box office draw on the planet.
She was also the wife of the most powerful producer in American movies, and she was falling apart.
The placards carried by protesters asked simply: “Ali MacGraw, who are you?” It was a jab at her perceived lack of celebrity pedigree. But the irony was devastating—the woman in the cement had been asking herself that same question since childhood, lying awake in a rented Westchester County home, listening for her violent, alcoholic father on the stairs.
Born Elizabeth Alice MacGraw on April 1st, 1939, she grew up in poverty disguised as rural gentility. Her father, Richard, was a brilliant artist raised in an orphanage who never forgave his parents for abandoning him. He was also violent, meting out what she called “predatory spankings” that left her with lifelong insomnia and a terror that lived in her body.
Her mother, Frances, kept her own secret—she was Jewish, the daughter of Hungarian immigrants, but she never told her husband. She simply shrugged off questions about her past. The family shared a cramped house with two elderly alcoholics, and MacGraw would later describe a childhood split between terror and genuine love, two halves that took her 30 years to reconcile.
A scholarship to Rosemary Hall in Greenwich, Connecticut, offered escape but delivered only isolation. “I didn’t feel I fit in, and I didn’t,” she said. “I knew how to be perfect and have good manners and be tidy, but I didn’t have ease.”
She was never once asked on a date during her time there.
At Wellesley, everything changed. Her figure filled out, her teeth straightened, and boys began turning around in the street. She also discovered alcohol, and it was love at first sip.
“From the instant I took my first drink, I loved it,” she wrote. “I felt pretty and witty and bright, not phony and uncomfortable.”
She married her Harvard boyfriend, worked at Harper’s Bazaar for $50 a week, and drifted through the fashion world. Then a Polaroid Swinger commercial caught Hollywood’s eye. She refused the overtures, declaring she wanted nothing to do with “the racket.”
But when Paramount put Philip Roth’s “Goodbye, Columbus” into production, she wanted the part badly enough to override her principles.
The director, Larry Peerce, took a chance on the inexperienced 30-year-old. The film made her an instant star. “The camera looks into your soul, and it looked into Ali’s,” said co-star Richard Benjamin.
She won the Golden Globe for most promising newcomer, though her own reaction was less triumphant. “I knew I was in over my head,” she said.
Robert Evans, the former pants manufacturer running Paramount, pursued her relentlessly. She dismissed him with Wellesley hauteur: “I took one look at that enormous house of boobs and said, ‘I know what this is about, and it’s not for me.'” Six weeks later, she married him.
Then came “Love Story,” a script six studios had rejected. Evans agreed to make it for $2 million. It grossed that amount in a single weekend and became a cultural phenomenon.
Time put her on the cover, teenage girls copied her haircut, and Roger Ebert coined “Ali MacGraw’s disease”—a screen illness whose only symptom is growing more beautiful as death approaches.
Her son Josh was born in January 1971, in the middle of the avalanche. She lost the Oscar to Glenda Jackson, then told anyone who asked that she had it all. “That is the American fairy tale,” she said.
But she was already in freefall.
Steve McQueen came to pitch her a picture in the spring of 1971. She saw him across the swimming pool, and the next decade was settled in about four seconds. “There was a bad boy there,” she said.
She knew she was heading for trouble. Her husband encouraged her to take the role.
The 𝒶𝒻𝒻𝒶𝒾𝓇 began almost immediately on the Texas set of “The Getaway.” Six weeks in, McQueen’s 15-year marriage was over. In one scene, he slapped her across the face without warning—her shock in the film is not acting.
Robert Evans, meanwhile, was celebrating “The Godfather” premiere with Henry Kissinger on one arm and his wife on the other, the last man in the world to know she was in love with someone else.
The divorce was finalized in June 1973. That summer, she married McQueen in Cheyenne, Wyoming, under a cottonwood tree with four hours’ notice. The reality of their life together was far darker than the fan magazines suggested.
McQueen wanted her home, always. “I couldn’t even go to art class because Steve expected his old lady to be there every night with dinner on the table,” she said.
His 𝒸𝒽𝑒𝒶𝓉𝒾𝓃𝑔 was not remotely discreet. She once watched him flirt with two women at a party, then heard him next door with both of them. The next morning, he asked her to make him breakfast.
“The amazing thing is, I went in and cooked it,” she said. His jealousy was operatic—hours-long interrogations designed to exhaust her into confessing to things that never happened.
Both were drinking heavily. Both were using. Neither had a name for what was wrong with them.
“I wish I had understood then all that I have since learned about alcoholism,” she wrote. “Both of us were not only adult children of alcoholics, but we were ourselves carrying our own disease.”
In 1977, she told him she was going back to work. His response was one sentence: “In that case, we are filing for divorce.” She arrived on set one day so full of cocaine and tequila that she couldn’t perform.
It scared her badly enough to quit drugs, though not the drink for another decade.
She signed a prenuptial agreement promising to ask for nothing, and she honored it. Three marriages, and she came out of them without a house or a settlement. “I had a romantic, ‘Aren’t I a good girl?’
take on divorce,” she said later. “But the truth is that was stupid.”
The comeback never came back. “Convoy” made money, but nothing else did. TV took her in, including a stint on “Dynasty” that ended with her character killed in the famous Moldavian Massacre—she learned she’d been fired while lying on the floor with 𝒻𝒶𝓀𝑒 blood squirted over her.
“Close, stupid,” the associate producer told her. “You’re dead.”
In 1985, she published a piece about the abortion she’d had in her 20s, moved by the revelation that her mother had undergone the same illegal procedure 50 years earlier. In 1986, she checked into the Betty Ford Center, convinced she was having a nervous breakdown. She told the counselor she wasn’t a drinker—two glasses of wine most nights.
Then she admitted she sometimes got bombed alone and telephoned strangers.
She stood up in a room in Rancho Mirage and said, “My name is Ali, and I am an alcoholic and male dependent.” She wrote herself a letter: “Dear Alice, I am ashamed of you. You’ve behaved insensitively toward the women whose husbands you have slept with.”
The Malibu fire of 1993 took everything she owned—every book, every photograph, every object she’d arranged exactly as she wanted. “The sleazy little outfit I had on for yoga was literally all I owned after the fire,” she said. She moved to Tesuque, New Mexico, and never described it as exile.
“That was a cosmic kick in the butt to get out of there,” she said.
The last 30 years have been the good ones. She took up yoga, campaigned against cockfighting, made her Broadway debut at 67, and toured with Ryan O’Neal in “Love Letters” to the best notices either had received in decades. She has been sober since the late 80s.
She stopped dying her hair. She stopped competing.
She turned 87 this past April. On the question of whether she’d take 1970 back if offered, she is unequivocal: “I do not.” The picketers on Hollywood Boulevard wanted to know who she was.
It took her about 40 years, two wrecked marriages, one fire, and a month in the desert to find out. The answer turned out to be nobody’s old lady at all.
