BULLETIN | SPRING 2016 39
Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw ’56 in A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters.
“I fell into the brook,” which separated the stage from the audience, “with a great clatter of tin.”
’56 An Accidental Actor Ali MacGraw ’56 “I plan to drive up to the front gate of Calhoun College in my new red Chrysler convertible, and sit there stark naked, honking my horn and drinking champagne and flashing at all the freshmen.” So declares Melissa Gardner, the wealthy young woman whose epistolary friendship with Andrew Makepeace Ladd III is the focus of Love Letters, A.R. Gurney’s 1988 play. It’s a moment that encapsulates Melissa’s personality: brash, provocative, impulsive. And Ali MacGraw ’56, the current incarnation of Melissa in a touring production of the play, offers it up with all the bravado and thinly veiled insecurity it deserves. “Love Letters is so well written, about a time I know so well, that I did almost no prep,” says Ali. “The language, the behavior, the slang was all really familiar. I believed it, I heard it, I said it.” The play’s milieu – from prep school to the Ivy League to the art enclaves of Manhattan – was Ali’s own, from her upbringing as a child of two artists in Westchester to her four years at Rosemary Hall, a college career at Wellesley (replete with Harvard socialization), and a post-college career as a stylist and photographer’s assistant. Ali always expected to live a life infused by the arts, but acting was never her focus. At Rosemary Hall, she mainly took part in theater because, as she puts it, “I’m a terrible athlete, and that was the alternative.” She remembers her parts as less than memorable – “I was things like spear carrier in Julius Caesar” – until she was an understudy in Henry IV and found herself called up for the lead when “a terrifically talented girl did something naughty.” Her
experience wasn’t a theatrical triumph: “I fell into the brook,” which separated the stage from the audience, “with a great clatter of tin.” Nor did it spark a yearning to tread the boards. “It wasn’t the start of a career,” she says. “It was just because I couldn’t play tennis.” Ali had to fake those racquet skills for her first big film role, as the tennis-loving Brenda Patimkin in Goodbye, Columbus. A year later, she starred as the sarcastic, doomed Jenny in Love Story. (Ali thought, after reading that script for the first time: “’I am flattened by it, and I don’t understand, because I’m not a sentimental fool.”) Love Story catapulted Ali to mega-stardom, and cemented her and her co-star, Ryan O’Neal (who now plays opposite her in Love Letters) among the most romantic cinematic couples of all time. After two marriages (to producer Robert Evans and actor Steve McQueen), Ali took on more roles, to mixed reviews; went to rehab for alcohol and sex addiction and wrote a best-selling book about it; took up yoga and made a best-selling video about it; moved to Santa Fe and worked quietly but assiduously – “a mouse among mice,” she says – on causes such as animal rights and abortion rights. “I’m an accidental actor,” she says of her stardom. “It was absolutely shocking.” What she doesn’t downplay is her respect for the craft and her commitment to hard work. “It’s been a job and a job I take seriously,” she says. “I’m a real pro. That certainly comes from my parents and Rosemary Hall. They taught me a ton of stuff that I think is rarer and rarer. Things like responsibility, respect for what we’re doing, manners, aspiration – I got all that.” Love Letters allows Ali to display her warm sensitivity, as she inhabits a character by turns combative and vulnerable, mischievous and angry, haughty and needy. Ostensibly the actors in Love Letters could be of any age, because the characters move from childhood into late middle age, but the roles are typically cast with older actors (memorable pairs include Elizabeth Taylor and James Earl Jones, Colleen Dewhurst and Jason Robards, and Mia Farrow and Brian Dennehy), in part because so much of the play requires a sense of perspective. While the Love Letters tour may keep her from her 60th Rosemary Hall reunion this spring – the show is currently scheduled to play in Buffalo, N.Y., that weekend – she looks forward to the occasion with disbelief. “When I used to go to the school, I remember seeing people there for their 60th reunion,” she says. “I thought, Nobody is that old.” andrea thompson Andrea Thompson is the co-author, with Jacob Lief, of the book I Am Because You Are.