BOOK REVIEW : A Little Bit of Talent Will Only Go So Far : MOVING PICTURES <i> by Ali MacGraw</i> ; Bantam Books, $20, 240 pages

“You have a great ass, but you better start working out now, because I don’t want to wake up one day with a woman who’s got an ass like a 72-year-old Japanese soldier.” That’s what Steve McQueen said to Ali MacGraw. And then she married him.

She’s an insecure woman who didn’t mind being put down by the sexiest man in Hollywood. Since McQueen spoke those words, MacGraw has gone to exercise class four days a week and at 51, she is lean, sleek and attractive.

Is being very attractive--is a great ass--enough to hang a book on? The story that between-jobs actress and first-time author MacGraw wishes to get across in this autobiography is the sad one of being too successful too fast, and then of being unsuccessful, and of being a dazed “shadow woman” when she was married to “Love Story” producer Robert Evans and later to actor McQueen.

And she wants to tell us, by devoting the last quarter of her book to her “rehab diary,” what it’s like to spend 30 days at the Betty Ford Center. And, in conclusion, she wants to demonstrate that at 50, having, as she and numerous other Betty Ford-ers have put it, “dealt with her garbage,” she has become a grown-up.

MacGraw is obviously a grown-up and a good mother and a loyal friend. But what also comes across to the reader is something of which the author is nearly unconscious. It’s that old thing that mothers tell their daughters. It’s all very well to be pretty, they say, but women who aren’t so pretty sometimes turn out to be happier in the long run because they have to be interested in other people and find some work that they’re really good at. Pretty women, say pretty and un-pretty mothers alike, can easily become spoiled, as rewards come without effort.

Perhaps excessive prettiness explains why she never made an effort to get better at what she was being paid for. She sees that her Hollywood career began with a ridiculous amount of hype--with the blockbusters “Goodbye, Columbus” and “Love Story” at the very start. As MacGraw recalls being fired from her role as Lady Ashley on “Dynasty,” she muses, “It puzzles me, today, that I did not take advantage of the moment to go to school and really study acting, it might have been the logical way to deal with the feelings I was starting to have, of being utterly without talent.”

It would have taken courage to go to acting school, after being nominated for an Oscar for “Love Story.” On the other hand, why go on wasting the time of your co-workers and your audience? She passed that time instead by being seductive and being smashed, hooked on romance and alcohol. At Betty Ford she told her group, “My name is Ali and I’m an alcoholic/Man Dependent.”

Her craving for attention and escape began as she was growing up in Bedford Village, N.Y. Little Elizabeth Alice MacGraw was “an immaculate, conscientious little student . . .” She became a rather rigid Good Girl to propitiate her father, a dry alcoholic prone to violent rages. Her desperate need to be loved she blames on her cool, disapproving mother. (Her mother, incidentally, was a commercial artist and the family provider.)

An interesting stroke of fate befell Elizabeth Alice. “Due to the interest of a wealthy and kind woman in town, I was offered a four-year scholarship at a private girls’ school a half hour’s drive from home. Rosemary Hall. . . “ But it’s a stroke of fate more interesting to the reader than the writer. Who is the wealthy, kind woman, and what happened to her?

A bit part in the madcap 1960s James Coburn movie, “The President’s Analyst,” led to “Goodbye, Columbus” and then, in 1970, “Love Story.” She knows it wasn’t good for her. “I was flattered constantly by everyone--for my work, my clothes, my so-called style--and I was loved and protected by a man who knew how to make me feel more special than I had ever felt in my life.”

She left that loving man for six years with Steve McQueen, who didn’t want her to act once they were married, cutting off her career “at its very height.” They fought, in Paris they hit each other in a restaurant courtyard.

Hearing McQueen’s rasping voice on the radio praising the Mexican clinic whose cancer medication failed to cure him, she cried. “Hearing that strange voice made me pull the car over to the side of the road and cry.”

But even McQueen doesn’t get off without some blame. “My strong personal conviction,” she writes, “is that his tragic illness was fanned by a lifetime of anger and suspicion, and that rage and pain caused the fatal cancer.”

A major portion of the garbage she said she wanted to unload at Betty Ford had to do with her prissy, judgmental quality. To blame asbestos-related cancer in a man who had been in the merchant marine and worked in a tire factory on some failure of personality seems judgmental.

A Time critic’s review of “The Winds of War” (“The only really bad performance in fact, is MacGraw’s”) gets the blame for the “solid week of blackout drinking” that brought her to the clinic. There, “the real problem could only be solved by jumping smack into my own rubbish pail and dealing with the massive pile of garbage with which I had smothered my life.”

“Moving Pictures” demonstrates that underneath all that shallow stuff, lies “an ordinary human heart.” But a book review has to answer the question, is it a sufficiently interesting human heart?

To answer the question ask yourself, would you go to see Ali MacGraw in a one-woman show? It’s definitely something to have a great ass; it’s a more difficult something to create something alive and true, which is what good actresses and good writers can do.

Next: Jonathan Kirsch reviews “The Crooked Timber of Humanity” by Isaiah Berlin (Knopf).