Ali MacGraw Reveals She Would Go to ‘Outrageous Lengths’ to Ensure Everyone Liked Her

In 1990, Ali MacGraw moved to Tesuque, New Mexico, about 10 miles north of Santa Fe. With approximately 1,000 residents, it’s a place filled with beautiful light and wide-open spaces. For Ali, who grew up in the New York suburbs and became a movie star at age 30, it was like coming home to her true self. “You know, I’m a strange old bird at this point,” the actress exclusively tells Closer. “I’m very involved with the community. I have a life that makes me happy.”

Like many children of alcoholics, Ali, 85, grew up to be a people pleaser. “I was so crazy about being popular,” says the star of 1970’s Love Story, “that I would go to outrageous lengths to be sure that every single person in a room liked me.”

She also shape-shifted through three marriages and several affairs before realizing that being anything less than her authentic self only brought misery. “At long last I am beginning to feel comfortable that I am wearing the right costume — my own skin,” she says.

Ali credits her parents for exposing her and her brother, Dick, to the arts very early. Both were commercial artists who prized culture and beauty. They “gave us a home that was filled with amazing books and art stuff and left us with inspiring values,” she recalls.

But Ali’s father, Richard, an alcoholic in recovery, had an explosive temper and was prone to violent rages. Sometimes “I was literally sick to my stomach with fear,” she says of her volatile early home life.

Ali MacGraw’s Early Life

Following college, Ali moved to New York City, where she worked as a fashion journalist, a stylist and a part-time model. She also had a starter marriage to Robin Hoen that lasted two years.

While assisting legendary fashion editor Diana Vreeland, she was spotted by Hollywood producer Robert Evans, who liked her natural look. He cast Ali as a rich college student who falls for working class Richard Benjamin in 1969’s Goodbye, Columbus. The film became a breakout role for Ali, who was crowned Most Promising Newcomer at the 1970 Golden Globes.

At the same time, Robert, the charming and powerful head of production at Paramount Studios, showered his protégé with gifts and attention. “I had never seen the likes of how he lived — the luxury of it,” Ali said. “It was thrilling and flattering and spoiling.”

The couple wed in 1969, the same year Robert greenlit Love Story as a project for his wife. The two-hanky film, costarring Ryan O’Neal about a doomed young bride, became an instant hit, and no one was as shocked as Ali. “Everything exploded with the stupefying surprise of Love Story — this cost-nothing project nobody expected to be a success,” she confesses.

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It took some adjustment. Stardom and marriage to Robert “were events that drastically altered my life,” admitted Ali, who became pregnant with their son Josh in 1970. “I was thrilled, and so was Bob,” she says. “In a typical gesture, he had thousands of tulip bulbs planted in our front yard, so that one of my favorite flowers would be in bloom when the baby came.”

Despite her good fortune, Ali became dissatisfied. She gradually realized that life with Robert in Beverly Hills would always leave “little time for anything but applause and success.” After the high of Love Story’s triumph, the marriage went downhill.

Ali MacGraw’s Complicated Love Life

She was still married when she met Steve McQueen, her costar in 1972’s The Getaway. “I knew I was going to get in some serious trouble with Steve,” confides the actress, who found that love with the tough-guy actor was a roller coaster. “You never knew what he was going to do or say or be next,” she says. Ignoring the warning signs, she divorced Robert and wed Steve in 1973.
They moved to then-bohemian Malibu, where Ali tried to live up to Steve’s chauvinistic ideas about marriage. “I played cook, cleaning lady, ‘simple’ woman to the hilt,” she recalls. “For a while, it worked and we were happy.”

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Ali and Steve were both drinking to excess, resulting in epic fights. Soon, they were cheating on each other, too. “Right from the beginning, I never showed him who I was,” reflects Ali. “I made up a kind of woman I thought would appeal to him, and I hid most of who I was.” They divorced in 1978, and Steve died two years later from heart failure while being treated for cancer.

In 1985, Ali checked into the Betty Ford Center to deal with her alcoholism and love addiction. She began to regard her time as the toast of Hollywood as merely a small chapter in a much bigger book. “I’m grateful I had all that, but I live a very different life now,” she says. “I don’t care at all about being seen in the latest piece of clothing or knowing the latest song. I don’t feel diminished by not knowing those things. I did it all and was looked at, and that was for another time.”