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Around mid-decade things, already apparently at their darkest, would turn black. Julian’s father went broke in the slump and he and his wife moved in with the latter’s brother Claude Thomson, a hog baron with a prodigious appetite for moonshine and also, with that spread, catnip to the ladies. The next time the bus pulled in from Indianapolis, Julian and Steve also joined the displaced family. Claude lived on a 320-acre farm on, aptly, Thomson Lane, three miles out of Slater by Buck creek. It was as near to a fixed childhood home as Steve ever had. He spent eleven years there on and off, sometimes with his mother, more often not. A woman named Darla More once saw him, head down, tramping alongside the Chicago & Alton railway between Slater and Gilliam. ‘Steve was just a poor, sad, fatherless, mixed-up kid. I don’t think it’s possible for a human being to look as absolutely beat as he did at that moment.’ More sat down with him and learnt that Julian had left for Indianapolis, without bothering to tell her son, the night before. ‘Steve slumped there on the tracks and wept his eyes out. It sounds corny, but I promptly went and picked a flower to cheer him up and gave it to him. I still remember the smile Steve flashed me back.’ When alluding to the scene in later years, McQueen himself would sometimes choke and have to compose himself.
In all, Steve grew up in ‘about twenty different shacks and dumps’, he said, and his imagination seems to have provided more richly furnished accommodations. There were any number of lifelong connections from that era, but a handful beat a straight path to sadomasochism: watching Julian casually come and go, for example, her soft, fat lips, her assertion that fun was more important than family.
Neglected by both parents, he was raised in large part by a man who ran the farm with a mixture of shrewdness, opportunism and brute force. Husbandry in those days was an often violent business, and they did have gangsters in Missouri. In fact, the only mention of crime in the Slater paper for Christmas 1933 records a sorry fall from grace: on 24 December two men shot at a third after catching him interfering with a sow. Although Uncle Claude owned several guns, there was no suggestion that he was tied up in this scandal. He did, however, protect his own, worked all hours and drove a hard bargain. All through the Depression he made a good living, becoming one of Slater’s richest men. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic whose great-nephew, for all the Catholic ritual and dogma his family tried to beat into him, grew up virtually wild.
Accordingly, Steve stood far closer to the moonshine than to any holy sacraments. By contrast, Julian’s mother Lil was a religious nut and disciplinarian said by McQueen to habitually ‘spit icicles in July’. She fussed around the white stucco home (first in the county to get electricity), a rambling pile with sixty-five scalloped windows and endless corridors, all lined with bad paintings and an occasional life-size nude. What Claude Thomson had in cash, he lacked in class, the threadbare rugs and wooden pews (to give things a churchy feeling) contributing to a kind of mingy staleness. Despite all the glass, the farm had a dark, gothic feel, grimy paint and heavy mahogany mingling with a reek of dishwater, slops and Lil’s speciality, garlic, oozing from the kitchen. Everybody muttered about private grievances and never shared. In an unresolved row over money, Claude soon evicted his sister and her husband, who moved into an unlit railway car put up on blocks in a neighbouring field. When Lil was later widowed, her brother promptly had her committed to the state hospital for the insane.
Slater itself, of 4000 souls and a single stop-light, was inhabited by cadaverously thin men in overalls working the land for soya beans, by the peculiar musty stench of the loam and salt deposits, by defecating hogs and ancient trucks beached in front yards, by fire-and-brimstone preachers and illicit stills and funereal hillbilly music drifting up out of tomb-dark shacks. Local politics were a depressing spectacle, most attitudes pre-Lincolnian, race relations fundamental. Tradition was all. The place boasted twenty-one Protestant and two Catholic churches. Behind these lay the wheatfields and the occasional plantation, like Claude’s, in a grove of trees; obviously places of pretension at one time. The whole area was a throwback to a vanishing America. As for the people, they may have been, as Claude said, ‘no Einsteins’, but for the most part they possessed a certain earthy frankness. They were also capable, gruff, and kissed up to no one, including a new, ‘dorky’ arrival. Steve now knew what it was like to be shunned in two communities.
The trouble grew worse each year, especially after McQueen worked out the full truth of his parentage. From the start, though fully alive to the gossip, he’d been determined to ignore it, to ‘shut [himself] down’. At first there were only whispered reports; the locals simply looked away when he walked by. Returning along the trail that led across the creek to town, deep in the green shade of the thickest part of the prairie-grass, Steve was regularly aware of the same group of boys sitting at a turn of the road, at a place just before it led up the hill to the railroad and the shops. They squatted between the cottonwoods, quietly talking. When he came up to them he’d keep his head down, and they always did the same, remained silent a moment until he’d gone by, then nudged each other and hooted out, ‘Bastard!’
By the time Steve was six or seven, this already tense scene gradually gave way to violence, and verbal abuse degenerated into punch-ups. One local teen known only as Bud once spat at him as he walked by on Main Street. The response was dramatic. Quite suddenly, McQueen’s indifference ended. Vaguely, Bud remembered one of the other boys screaming and then felt a cracking pain as he went down on the kerb. There was another blow, and blood began to spurt out all over his face. A wiry meatpacking arm began to flail downwards, and with one hook of his left fist, Steve split the much older boy’s nose. Two passers-by, fearing he’d brain him, started yelling, ‘You’ll kill him, Mac! You’ll kill him!’ and dragged McQueen off. The police were called.
Steve would later attend a small, all-white school, where his aggression was matched by sullenness. For the most part his hobbies were solitary, his companions subhuman. So far as he ever let himself go, it was with a series of animals and household pets – his best friend was one of Claude’s hogs – with whom he abandoned himself in a carefree display of emotion, an uninhibited effusion of irresponsibility, happiness and love. He also, says Gahl, ‘dug anything with wheels’. Within those massive confines, it wasn’t a bad childhood, merely a warped one. First Bill’s and then Julian’s defections were a blow that helped to shape, or did shape him, making him tense, hard-boiled and edgily single-minded. He had his code worked out. People were swine; performing for them was simply to rattle the swill bucket. The sense of parental love which nourished even a Bud was shut off totally. On the other hand, McQueen learnt the value of self-help early on, and in the one surviving contemporary photo of him, taken in the pig-pen, he’s tricked out for the occasion in boots, bib overalls and a wide grin. Striking a pose that’s at once studied and casual, he leans against a trough with his knees slightly bent, as if ready to spring into action the moment the shutter’s released: finishing his chores early would earn him a bonus from Uncle Claude, and a Saturday matinee ticket to Slater’s Kiva cinema. ‘I’m out of the midwest,’ McQueen would say, from the far side of fame. ‘It’s a good place to come from. It gives you a sense of right or wrong and fairness, and I’ve never forgotten [it].’
He made his life within the cycles of manic depression, and they shaped him as much as the cycles of seasons and weather and fat and famine shaped the lives of other Slaterites. For the most part, Steve was happy enough to lose himself in Claude’s farm and the hardware. But clearly there was a part of him, burning down inside, that wanted to get away as far and as fast as possible.
McQueen’s morbid ambition was in large part revenge. Right down the middle of his psyche ran a mercenary core: the will to get even. Someone, he thought, was always trying to screw him; somebody else was having him on. All the world – but never he – was a con. Not exactly a prize sucker for the sell, Steve started off life ‘thinking everyone, from [Julian] down, was after me’, and went on from there to get paranoid. The bitchy litany became the sustained bark punctuated by the snarl and – when backed into a corner – outbreaks of hysterical frothing at the mouth. Even when McQueen got what he wanted, he combined the swagger of the aggressor with the cringe of the abused.
As Steve’s suspiciousness increased, so did his solitude. At a 1900-era diner stranded on Slater’s Front Street, the ex-owner remembers McQueen ‘real well…he came in after school and spent an hour sitting alone there over a glass of water. He wasn’t like other kids.’ Robert Relyea, with whom Steve went into business in the 1960s, recalls him ‘practising the famous baseball drill in The Great Escape for two days…I don’t think he’d ever been much for team sports.’ This key truth, more broadly unsociable than narrowly un-American, was echoed a few years later, when Relyea and his family were playing football with McQueen in a California park. ‘It was touching that he was running around, laughing at a fumble, punching triumphantly with his fist in the air when he made a touchdown, smiling and nodding when one of the kids brought off a catch, having the time of his life…touching, but also sad that he’d never once played the game as a boy.’ Little wonder McQueen hit the heights in offbeat roles in breakout films. In the process, the improbable wisdom of his moodiness would be fully vindicated.
His life was transformed – at least intensified – by the accumulated blows of 1930–44, to the point where the whole ordeal seemed to be a jail sentence. Not only was McQueen an orphan and condemned case, the Midwest itself was a haven of kidnapping and racketeering, stony-jawed icons like Bonnie and Clyde, Machine-Gun Kelly and the Barkers all plying their trade along the Route 44 corridor. The young Steve once saw John Dillinger being led into jail in Crown Point, Indiana. In later years he remembered how the killer had turned to him with his grinning, lopsided face, curling away from his two guards, and winked. Quite often, McQueen said, he couldn’t go to sleep for replaying the scene in his mind.
Against this felonious backdrop, marches and violent pickets in Saline county reflected the feelings of most Americans in the face of the appalling and mysterious Depression. Fist fights, or worse, regularly broke out between labour organisers and the law. ‘Most of my early memories’, McQueen once told a reporter, ‘are bloody.’
One morning in 1937 Steve was walking with Claude up Central Avenue in Slater when he saw several protesters holding banners turning the corner ahead of them. Soon there was shouting from around the bend. Armed police began to run towards the intersection. Steve looked up at Claude, who said quietly, ‘Something’s up.’ They walked on to the general store on Lincoln Street and heard shots fired. When they got nearer the crowd, they saw one of Claude’s own farmhands being dragged along the ground by three policemen. He was kicking. There was blood, Steve noticed, all over his face and shirt. ‘We better not have anything to do with it,’ Claude calmly told his great-nephew. ‘Better stay way out of it.’ The seven-year-old shook his head.
Steve’s clash with formal education, later that same year, came as a mutual shock. Every morning he walked or biked the three miles down to Orearville, a small, segregated elementary school on Front Street. Stone steps led up under a canopy to the modest one-room box he later called the ‘salt mine’. It was certainly Siberian. A coal stove in the vestibule there gave off as much heat as a 60-watt bulb and when it rained, which it did constantly most winters, water seeped through the roof. Like many shy boys, Steve relied on memorising to get by. (The rote student of Mark Twain would become an actor who hated to learn lines.) Parroting Huck Finn, for his peers, was enlivened by the ‘deez, demz and doz’ tones, plus stammer, in which he flayed the text. It was later discovered that he was suffering from a form of dyslexia. The muffled sniggers were yet another small snub, avenged by Steve with a quick, impersonal beating in the dirt bluff behind the schoolyard or, more often, playing truant. A Slater man named Sam Jones knew McQueen in 1937-8. ‘We all heard stories about him, but the truth is he didn’t show up much.’
By his ninth birthday he was firmly in the problem-child tradition, a pale, sandy-haired boy whose steely-blue eyes gave Jones the uncomfortable feeling of ‘being x-rayed’. People called it a striking face, broad-nosed but narrow-chinned, so that the head as a whole was bullet-shaped rather than oval. Another Slaterite recalls ‘that tense, hunted look he always had in a crowd’. Aside from the claustrophobia, McQueen owed his trademark quizzical squint to hearing loss. An undiagnosed mastoid infection in 1937 damaged his left ear for life, bringing him further untold grief in class and completing a caricature performance as small-town misfit. His remaining time there would be brief, violent and instructive.
As soon as he could drive Claude’s truck or fire a rifle, Steve immediately entered into such active conflict with Slater that the local sheriff called at Thomson Lane to issue a caution, and he aroused the school’s indignation by appearing, when he did so at all, reeking of pig dung. But he also deftly took to his relatives’ world. He liked to hunt, for instance, and once, to Claude’s eternal admiration, he took out two birds with a single shot. Steve often stalked deer or quail in the woods north of town, on the banks of the Missouri, at least once with a pureblood setter named Jim, the officially designated ‘coon dog of the century’. (The animal could apparently understand elaborate human commands, and also predicted the winners of horse races and prize fights.) In short, he said, it was a ‘schizo existence’, in which the wilderness, bloodletting and the magic of the primal, male life jarred against the drudgery of school and church. Steve’s great-uncle and grandparents didn’t bring him up to be violent – something beyond even their nightmares – but they showed him the world, and that was enough.
All this changed for the worse in 1939.
A flash of inspiration as can only be produced by a newlywed parent now caused Julian to send for her son from Indiana. Early that autumn, the same month that Britain went to war with Germany, Steve was taken out of school, packed a kit bag and sat, shrouded in his moth-eaten city clothes, cap pancaked down on his head, in the very back seat of the bus east. It was crowded with immigrant farmworkers going home to enlist. Many of them knew as much about the rest of America as they did about the Antarctic and sat staring or muttering over the noise of Steve’s neighbour, a Negro with a mouth-harp, as they crossed the Mississippi at St Louis. The Greyhound wound through Illinois until, late at night, it came around a curve into town. On both sides a sudden, windswept ruin opened out, the bus ploughing down dark alleys and backstreets, hardly better than furrows between the slums with, Steve noticed, ‘only a couple of pissing rats’ as proof of life. Indianapolis.
McQueen himself looked unhappily through the back window taking in the acrid smell of the city. Those 400 miles were worlds exquisitely separated. Where once there’d been Claude’s pigs, now there were pool halls, the Crescent and the Roxy. Racially, too, Indianapolis was segregated, black and white symbolically split by the railway – somewhere, downtown, men wore cheap Irontex suits and drove boatlike cars past hand-painted signs saying EATS. Local unemployment and, not incidentally, racketeering and Klan activity were all at their height and there was a curfew. It was raining. With two mismatched homes and no fewer than four warring role models (five, including his new stepfather), it’s hardly surprising McQueen would return to the theme of self-reliance throughout his career, channelling it into his best work and telling one startled reporter, ‘I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.’
The bus pulled in to the Meridian Street depot at midnight. Julian was more than an hour late meeting it, and Steve could smell the gin on her breath when she kissed him. He was introduced to her dour, clinically psychotic, it emerged, husband, and the three of them walked down dark streets, frequently challenged by police, to the boarding house. It was on the site of a former stockyard, and the old stink still haunted the place. Even through the shut window, the familiar depressing reek of meat, tallow, pulverised bones, hair and hides wafted up to Steve’s cold room. Towards dawn, he could hear Julian’s voice pleading and begging through the wall, and then the sound of her husband punching her. Finally, with daylight, the boy fell asleep. After all, he later told a close friend, it wasn’t as if it were permanent. They already owed their landlord ten dollars.
Before long Steve’s fourth-grade teacher in Indianapolis wanted nothing to do with him, and the contempt was mutual. Most mornings he went back to his earliest haunts, nowadays alone, slipping into the darkness of the Roxy, then begging some bones at the kitchen door of a diner. It wasn’t unknown for him to scavenge from the dustbins outside the canal bars, and he became an underage, lifelong beer toper. One day Steve fell in with some older boys who showed him how to steal hubcaps and then redeem them for cash at a store downtown. It was his first glimpse beyond his own rebellion into a world of organised crime that he would find more intriguing than the weekly mass to which his grandmother had dragged him in Slater. Julian and her husband tried, too, packing him off to a delinquents’ summer camp and Sunday school. But Steve acquired neither religion nor social graces. Soon, he was spending his nights running with a gang. He rarely, if ever, slept at home.
There was some building done during the late 1930s and early 1940s: hospitals, museums and parks all overlaying the great Lockefield Garden prank, a slum clearance scheme that provided housing for 7000 families. Several of these projects went broke and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation had to bail them out. By the time Steve arrived for the second time, the feds had assumed much of the local relief burden and a bewildering raft of agencies funnelled funds to help towns like Indianapolis to their own grass-roots ‘solutions’. Soon enough, there was money and food available to the needy. The young McQueen doted on the pleasure it would bring to relieve the suits of their cash.
Steve not only legitimately applied for ration tickets. He began working a lucrative forgery scam with his street mob. Between them they printed bundles of the tatty coupons and sold them at a profit to their contact downtown, who was in turn reimbursed by Washington. It was a crude but highly effective form of pioneering welfare fraud. Steve might have been a flop at school, but his inner fire – the vitality that erupted whenever he got away with something – was uncanny for a so-called loser. From about 1940 onwards he was busy either as a petty hood or generally twisting the system – and people’s melons – to his own ends. ‘You had this sense he was getting back on folks,’ says Toni Gahl. ‘He just tried everything, like he was fighting for his life. I heard about his [welfare] thing. Son of a bitch! No one else was doing that then, I couldn’t believe it.’
There was something almost confidence-inspiring in McQueen’s later career. For the few who knew him and millions who didn’t, his was the big magic that offset the cliches of the American film industry. Partly this was a result of his image, partly the result of his personality. Even in the 1940s a gap opened up between the angry thug and the shy boy wearing a pair of overalls hand-labelled Huck who was quiet, kind and fanatically loyal to friends. One was dark, one was sunny, but the two McQueens had this in common: both were warped by a sense of being alone in a ‘shit’ world. That long and hard childhood made him a master at walking a thin tightrope, buffeted by the warring rivalries of Julian, her husband and Slater, with church, school and his criminal interests to consider as well. It was a neat balancing act.
When her man left, as they all did, Julian made it a point of honour not to resort further to food stamps. Prostitution only ever supplemented her typing and waitressing but, after the day Steve caught her in flagrante, it took on a symbolic importance for him far outweighing its fiscal value. She hated doing it, obviously. No she didn’t. She didn’t hate it all that much. She was always fucking at it, he told Gahl. Sailors. Suits. Anyone, any time at all. From then on Steve spent his few evenings at home sitting on the stoop of their small downtown hotel while Julian was at work upstairs. She’d yell at him and throw a shoe at the door if he ever interrupted her, and he even had to fit his sleeping arrangements (by now he and his mother were sharing a bed) around hers. If Julian was entertaining late, Steve would make up a sort of bunk for himself, using his jacket and a few flattened boxes as blankets, on the ugly, geometric-patterned tile floor of the vestibule. One winter when she was unusually busy, he ate all his meals out there, crouching behind stairs or walls, or anywhere that was protected from the snow.
Indianapolis aged him, but arguably he never really grew up. Steve’s family life was dire and, at times, outrageous. On Saturday mornings, after a week in which she’d been with four or five men, Julian would shout downstairs and ask him the time. The ritual gave Steve a rare link back to Slater, since his one valuable possession was a pocket watch he’d been given by Claude. He’d yell up in his high, reedy voice, breaking slightly but also militant, ‘Nine o’clock, Ma.’ This was the signal for one of those sudden reversals in behaviour that constituted the basic pattern of Julian’s life. She’d come down in her high heels and dress, kiss him on the mouth and then hurry off with him to the Roxy. Steve already lived for the cinema. Even in the drenching rain which seeped through the brickwork, he could soak up the lushness and grace of the western landscapes he loved, the grandeur and ruggedness, the seductive combination of sex and violence. By his eleventh birthday, he was hooked.
It was a boom time for the movies. In the early war years Hollywood went from a half-shod outpost dealing in flickers to a culture factory employing the likes of Mann, Brecht and Faulkner. A large number of Broadway’s classical stars were coming west as fast as they could make it. The very best pictures of the day – Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath, Mrs Miniver – created characters that weren’t just some new aspect of stage acting, but new from the ground up. Bogart’s High Sierra, above all, won Steve over. This far-fetched gangster yarn had its faults, even he would admit, but in the lonely, sardonic yet soulful leading man it boasted a recognisable role model – ‘someone [whose] mud I dug’. More than thirty years later he was still mining the lode of that film, along with trace elements of The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. ‘I first saw Bogie on screen when I was a kid,’ Steve said in 1972. ‘He nailed me pronto, and I’ve admired him ever since. He was the master and always will be.’
There were better technical actors than McQueen, more classical or orthodox, but none who did a more brilliant take-off of his hero. He was more volatile than the actual Bogart, colder, more threatening, more thoroughly lost in the parts. He reprised and improved the famous sneer; he paid homage to Bogie and outdid him in the same breath. But Steve’s emotional authenticity went far beyond getting off a decent impersonation. His smallest movements had the kinetic flow of an animal, something feral. Whether playing the loner, the loser or the lover, he drew on his own signature mix of ego and insecurity. There was, first up, the man himself. Steve McQueen looked like a movie star. A front page of him, whether tight-lipped and scowling or smirking archly, was usually worth thousands of extra copies. But there was more to his success than bright blue eyes and a fetching grin. McQueen was one of that rare breed of actors who didn’t need to ‘do’ anything in order to shine. It was enough that he had, as Brando puts it, ‘the mo’, the properties of a bullet in flight.
Laser-like focus was key to the young Steve, always adapting to some new competition, some fresh conflict. When not brooding at home or prising off hubcaps, he would make for the downtown pool hall. He played the game like a war, often wagering his entire day’s cash and immersing himself in the ritual, polishing shots and practising slang – picking up the protocol of the sport. Steve’s technique was sound, his gamesmanship honed, the depth of concentration frightening. But what most struck people, says Gahl, was the way ‘he got in part…Even broke, he’d show up with his own monogrammed stick and a bridge that was pure Minnesota Fats.’ McQueen played with self-assured pride, gliding this kit around the baize and carefully stowing it at night in a leather travelling case. He took it with him everywhere and, in 1956, its third or fourth successor became the very first item of the ‘stuff’ (as he called his stage artefacts) he worked so brilliantly on screen. Persistence, panache, props: the three ingredients were already filling out Steve’s street education, and he soon added a fourth. The fear he aroused in people was palpable, and he reinforced it more than once around town with that same pool-cue.
How much of the juvenile delinquent McQueen would be in his films? The answer is that the more you watch him, the more of him you recognise. It was precisely because he was real – working off his own reactions, not the director’s – that he managed to create roles with mass appeal to high- and lowbrow alike. When he played a loner or a hustler, an emotional basket case, you could be sure it was coming from deep source material and not just a script. Those early years fell, Steve said, as ‘ashes and muck’ on adult life but as gold and fame on his career. In a rare cultural allusion, he sometimes compared his Indianapolis gang days to Fellini’s I Vitelloni. ‘That one…seemed to sum up the kind of kids we were at the time – whistling at chicks, breaking into bars, knocking off lock-up shops…a little arson.’ That kind of thing. His early childhood was the ‘baddest shit imaginable’, McQueen later told his wife.
Then things took another turn for the worse.
Late in 1940 Julian, apparently unable to cope, sent him back to the farm in Slater. Steve spent the next two years there. Home again became the tall prairie-grass pastures around Thomson Lane, the hulking grain storage silos and the love-seat under the old elm close to the house where Claude would sit swinging on summer nights with his new maid and future wife (less than half his age), Eva. McQueen’s room was a tiny attic under the eaves. Because of his obvious affection for his great-nephew, his tendency to josh him, and the enjoyment he took from his company as time went on, much would be made of Claude’s influence on Steve. With such a father figure a boy could hardly be an orphan. ‘The main script read like Tom Sawyer,’ one McQueen biographer has written. But there was also a dark sub-plot from Tennessee Williams around the place.
A heavy drinker, Claude had a volcanic temper. His fiancée, an ex-burlesque dancer from St Louis, where she left an illegitimate daughter, wore fake diamond rings on every finger and drove a gold Cadillac. The money soon ran out and the farm resorted to raising fryer chickens to sell at Christmas. Steve’s grandfather Vic was still living across the field in the disused sleeper, suffering from terminal cancer. His wife Lil went from being merely pious to fanatical, sometimes hobbling up Thomson Lane nude except for her crucifix and rosary in order to ‘see God’. Most days she didn’t recognise, or even acknowledge, her grandson. There were constant rows between husband and wife, brother and sister, plates flung, cops called. Julian, meanwhile, never once visited. All in all, it was no place for a chronically depressed twelve-year-old with an already fractured home life. If Indianapolis seemed like Fellini, then Slater was a living embodiment of American Gothic, the starkly realistic painting of Midwestern farm life unveiled, like Steve himself, in 1930. He ran away more than once, loping down to the railroad tracks with his few belongings in a knapsack, accompanied by a black-and-tan dog of uncertain ancestry and his black cat Bogie. The brick depot at the far end of Main Street made a viable overnight shelter from the madness of the farm.
The central fact of Steve’s childhood is that he was destroyed by men and blamed a woman. He carped at his vanished father for the rest of his life, but always with the key qualification, ‘Julian!’ He caught the right note of bewilderment. Claude himself wasn’t merely cranky, he was a tough disciplinarian who used strap and rod on his great-nephew; McQueen once called him ‘a shouter, very vociferous…He’d blow me out of the place, but I deserved it.’ His first stepfather, according to Gahl, ‘sexually molested Steve. He told me the two of them had been together one cold night while Julian was downtown, and how [McQueen] could always remember the beads of ice dripping from the ceiling like the sweat on the old geek’s lips…and that he, Steve, had tried to focus on the sound of the water and the wind flapping the hotel sign around outside the door to avoid thinking about what was going on.’ This was the same man who casually – and quite frequently – beat up his wife. That long winter of ritual abuse, physical and emotional, can only have been a trial to Steve’s mother as well, tied as she was to a perverted bully she couldn’t acknowledge as such. Steve, for his part, would always hold Julian responsible for the misery of his early years. ‘Don’t talk to me about love,’ she used to say. ‘I feel the same way before, when and after I fuck somebody – like shit.’
In mid 1942 Julian, now divorced and remarried to a man called Berri (Steve could never remember his first name), sent for her son to join them in California. Various circumstances had led to the move west, earlier that spring, among them another landlord-related crisis in Indiana. The specific reason that brought her to Los Angeles was that Berri was offered steady manual work on the fringes of the film trade. They took an apartment together on a drab, half-paved road of cheap motels between Elysian Park and the Silver Lake district, a mile or two north of downtown. Though there were sweeping views and a few modernist piles nearby, it was practically a genetic rule of thumb that Julian would end up in a slum. If the change was as good as a rest, its effect was to shatter her already primitive concept of family.
Day one she broke out the peroxide, nestled into a deck chair and whooped, ‘California!’
In fact neither the address nor the building itself could have been much worse. The Berris counted rats, raccoons, snakes, wild dogs and prairie-wolves in three or four varieties amongst their neighbours. Coyotes, the most feared, regularly came prowling down from the Verdugo hills. It was all a long way, figuratively, from Hollywood, let alone either Indianapolis or the farm. Steve arrived in LA, he told Gahl, feeling like he’d ‘crash-landed on Mars’, a pale, sulky refugee who now barely recognised his mother. Her first words when she met him at the depot were to tell him to behave around his stepfather, whose name they now took.
One night in his tiny back bedroom, with the vermin grazing outside, Steve lay down to write a letter to Slater. It wasn’t the usual perfunctory note home of a young teenager and it turned into a long one, as there was real hell as well as news involved. His new stepfather, he told Uncle Claude, was a thug who regularly beat him up. Steve was torn between his desire to run and a strong, but not yet overpowering, urge to fight back. Surely his family would rescue him. Is that what they were? Yes, he decided, those were his loved ones back in Slater. ‘Tonite after supper’, the letter continued, ‘[Berri] came to my room when he was ripped and lit off on stuff that he yells at Ma and me about and which he’s crazy over. That is, me and Ma finding jobs. Says he will likely toss us out if we dont start work.’ Steve went on like this for three pages, all of them covered in his spidery, retarded scrawl, sloppy, verbose and misspelt, though with sudden and surprising jolts of insight. The very last word over the signature, and the keynote of his whole year in LA, read ‘Help’.
The letter never made it to Slater. Berri, now lacerated by ulcers as well as by failure, got up in the night and noticed the light from under Steve’s door. Grabbing the letter, he read the first line or two before tearing it in half. When Steve bent over to pick it up, he was kicked or at least swatted hard on the rear. Berri followed this up by threatening to brain him. Unscrewing the dim bulb overhead, he then left Steve alone in the dark, whimpering in long, shuddering sobs and vowing revenge.
‘Berri used his fists on me,’ McQueen said later. ‘He worked me over pretty good – and my mother didn’t lift a hand. She was weak…I had a lot of contempt for her. Lot of contempt.’ Unsurprisingly, he was soon back running with a gang of toughs and shoplifters who worked the area around the bottom end of Sunset Boulevard. On Christmas Eve Steve was booked for stealing hubcaps from cars parked in Lincoln Heights. Truancy officers from the Los Angeles school board also called. At this dire pass, Julian wrote Uncle Claude a letter of her own, telling him how bad the boy was, and that they were considering sending him to the reformatory. A month later Claude wired money for the bus fare back to Missouri.
It had changed in Steve’s absence. Now the trains hauled troops as well as cattle, and a local factory converted from shoe manufacturing blasted out parts for the B-29 bomber. On the farm, too, began a painful induction into the world of peers and rivals. Claude’s wife Eva had sent for her own child, Jackie, from St Louis. The teenage girl was a year older than Steve and, it seemed to him, was spared chores around the house as compensation for having been dumped. Though he began innocently dating another relative of Eva’s, Ginny Bowden, Jackie’s would duly be the ‘first cooze I ever saw’, ogled through the crack in her bedroom door. There was also a suspicion that the seventy-year-old Claude was more interested than was proper in his stepdaughter. It was now, too, that Steve’s widowed grandmother was hauled off to State Hospital One, as the local asylum was called. The last sight he ever had of her was of her being dragged, kicking and screaming, out of her room. They used a straitjacket on her; an experimental model, it dislocated one of Lil’s painfully thin shoulders. Steve stood in open-mouthed horror as the old woman whirled free, yelling in agony and biblical righteousness, before being muzzled and hauled off like a mad dog. Once in the ambulance, she became a muffled shade and disappeared.
Steve, for his part, enjoyed his freedom to go drinking, hunting, or cruising off on his red bike with the black-and-tan or his pet mouse. For an inquisitive boy, he did remarkably little reading; the business of showing up for eighth grade was so tedious and time-consuming that he never made more than a few stabs at it. He was a dab hand at story-telling, but that was his one and only accomplishment back at Orearville. Formal learning never mattered much to Steve, aka Buddy Berri. At the end of the summer term, after calmly informing his schoolmistress of his dream of becoming a movie idol, he ran down the seven steps onto Front Street, laid out his cap on the ground in front of him and began doing Bogart and Cagney impersonations. When the afternoon was over he’d collected a total of two dollars. Thrilled at his success, Steve rode his bike home to Thomson Lane, where he repeated his career plans to Claude and Eva. His great-uncle’s response was to let rip with a contemptuous belch from behind a gin bottle.
One evening Claude tore a strip off him after the law called yet again at the Thomson farm, this time in response to complaints that Steve had shot out a cafe window with his BB gun. After the shouting had died down, the fourteen-year-old took off into the night. By way of a travelling circus he grubbed his way back west, eventually reaching California. Steve never set foot in Slater again. For the rest of his short but active life he carefully avoided it. McQueen had mixed views about the place. On one level he clearly loathed it, running it down as a ‘sewer’ where he’d felt his welcome to be, at best, sketchy. On the other hand it was precisely in his retreat into the world of guns, engines and play-acting that he found his way in life. Keenly aware of his role as Hollywood’s misfit, he played the part with a flair that gave his performance that touch of genius. He made a whole career out of his rich source memory.
Most of his best films were attractive reflections of his own personality. Long before his fifteenth birthday, Steve knew what it was like to be dyslexic, deaf, illegitimate, backward, beaten, abused, deserted and raised Catholic in a Protestant heartland. He was the fatherless boy who was a hick in the city and a greaser back on the farm. Not surprisingly, nobody would do outcast roles better than he did. And to the bitter end: it was one of the weird paradoxes of McQueen’s cv that while everything got better, he experienced it as having worsened. Only a true depressive could complain as he did, while earning $12 million a film, of being ‘screwed blind’. After the Dickensian time he’d had of it, no one would ever blame McQueen for bitterly anticipating more ‘shit’ even as life, materially, turned up roses. They merely got used to it. Most sympathised with what Cagney would tartly call McQueen’s ‘clutching at the bars of his sanity’ in an ‘Alcatraz of self-loathing’. As a superstar, he maintained his old ways. At heart, Steve always saw himself as last in life’s queue, with few real options – or, in psychiatrists’ jargon, a touch of moral masochism – given the odds stacked up against him. A measure of his despair in 1944 was that, after quitting the circus, he soon thumbed his way back to his mother and stepfather in Los Angeles.
McQueen the film star would be a man alone – just as he’d once been a boy alone, hoboing his way across America or stealing out the window of the Berris’ shack to duck another beating. If, in the end, he was a loner by choice, nature and circumstance did their worst to set him on the path. ‘He once told me he’d wanted to murder his folks,’ says Toni Gahl. ‘He’d actually stood in their doorway with a butcher knife, it was that close. And you know he could have done it. You know it.’
According to her, ‘Steve always said Berri ran that family like his own Stalag Luft III. Living with him was like being a POW, only most POWs don’t get the crap kicked out of them every day for no good reason, and they also ate better.’ As the quietest and one of the smallest, wearing rags and usually sporting a thick lip, Steve knew what it was like to be given hell at school, too. He solved the problem by rarely turning up there. Most days he was out on the verminous streets around Silver Lake, up by the reservoir, resuming his old trade in hubcaps and food stamps. In January 1945 he was brought in front of a judge after being involved in a violent street brawl. Steve’s age saved him from the lockup that time.
The next morning he awoke to a flash of white light, followed by shooting pain across his whole face. He crawled out of bed half blinded. Coming home late to a tearful wife, Berri had belted him unconscious while he slept. Largely out of laudable respect for Julian, Steve had never fought back before. Now he finally went berserk. That dark new year’s morning he flew at Berri, knocking him across the room and out the door. Before long the two of them fell down a flight of concrete steps onto the street. Steve’s parting comment, hissed through broken teeth, was, ‘You lay your stinkin’ hands on me again, I’ll kill you.’ Then he began shambling up Glendale towards Griffith Park, where a city gardener, Dale Crowe, found him coiled in the foetal position and sobbing under a tree. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. Nor, however, was it Crowe’s problem. ‘I asked Steve if he needed help, and he told me to go fuck myself,’ he says. ‘I took that as a no.’
As early as 1940 Steve had narrowly escaped a stretch in the Indiana Junior Reformatory, alma mater of his friend Dillinger. The one night he did spend in custody, in a prison ward after another fight, the clang of the door behind him – which a guard then locked, banging him up with the criminally mad confined there – was the ‘second worst shit’ of its kind he ever experienced. Rock bottom came on 6 February 1945, when his mother and stepfather signed a court order confirming the fourteen-year-old to be incorrigible. That same evening Steve arrived at Junior Boys Republic in Chino, one of LA’s far eastern suburbs in the foothills of the Santa Anas. But even this craggy fastness wasn’t secure enough for him to serve out the sentence worthy of his crimes. After an immediate bolt and recapture, Steve achieved his recurrent lifelong fate – he was put in solitary.
Steve was never to forget those next hours in the dark, breathing in the sharp tang of rag mats, cabbage and stewing tripe. Suffocating. Other boys’ voices could be heard mumbling or sobbing through a shut metal door. McQueen lay awake all night, alone in the cooler, his bedroom a moth-eaten mattress jammed in the corner. The word ‘murder’ soon came to mind too enthusiastically for anyone’s liking but his own.
In fairness, though no ‘candyass scam’, as he later put it, Chino certainly wasn’t the borstal sometimes portrayed. The 200-acre campus was encircled not by bars and fences, but by cottages and open fields, and the regime stressed hard work, not punishment. It was an enlightened and even quite radical experiment in building character and self-respect. None of the ‘trusted’, as opposed to solitary, inmates was ever physically locked up. But if the security was lax, the story was sturdy, and duly found its way into the early McQueen fiction. ‘Ex-con’ was the fell phrase used in one biography. The reality of Boys Republic was more like a boarding school, with an elaborate system of rewards and fines. Its house motto was ‘Nothing Without Labor’ (almost too perfectly, though quite unconsciously, Himmlerian), the prime trade the manufacture of fancy Christmas wreaths for sale around the world. There was an emphasis on practical discipline. For the first time in his life Steve made his own bed. He learned to lay and clear a table. Most afternoons he was at work in the laundry, whose close, chemically scented walls still haunted him years later; McQueen would vividly recall that reek on his deathbed. The next time he ran away, over Gary Avenue and through Chino’s southern outskirts towards the mountains, the Republic’s principal gave him twenty-four hours before he called the law. They found Steve hiding out in a nearby stable. It was the second of five escape attempts, which appear to have been concerned less with actually absconding – he never made off by more than a mile or two – than with proving he could. The bolstering idea was rebellion.
Boys Republic would only be one part of McQueen’s breakout theme, first switched on with such voltage when he ran downtown to the bright lights of the Roxy. After Chino, he would jump ship and go AWOL from the Marines. He bailed out of literally scores of affairs – ‘fuck-flings’, he called them – as well as two marriages. Right to the end Steve would quite seriously talk of ‘getting away from it all’ on a sheep farm in Australia. Commercially, The Great Escape was in a long line with The Great St Louis Bank Robbery, Nevada Smith, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Getaway, Papillon and Tom Horn as variants of this – to him – magnificent obsession. Short of beating off Harrison Ford to The Fugitive, it’s hard to see what more McQueen could have done to make the point. When they hauled Steve back to the Republic for the fifth and final time, he actually knuckled down for a few weeks and was elected to the Boys Council. That last stretch of his year-plus there was always the one he later referred to nostalgically. But this seems to have been a ceasefire, not a real truce in the war between Steve and the powers that be. ‘I didn’t hang around with no crowd that dug suits,’ he confirmed.
Steve would spend fourteen unremittingly long, character-shaping months at Boys Republic. His mother never once came to visit him. One Saturday morning, not long after Berri himself left her, Julian rang Chino to say she wanted to take her son out for the weekend. Steve spent the whole day, from breakfast until supper, sitting on a chair by the front door. Towards evening he began to whimper quietly, raking his hands up and down his dust-caked overalls. The visit was finally cancelled hours late, and Steve sent back to the dormitory with a brusqueness that turned mere disappointment into mad fury. ‘I remember what I did that night,’ he’d say – namely went on the rampage: the cottage door with its sliding panel, the walls, bed, table and windows were all beaten and spat on. To face, on his own, not only incarceration but now rank betrayal was a formative experience. When Julian did at last send for him to join her, at her new lair in New York, he left Chino at a clip, a bone-thin teenager in blue denim and an institutional haircut, with the general aspect of a ‘whipped cur’.
After a week-long bus journey Steve arrived at the Port Authority depot in Manhattan on 22 April 1946. It was another catacomb. There was the familiar brief, stilted reunion with Julian, now technically a widow (Berri had died just before the divorce went through) and living with a man, also on the fringes of the film trade, named Lukens. The three of them walked in the rain down Seventh Avenue to Barrow Street. As usual, Julian’s new apartment had no pretension to elegance. An iron gate gave on to foul-smelling steps, the stone worn to the thinness of paper, leading down to a sort of crypt. This subterranean pit was divided from its neighbour by a narrow barred window, or squint; through the iron grille two men could be seen lying on a bed in each other’s arms. Lukens mumbled, ‘Here’s your place,’ and pushed the boy forward. Steve peered through onto this scene and, a moment later, started to cry again. At the same time he began to shake his head, apparently in violent refusal, but was prevented by the bars from making the gesture at all adequately. It was another captive moment. McQueen’s final response to these dire living arrangements was theatrical: he threw up. Then he took to his heels and ran up Seventh, round a bend and effectively out of his mother’s life for ever.
When Julian died nearly twenty years later, Steve McQueen was a rich and famous movie star. The triumph of perseverance and reconstruction that had, almost incredibly, led to this coup had begun in 1933, when she first took him to the Roxy in Indianapolis. He owed her, in one sense, everything. But she almost destroyed him, too, and was single-handedly responsible for most of the ‘shit’ of his early life. The emotionally stunted boy duly grew up into a man clear-eyed about the precariousness of love, as ‘tight as a hog’s ass in fly season’ towards women, says one of the Thomsons. There was a vampiric duality to McQueen’s sex life. By day, he was the picture of reasonableness – usually or always courteous to the ladies. By night, though, Steve sluiced new blood into his dark self through a series of fuck-flings. Promiscuously, quite often cruelly. Once or twice violently. ‘He treated females badly,’ notes Gahl.
McQueen’s ambivalence on the subject was legendary. Whatever he thought about them as ‘chicks’, he distrusted them as people, and his suspicious mind frequently crossed over into that less attractive realm, paranoia. Some of this equivocal mood was on show at Julian’s funeral in October 1965. Steve, acting as officiant, variously ranted, raved, knelt, implored and suddenly wept, before looking down and weakly muttering the word ‘Why?’ into the open grave. In later years he always spoke of her in the same bewildered tone. McQueen’s mother could never lie in peace; she could be dug up precipitously, her praises might be sung – but more often, her old sins would be remembered.
With nowhere particular to go Steve took in all New York had to offer, and he liked it. He won a few dollars in pool tournaments, bought a used Vespa and befriended the streetwalkers and other people of the night. He already knew something about sex. One plausible but unproven theory is that, long before that dungeon in Greenwich Village, he’d been in his share of deviant physical dramas, even that he was homosexually raped at Chino. As McQueen later recalled it in his dramatic hint, ‘I lost it big-time when I was [living] in California,’ thus leaving all his biographers to speculate on the identity of the other party – a boy? an older woman? – who initiated one of the twentieth century’s red-hot lovers.
According to a New Yorker named Jules Mowrer, who still lives in the city, ‘I met Steve McQueen in the summer of ’46 and wound up, when they were out, at my parents’ brownstone uptown. “Nice place,” he’d say. I always got the feeling Steve knew life could be better for him. He yearned for something more.’
Something more, at that moment, turned out to be sex. ‘Steve had a broken heart. That was the reason for all the attitude. And I think it made him hard – what I mean is, I think it gave him that edge. For a fifteen-year-old [sic], he knew exactly what he was about…I remember Steve took all my clothes off and casually looked me up and down. He posed me, and it was made clear that I was only one of his harem.’ (The voyeur routine resurfaced when McQueen’s later partners were told to ‘sit for me’ and his wives’ bodies were subjected to minute inspection.) ‘Steve was a dear, even if he rushed things a bit in bed, sweet and with a dozy smile like a little boy who’d just woken up. Naughtiness and innocence – that was my Mac.’ McQueen told Mowrer that he’d lost his virginity to another teenage girl ‘in an alley someplace’ behind one of the Silver Lake night spots. Moreover, anyone who had regularly hitched his way along Sunset into Hollywood was unlikely to be a stranger to ‘straight’ prostitution.
Mowrer remembers Steve ‘hunched up, no money, no food’, leaving the brownstone for the last time to ‘go do the world’. In a bar in Little Italy he duly fell in with two comic-opera chancers, Ford and Tinker, who stood him several drinks before asking him to sign a scrap of paper. After the hangover died down, McQueen found himself in the merchant marine. He shipped out, bound for Trinidad, on board the SS Alpha, and jumped it a week later in Santo Domingo. There Steve lived in a bordello for three months. It was a heady scene: a thick vine jungle lay between his room and the ocean. The cathouse itself, made of palm fronds and tin scraps, provided viable winter digs in return for odd jobs and physically extracting the customers’ dues. Something similar happened after Steve worked his way back to the Texas panhandle. His burgeoning career as a towel-boy in the Port Arthur brothel was, in turn, cut short by a police raid. Next he signed on as a ‘grunt’ labourer in the oilfields around Waco. He sold pen-and-pencil sets in a medicine show. January 1947 found him starting out as a lumberjack in Ontario, Canada. There, with a partial reversion to his original name, he emerged as ‘Stevie McQueen’. Several other such stints followed, including prizefighting and petty crime. If he never thought about acting, that must have been the one job he failed to tackle, though McQueen’s permanent audition for the role of Jack Kerouac hints otherwise. ‘I got around,’ he understated.
While spending an Easter break in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on 7 April 1947, Steve wandered into a bar and saw a recruitment poster advertising the US Marines. This appealed to his sense of adventure, not to say of the ridiculous. Exactly three weeks later, after one final binge in New York, he became Cadet McQueen, serial number 649015, rising to Private First Class and training as a tank-driver. It wasn’t so much the breadth as the speed of Steve’s apprenticeship that struck friends. As he quite accurately put it, ‘I was an old man by the time I was seventeen.’
After boot camp, McQueen was sent to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Here he carried out basic training, as well as such extra duties as lugging beds, bedding and clothes baskets for the officers when they moved to new quarters. It was the ‘same old shit’ as Chino, he griped. After three frustrating and uneventful months as a private soldier, Steve was ready to desert. The sole surviving photo of him in khaki shows a teenager with a face so taut his garrison cap is sliding down it; scowling, thick through the shoulders and chest but cinched at the waist, Steve looked like a welterweight boxer with submerged psychopathic tendencies. Colleagues remember his legs were constantly restless and his feet ‘gave nervous jerks’. Below, shuffling energy; above, coolness and poise, a certain menacing handsomeness. His best friend in the corps recalls how ‘that look of Steve’s bothered you until you got to know him, and then it bothered you some more…There was nobody better in the world to have on your side, and nobody worse to cross, than McQueen.’
Speaking of this era to the writer William Nolan, Steve described his technique for dealing with a platoon bully:
His name was Joey, and he was always with this tough-looking buddy of his. Real big dude. These two were like glued together, and I knew I couldn’t handle both of ’em at once. So I played it smart. I hid inside the head until Joey came in alone to take a piss. I said, ‘Hello, pal,’ and when he turned around with his fly unzipped, I punched him in the chops.
After that, harassment never visited Private McQueen.
Another marine walked into the barrack hut one day and found McQueen alone on his bunk, writing a letter to Julian. What struck the other man, whom Steve called over to help with his grammar, was the opening statement, scrawled in an ink that looked uncommonly like blood – ‘IM MY OWN MAN NOW, fuggit!’ – and which went on from there to get angry. There would never be a more accurate or succinct description of McQueen’s three-year hitch in uniform. Those first four words, in particular, expressed the whole throughline of his career. His own man. Fuggit. While most of the grunts tore about the camp in quick-moving, impetuous gangs, seeing almost nothing, Steve was watchful, curious, even as the rawest recruit, about the way people behaved. The military, as a rule, humiliates the individual, but never so McQueen. His rebellion turned on the familiar devices of sarcasm, cunning and obliging charm – Why didn’t he wash everyone’s jeeps? ‘I’ll make ’em glow!’ – again and again.
A note of satire, needless to say, lurked just below the smile. ‘Steve was always on the side of Steve,’ is one ex-marine’s fond memory. Yet another contemporary account of Camp Lejeune has McQueen ‘marching up and down, mumbling obscenities and doing hilarious impersonations of the officers under his breath’. He was a gifted mimic, and now military ritual was feeding his inborn talent as fast as he could hone it. Not surprisingly, Steve got involved in his unit’s biannual revue, and in later years he always felt that his time in the service had made it natural for him to ‘hang with show types’, and even to join them.
Gambling, whether for high stakes or laughs, played a large part in 2nd Recruit Battalion life. McQueen played too, but only when there was cash on hand instead of chips. Poker was a key factor in Steve’s judgement of his friends; he was said to form an opinion of a new recruit’s ‘mud’ – his basic code – only after he’d played cards with him. McQueen was one of these games’ fiercest competitors and one of their most engaging personalities. He was highly disciplined at the table, as well as a natural bluff – cool-headed, daring and independent. His only interest was in winning, but his best friend at Camp Lejeune insists that ‘Steve would frequently, and on the QT, slip back what he’d taken off you…The key factor was always whether or not you’d had the balls to “see” him instead of folding. That kind of style counted for a lot with McQueen.’
Besides the fighting and gambling, Steve’s only other long-term legacy from the military was his cancer. The exact illness that led him to Dr Kelley was mesothelioma, an acute form of asbestos poisoning. In those days the stuff was everywhere, including in the tanks he drove at Camp Lejeune. It was also used for such insulation as there was in his barracks. In one sorry incident (part of a punishment for his exploding a can of baked beans) McQueen was ordered to strip and refit a troop ship’s boiler room. Most of the pipes there were lagged with asbestos. The air was so heavy with it, Steve would say, ‘You could actually see the shit as you breathed it.’
Ample evidence, including his own, documents that McQueen’s visceral mistrust of ‘suits’ continued to harden in the Marines. Free, fast-living, for him all discipline offended. Specifically, Steve wanted no such austere figure as his CO interfering in the schedule he meant to set himself. Long experience had taught that with any brass restraint, even ‘shit’, was inevitable. As McQueen encountered more authority, the bones of a deeply individualistic, anarchic view of life emerged more clearly. He was no ideologue. Rather, Steve was romantically attached to certain personal principles which weren’t necessarily owned by the left or right. One army buddy recalls him ‘reading his rights’, as he put it: the right to drink, to get laid, to race bikes and to tool around in his souped-up jeep. With that agenda a clash with authority was ordained, and duly came. From then on, Steve’s insubordination became proverbial. The one moral or intellectual datum it brought with it was a programmed response – one of his crisp variants of ‘Fuck you’ – to being cooped up. McQueen hated fences.
Leave soon came around.
‘I’ll be hootin’ and hollerin’,’ Steve said with glee. ‘I’ll be boozing! Fucking and fighting! Do you hear me?’
‘Just watch it,’ they told him.
But after extending a two-day pass into a two-week holiday with a girlfriend, Steve spent forty-one days in the Camp Lejeune brig. (This stint in the stockade, suitably dramatised, would provide much of the source material for The Great Escape.) Following a second AWOL episode – this one involving a punch-up with the Shore Patrol – he was busted down to private, the first of seven straight demotions. Not long after that, Steve was posted to the military arsenal in Quantico, Virginia, before graduating to the Gun Factory in Washington, DC. His best marine friend – who asked to follow him there – recalls the scene in the barracks when McQueen burst in after yet another report: ‘I remember he flung his cap into a corner and shouted, “Well, pal! Busted!” And I said, “What are your plans now, Steve? Somehow I can’t see you as officer material.” And with that he gave me that cool, drop-dead squint of his. “As far as I can see,” Steve said, “I got two choices. I could go on stage, or I could go to jail.” Most people’s money would have been on the latter.’
McQueen may have been a full-time morale problem for the uniformed class. His beefs about military life in general, and the lack of women and good food in particular, became lore. When his unit pulled a midwinter tour of Lake Melville (then 30 degrees below zero), it seemed to his friend that ‘all the ingredients were there for Steve to go ape. A lot of guys, better adjusted than he was, snap in those conditions.’ The first few days in Canada, spent in various cold-water amphibious exercises, were bad enough. McQueen complained ever more bitterly about his rations. Frozen bully-beef – ‘Shit,’ he growled as he crunched his. One early morning, when a transport carrying tanks and jeeps set off for Goose Bay, the divisional brass sensed there might be further trouble with McQueen. He was standing on the bank, hunched double against the snow, while waiting for the boat to pick him up. The few other men around him could hear him curse, over and over, moving from his cold and hunger to his lieutenant, to whom he offered certain medical advice as blunt as it was impractical: ‘rich stuff’, according to one witness, even for the Marines. In short, everything looked set fair for a confrontation.
And then, before anyone quite realised what was happening – before the officers could shout warnings – the transport floundered on a spit. Several vehicles and their drivers slid off the deck into the arctic water. Because of its speed, the ship itself capsized and began going down within seconds.
People watched.
McQueen sprang from his crouch and began snapping out orders, grabbing two or three soldiers (striking one of them as being ‘almost inhumanly calm’) and launching a small flatboat towards the sandbar. Inside a minute he was at the scene of the wreck, ducking down into the ice to rescue survivors – he personally pulled five men to safety – while keeping up a flow of commands, echoing crisply over the water, so as to avoid a second sinking. (Another boat that set out to help did keel over, with the loss of three lives.) Back on shore, he then saw to it that warm clothes and blankets were broken out before accepting any help for himself. Even his commanding officer seemed disarmed. After the shock had worn off, and before his own court-martial, there was a seizure of gushing thanks – a notable reversal for a hip-hup type who had long promised to ‘break’ his company misfit. ‘Steve, you amazed me,’ he admitted. According to the handwritten citation, ‘Pfc McQueen’s initiative in immediately setting a rescue in motion was the key to what followed afterwards…Had Pfc McQueen not acted promptly in that direction, more loss of life would have ensued.’
Once again, the bloody-minded loner had been redeemed by his instinctively gutsy, dogged alter ego: this was McQueen’s track record in the forces. His mutinous streak, his overall volatility and neon changes of mood would provide most of the copy for biographers mining his early years. But the artful, organised side deserves attention, too; no one personified grace under pressure like he did. ‘Watching him take charge that morning,’ his friend now says, ‘was the most revealing experience I had in the military.’
From Newfoundland, McQueen worked his way into a plum job by displaying a new instinct for keeping his head down. According to friends, by 1949–50 he had almost obsessive hopes of an honourable discharge, ones that would have been far-fetched a year or two earlier. But as at Chino he wanted to go out on his terms, for once having ‘done something’ for his country. His own boats were only half burned. Enlistment was an ordeal before him as well as behind. In time McQueen’s patriotism duly found expression when he became a member of the guard manning Harry Truman’s yacht, the Sequoia; he may have spoken to the president for a moment or two, as he would to four of his successors. Around 1950 Steve also began, or formalised, his lifelong exercise regime, and never quite forgot the bends and squats he learned in the marine gym. Aside from that and the poker, he had few other interests. The internal combustion engine, and driving it too fast, wasn’t strictly speaking a hobby. It was more what McQueen did.
Having joined the corps as a private in April 1947, McQueen left it exactly three years later with the same rank. From Camp Lejeune he hitched his way down the Pee Dee river to South Carolina. There was some talk of him moving in with – even marrying – his girl there, neither of which ever happened. Steve always preferred tearless exits, women knew, and he didn’t disappoint his Myrtle Beach connection that summer. In the early hours of 22 August 1950, his mustering-out pay gone, McQueen jumped a train to Washington, DC, where he eventually became a taxi driver. His parting note to his fiancée said he was sorry, he’d tried, but, as far as loving someone went – ‘I cant remember the drill.’
But then, Steve had a lot to forget.
The next year was a relatively happy one for McQueen, even though his income wasn’t large or his jobs very promising. He moved back to New York, to a $19 a month cold-water flat in Greenwich Village. Having thrown over a good living as a cabbie, he worked as a builder’s mate, did a paper round, repaired TV sets, trained as a cobbler, boxed, played stud, recapped tyres in a garage and ran numbers for a local bookie. On his own cheerful admission, he ‘got wasted a lot’. By now, pot, wine and beer had become his constant companions, his most dependable friends. Sometimes, late at night, Steve would take his bottles and bags down from the shelf, count them and fondle them as, other nights, he was known to do to his guests: there were literally dozens of women. It’s significant that he recognised the ways in which his cynical but childish twenty-year-old self kindled emotions associated with a much younger boy. Even teenagers wanted to mother him.
Nor did McQueen get about much. If he ever needed male company, his card-playing or dirt-biking crew would come round. Two ex-marines once paid him a visit at the apartment. Steve generously urged them, along with his current girl, to go out on the afternoon of her day off while he made dinner. They returned and found no trace of food or of McQueen. He was discovered in the kitchen reading the paper and drinking beer. Supper was ready: it consisted of meat loaf, potato salad and pie, all scrounged from the local diner. Steve was inordinately proud of this achievement and boasted of it for years later. Aside from a few tins and paper plates, his only personal effects around the place were a stolen NO PARKING sign he used as barbells and the 1946 Indian Chief motorcycle he kept by his bed. Dora Yanni, who knew McQueen in late 1950, remembers the look of ‘almost sexual awe’ that came over him whenever he gazed at the bike – quite unlike the ‘perfunctory stuff’ he went through with the women whom, she shrewdly guessed, ‘Steve needed but didn’t like’. Julian, for one, never called.
Though, naturally enough, he didn’t realise it at the time, McQueen had lived through the most pivotal years of his life. Although still technically a minor, he had the raw material to harness his own adult personality. Already a pattern had emerged: thoughts of disgust upon waking in the morning. Feelings of depression for most of the day. Dreams of manic elation and triumph on a great tide of sexual encounters after dark. During the night itself, he often lay awake reviewing things, and they often made him sick.
In the five years since he left Boys Republic, McQueen had variously worked as a deck ape, card-sharp, gigolo, huckster and runner in a brothel. His mind went in dolorous circles around the dim past – furnished slums, he always remembered, with gaslight laid on and find your own heating. Steve’s self-dramatising impulse, so crucial to his acting genius, grew out of a need to escape. He was a serial runaway, a Leatherneck and a boxer, an expert at pool and motorbikes. Not surprisingly he had a temper. Yanni’s recollection of him gripping the stationary Indian Chief, swaying back and forth on the seat as if it were a rocking horse, is chilling enough; but the self-destructive fits, not often encountered in the life of the publicised McQueen, were ‘worse – the pits’. Drinking for fun was out, but drinking to induce coma was a way of coping with life, specifically with ‘chicks’. The thought of sex while sober was like a doom before him.
Nor were career prospects that rosy. For most of the winter of 1950–51 Steve’s odds-on fate was a swift exit into jail, if not an undignified grave. Hundreds or thousands of men like him fell every year in New York, first in the gutter and then down the drain. What separated him from them was, oddly enough, both a strength and a weakness – his insecurity. Steve was, as he saw it, in a death struggle with the world, and he successfully passed off his dark streak as a sign of necessary moral fibre. Tenacity was what life was about. He was going to ‘grab the brass ring’, he told Yanni, who remembers visiting Steve one wet evening that March, carrying beer and cake ‘to celebrate, for once’. But by the time she got inside McQueen was already on the Indian Chief, rocking to and fro and repeating, like a machine, ‘Bad…Very bad,’ while gazing straight ahead of him with a glazed expression ‘like a man scoping hell’. Some of the ‘madness and fire’ that drove McQueen was there that night in the apartment, as Yanni watched him slowly nodding, then lurching with furious speed, kicking at the wheels of the bike, falling at last into an exhausted slump and sobbing with dreadful, ever-increasing momentum, panting and miserably trying to blink out the dampness in his eyes.
He was twenty-one.
3 ‘Should I lay bathrooms, or should I perform?’ (#ulink_be33ce11-f2d9-5aa1-adc1-fcb94aedf521)
McQueen’s mother never visited him in New York, even though she was living a few blocks away. In a sad twist on Steve’s life, Julian, too, drank fanatically and slept from bed to bed, the great masculine prop of her thirties, Lukens, casually admitting to keeping a wife and family at home in Florida. After he left, Julian drifted around the Village, where she eventually ran into McQueen one night in a bar. From her crouch on a stool, he remembered this ‘zonked out lady’, now plump and with matted hair, piped up, ‘Tell me you don’t know me, Steven.’ His reply was curt: ‘Drop dead.’ But the reunion wasn’t over yet. ‘For God’s sake,’ she sobbed, ‘at least give me your hand and help me out of here.’ A moment later Steve was walking her outside, where they awkwardly exchanged phone numbers. There was the faintest suspicion of a reel as mother turned one way up Broadway and son the other. Apart from that barely visible lurch, Julian’s slow departure wasn’t without dignity. For years afterwards Steve would remember her ‘shuffling off home alone’, and if he had his regrets on other fronts, they were as nothing compared to how he felt about Julian. That ‘narcotic whiff’ of mother loss, says Yanni, would be the first source of his genius as an actor.
A few years later McQueen hit the heights with more than his share of personal ‘shit’; but this almost always fed his career. For one thing, as the 1950s prove, he was an uncommonly driven man in his need for greatness, achievement, recognition; the sort of drives that come from doubt rather than, in the Freudian sense, being his mother’s darling. As he so often did later, when creating his best characters, McQueen sought to mitigate despair through toughness. His grubby twenties were largely spent trawling Manhattan in the years before being ‘different’ enjoyed much status there. In those days you sensed you were illegitimate or off the farm based on who picked fights with you in bars. A year after separating from the Marines, McQueen was back weight-training again. By now the thin, pockmarked teen had bulked into a stud, small and compact but with the sinewy mark of his boxing days. Steve’s face was a similar case of taking the rough with the smooth. According to Yanni, he ‘was like a crude sketch for one of Rodin’s hulks’ – rough-hewn and finely chiselled in equal measure. McQueen seemed to be hungry or tired at least half the time. What mattered more was that he always looked dangerous.
Steve’s great achievement was to make a living without ever finding much of a job. That spring alone, he sold encyclopaedias and laid tiles; arranged flowers and trained as a bartender; applied for a longshoreman’s card; and was known to roll both dice and sleeping drunks. On a whim, he drove the Indian chief to Miami and back. Money, even during periods of relative fat, was always tight. When things were going badly, as they often did, Steve wasn’t above cadging ‘loans’ as well as collecting welfare. He took to haunting the kitchen door of Louie’s, his neighbourhood diner, where he earned the half-cowed, half-affectionate nickname Desperado. Between times, McQueen took up with another woman, this one a resting actress, who, largely on the basis that ‘you’ve already conned your way round the world – you’re a natural’, nagged him to audition. Occasionally, Steve’s voice would soar into a girlish treble. Now it broke. When the laughter had died down, he casually rang his mother to tell her he was thinking of enrolling in drama class. ‘Be sure to call me back when you flunk,’ she said.
‘I won’t flunk.’
‘Oh my God.’ Julian sloshed some more gin into a mug and hung up.
McQueen smashed his own glass against the wall. For him, too, the idea of acting – his acting – was no less unlikely. Clowning around in tights, Steve’s own phrase, jarred badly against the Levi-and-leather biker image he was already buffing. Yet in one sense it was a sane, logical move. McQueen, the unhappy outsider, had been posing all his life. Putting on a front to get what he needed, or to make the household reality vanish, was one of the few lessons he’d learned at Julian’s knee. His own term for this charade was scamming, and it was an art he made his own. The sheer hell of being natural deepened his gall and also his repertoire, so even his performances at home, in New York, swung from glum to tragic, which was the true reflection of his state of mind. Tortuous and immanent, much of Steve’s play-acting was a puerile need, near pathological, to bolt. What’s more, performing restored the Bogart, and other boyhood connections in McQueen’s life. Both Berri and Lukens, incomparably vile as father figures, had exposed him to some of the tools, cameras and the like, of their trade. There was the fact that he was a gifted mime. Finally, and this pulled heavily with Steve, ‘There were more chicks in the acting profession who did it.’ He was with one of them now.
McQueen signed up.
On 25 June 1951 Steve took the subway to Sandy Meisner’s dark, ivy-covered studio, the Neighborhood Playhouse. Meisner instantly grasped what film audiences would learn later. ‘He was an original, both tough and childlike – as if he’d been through the wars but preserved a certain basic innocence. I accepted him at once.’ A combination of the GI Bill and poker paid McQueen’s tuition.
It was Steve’s long-standing conviction that if you did your best in life, held your ‘mud’ always, then whatever happened you at least knew it wasn’t for lack of trying. But he was also a great believer in fence-sitting. His friend Bob Relyea remembers how ‘Steve had to be talked into almost all his best films.’ Some of the same ambivalence was there that first term at the Playhouse. Steve startled one group reading by declaring the day’s text (Hamlet) to be ‘candyass’. Even years later, when scripts were unfurled for him like rolls of silk before an emir, and McQueen’s accountant suffered a nervous collapse from hauling so many bags of money to the bank, he quite seriously told a reporter, ‘I’m not sure acting is something for a grown man to be doing.’
This sort of wavering, suspended between worlds, was Steve’s hallmark. Throughout that autumn and winter he commuted from squalid Christopher Street to the smooth Meisner, from all-night stud and truck-driving to parsing Chekhov. He quickly emerged as one of the Playhouse’s true characters, a man who lolled in, milk-pale and with a hunchback’s slouch, mumbling, unlit cigarette dangling at the perfect angle. His eyes caught the melancholy of his life. McQueen’s smile, according to Meisner, was ‘warm but always conditional’. For Yanni, watching Steve’s attempt at seduction ‘was as cosy as having a pit-bull lick your hand…You waited for him to snap.’ McQueen’s unabated desire to chop and change – almost a morbid addiction – proved that neither work nor women had cured the deep vulnerability inside the alcoholic’s boy from the farm. Insecurity was his watchword. When not electrifying the class, Steve seriously pondered a return to tile-laying at $3.50 an hour. He asked a friend called Mark Rydell, ‘Should I lay bathrooms, or should I perform?’ Rydell would remember, ‘I think he got into acting because he didn’t want to bust his ass.’
McQueen’s greatest skill was his ability to radiate. Picking up women, many of them as broke as he was, he switched on what Yanni calls ‘several million volts of synthetic charm’, and Steve himself termed his ‘shaggy-dog look’ when sponging money. It was rarely refused. But McQueen always went further than the mere touch. He believed that he had to shore up people’s confidence as well as trawl their purses. Years later one of his overnight guests recalled how she had hesitated when Steve asked her to take classes at the Playhouse in addition to her work as a secretary. Seeing her pause, he ‘half closed those eyes of his’ and asked: ‘Did you know any more about typing or filing when you started that?’
