“Love means never having to say you’re sorry. With that absurd lie, millions of boxes of Kleenex were sold, and a number of careers were launched. Including mine.”

So writes ’70s superstar Ali MacGraw in 1991’s Moving Pictures: An Autobiography, of the film that made her a household name: the 1970 weepie Love Story. The style icon and star of films including Goodbye Columbus, The Getaway, and Convoy recounts her life story—which has included romances with Robert Evans, Steve McQueen, Warren Beatty and Peter Weller—with taste, refinement, humor, graciousness, and a dose of new-age introspection. It is the autobiography of someone who lived a dream life, but found herself lost in the glamor she craved.

“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,” she writes. “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.”

Bohemian Rhapsody

“From early on I thought there was something really peculiar about our entire family: we didn’t fit in,” MacGraw writes. “We were not ‘normal.’”

Elizabeth Alice MacGraw was born in Pound Ridge, New York, on April 1, 1939, to a reclusive, artistic family. Both of her parents were commercial artists. Her father, Richard, was an “elegant loner” and “mysterious genius,” while her mother, Frances—the family’s main breadwinner—was disciplined, charitable and judgmental (a trait MacGraw admits to inheriting).

MacGraw describes her cultured but isolated childhood as one filled with crafting, exploring and observation. “[Daddy] would go into the garden and sketch the flowers and the birds,” she writes. “He would hold a fuzzy dandelion between his fingers and say to me: ’Look at this. Isn’t it remarkable, perfect?’ And I learned to see it, and everything else, acutely well. That was a big gift.”

But the artistic, watchful girl saw more than she would have liked. According to MacGraw, her father was an explosive and at times abusive dry alcoholic, and their small family home was filled with simmering tension. “I was literally sick to my stomach with fear,” she writes.

Like so many children with a volatile parent, she worked hard to be the perfect child, excelling at the progressive all girls-school Rosemary Hall before graduating from the prestigious Wellesley College with a degree in art history (and landing a modeling contract with mega-agent Eileen Ford). She escaped into fantasies of glamor, which would be shockingly close to her future fate. “I was always the mistress of some member of the Imperial Family, dancing to rave reviews and decked …in real diamonds donated by my royal lover,” she writes. “Anyone but Elizabeth Alice MacGraw, immaculate, conscientious little student and member of the community.”

Hot Child in the City

After graduating from college, MacGraw moved to New York City at the dawn of the swinging sixties, with the aim of making it in fashion journalism. She embarked on a life that made this reviewer acutely jealous, a real-life midcentury take on The Devil Wears Prada that included a stint as an assistant to Diana Vreeland, the legendary fashion editor at Harper’s Bazaar.

MacGraw was in awe of the sophisticated, brilliant Vreeland and hung on to her every word. Vreeland was a tough, imperious boss, but the steely MacGraw occasionally gave as good as she got. She writes:

One day, as I struggled on the carpet to arrange violet snakeskin shoes for a photo shoot, Mrs. Vreeland swept dramatically by me, throwing her heavy Mainbocher overcoat at me, and I involuntarily chucked it right back at her. “That is the rudest Girl I have ever known!” Oh, she was tough.

Although a brief marriage to Harvard grad Robin Hoen failed, her life continued on its glamorous path. MacGraw was a part-time model and a photo stylist for celebrated photographer Melvin Sokolsky. She describes being Sokolsky’s Girl Friday as the best job of her life; it entailed racing around town to find props, taping models’ breasts, designing and facilitating shoots, and spending an afternoon with Coco Chanel.

In a different memoirist’s hands, all these glitzy tales could veer into pretentiousness. But MacGraw is so honest about her insecurities, so self-deprecating (especially about her middling modeling career) and truthful about her muddled motives, that you simply cheer her on. Like when the “wacko” Salvador Dali requested to draw her, and she found herself naked in his studio, desperate to look “cool.”

“This resolve came slightly unglued when I saw with horror that Dali was crawling under the table separating us,” she writes. "Suddenly, down on the floor, out of my sight, I felt him begin to suck my toes. I managed to mutter something about having to leave to walk the dog and, after throwing on all my clothes, slid out of there without betraying that I found this at all out of the ordinary.”

The It Girl of the In Crowd

MacGraw seemed to be floating through life. She readily admits that with hardly any acting training she found herself the breakout star in 1969’s Goodbye, Columbus. The surprise hit was produced by the legendary lothario Robert Evans, then head of production at Paramount, and when MacGraw was summoned to Los Angeles from NYC to screen another studio production at her boss’s home, she fell into a “high-powered seduction scene.”

That night, MacGraw embarked on “one of the great drunks” of her life. “I…slept through the film, and woke only long enough to throw myself fully clothed, high heels and all, into the swimming pool,” she writes. “I remember, too, thinking that I was behaving just as Zelda Fitzgerald, one of my earlier idols, might have done. I spent the night in the master bedroom of that house. And I never left.”

Instantly, she was the hip, It-girl partner of the high-flying Evans, “a survivor with style,” who generously folded his “little hippie” into his extravagant world. “I had never seen the likes of how he lived — the luxury of it,” she writes. “It did not seem real to me, not then, not ever. But it was thrilling and flattering and spoiling… From the dinner-party guest lists of everyone I had ever heard of, to the thirty-two telephones scattered around the house, to the first-class style of every single thing we did, my life moved in a dizzying spiral. I had landed on another planet.”

The two were married in 1969, and it was Evans who cast her as the doomed Jennifer Cavilleri in 1970’s blockbuster weepy Love Story. As MacGraw notes, she was totally unprepared for what followed. “I was so crazy about being popular,” she writes, “that I would go to outrageous lengths to be sure that every single person in a room liked me.”

But at the premiere of Love Story in London, MacGraw found there was one person even “Miss Hollywood Charm” could not win over. “As Princess Margaret passed by me, I could have sworn I heard her say, ‘My husband saw your film in New York last week and didn’t particularly care for it,’” she writes. “We were all dumbfounded to realize later that she had managed to make that same comment to everyone in the receiving line who was connected with the film.”

The Scandal of the ’70s

“I guess I was a prime candidate for the rush of movie stardom: a walking time bomb of bottled-up ambition, ego, insecurity and romanticism,” MacGraw writes. She was also evidently a prime target for movie icon Steve McQueen.

According to MacGraw, she initially resisted costarring opposite the newly separated McQueen in 1972’s The Getaway, partially because she wanted to spend time with her son Josh (born in 1971.) But that wasn’t all. “The real reason I had hesitated,” she writes, “was that I knew I was going to get in some serious trouble with Steve.”

She was right. MacGraw is at her most relatable recounting the rush of her affair with McQueen, which began almost as soon as they landed on location in Texas. She was his “New York intellectual;” he was her protective, motorcycling outlaw, sensitive and gentle beneath his swagger. “For the next three months of filming I walked the nasty razor’s edge between occasional moments of sanity and remorse on the one side and, on the other, feverish excitement,” she writes.

But there were warning signs from the beginning. After one of the first of their many legendary fights, McQueen picked up two women and brought them back to his apartment next to hers. Excruciatingly, she listened to all that followed. “The next morning he sauntered out onto his front step and casually asked if I wanted to come and make him breakfast,” she writes. “And the amazing thing is, I went in and cooked it.”

News of the affair was soon a tabloid sensation, and aimless, manic MacGraw bounced between Evans and McQueen—though the outcome was already written in the Hollywood stars. “I was obsessed with Steve from the moment he stepped into my world,” she writes. “There was never enough air for me to breathe to change that feeling.”

His Old Lady

MacGraw and McQueen, now an international superstar couple, married in 1973. While they may have seemed to the masses the sexiest couple alive, Moving Pictures will make almost any reader glad they never snagged a superstar themselves. “You never knew what he was going to do or say or be next. That translated on screen as excitement,” she writes. “In life it was a little less romantic, making for a pretty nerve-racking home life as I tried to guess the mood of the day or the hour.”

To mitigate his moods, it seems MacGraw morphed into what McQueen wanted her to be. “He liked to call me his Old Lady,” she writes, “a phrase I could live my whole life without hearing again.” McQueen insisted she quit her acting career and wanted his sophisticated siren in jeans and a t-shirt, serving him grub at 6 p.m. sharp. “I played cook, cleaning lady, ‘simple’ woman to the hilt,” she recalls. “For a while it worked, and we were happy.”

The couple lived like hermits in a rural part of Malibu with their blended family. “Life was wonderful—tuna fish sandwiches and surfboards and bicycles,” she writes, “each child with a little core of friends, whose parents we also enjoyed.”

But dark forces were brewing. As MacGraw notes, McQueen was getting drunk and stoned every day, and she was also battling alcoholism. Her descriptions of their epic fights read like a drunkalogue, with one row spilling into violence. McQueen eventually took a suite at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel where rumors of his infidelities soon filtered back to her. (She notes his first wife, Neile, joked at his funeral that “Steve liked to fuck blondes — but he married brunettes.”)

Soon MacGraw also cheated, escaping the “crippling, claustrophobic mismatch that was our marriage.” She takes an enormous part of the blame—even too much, one feels—for their downfall, admitting that in her desperation to be with him, she never showed McQueen who she really was. They divorced in 1978. McQueen died of cancer in 1980.

In a particularly poignant passage, MacGraw recalls going for a drive with her lover after they broke up. He was wearing a “ghastly” trucker hat and carrying a beer; she had her high heels and long fingernails. Both felt like themselves again. The electricity was instant. Yet “when he suggested that we pull off to the side of the highway near Oxnard and make love in an orange grove, I just couldn’t do it.”

The star-crossed lovers never met again.

A Separate Peace

“Prizes and lovers, tequila and chocolate,” MacGraw writes. “Attention and work. I needed them all to keep me from the edge of the deep black hole inside me.”

Still haunted by McQueen, she was desperate to restart her film career. MacGraw is often painfully critical of her own acting talents (and herself in general), but she is at her best describing her disastrous 1985 stint on the soap opera Dynasty as Lady Ashley, who was killed off in the show’s “Moldavian Massacre.” But her character’s fate was unbeknownst to her until they shot it:

I did not know whether I was meant to close my eyes and lie still, or stare like a Keane painting at the ceiling. Between takes I asked the associate producer, who, in a rapture of theatrical pleasure, had grabbed a plastic bottle of false blood from the makeup man and was squirting it all over us. “Closed, stupid,” she said. “You’re dead.”

That year, MacGraw was in the throes of an affair with a married man (a somewhat regular occurrence). Spiraling into love addiction and alcoholism, she checked into the Betty Ford Clinic in 1985. She nobly shares her journals from her stay in rehab, though reading them is a bit of a new-age slog; doubtless, however, they could be helpful to those embarking on sobriety.

After a long search, MacGraw finally found the true self she had lost while living out her fantasies. In 1990, she moved to Tesuque, New Mexico—where she still lives, designing, creating, and volunteering tirelessly for progressive and charitable causes. “At long last,” she writes, “I have come to realize that none of us has anything more valuable to offer than who we really are.”