Ali Macgraw's troubled love story

last updated 8 January 2015

Ali MacGraw has never quite gotten over Steve McQueen, says Sheila Weller in Vanity Fair. “It sounds so corny,” she says, but she fell for him the moment she met him in 1971. “Those eyes—the most extraordinary blue. I was just electrified. It’s very visceral. The brain isn’t involved in that moment.” The two began an affair while shooting The Getaway and, after MacGraw’s divorce from producer Robert Evans, were married in 1973. From the beginning, they fought. “He was a combination of incredible darkness and anger and mystery and almost child-like vulnerability. His mood swings were incredible.” Possessive and paranoid, McQueen convinced himself that MacGraw was being unfaithful. To get even, he had multiple affairs. After years of infidelity and emotional abuse, MacGraw and McQueen were divorced, in 1978. Today, at 71, she realizes she was partly to blame: Insecurity, she says, made her “trim and cover” her feelings. “I did the sullen holdback. I was tight. Inauthentic. Because he was the most desirable man on the planet, I would think, I can’t possibly be desirable enough for this creature—every woman in the restaurant is looking at him!”