Ali MacGraw - Moving Pictures: An Autobiography

Moving Pictures: An Autobiography

Ali MacGraw

Published in collaboration with Renaissance Literary & Talent

Post Office Box 17379 Beverly Hills, CA 90209

www.renaissancemgmt.net

Originally published in the United States by Scribner
Orignally published in the United Kingdom by Transworld

Original Copyright 1991 Ali MacGraw

Copyright 2015 Ali MacGraw
ISBN: 978-1-938402-42-5

The right of Ali MacGraw to be identified

as author of this work has been asserted in accordance

with sections 77 and 78 of the UK Copyright Designs and

Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may
be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted in any form or by any means,
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or otherwise, without the prior permission of
the copyright holder.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not,
by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out
or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

Cover photo courtesy of Douglas Kirkland

www.douglaskirkland.com

Moving Pictures: An Autobiography

X X

4 Z

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and in loving memory
of my parents

I t has taken me a number of years of stopping and starting to write this book, and there are certain people whose encouragement through all this time made it finally happen.

First, I want to thank my agent, the legendary Irving Lazar, for believing that I had a book in me, as he put it, and for keeping after me until I got it done. My thanks to Richard Meryman for making me believe that I should and could write it myself, and for introducing me to the man without whom it most certainly would never have been done: David Outerbridge. I am grateful to David and to his wife, Lilias, for their support and generosity during all those weeks in their home in Belfast, Maine, where most of this book was written. In offering me their home and their friendship, they helped me to retrace my roots and finally to begin this journey.

My thanks, too, to the town of Belfast, which, like Malibu before it, provided me with a nurturing environment while I was living there. I am grateful to Kim Ryan in Maine for deciphering my illegible longhand and turning it into workable typewritten pages for David to organize. Thank you, Lori Hale in Los Angeles and Joe Pittman in New York, for performing the same role. And thanks to Alan Nevins for orchestrating so many details. I am also indebted to all the photographers who so generously allowed me the use of their photographs in this book.

I am grateful to so many friends who have been there for me during various times in my life; I think you know who you are. But writing this book turned out to be a far more stressful experience than I had ever imagined, and certain people were particularly supportive during this time. Thank you, Candice Bergen, Nicky Butler, Jos Eber, Arlie Manuel, Sue Mengers, Barbara Nessim, Michle Parmiter, Byron Pedersen, Gilda Traylor, and Jeff Wald. And my thanks to Ann Sterling for finding me my first house.

Finally, I want to thank Linda Grey at Bantam for sticking with me months after this manuscript was due, believing that I had a story to tell and that I would finally deliver it. And my especial thanks to my editor, Beverly Lewis, who looked at the whole thing with a much-needed fresh eye long after I had grown dizzy with it, and with sensitivity and intelligence and remarkable patience helped to shape it into a real book.

I have been blessed to have certain children in my life beautiful grown-ups now. They have made my life richer: Terry and Chad McQueen, Lori and Tod Spangler, Robyn Westbrook, and Lauren Wild.

And finally, my deep gratitude to the hundreds, if not thousands of people whom I know only by their first names. Their unconditional acceptance and honesty have taught me how to live.

Out of respect for peoples privacy, I have changed some of the names in this book.

A t fifty.

I think I may be growing up at last.

I bought my first house today not the eighteenth-century white clapboard farmhouse and barn I had always imagined, somewhere in New England. This one is a small adobe half-buried in the terra-cotta hills of Tesuque, New Mexico, as far away from my roots as are they from my temporary home, Los Angeles, where I have lived these many adventure-filled years. This little house is surrounded by pale silver shrubs and wild flowers whose names I have yet to learn, and the sky is a swiftly changing canvas of huge clouds chasing one another across a field of brilliant blue. At night I can touch the stars and the iridescent silver moon, and always I can breathe the clean, perfumed air. Like all good presents it came as a surprise, and like a child I catch myself smiling when I think about it.

It wasnt always this way. For so many years, in circumstances that seemed so perfect to the great invisible them out there, I existed as a kind of shadow woman. Part of me performed appropriately, and sometimes even brilliantly much more so in life than I usually did on screen.

But there was another part of me that always, always felt that everything was happening to the shadow standing right next to me. All that attention. All that praise. All those fabulous times. The real me was there, too, with a fixed smile and a certain deceptive energy. But beneath the unconscious pose there was nearly always a dull ache in my heart. It was unfocused, but behind my eyes I was crying.

For a very long time I had no idea that there were two of me. Certainly I have been inordinately lucky this first half-century of my life, and often I was too distracted to take time to examine the anger and insecurity and raw fear that made me crave fixes to keep me from feeling. Prizes and lovers, tequila and chocolate. Attention and work. I needed them all to keep me from the edge of the deep black hole inside me.

Today everything is different, and some things are the same. I wake up less often with that terror in my selfish heart, that longing for a present like a petulant child stamping her foot. Nowadays on my daily walks with my dogs I find myself saying out loud, over and over again, Thank you.

Thank you for that cobalt morning-glory vine, and thank you for the two sparrows playing in that tree. Thank you for the fun my dogs are having in the leaves by the side of the road, and thank you, God, for the sweet-smelling breeze from the jasmine. Thank you for my friends. And for my animals. And for the miracle of my perfect child as he sets out on his own life at last. And for my sobriety.

And so every day, every moment brings its own lessons, its own treats, and I grow.

A warm wind brings back memories of a long-ago day in Rome. It was 1967, and I had given up my part-time job as a fashion model and my rented apartment in New York to join my boyfriend in Rome for several months. He was an actor who had gotten a part in one of those spaghetti westerns so popular at the time, and I couldnt resist the chance to live in Italy. Life was all laughter and pasta and flirting in the Rome of the Sixties, and it was only a matter of time before we were collected, like every other new face in town, by the In Crowd. Night after night we joined dozens of charming strangers for long dinners alfresco on the Via Veneto and all-night dancing afterwards in the club of the moment.