In a special memoirist’s palms, all these glitzy tales might veer into pretentiousness. However MacGraw is so trustworthy about her insecurities, so self-deprecating (particularly about her middling modeling profession) and truthful about her muddled motives, that you just cheer her on. Like when the “wacko” Salvador Dali requested to attract her, and she or he discovered herself bare in his studio, determined to look “cool.”
“This resolve got here barely unglued once I noticed with horror that Dali was crawling underneath the desk separating us,” she writes. “All of the sudden, down on the ground, out of my sight, I felt him start to suck my toes. I managed to mutter one thing about having to depart to stroll the canine and, after throwing on all my garments, slid out of there with out betraying that I discovered this in any respect out of the bizarre.”
The It Woman of the In Crowd
MacGraw appeared to be floating by life. She readily admits that with hardly any performing coaching she discovered herself the breakout star in 1969’s Goodbye, Columbus. The shock hit was produced by the legendary lothario Robert Evans, then head of manufacturing at Paramount, and when MacGraw was summoned to Los Angeles from NYC to display screen one other studio manufacturing at her boss’s house, she fell right into a “high-powered seduction scene.”
That night time, MacGraw launched into “one of many nice drunks” of her life. “I…slept by the movie, and woke solely lengthy sufficient to throw myself absolutely clothed, excessive heels and all, into the swimming pool,” she writes. “I bear in mind, too, pondering that I used to be behaving simply as Zelda Fitzgerald, one among my earlier idols, might need completed. I spent the night time in the master suite of that home. And I by no means left.”
Immediately, she was the hip, It-girl accomplice of the high-flying Evans, “a survivor with model,” who generously folded his “little hippie” into his extravagant world. “I had by no means seen the likes of how he lived — the posh of it,” she writes. “It didn’t appear actual to me, not then, not ever. Nevertheless it was thrilling and flattering and spoiling… From the dinner-party visitor lists of everybody I had ever heard of, to the thirty-two telephones scattered round the home, to the first-class model of each single factor we did, my life moved in a dizzying spiral. I had landed on one other planet.”
The 2 have been married in 1969, and it was Evans who solid her because the doomed Jennifer Cavilleri in 1970’s blockbuster weepy Love Story. As MacGraw notes, she was completely unprepared for what adopted. “I used to be so loopy about being common,” she writes, “that I might go to outrageous lengths to ensure that each single individual in a room appreciated me.”
However on the premiere of Love Story in London, MacGraw discovered there was one individual even “Miss Hollywood Allure” couldn’t win over. “As Princess Margaret handed by me, I might have sworn I heard her say, ‘My husband noticed your movie in New York final week and didn’t significantly take care of it,’” she writes. “We have been all dumbfounded to appreciate later that she had managed to make that very same remark to everybody within the receiving line who was related with the movie.”
