The Girl Who Has Everything--Just About

IT'S all happening to Ali MacGraw, and it's happening all at once. Until lately, her world had been Manhattan's jungle of models and photographers, boutiques and private discotheques. Now, at 30, her first film role, as Brenda Patimkin in Goodbye, Columbus, has made her the latest heir apparent in a domain that is just as fickle. "I always had a wish, way in the back of my head, that it would happen," Ali says, "but I did nothing about it. You don't do what you don't have to."

The language is that of a Scott Fitzgerald heroine, and rightly so. Ali (a childhood abbreviation of Alice) is a reasonable facsimile of Judy Jones in Winter Dreams, whose mouth gave a "continual impression of flux, of intense life, of passionate vitality--balanced only partially by the sad luxury of her eyes." Even more, she seems to be playing some endless version of Gatsby's Daisy, whose voice had "a singing compulsion, a whispered 'Listen,' a promise that she had done gay, exciting things just a while since and there were gay, exciting things hovering in the next hour."

Rightest Kind. Fitzgerald--not coincidentally, one of her favorite authors --surely could have written her biography. Born into a middle-class family in Pound Ridge, N.Y., she had most of the right things: "artist parents," an education on scholarship at Rosemary Hall and Wellesley, a job as an editorial assistant to Diana Vreeland on Harper's Bazaar, even marriage to a good-looking Harvard grad. The marriage went nowhere for two years, then ended in a quiet divorce. "He was a nice guy," she says now. "We just had nothing in common. Nothing."

Ali meanwhile had managed the rightest kind of job as an assistant to Fashion Photographer Melvin Sokolsky. "He'd seen me at Bazaar," she recalls, "and offered me $100 a week, twice what I was making. I was married then, and needed the money. Before I left, Diana Vreeland warned me, 'You can't leave now. You don't know enough.' " But Ali learns quickly, and she soon made herself a permanent studio fixture. She did everything: made up the models, adjusted the lighting, hunted for an endless variety of photographer's props all over New York. "I think I must know where to get just about anything in the world," she says.

During her six-year stay with Sokolsky, Ali also picked up an occasional assignment in front of the camera. Her open face and broad shoulders kept her from high fashion, but she was the suburban stereotype, one of those "young mamas" who reads Redbook and shops at Peck & Peck. She brought to modeling the same qualities that have made her a star: a combination of controlled, countrified chic and hip innocence that types her as that kind of smart, pretty, unapproachable girl who sat in the back row of the sophomore poetry seminar.

The New York worlds of fashion and films are symbiotic, and it was inevitable that she would be offered auditions. It was not until she heard about Goodbye, Columbus, however, that she really decided to make the try. Her first reading was a horror, and Producer Stanley Jaffe told her with tactful finality: "I'm sorry, you're just not Jewish." But Jaffe and Director Larry Peerce could not find anyone else, and Ali kept trying. She rehearsed all Memorial Day weekend with co-star Richard Benjamin, and the resultant screen test finally landed her the part. Then her troubles really began.

For the first few weeks of filming, she was a svelte mass of insecurities, intimidated by her co-stars and frightened by the complex process of moviemaking. Her first scene with dialogue was a 15-take trauma. "I started to miss my mark over and over again," she recalls. "I could feel my face and body freeze as each take got more and more terrible. All I could think of was the time I was wasting and the money I was costing." Gentle coaxing from Director Peerce and a little tactful hand holding from Benjamin pulled her through the scene --and, according to her, the picture. Watching herself for the first time in the completed film, Ali alternated between "diving under the chair in front" and sustaining herself with a chocolate milkshake. After an advance screening, however, when Ingrid Bergman and Roman Polanski offered congratulations, she began to feel more assured.

Making of the Star. Now comfortable as a performer, she handles what she calls the "maniacal cycle" of publicity with a kind of patient expertise, even though she has "this insanity streak" about keeping her personal life personal. She lives on Manhattan's West Side, "right near the Thalia theater," with a Scottie named Grounds, and has been seeing the same nameless beau for two years. She also says lots of disarmingly ingenuous things: "I think justifiable film nudity is terrific" and "People must find me terribly boring because I'm always talking in superlatives."

What's more, she remains in awe of the "beautiful adventure" she had making Columbus. She maintains that "the idea is to be a damned good actress" and continues to stress her general lack of experience. For all her callowness, though, she is no amateur about managing her career. She turned down major parts in two multimillion-dollar epics because "they just weren't right," and has the anti-star's horror of getting hung up in contractual commitments, "Did you see Katharine Ross in Hellfighters?" she asks. "That poor girl. I'd rather do nothing than a film like that."

Last week Paramount's Robert Evans finally found a project to satisfy Ali. Love Story, which will go into production this fall, casts her severely against type as the daughter of a cab driver. Besides allowing her to die at the end, the film, according to Ali, has other advantages. "It will be very different from Columbus," she says, "and it's going to be made in New York, where all my friends are. That means that while I'm actually filming, I'll still be able to go to acting class."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.