#goodbye columbus

[litsnaps]

[quotethatfilm]

Goodbye, Columbus | 1969

So are you a planner or a liver?

[idasessions]

Ali MacGraw; September 2nd, 1969

[quotespile]

None of us ate together: my Aunt Gladys ate at five o’clock, my cousin Susan at five-thirty, me at six, and my uncle at six-thirty. There is nothing to explain this beyond the fact that my aunt is crazy.

Philip Roth, Goodbye, Columbus

[veryslowreader]

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

Goodbye, Columbus

[strawberry8fields]

"In realtà non avevamo i sentimenti che dicevamo di avere finché non riuscivamo ad esprimerli;io, per lo meno; enunciarli era inventarli e possederli. Montavamo la nostra estraneità e la nostra inesperienza in una spuma che somigliava all'amore, e non avevamo il coraggio di giocarci troppo a lungo, di parlarne troppo, per timore che si afflosciasse e finisse in niente."

Philip Roth, Goodbye Columbus

[quotessentially]

From Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus

[long70s]

ALI MacGRAW

Actress Ali MacGraw graduated from Wellesley College and worked as Diana Vreeland’s photographic assistant at Vogue before turning to modeling and acting. Her marriage to Paramount’s head of production, Robert Evans and chiseled good looks earned her the female lead in the prestigious adaptation of Phillip Roth's novel Goodbye, Columbus (1969), for which she won a Golden Globe Award.

It was her starring role as the working-class Radcliffe girl in the adaptation of Erich Segal’s tearjerker, Love Story (1970) that made the 31-year old MacGraw the most famous and sought-after actress in the world overnight. Her character’s assertion "love means never having to say you're sorry" ranks as one of the most famous lines in film history. Fifty years after its release, Love Story remains one of the highest grossing films of all times.

MacGraw's next film, The Getaway, was directed by the uncompromising, heavy-drinking, maverick, Sam Peckinpah. For the heist film, MacGraw and co-star Steve McQueen were cast as married bank robbers. Evans urged MacGraw to take the role of a hardened criminal to prevent her from becoming typecast as a New Engand college girl. The screenplay certified her character’s inherent trashiness when it called for the fugitives to evade capture by hiding in a garbage truck that dumps them in a landfill.

During the film's production, MacGraw left Evans for McQueen, whom she married in 1973. The Getaway was one of McQueen’s and Peckinpah’s greatest box office successes, but their combined professional experience and hardcore masculinity intimidated MacGraw, whose relatively limited acting experience was thrown into high contrast. Convinced her performance was a disgrace, and no longer married to the head of production at a major studio, at the height of her fame, Ali MacGraw withdrew from acting.

Her hiatus from acting and her rocky marriage to McQueen (which the tabloids followed almost as closely as Cher and Greg Allman) both ended in 1978. Her comeback vehicle, Convoy, which was based on a novelty song of the same title, spawned by the brief, popular craze for truckers and Citizen’s Band radios, reunited her with the dissolute Peckinpah. Like Smokey and the Bandit the year before, the easy-going , populist Convoy was an enormous hit, but MacGraw’s last. By the early 1980s she was working in television, still viewed at the time as the last resort of former stars.

Like Cher and Marissa Berenson, MacGraw’s status as a style icon of the 1970s may prove to be a more important legacy than her acting career. Her lanky, severe beauty and poker straight center-parted hair perfectly suited the fashion trends of the period. Whereas other female stars like Barbra Steisand insuccessfully chased fashion trends, MacGraw possessed the unerring sense of style of a former Vogue staffer and the experience as a professional model to carry it off effortlessly.