Word: macgraw
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...Neal does an admirable job of acting, but Ali MacGraw may have performed a miracle for Hollywood. She is an echo of a time when Celluloid City really was the dream factory, when people truly went to the movies every weekend. For Tinsel Town, she represents not only an irretrievable past but a plausible future. To moviemakers, she is the Girl Who Made Love Story Happen after six major studios had turned it down?the actress who was moved, she says, by the script's "straight, basic, clean emotion." She is today's closest approximation of the old-style star...
...course, the film is a phenomenon ?there has been nothing like it in a generation. And nothing like its star, Ali MacGraw, to remind the world of the kind of stars that used to glisten in Hollywood...
What was a nice, ivy-minded, dreamy kid doing in a place like Hollywood? Maybe it was a case of positive-negative attraction. Maybe it was her postgraduate fascination with F. Scott Fitzgerald, the ultimate Princetonian, fresh from Metro drinking himself to death just one year after Alice MacGraw was born. Fitzgerald wrote: "People in the East pretend to be interested in how pictures are made, but if you tell them anything, they never see the ventriloquist for the doll. Even the intellectuals, who ought to know better, like to hear about the pretensions, extravagances, and vulgarities?tell them pictures...
...after all, Irving Thalberg. Still, he was a contemporary version of the studio czar, a two-time loser as a husband, an 18-hour-a-day man at the office, constantly visible at parties, previews, promotions. Was this what a Wellesley girl was meant for? Entries in the Ali MacGraw notebook: 1) "To marry a second time represents the triumph of hope over experience." 2) "Do you want to be in the movies?" he asked. "Yes, I think so . . . Now," she said. "Why?" "Because . . . I guess . . . it will be okay to invent my life for three months every year...
...right head would have believed that Ali MacGraw would be the divining rod for a movie trend? A lady who never watches television, who wrote a whole book when Grounds was killed by a car, who copied out Fitzgerald's Winter Dreams in longhand for Evans? Not even