By Bill Hirschman, FloridaTheaterOnStage.com, for SouthFloridaReporter.com, July 15, 2015 – Interviewing Ali MacGraw and Ryan O’Neal, or trying to, about their upcoming national tour of Love Letters that kicks off in Fort Lauderdale next week seems almost churlishly interfering with a warm reunion of old friends.
The off-topic banter and wandering riffs worthy of a vaudeville act are clearly spontaneous and genuine, and asking questions really just gets in the way.
Some interviewees, like Broadway’s Bernadette Peters, are cordial, but it’s clear you can’t ask a question she hasn’t heard 100 times and for which she doesn’t have carefully honed and homogenized answer memorized.
But on the phone, these two natter along in about as unscripted a session as you could imagine.
The chemistry is palpable, not of old lovers, but old buddies. In fact, they admit, that while they have remained friends for 40-plus years, they see each other only every once in a while. “We christened a ship together on a cruise to the Bahamas,” he said. Enough time goes by between times that they spent much of these interviews catching up on friends and family and career.