I don’t need Lance to love Tour de France
The bicycle race in France keeps winning her attention.
In the summer of 1999, I knew my parents were slowly dying. Dad had lung cancer. Mom had colon cancer. Time was running out. We needed a miracle. We got one: Lance Armstrong. As the cancer sucked the life out of my parents, Armstrong, a survivor of testicular, brain and lung cancer, got stronger and stronger. I shook my head and smiled in July 1999 as he rode down the Champs Elysees after he miraculously won the Tour de France.
I read his book before the 2000 tour and ordered satellite TV so I could watch the tour on an obscure station. Lance won again. Just before the start of the 2001 tour, my father’s doctors told me my father would be dead by the end of the year.
Mom’s cancer had spread to her liver and lungs. But Lance bounced back better than ever after his cancer spread to his brain. And look at him now – he’s riding the Tour de France and winning and winning and winning. Maybe mom and dad would get a miracle, too.
But my parents died. Dad in November 2001. My mom died 16 months later – March 6, 2003. I wrote a story about Lance, how he helped me get through my parents’ illnesses and deaths and the trip I planned to take with my
though. He’s asked me not to,” confifides O’Neal. It’s nothing much. I’m a host of a party that the main character comes to.”
O’Neal recalls unfondly a brief foray into stage acting early in his career, playing a young stranger in Edward Albee’s oneact play, “The American Dream.” He describes it now as “rowing upstream without a paddle.” Marriage has also not been his strong suit. Twice wed and divorced, his longest relationship was with the late Farrah Fawcett, whom he never married.
MacGraw, 76, had a similar meteoric start to her career, featured in 1969’s “Goodbye, Columbus.” Married to studio executive and producer Robert Evans, she was showcased in a few of his fifilms, including “The Getaway” starring Steve McQueen, whom she subsequently wed and later divorced. MacGraw also appeared in the TV miniseries of “The Winds of War,” as well as a few other minor theatrical movies, but none since 1997.
For the past two decades, she has been content to live in Santa Fe, far from the show business spotlight. Of her semi-retirement from acting, MacGraw says, “There’s a ton of really gifted women in my age group and very few parts. I get it. I’m not an idiot.”
She is a natural beauty the camera loves, but the feeling is hardly mutual. “To be perfectly honest with you, I loved the reading and the rehearsals for the movies. The minute I saw that camera, I almost had a heart attack,” she concedes. “And certainly I have no stage experience except that one time. So I feel so comfortable knowing that Ryan — who’s really brilliant in this, and somebody I love — is right there.”
More so than O’Neal, MacGraw sounds nervous about appearing in “Love Letters,” aware of the many veteran actors who have done the play before her.
“More than anything, I would give anything if we really pull it offffffffffff,” she says.
It will feel so wonderful if we do it credit.”
No attempt to soothe her nerves by remind- ing her she is an accomplished actress will help, it seems.
“No, I’m not an accomplished actress,” she scoffffs. “I’m a pop star. There’s a big difffffffffffference. I’ve done my share of really awful stuffff and I’ve done a couple of things that weren’t. So obviously, it would feel wonderful if people said, ‘God, that really touched me.’ That would thrill me, that’s all can say.”
In fact, MacGraw has a history with “Love Letters.” “I did do it 20 years ago with a wonderful actor named Robert Foxworth. And also once as a favor in Maine with an actor friend at a summer theater,” she says. “I just
Ilike the play. I think it is incredibly touching and real. And I know those two people, Ryan’s character and my character. I went to school with some of them. And I was shocked all these years later to read it and be as moved as I was by it. So, I thought, as it’s a reading and as it’s Ryan playing the other part, it was just a fantastic opportunity.” O’Neal admits he was unfamiliar with the play when the offffffffffffer came. For him, the appeal was reconnecting with MacGraw.
“Well, we have this prior that went pretty well,” he says, referring coyly to “Love Story.” “In fact, I fell in love with her. And when you fall in love with someone, it’s hard to fall out of it. I’ve been there so many years, and I thought this was a gift from God handed to me. Here was a chance to see her again in nine difffffffffffferent cities.”
“Through tornadoes, lizards and probably hurricanes in Florida,” quips MacGraw. “We’re going to have fun.”
Fresh from a test runthrough of the play, O’Neal says, “With one rehearsal, we were ready. We’re fifilm actors, so we’re not used to rehearsing. So after one day, it was ‘When do we start, where do we go? And when do we get paid?’ ”