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SM: I wouldn’t give much for our chances…you know, wandering around in the middle of the night trying to find something that if we found it, it might kill us.
AC: If we could only find a couple of people to help us.
SM: Who?
AC: Why, your friends – Tony, Mooch and Al.
SM: [Excitedly] Hey! You know, that’s worth a try.
In time, The Blob became that then rarity – a cult that gave tangible as well as critical meaning to the word ‘gross’. After Paramount bought the rights and pumped in $300,000-worth of PR, it earned an initial $2 million, the first wedge of what, for them, became a stipend. McQueen would soon and long regret having taken his flat fee. In chronological order, the film became first a fad, then a full-blown hit, latterly a video staple, made the producer Jack Harris a rich man, spawned both a sequel and a remake, warped into one of those camp classics loved precisely for being bad and finally found its true home on TV – The Blob is on somewhere most Friday nights, and features in virtually every trivia quiz show. Its entry in the reference books invariably includes the footnote, off by two years, of being ‘Steve McQueen’s first film’.
(#litres_trial_promo)
Around William Morris they were soon celebrating, and the PR office began concocting what was the prototype of so many puff pieces: ‘Young people today want a new hero to relate to, someone whose success isn’t for himself but for his fans everywhere. Their enjoyment [of the film] is his best reward of all.’ But Steve’s true feelings hardly amounted to pride. He reacted to The Blob with a mixture of hilarity and embarrassment. After fame finally struck, he tended to shrug it off – suggesting they hang a poster of it in his executive john – when not quite seriously denying any knowledge of it. Near the end of his life McQueen told his minister Leonard De Witt that he’d always rued not having taken the points on The Blob, ‘but at the time he did it he was flat broke – being evicted’. The man with the by then legendary clout around town ‘just laughed at the whole mess’. But that was later. In 1958, according to Neile, ‘Steve was shocked – it was like, “Jesus Christ! I’m in one of those things.” Total horror. On the other hand, that’s when he knew he was on the way.’
Ambition, money, sex: whatever else you said of him, McQueen didn’t skirt the big issues in life. Many Hollywood producers, with their penchant for docile idiots, hated him on sight. But he was hard-working and talented, and with others that nearly cancelled out his quirks about ‘face time’ and close-ups.
A man like Jack Harris saw McQueen as taut and tightly strung, physically as well as in type. ‘Steve had a reputation for being trouble,’ he’d say. ‘He was always hard to handle.’ Another actor remembers that McQueen ‘walked tense, and when he walked he’d really strut out. Bang, bang, bang. Onto the set. I mean, he didn’t have a leisurely, graceful walk.’ On stage or in the hotel, Harris and the rest watched him act or sulk or argue aggressively in an obvious and deliberate effort to overcome his basic shyness, to win the very approval his intensity often prevented. ‘I don’t think he ever had an ounce of self-confidence.’ To others, though, the effort was all too convincing. ‘Steve had an almost animal streak about him,’ says Hurt, ‘which was why some people gave him a pass. He could be wild.’ And violent: one morning in New York McQueen and his wife were out walking in the park when a man wolf-whistled at Neile from a passing convertible. Steve immediately ran after the car, caught up with it at a light, dragged the man from his seat and forcibly extracted an apology. The alternative to this solution had been ‘a pop in the chops’.
McQueen’s flip side, in contrast, was a childlike insistence that life was supposed to be fun. He had the great capacity to take things solemnly but not seriously, and a part of him remained firmly rooted in 1938, the shy but self-contained boy on the hog farm. (Soon after Steve married Neile, he took her to meet Uncle Claude – carefully bypassing Slater itself.) Although he was a realist at heart, he never quite lost Claude’s own conviction that life not only should but could be enjoyed, and in the right mood, says Hurt, ‘McQueen had a great sense of humour – always provided the joke was in the proper context.’ Friends remember his helpless laughing jags when Steve simply abandoned himself. A roar with a giggle in it, and quite often hysterics. ‘Knock knock’ gags sent him into fits. Not quite Oscar Wilde then, this man-child, but warm and witty enough to offset at least some of the darker side.
That first year or so after Neile met him, McQueen ‘virtually invented a new way to live’: gunning the bike down New York alleys, adopting the ugliest pets – mutts in the street always seemed to follow him home – jogging into the apartment, hot and fetid (if not an accomplished athlete, a spirited one), then running downtown, unchanged, for beer and burgers and yet more belly-laughs in Downey’s. In other words, Steve was the consummate mood swinger – Hollywood’s swinger. ‘When something bugged him, he let you know it,’ says Hurt. ‘But, otherwise – God, what a smoothie.’
Above all, Steve doted on Neile and, eventually, even came to trust her. He may have avoided being ‘head-over-heels in love’, but, he asked, who wouldn’t? The accident of being worked over by a woman was one thing. Courting such grief was another, and if a charge of aggressive intent were lodged against McQueen he answered it with a plea of self-defence. ‘I try to get along, and I’ll continue to get along. In fact, I plan on doing as much getting along, with as many folks, as possible. I will get along until I drop. How ’bout that?’ He seldom bad-mouthed a woman or a colleague in public, rarely displayed his obvious first-strike potential and never jilted a friend. Or not yet. Everything else, as he often said, was ‘just business’.
Within only a year or two McQueen was one of the few stars who could ‘open’ a picture, a man apparently with his finger on the pulse of the mass audience. Strangely enough, he was never ‘one of the people’ himself. Steve essentially went from zero to eighty without feeling the need to level off at forty or so en route. Late in 1957, cheered on by wife, manager and agent, he duly made the full-time move west. He had never spent more than a few weeks, at least at large, in California, and his prospects there were as unpredictable as the country. But Elkins, particularly, was all for it. He and Stan Kamen went to work on Steve, still the sweatshirted hipster, getting him first into chinos and suede jackets and then on to a plane. Kamen took him aside and talked out his reasoning: ‘Kid, you can be one of the chorus line in New York or you can make for Tinseltown…I know it’s a risk to take. Do you want to fold your cards, maybe, or raise the ante?’
Go for it.
He and Neile arrived deep that midwinter and rented their first house, admittedly not much more than a shack, beside an auto shop and a Mexican cantina on Klump Avenue in Studio City. At the time he moved in, McQueen owned his clothes, a bike and a car, and one Indian quilt. He loved the place. Klump may have been no Beverly Hills, but it was, nonetheless, Hollywood, and Steve would never forget riding his BSA up into the canyon trails, cruising under winter skies streaked with red and purple. His whole life now went from noir to Technicolor. By the end of a new year that had begun in 55th Street, he was a sunny fixture in a town gaudily decorated in 1920s Moorish, fêted if not always loved, rich, famous, and a serial collector of unpaid tickets in his fancy Porsche Super Speedster. He would never again go back to live in New York.
Steve settled in California at Christmas, and got his break by Easter. He still had no real reputation except the one Neile gave him by her support and flattery, but because she yielded so freely, he began to grow in confidence. McQueen now regularly met their mutual manager for planning sessions: and like others Elkins came to love his private lack of pretension, his habit of breaking into fits, telling little stories, making irreverent jokes about The Blob, his uncanny impressions of famous actors. Klump soon became the unlikely command post for Steve’s next offensive. It started with the familiar combination of talent and good luck.
Elkins happened to also represent one Bob Culp, then starring in the weekly CBS series Trackdown. ‘The producers, Four Star, hit on the then novel idea of a companion piece. The spinoff was about a bounty hunter in the old West. I immediately knew that McQueen, playing this quasi-heavy lead, wouldn’t only be perfect for the part – he’d use it as a launch pad for stardom…I made my pitch to Steve and to Four Star. He did the pilot, then made The Blob while the jury was still out. The Western was a smash and the rest is history.’ Instead of doing more B-films, McQueen suddenly found himself being rung up and chauffeured to the Four Star offices. The first of the four he met there was David Niven, who, like Elkins, soon also grasped the fact that ‘Steve had “it”, and that “it” – whatever it was – was the future’. One of the great Hollywood icons of the then recent past, merely by launching McQueen, thus illustrated that legends of their day would inevitably become prey for those who followed them.
The only way Steve himself could avoid this fate was to establish a character for the long haul.
An actress friend was invited to dinner at Klump one night that summer. She remembers that McQueen ‘actually put down his knife and fork to take an enormous script from his coat pocket to bounce ideas off everyone’. For the remainder of the meal Steve chewed over the text as much as his food. Later that same evening, he was still up ‘trying out voices, practising quick draws, doing funny little moves, going over scenes where he needed a reaction’. It’s doubtful that McQueen’s guests did any serious advising. By then Steve was an uncontrollable ball of energy, his voice sometimes soaring back to Hatful register and the peak of blond hair rising on his head, his hands flapping and his feet in biker boots stamping up and down. His rehearsal was a gala performance in which he sang and played all the parts.
McQueen’s Trackdown slot aired on 7 March 1958. CBS and Four Star both liked what they saw and bought the series. Wanted Dead or Alive, as it now was, made its prime-time debut that September. Virtually overnight Steve became the first though not the last TV cowboy to shoot his way towards the big screen. But where Richard Boone, Chuck Connors and the other fauna of the half-hour ‘oater’ barely made it onto film, McQueen would leapfrog the entire Hollywood pack. The breakthrough was stunningly achieved. In 117 straight episodes, whether riding into the sunset or daringly allowing his character to be human, Steve staked out a claim bordered by Bogie’s eruptive cool and Gary Cooper’s suave languor. Though McQueen soon had company on that turf, he drew more from it than most. He became a star. Men like Niven and his partner Dick Powell now related to him as a virtuoso peer, as well as a self-dramatist. Trade reporters who had barely heard of McQueen in 1957 now began to speak in his voice and wrinkle up their noses at things that had a bad smell for him. A few fans doorstepped him at Klump. Steve’s relationship with Neile also changed. She remained his friend and gatekeeper as well as his wife, but he was no longer her project. Steve himself affirmed this when, the same week Wanted went on the air, he asked her whether it wasn’t time to settle down and have a baby. By mid September of that year Neile was pregnant.
Then, for fifteen years, she stopped working.
McQueen, meanwhile, never resolved his feelings towards the paired universe of his own childhood, the lonely son of the absent father and the mother who was a nervous wreck. This legacy gave rise to the ruthless demands he made on himself and others. When Wanted first went in front of the cameras, Steve was twenty-eight and pretty much fully formed. He was intense, grim (except when he collapsed in giggles), insecure, prickly and exceptionally focused – a flinty product of fly-by-night adventurism and naivete, hardened by reform school and the Marines. It took all his combined experience, ambition and sheer nous to lift Wanted out of the mire of competing horse operas. Cheyenne, Wyatt Earp, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Maverick and Zane Grey were only the upmarket end of a genre tethered by the likes of Rifleman and Wells Fargo. McQueen’s series went out in the cut-throat 8.30 p.m. slot on Saturday nights, after an hour of Perry Mason and directly opposite Perry Como. Steve declared a private ratings war on the famously smooth, cardigan-wearing crooner. Como’s weekly guests – an assortment of ‘real folks’ such as construction workers, on hand to make requests – never looked half as real as McQueen himself, sporting dirty boots and a sawn-off Winchester shotgun dubbed the ‘Mare’s Laig’. More than forty years later, rerun episodes of Wanted are still saddled with a Violence rating.
Steve very soon changed and then embodied most people’s stereotype of a cowboy. Rugged, wan and bow-legged like a prairie John Wayne, self-contained, cool, he also liberated the postmodern, ironic school which sprang up in the years ahead. In an equivalent move, thousands of female fans – many of them defecting from Como’s jacuzzi – duly responded to the all-action hero who had the nerve to, as he put it, both ‘fight and think’. Men simply wanted to be like him.
Elsewhere, however, it was another story. Behind the scenes, among at least some of Wanted’s crew and cast, it’s fair to say that McQueen wasn’t just not liked, he was disliked. For one, there was his relationship with the show’s primary advertiser, Viceroy cigarettes. Steve’s contract called for him to be wheeled out, in character as the star Josh Randall, to make his periodic pitch (‘It’s good entertainment for the whole family…yessir…and that’s what’ll sell any product’) for both sponsor and series. Somehow, the way he did it was always thought to be lacking in warmth. One ex-Viceroy mogul, Nick Payne, recalls McQueen working the company’s convention, ‘cruising the room like a zombie…He’d stare at you with that squinty, butch look, offer a “Howdy, mac” and move on, his arm outstretched to his next mark. What I remember him telling us was that he’d sold millions of cigarettes for us, for a few bucks’ return,’ says Payne. ‘Been there, done that. It was extremely flip.’ McQueen’s tone was cool, his grip cold and clammy. Nor did he exactly endear himself to the Viceroy suits by ostentatiously smoking one of their rivals’ brands. ‘It was obvious to most of us that Steve was a so-so salesman, and that the product he was really plugging was himself.’
McQueen became a star, but he didn’t immediately decide who Josh Randall was. It was an important question, quite apart from its personal stake for him, because it involved the whole business of anti-heroic acting. Steve began his invention of the future by going back to the past, specifically to the hoary Western star Randolph Scott and his 1954 The Bounty Hunter. He worked out characteristic poses, moves, both by constant rehearsal and by studying the masters. But McQueen was always much more than a clever copyist. For one thing, he was small for a leading man, giving Randall the advantage of the underdog. Trackdown’s producer Vince Fennelly would remember that ‘I needed a kind of “little guy” who looks tough enough to get the job done, but with a kind of boyish appeal…He had to be vulnerable, so the audience would root for him against the bad guys. McQueen was just what I had in mind. I knew he was my man the minute he walked through the door.’ When the character got in a fight, he’d do exactly what his alter ego did to his old marine buddy Joey – wait until the odds were even, and then deliver a quick beating. There was nothing particularly macho about Josh Randall. When two or three men came at him at once, he either high-tailed it out of town or, at a pinch, pulled the Mare’s Laig – his whole weight leaning into the gun, levelling it as easily as if it were a pistol. It was an extension of McQueen’s nervous system. Steve’s control of both his props and his body was always masterful, with no energy wasted. Finally, for authenticity’s sake, he got rid of the designer jeans and starchy shirts and wandered around in what looked like Scott’s old duds and a scuffed hat. It was the reverse of the classic Hollywood makeover, and it worked.
Much as McQueen had superb control of his body, he was also (as Viceroy now dubbed him) the thinking man’s cowboy. In 1979 he startled an old guest star on Wanted by recalling how ‘something in my look had once moved him during a take, and instead of punching me out, as we’d rehearsed, he’d just gently helped me up onto my horse. That’s the way we shot it, and I kept thinking Steve had obviously gone nuts and that it was now a lousy scene. Then when I saw it on TV, I couldn’t believe what came across. McQueen made it deeper and subtler, less bad cop and more Jimmy Stewart, and he did it all, I finally learnt, on the fly.’ Steve would never talk much about that dread word ‘motivation’. But he revealed clearly enough to men like Elkins the churning McQueen interior that so drove his work, and so embedded another actor’s scared look in twenty years’ memories of pity. His character, he once rightly said, was a ‘contradictory dude’. He was talking about Randall, but it was a self-sketch if ever there was one.
Besides the audience, Steve’s only other long-term relationship on Wanted was with trouble. He yelled at directors, writers, wardrobe men – particularly the last if their gear wasn’t pilgrim enough, namely too clean. Everything had to be perfect. If it wasn’t, you fixed it. ‘He was a shit’ comes Wanted’s echo of him again and again. Always, everywhere. McQueen even fought with Ronald Reagan over a script for the latter’s ‘General Electric Theater’. He wasn’t doing any stinking guest spot, he announced. Compared to Steve, Reagan ambled along as loose and haphazard as a tumbleweed.
Two men got closer to him than most. One was Dave Foster, his publicist and later co-producer of The Gateway. Foster was to play a major part in the unfolding drama of McQueen’s career and, particularly, his morbid distrust of the press. He also met his stunt double of twenty-two years, Loren Janes. Janes got the job only after Steve had fired three other stuntmen – two because they had the wrong look, the third because he ribbed McQueen about his name – on the very first day of shooting. To colleagues like Janes, the pattern was jagged but constant. They generally accepted Steve with affection and respect for his sincerity, talent and total absorption in the part. They smiled a bit over his petulance, particularly towards those above him on the food-chain. ‘McQueen raged nonstop at the suits,’ says one of the Wanted crew. Contrarily, and particularly to those below him on the food-chain, he developed a reputation for being, on a whim, ‘either a prince or a royal pain in the ass’. Mostly, they felt that he tried too hard and had too much front, and they were uncomfortable with his obsessive concern with future glory, which he couldn’t resist airing from time to time.
He had no close friends.
The same colleagues were divided on whether McQueen was a shit or merely too serious: pathologically nasty or exercising a due quality control. But the results were clear enough. In the three years it was on air, Wanted became a proving ground for several noted directors of the near future, including Dick Donner of Superman and Lethal Weapon fame. Steve gave Donner ‘utter crap’ when he first appeared on set, blaming him for every conceivable hassle from the script to the quality of the canteen lunch. Donner was driven home that night quite literally in tears. When McQueen decided to bare fang like that, there was a touch of the bad cop. Not Jimmy Stewart. It was a side of him that alienated many co-workers and ‘didn’t allow him to be accepted as much as he might have been’. Things were hardly less ugly further down the evolutionary ladder, with Josh Randall’s horse. This jet-black bronco, named Ringo, was once called upon to stand patiently behind McQueen as he rehearsed a scene with another actor. Instead, startled by the noise and lights, the animal first head-butted and then reared up and stamped on Steve’s back. As McQueen spun round, his mount at once made ready to bite him. Steve cocked back his fist, popping it in the ‘chops’, then hurled his script into the air and, as Ringo snapped its halter, ran for his life. After that particular chase petered out, McQueen and his horse got along famously together.
Wanted took a season to find its audience, but Steve became an instant cult. Suddenly, he was an early middle-aged golden boy who had views on everyone in town. Hollywood, in turn, sat up and noticed McQueen for one reason or another; he didn’t inspire many lukewarm feelings. The airwaves and hoardings were dominated by pictures of him in character, posing on the prairie in chaps, boots and Stetson, and brandishing his long gun. He was making a steady $750 a week, plus endorsements. Out of his new earnings McQueen bought his first Porsche and an underslung, production model XK-SS Jaguar – the ‘green rat’. A replica Winchester was bolted to the hood, the snub nose tilted against the sky like a live cannon. Steve collected so many unpaid tickets in these two machines that, within a year, his driver’s licence would be torn up. He also, much less publicly, embarked on a gradual self-improvement course at the Amelia Earhart branch of the LA library, immediately around the corner from his house. Steve’s autodidactism sprang out of genuine simplicity and humility, as well as the familiar, nagging doubts about his long-term security as an actor. ‘I don’t want to grow old living in a street called Klump,’ he explained to Julian.
His wife stayed home now, barefoot and pregnant, allowing Steve to indulge his quite unmodified, pre-Aids lifestyle. Nor, in that bygone era, was sexual equality ever much of an issue. ‘All I can say is, that so far as I’m concerned, a woman should be a woman. By day she should be busy making and keeping a home for the man she loves. At night she should be sleeping with him.’ To this stark ideology Neile would add that ‘[Steve was] the quintessential male chauvinist pig.’ The flesh, meanwhile, kept coming, whether on set or in the room McQueen sometimes kept downtown, described by one guest as ‘conceding nothing to romance…the brown walls were peeling, the wooden bed creaking and the three greasy windows covered with yellow tar paper’. Another colleague from Wanted happened to see Steve setting out from this establishment late one afternoon in 1958. The short journey west down Sunset towards Laurel Canyon amounted to a one-man demolition of the Highway Code. It was driving Le Mans-style, foot hard on the gas, stamping on the brake, lurching, squealing, once swerving away from a pedestrian and mounting the pavement.
‘I didn’t know where he’d been or where he was going, but I can see him now in that hopped-up rat, doing about eighty, scattering people left and right. A real man on the move…Then that same week, I was watching TV and there was a trade show where they praised Steve to the sky for having the right stuff, and saying that with a few other things in place, he was bound to get better still and become a worthy successor to the John Waynes and Gary Coopers, and even to be – I’m quoting – the baddest star in Dodge.’
4 Candyland (#ulink_84a532d8-2ff2-55f0-976e-7afba7c0338e)
McQueen never really enjoyed being a TV star. He had a riff, which he gave to anybody who would listen, entitled ‘The Factory’. Every trade reporter Dave Foster brought him heard it, to the extent that it induced affectionate eye-rolling when it came up. ‘The Factory’ was based on Steve’s dislike of having to get up at five in the morning in order to report on set for a full day’s filming. ‘They just want it slam-bang, one take and onto the next. Assembly-line stuff. I didn’t bust my ass all those years in New York just to end up acting in some factory.’ Behind McQueen’s self-pity lay a broad streak of professionalism, even perfectionism. He wanted every shot and every show to count and he wanted to grow as an actor. When not berating a Donner, Steve would often stand at his director’s shoulder, asking about camera angles and lighting. McQueen ‘had only to be exposed or shown, and he never forgot…He absorbed knowledge of any kind like a blotter.’ Across that nightmare first season, and into its second, Steve became Wanted’s player-manager, suggesting scenes and set-ups, quite complicated shots like ‘Let’s track fast to the gun, then pull back in a smooth flow – tension and release’ or, ‘Dolly-out on the silhouette, Dick’ – advice that could raise hackles as well as the show’s quality. In a format where time was tight, most directors had no higher ambition than staying in focus and nobody bothered much about motivation, it was inevitable that people would talk about the new kid in town who wanted everything done right, or, failing that, his way.
They did talk. Men like Janes saw how ‘Steve was fixated on the part. He wanted to make it unusual, and also to [break into] films…So he’d get furious…he was so focused on what he was doing,’ crashing back and forth between set and trailer, a brute even by Hollywood TV standards. To many who watched him work, McQueen – with his tendency to kill a weak scene with a curt Shit – still did a fair impression of a ‘royal pain in the ass’, however apposite and penetrating his remarks. According to Nick Payne, ‘he was combative rather than conciliatory,’ but then contradictorily would take the entire Wanted crew and their wives out to dinner. Another colleague remembers that ‘McQueen usually arrived on set looking like thunder.’ But this soon broke and followed a familiar pattern. ‘He’d be a turd and the director would snap,’ he says. ‘Then they’d make up.’
Steve’s arrival on his motorbike for the day’s shoot, at least early on, was the signal for muted groans, the respect accorded an admittedly gifted but temperamental child. The first cameraman on Wanted claimed he could tell his boss’s mood by the clothes he showed up in. All-black leathers evidenced a storm – trouble ahead. A denim rig with a loud shirt was the sign of good humour – a day when he was approachable and nearly an entire episode could be shot. A neutral outfit with dark glasses signalled the unpredictable. This last look was the most common.
Despite or because of the tension, Wanted soon began to improve. As a rule, the scripts had no pretensions to subtlety. In a typical plot Randall would chase and get his man (first act), be foiled (second act), then resolve the crisis in a mild twist (third act). Justice was done, loose ends tied up, and there was never a dull moment, a scene that unfolded merely for its own sake. But within a dozen episodes, and thanks largely to McQueen, Wanted was breaking new ground. Then, it had been a formulaic channelling of John Wayne. Now, it toyed with the familiar genre of half-hour Westerns while skilfully distancing itself from almost all cliché. Daringly, Steve played the role with an ethical centre closer to Bogie’s in High Sierra. But he went vastly further than that onto what had hitherto been the stage’s traditional turf: his hero wasn’t a shoot-’em-up hard man with no time for metaphysical asides, but instead the critical study of a morally aware adult willing to do anything reasonable, but no more, to get his bounty back to town. Once or twice Randall even let his man go.
Sympathetic, low-key, physically active; there was both charity and cruelty in this radical hybrid of McQueen’s.
Wanted barely troubled the Nielsen ratings for its first six months. But by late March 1959 it had moved into the charmed circle of the Top Ten, with a 30.6 share – 15 million viewers. Everything now went overboard. Week after week, Steve’s picture appeared in the trade press and the Hollywood fanzines, some thirty hits in all. As well as Foster’s ‘awareness campaign’, there were hand-outs, potted biographies, glossies and souvenirs, all coupled with a strategic year-long blitz by CBS that would lead to stories in Variety and Photoplay. People who would never go near Broadway now knew the name and, above all, the face of Steve McQueen.
The camera loved him. To Four Star and the network he was blue chip – even in black and white, a glossy shot of him, tanned, trim and hardy, with a thatch of fair hair, big eyes and a quizzical grin was enough to bring the sponsors running. Not that Steve just stood in front of the lens and allowed himself to be photographed. He had certain tricks and impenetrable mannerisms like the ‘squinty, butch look’ (at least partly a response to deafness) and the lopsided, crinkly smile; but the forging of a direct personal link to the audience, a vector of just-you-and-me was something they didn’t, and couldn’t, teach him at stage school. One obvious form of it was that McQueen always looked another actor dead in the eye when he spoke or, more typically, listened. It was the instant way of establishing that he was missing nothing, and that he knew what to do about it. Steve was never an all-out action hero in the sense of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger. At the same time he was a man who gave the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he would stop at nothing. If he decided to kill you, he’d kill you; if he thought it sufficient to walk away, he would. What’s more, he patently had a wry, deep awareness of the inherent failings of human nature; the ultimate slipperiness of all relationships. Steve’s internal gyroscope – his ‘bullshit detector’ – never stopped turning. On screen, as in life, precious little got by him. Wayne Rogers, who guested with McQueen on Wanted, particularly remembers his ‘taciturn, Gary Cooper quality that made one feel he was always thinking a lot more than he was saying’. Nick Payne also cites the ‘less-is-more vibe’ that made McQueen the sharply prejudiced, brilliant observer he was. ‘It’s the obvious analogy of the killer iceberg – most of him was submerged.’ Even in those prehistoric days Steve was proving his key theory that what the actor omitted was as vital as what he did. Neile, for her part, remembers his heroes as four men – Cooper, Bogart, Cagney and Walter Brennan – not exactly known for their hamming.
To some people in 1959, McQueen wasn’t so much an actor who knew how to cope as a man consumed with violence. The controversy simmered throughout the series’ first season, at which point it boiled into a crisis. According to a Variety report published in mid-run, Wanted was a ‘brutal, hard-boiled actioner [some] feel single-handedly responsible for the big business pickup in the sale of pistols and shotguns’. The complaint duly made its way to the FBI, who opened a file on both show and star that 12 November. Meanwhile, The Great St Louis Bank Robbery was finally released to an indifferent audience and critics who also used it as a weapon to beat the man who seemed to be ‘blasting at the rest of the world…a loner…obviously the hard type’. While partisan, the description reflected much of what Steve’s closest colleagues felt as well.
At the same time, money was nudging McQueen out of his dark haze. The couple moved upmarket in 1959, buying their first home together in Laurel Canyon’s Skyline Drive, a semi-private street hidden by thick ivy and bougainvillaea. A sign read ‘Patrolled by Armed Security’. Number 8842 with its high window and skylight was, however, fully visible from the road. Standing on a neatly manicured plot landscaped with a trellis and bushes, the back of the house enjoyed a view over Hollywood. Pharaohs like Marlon Brando lived nearby on Mulholland Drive. Steve liked to gun his cars up and down the steep access road, duly collecting more tickets; after he appeared in Long Beach District traffic court that spring, Neile became his designated driver for several months. When not actually working or on the trail, McQueen spent whole days at the Union 76 station on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura, where he oscillated between being a regular guy – talking shop with the mechanics – and that old ‘royal pain in the ass’. He wanted his Porsche hand-waxed for free whenever he bought gas, he announced once. The help scoffed at this. No, it would be good PR for them, Steve insisted, thereby demonstrating the yawning gulf between Hollywood and real life. He also loved to browse at the nearby flea market, where he’s fondly remembered for once having ‘chiselled the price of a Johnny Mathis LP from fifty cents down to something like a dime’.
It was a rare day when McQueen didn’t have at least one row about money. He under-tipped, his cheques bounced. Steve seemed to get tighter as he got richer, and the general theory was that he feared he could lose it as quickly as he’d made it.
Even while he banked $750 a week on Wanted, McQueen used to talk to Neile and a few others about quitting and ‘emigrating to a sheep farm in Sydney’.
(#litres_trial_promo) To Julian, whom he never saw but wrote to intermittently, he soon began to send curt, moody, often despondent accounts of life, pouring out the frustration and discouragement he felt over the reviews and ‘The Factory’ generally. Steve was never to talk openly about how near he came to chucking Hollywood. Twenty years later, he did recall his misery in a conversation with a flying friend in Santa Paula. ‘I was as confused and down as anyone at one time or another,’ he said. ‘But acting still had all the other jive beat.’ McQueen invariably met such jive by desolation, despair and the threat to quit, quickly followed by a grim if still uncertain determination. By mid 1959 he had begun to cultivate a few key contacts in the industry, like the gossip queen Hedda Hopper. Hopper adored him. She noted affectionately how Steve used what she imagined was his ‘formal’ vocabulary whenever he did interviews. But around the house, or on set, he adopted the lingo of the mudlark he once was: words like ‘bread’, ‘juice’, ‘pork’, ‘jive’ and ‘gas’ would come around like pit-stops on a race track. ‘He was insecure,’ Hopper shrewdly observed. It was a measure of Steve’s depth and strength, though, that ‘he could talk to me about stagecraft, then go out and basically be a grease-monkey for the rest of the day’.
According to the actor Dean Jones, Steve was ‘an odd mixture of ego and immaturity’ when they worked together in 1959. McQueen ‘would always bring his Mare’s Laig with him wherever, and show the rest of us how he could handle it. Look guys. By then he was really fast on the draw. Impressive and endearing as it was, with Steve there was also that sense of a sleeve being tugged for attention.’
A year or so later, Jones was shooting a TV series on the next-door lot to McQueen’s. ‘I remember seeing Steve once going down the cafeteria line at lunch, except, being Steve, he was actually behind the counter, helping himself from over the cooks’ shoulders. I ribbed him about it and he turned on me: “When your show’s a big hit, you can come back here, Jones.”’ But it was a sign of McQueen’s complexity that while still enveloped in his own ego trip he could, and did, reach out to others. Jones also remembers that during one discussion McQueen made a crack about a mutual girlfriend. ‘I turned on my heel, walked out of his dressing room and started up the street. Steve must have sensed my feelings, because he ran after me calling “Dean! Dean!” and apologised with tears in his eyes.’ Genuinely stirred and charmed, Jones realised that ‘McQueen’s fear of being rejected and outdone was what motivated his outer behaviour. When and if he ever relaxed, he was capable of radiant kindness.’
Then, for hours, he was the best company in the world.
The gesture to Jones remained private, though there were similar acts of warmth his fellow actors saw more openly. Sometimes with his director, more often alone, McQueen would spend long afternoons entertaining in the children’s ward of Midway hospital. He befriended the very old and the very young as few others, and later, throughout his life, quietly gave tens of thousands of dollars to medical charities. Nurses who watched him at Midway recall vividly how he listened intently to each child, how, with his already asbestos-worn lungs, he grunted and staggered as he carried them piggy-back, how gently he set them down again, then stayed until nightfall telling stories and laughing with his thrilled fans. Wayne Rogers saw a similar sensibility after he and McQueen did an episode of Wanted. Steve was typically tense and focused during the shoot, but still went out of his way to help the lesser cast shine. Once actors have made it, it’s assumed, without being a given, that most of them will be supportive enough of their peers. They’re all in the same designer padded cell. Even in this context, McQueen stood out as unusually loyal. ‘Steve was an incredibly [sincere] person and helpful to many people.’ Jones, sick children, Hopper and Rogers – the brooding, uptight TV star showed them much the same empathy and tenderness his wife and a few close colleagues saw in him, the ‘real Steve’ that was somehow tragically warped by the orphan he’d been and the legend he became.
He never met his natural father. Ironically, by 1959 Steve was living less than ten miles away from Bill McQueen in Los Angeles. Ever since marrying Neile, and becoming an expectant parent, he’d grown more inquisitive, if no less resentful, about his own upbringing. His feelings on the subject were fast-moving, tiered, and sometimes nostalgic. Bewilderingly changeable, because the bedrock truth was that he didn’t know what he’d do if he found Bill. Following a tip-off, Steve began to methodically comb the Echo Park neighbourhood, close to where he’d lived so miserably with Julian and Berri in 1942. His persistence paid off. One night a woman called, identifying herself as Bill’s common-law wife, and inviting Steve to visit. He arrived at the rundown apartment block only to be told that his father had died of heart failure three months earlier. The woman added that Bill had always watched Wanted on Saturday nights and wondered whether the star wasn’t, in fact, his son. She gave McQueen his father’s photo and an engraved Zippo lighter which, Steve told a friend, ‘I slung down the gutter…Then I went out to a bar. And that was the end of me and the old man.’ Even though the friend, Bud Ekins, ‘believed Steve implicitly’, it was a lie. McQueen kept the photo and left the lighter to his own daughter. After he died, Bill assumed a more prominent and warmly human role in Steve’s life than Julian ever could. A wary affection showed through whenever he talked about either his father or Uncle Claude, who also died that winter. Steve heightened the poignancy of the Indianapolis and Slater years by often drawing attention to the timing of this double blow. As a dedicated actor, he understood and rued the ‘motivating shit’ he saw in both men’s lives. He no doubt regretted it as much as the shit in his own.
The losses killed whatever hopes there might have been that Steve would square his past. Like the Jaguar fish-tailing down the canyon lane, he began to accelerate now.
One late afternoon in May 1959 Steve and a heavily pregnant Neile went shopping for baby clothes on Rodeo Drive. It was a moment of real crisis for them, since one of McQueen’s flings had recently taken to phoning the house and Steve evidently felt the need to confess. According to Neile, ‘For the next few days he brought me flowers and presents and cards. For a while I was so hurt that I refused to speak to him, but eventually we again became a happy couple.’ On this particular hot spring evening Neile began to blanch as she stood at the sweater counter. She fainted away in Steve’s arms just as a young fan approached, her own face wreathed in goofy goodwill:
‘I know it’s a bad time, Mr McQueen. But could I please have your autograph?’
As Steve recalled it, he went ‘fucking nuts’, raving at the girl while simultaneously helping to revive his wife. Neile soon recovered, but McQueen never willingly signed his name for anyone again. It was, for him, the first of several hopeless gestures to privacy.
The McQueens’ daughter, Terry Leslie, was born in Los Angeles that 5 June. With the actor’s instinct for detail, Steve made notes on his first child that night: ‘Oh God, looks like me. Isnt she smart, though – just perfect.’ A boy, Chadwick Steven, followed on 28 December 1960. Steve’s son inherited his mother’s looks and soon settled into his father’s lifestyle. ‘Always smells like hot brakes,’ McQueen would say of Chad approvingly. It was a neat simile. The amount of engineering in Steve’s conversation was impressive. Cars and parts were always apt to have a symbolic importance. Being ‘full of juice’ was as high a tribute as he ever paid to man or machine. Like many of his fictional heroes, McQueen, too, sensed an affinity between happiness and hardware.
But Steve in the flesh kept rather less to the straight and narrow than one of his famous Porsches. Weeks after Terry’s birth, he was keeping company again in the hotel room downtown. He also began entering sports car heats around LA – he won his first ever event, held at Santa Barbara airport – despite promising Neile he’d stop as soon as their first child was born. Instead, semi-professional racing became a sub-plot of Steve’s career; whenever he got behind a wheel he suddenly realised he no longer had to defer to any ‘fucking suit’ – he had what he called the ‘big jolt’, the thrilling alchemist’s gift of turning an inert object into something else. And racing provided a sort of equaliser, particularly for a man with McQueen’s nagging sense of guilt that his day job was ‘candyass’. ‘It gave me a fresh identity,’ he said. ‘I was no longer just an actor, I was a guy competing. And it was real important to me – to have this separate identity.’ The other thing both racing and fatherhood gave Steve was insomnia. Already having trouble unwinding at night, Neile recalls how he snapped when ‘a work crew put up a big new street light which shone right into our bedroom’. When the City refused to move the light, McQueen solved the problem by promptly shooting it out.
One lunchtime that same summer Steve rode his Bonneville into Bud Ekins’s motorcycle shop on Ventura Boulevard. Ekins, both as a dealer and an all-round biker, was the very best of the breed – a triple-A rider who was gruff, cool and toadied up to no one, including McQueen. ‘I knew Steve from Wanted and thought he was a pest. He used to hang around the shop.’ Gradually, however, Ekins began to warm to the man he describes as ‘totally paranoid…Not only didn’t Steve trust people, he kept them separate from each other. You’d never meet his other friends.’ A complicated man, McQueen – even then, an embarrassment of paradoxes. ‘Basically, Steve couldn’t ever make up his mind whether he was a big star or a little kid made good. I always remember how he’d put on a fake beard and shades in order not to be hassled, then get pissed when no one recognised him. Other times, when they did come up for autographs, he’d flip.’
Gradually, this serene middle-aged outlaw began to notice key differences between his new buddy McQueen and the other groupies who passed their time on Ventura Boulevard. There was, first of all, his natural flair. The two started going desert-riding together, and Ekins found that ‘Steve was good – great reflexes and fast, even if reckless. He’d hit everything en route.’ Two additional traits grew out of and complemented that talent: an intense curiosity and a slow but profound ability to bond. McQueen wanted to know all that he could about motorcycle history, and he’d ‘try to get a rise’ from people until he narrowed the field down to a few trusted cronies. Ekins evidently passed the test, because he and Steve were close for the next twenty-one years.
Then there was Don Gordon, a thirty-year-old actor living near McQueen in the Hollywood hills. ‘Steve would literally go by the front door on his way to work and sort of announce himself. It happened over two weeks, in four phases. First, he’d just drive by and stare; not a word. Then he’d drive by and wave. Next he’d drive by more slowly and smile. Finally, he actually stopped and said, “Hey, I’ve seen you on TV.” I said the same, and that’s how we got tight.’ Soon enough, bolstered by the power of his ratings, McQueen offered Gordon a guest spot on Wanted. ‘In those days Steve was still groping his way through the maze, discovering what did and didn’t work for him. For instance, that smile and a particular kind of walk were in. Surplus dialogue was out.’ Yet when he talked to Gordon about bikes, the mouth that chewed fastidiously on lines like bits of gristle suddenly relaxed and grinned, ‘Beat you to the top, man.’
Once you got used to him, you found he was a very nice person.
McQueen’s perfectionism and his undying paranoia did for him with at least some of his peers. But, for others, the over-intense actor was but a ‘Cut’ away from the passionate friend. ‘I loved the man,’ says Gordon. ‘Many was the night he’d come by late, I’d grab my leathers and we’d literally ride off into the hills. Great times.’ As for how Steve in turn treated his friends, nine years later Gordon was invited out of the blue to read for a film being shot at Warners. The title was Bullitt. When Gordon tried to thank McQueen for getting him the job, ‘Steve looked me in the eye and said, “I had nothing to do with it.” That was typical of the guy. It was endearing, and it was also total crap. Steve didn’t want me to feel beholden to him.’
That same summer of 1959 MGM put together a budget for Never So Few, the screen version of Tom Chamales’s World War II novel set in Burma. It was a solid melodrama starring Frank Sinatra and, as was his wont, a few of his clan, including Sammy Davis Jr. After Davis talked himself out of the job, Stan Kamen at William Morris rang his own friend the director John Sturges. Kamen not only had a replacement for Davis in mind. He told Sturges that he could get him Hollywood’s ‘next Bogie’ for ten weeks at just $2500 per week.
McQueen then had to report to Sinatra, who laid it on the line. ‘Steve, baby,’ he said, ‘here’s how it’s gonna be. I turn up, I say the lines, I fuck off back to the hotel. They got any light left, I’ll tell ’em to focus on you. Dig it?’
McQueen dug it.
Perhaps the most winning quality of Never So Few lay not in its deadpan, pre-ironic swashbuckling, nor in the jungle locations (largely faked in Hollywood and Hawaii), nor even in Sinatra himself, but in the gum-chewing Ringa, the renegade army driver played by McQueen. He was brilliant. More than a year in front of the camera had taught Steve how to react. But his first appearance, leaping down from the jeep with a feline grace and giving his signature crinkly grin, was so naturally deft, and the impact so sudden, that if Gene Kelly had done it audiences couldn’t have been more impressed. At the New York premiere Sturges heard people actually gasp at the scene. McQueen photographed like a god, yet basically carried and conducted himself like a regular guy. Somewhat taut, watchful, but with a touch of shyness, he was never more human. Steve was so cool and lithe, with his muscle shirt specially cut for him by Neile, that gnarled, goateed Sinatra never really got to grips with being the picture’s star. I’ll tell ’em to focus on you. Sturges and MGM also picked up on McQueen instantly, the studio signing him to a non-exclusive contract. Finally, Steve made a friend of the assistant director Bob Relyea, who worked closely with him throughout the sixties. After twelve years of puzzled study and a further thirty since they split, Relyea gives his wry assessment of McQueen’s career. ‘Steve in some respects – the way he was always on his toes – was the same offstage and on. But he did more than just hold his character. For all the defensiveness and deadly mood swings, McQueen had the best instincts I’ve ever known for what he could and couldn’t get away with. His choice of scripts was masterly. The man was a genius at planning his next move.’
Mood swings a problem? Some would say they were Steve’s meal ticket. Critics loved the gregarious loner, the anti-heroic McQueen; his family and few friends were proud of the ‘regular guy’ who liked nothing more than to swig beer and talk mechanics. No one, however, ever responded more enthusiastically to Steve’s taste for low comedy than Sinatra did. It matched his own – no small accolade.
If a staccato, comradely bond characterised the two men’s relationship in Never, then the same quality regularly surfaced off screen. McQueen and Sinatra were ‘both children emotionally’, as Steve put it. One afternoon on location McQueen was diligently reading his script when Sinatra crept up behind him and slipped a lit firecracker into his belt. After the explosion had died down, Steve levelled his prop tommy gun and let off a full clip at Sinatra’s chest. At that range the paper wadding from the blanks actually bruised him; the director ‘heard Frank gasp out’. After that there was a long silence, finally broken by Sinatra’s admiring laughter. ‘You got stones, kid,’ he said. From then on the two of them could be seen zipping off to one bar or another, a surfeit of Y chromosomes rasping along in a liberated jeep.
Every account of the Never shoot depicts it as a summer of frat-house antics, dissipation and frequent practical japes, usually involving fireworks. It was the summer in which Steve, in a fit of beery hi-jinks, detonated an ‘entire fourth of July show’ inside Sinatra’s dressing room. In some versions, Sinatra was tickled by this display; in others, he emerged singed and ranting, like Hitler after the generals’ plot of 1944, and began demanding blood. It was the summer in which the stars nearly killed Loren Janes by blowing up his trailer, dragged another crew member to the edge of a cliff, promising to push him off, and threatened to dunk Charles Bronson, claiming there was no danger since, like his acting, he was ‘all wood’. It was the summer in which McQueen, banned by MGM from riding his motorbike on set, asked if he could borrow Dean Jones’s Triumph – and Jones said yes, only to have Sturges appear later and tell him, ‘McQueen’s just driven through a fence; now you’re both banned.’ Above all it was the summer in which Sinatra’s first words on screen to Steve – ‘You interest me, Ringa’ – echoed real life. He’d found a protégé who was tough, playful and bad-assed; and that was certainly part of the truth.
In the end, salty performances kept Never So Few from sinking in its own melodramatic plot. One reviewer called it a ‘schizoid war romancer that, when it comes to split personalities, is up there with Sinatra himself’. Sadly, he was wrong: Never So Few had precious little personality to split. McQueen’s own sense of humour and spirit, at least, was well done. There was a steadiness there which carried him through. All his war films would manage the rare feat of combining rebellion and charm in equal parts. Cocky, unfeasibly bronzed and swaggering, McQueen’s Ringa announced the arrival of a major talent.
The comer.
Sinatra, says Bob Relyea, ‘encouraged Steve to be the next officially tolerated bad boy in town’. The two men and their families were inseparable that year. Sinatra and the McQueens spent a week together in New York, where they ate at Louie’s and took innocent pleasure in demonstrating how far each had come. One evening McQueen stood at the window of his hotel suite, pointed a finger down Fifth Avenue and said, ‘It’s a lot longer from Barrow Street to here than you think.’ That Saturday night the McQueens went backstage at Sinatra’s homecoming concert in Atlantic City. Steve was mistaken for one of the band and mobbed. ‘That’s it!’ Sinatra remembered him yelling. ‘That’s what I want.’ Feverishly excited, Steve and Neile then flew to a preview of Never So Few in Hollywood. As the final credits rolled, Sinatra turned to McQueen, slapped him on the back and said, ‘It’s all yours, kid.’ Neile recalls running across the parking lot, two figures whose doll-like smallness gave them the air of kids breaking curfew ‘beside ourselves with glee. “The pope’s just blessed you,” I told Steve, and then we hit Cyrano’s to celebrate.’ Thanks to luck, talent and timing, McQueen’s dues-paying years were over. Hollywood’s idea of a hero was ruthlessly tumbling forward, and Steve triumphantly captured the moment. After Never So Few he became the consensus superstar-in-waiting. ‘I remember going to a party where all the A-list flocked around Steve,’ says Neile. ‘Jennifer Jones and Rita Hayworth were both jostling to get a look at the “next big thing”.’
They weren’t alone. Over the coming few months an unlikely friendship developed between the sixty-nine-year-old Hedda Hopper and the ‘young gun’, as she dotingly called him. At eleven in the morning, as soon as Hopper awoke, she began her day by phoning Steve on the Wanted set. The venerable columnist and one-time vamp followed down a line from Powell and Niven as stars of an earlier era for whom McQueen now became a kind of mascot. ‘He excites,’ she said. ‘I knew he had a past after one look at that hardened face.’ Evidently, he also had an effortless kind of glamour from the rear – ‘such an arrogant back’, Hopper added. As well as promoting McQueen nonstop in print, she cannily advised him to turn down Sinatra’s Execution of Private Slovik and Ocean’s Eleven by posing the stark question, ‘Do you want to be a Rat Pack flunky, or say no to Frank?’
Say no to Frank.
Steve returned the favour by, allegedly, taking Hopper to bed. He always referred to her around town as a ‘great lady’, often dropping a syllable amongst friends. After her death in 1966 lavish, black-bordered tributes to Hopper appeared in all the trade press. The mourner was anonymous. But Hopper’s staff, by dint of detective work, tracked him down. It was McQueen.
In the autumn of 1959 Steve reluctantly went back to Wanted and the small tube. It’s difficult today to imagine the power and the precise chemistry he and Josh Randall had together – and how receptive pre-Vietnam America was to the adage ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’. The initially sparse audience for McQueen’s frontier show had first made it a cult and then a phenomenon. By the end of its second season Wanted was firmly atop the ratings and sponsors were beating a trail to CBS’s door.
Steve responded with a new frenzy of bickering with the series’ producers. For him, there was no inherent contradiction between titanic personal ambition and a genuine commitment to getting it right. Although he asked for, and won, a pay rise – now $100,000 a year from all sources – his real leverage went towards upping the quality of the show. The quickest annoyance duly came with the arrival, on set, of a suit. McQueen often seemed to conflate all his authority figures into one vast anti-Steve conspiracy. ‘This is jive,’ he’d tell Dick Powell. Or: ‘You’re twisting my melon, man – screwing me.’ Once, on being told an episode was behind schedule, McQueen carefully counted off ten pages of script, ripped them out and snarled, ‘Now we’re on track.’ The pages never went back in. He ranted when CBS talked about changing Wanted’s transmission time, then ranted when they didn’t and a rival network scheduled Leave It to Beaver in the same slot, inviting viewers to choose between Steve and one of America’s pet sitcoms. Most of all, he ranted about Josh Randall not being ‘real’. Often he would break off and snarl at the malevolent figures behind the lights:
‘Bullshit!’
As McQueen told one of the show’s writers, Bill Nolan, ‘I wanted to play [Randall]…as a guy trying to do a dangerous, unglamorous job with a minimum of fuss. But the Four Star dudes kept trying to turn him into a jaw-busting, sure-shot hero. I had some bad times with them over this.’ Steve’s manager Hilly Elkins confirms that ‘McQueen’s wars weren’t about bigger trailers or more lines – usually they were about less, but better lines.’ The view that Steve simply tried too hard was a common one amongst detractors. ‘McQueen always wanted it to be Hamlet,’ a well-known Wanted guest star says. ‘That was his strength, but at a certain point it became a weakness. It was only a cowboy show, for God’s sake.’
‘The Factory’, with its 5 a.m. calls and work-sheets, was McQueen’s great theme, but there were rewards too. With his combined big- and small-screen earnings, Steve had bought land and blue-chip stock in Dow Chemical, as well as a new Lotus Mark XI. Early in 1960 he formed his own production company and began to talk of developing a racing film with the title Le Mans. This particular obsession would tick steadily away for the next ten years, at which point it promptly exploded. ‘Steve was so up around then,’ says an ex-family friend; ‘he was twenty-nine, tanned, rich and had that manic zip. The guy was fresh goods.’
There were also some darkly revelatory moments around the house on Skyline Drive, frequently after McQueen had overdone his beloved Old Milwaukee or Peruvian flake. He never forgot a slight, real or imagined, wrote off anyone who crossed him and, as Neile says, ‘trusted exactly one soul in the world – me’. Steve’s paranoia could be as heated as his affection. ‘If anybody hurts my family, I’m gonna put them down in a little black book.’
One balmy evening in late 1960 Steve, his young daughter and their dog went for a walk up the canyon road. Far below them in the valley the jumble of downtown LA and Century City were strung with Christmas lights. In the spirit of the season, McQueen knocked on the door of a neighbour, one Edmund George, to make peace. Recently, there had been complaints about Steve ‘partying’ and ‘scaring the shit out of the street’ by gunning the Lotus on his midnight rounds to and from Hollywood. When the neighbour came out and his attitude wasn’t satisfactory, McQueen socked him in the mouth to make it so. Out of sheer shock and frustration, George allegedly retaliated by punching not Steve but his own wife. Meanwhile, the dog went berserk. McQueen then strolled the few yards back to his house where, sure enough, he was promptly hit with a lawsuit. (It was thrown out of court several months later.) A tangled contradiction for a man who continually wanted his TV series to be ‘less violent’.
Why did Wanted succeed?
‘Impact,’ says Don Gordon. ‘A fresh approach. Steve wasn’t a worn-out ham. The very few great screen actors know to break through that veil between them and the camera. They just do. It was McQueen’s greatest strength and his greatest hassle – he busted his ass. He worked. That’s what people forget when they talk about a big star.’ Among the ‘business’ Steve would perfect was his trademark, swivel-fire technique with the Mare’s Laig and various other quickdraw stunts he practised hours on end. He researched countless books on the correct 1890s-era wardrobe. There were his other finely-tuned mannerisms, like the way he walked or mounted a horse. McQueen would give certain scenes an hour or two while he pondered a move. Cast and crew got used to hanging restlessly on until the spirit moved him, at which point he would emerge at a run, once skidding at top speed into a prop cactus as he bawled excitedly:
‘Roll ’em.’
Once an idea was lodged in McQueen’s mind, he was raring to go and, as soon as the sets were ready, plunged in with his ‘manic zip’. Beneath it all was a hard unsaid truth. He was manic, he was depressive. The imitative, or impressionable, in Steve was there too. He was still given to his cherished Brando and Dean impersonations. Often it came through off set, as in his hi-jinks with Sinatra. And yet, by 1960, one look at the hardened glint in those shaggy-dog eyes told you there was something there rather deeper than mere mimicry. McQueen had unbeatable film sense. As Eli Wallach, who worked with him that year, says, ‘Steve’s great skill – the word genius comes to mind – lay in being observant. He could always find what it had been in an earlier scene that led, logically, to what he was doing just then. Nobody quite grasped the poetry in the flow of film like him.’ McQueen’s latter-day refusal to truck with decorative flourishes, but simply to wire back the facts, was also what struck Gordon. ‘Jimmy Cagney said it best: “Walk into the scene, hit your marks, look the other guy in the eye and tell the truth.” Steve did that in spades.’
McQueen made it big that year, his thirtieth, presiding over the birth of modern cool. Before there was Clint Eastwood or Jack Nicholson or Robert De Niro or Bruce Willis, before Sean Connery first suited up as Bond or Gene Hackman perfected his common touch in The French Connection, Steve cast his eye over the house and determined that both men and women would go for a ‘type’: someone who, if he got any more virile, could have joined the World Sumo Federation, yet who also had a heart. One half of the audience saw the icy surface and thought they could melt it. The other half merely applauded. As the critic Barry Norman says, ‘It was a clever unisex appeal. Males wanted to be him – the females wanted to bed him, which a fair number duly did.’ The character ‘Steve McQueen’ was a definite artefact of the mass market.
McQueen was up for three films that year, Ocean’s Eleven, Pocketful of Miracles and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, all of which he walked on or vetoed. His Wanted contract allowed him only the vague option to take outside work at ‘mutually convenient times’ for Four Star and CBS. Then Steve heard that John Sturges was applying the model of a Josh Randall type to the big screen in a version of Akira Kurosawa’s film The Seven Samurai. Sturges’s model was Westernised, starring seven gunslingers hired by a Mexican border town to halt periodic forays on the pueblo by bandits. By the time McQueen first got wind of it, the project already had a long and chequered history. The producer Walter Mirisch had been developing the story with his old friend Yul Brynner for six years when, between takes on The Guns of Navarone, Anthony Quinn filed suit alleging that he, not they, owned the rights to the 1954 screenplay. Mirisch and Brynner then had their own falling out about money. On several occasions the Mexican government came close to torpedoing the whole project on the grounds that ‘bad things’, such as torture and buggery, were done in Sturges’s original adaptation. Clearly, The Magnificent Seven wasn’t destined to be a standard oater. McQueen saw his character Vin as more sombre and internal than Josh Randall, at least as envisaged by Four Star. He quickly signed up.
Four Star acknowledged the news, then hit Steve with a hammer-blow. They refused to release him from his Wanted shooting schedule. Dick Powell waved away the very idea that a successful movie star could impress himself on the series and the ratings. It seemed as though McQueen’s first real shot at the ‘brass ring’ would be lost. Before he had time to get the snarl off his face, he was already doing the mental arithmetic. He was a few weeks shy of thirty, the age by which he’d promised to ‘get some sugar out of the business’, and he was stuck there, in The Factory, atop Ringo and greased up like Tom Mix; playing cowboy ‘for fucking seven-fifty a week’ when Candyland lay just over the horizon; wondering whether he should, after all, book three tickets for Australia. ‘For me and my ol’ lady and my kid,’ he told David Niven. ‘I’m tired of the whole scam.’
‘He really meant it,’ says Hilly Elkins. Elkins appealed to Niven and Powell, who referred him back to Four Star’s manager Tom McDermott. The two men had known each other for years in New York. ‘I met with McDermott and told him, “Steve has a real opportunity and it’ll bring only good PR to the series. Give him a couple of weeks’ leeway.”’ That was cut off with an angry chop of McDermott’s hand. He reddened, glared at Elkins and delivered the blow.
‘Fuck you. McQueen’s paid for.’
As Elkins caught his breath, McDermott rushed on, trying to convince himself as much as Elkins that ‘We own McQueen. We made him and we can break him.’ A long pause greeted this remark, broken by Elkins saying, ‘Tom, you may want to think it over. I hate to hear you say that, because Steve’s so emotionally set on the film. You don’t want an unhappy actor.’
‘What in the name of fucking shit does that mean?’
Elkins groaned.
‘Be reasonable, Tom. All I said was, You don’t want McQueen unhappy.’
‘Well, fuck you.’
Then, according to Elkins, ‘McDermott went completely out of control, prodding his fingers towards my face, yelling, “Don’t try those fucking Mafia tactics with me,” and “I’ll take you and your client out and kick both your asses.” He told me to put my coat on and leave. As an afterthought, I asked him if he really proposed to kick Steve McQueen’s ass. And that was the end of the interview.’
Elkins drove back to his office, picked up the phone to McQueen, who happened to be visiting Boston with Neile, and told him, ‘Have an accident.’
‘Steve, being Steve, promptly rammed his rental car into the side of a bank, narrowly missing a cop on the way. It made the press. McQueen – who was completely unhurt – came back to LA in a neck brace, and I dutifully told Four Star that their golden boy was laid up and unable to work. Next thing, McDermott was back on the line screaming, “I know this is a fake, motherfucker, but you’ve got your film.”’ Whatever McDermott thought, Elkins was playing tough, so tough that he renegotiated Steve’s contract. He had Four Star double his salary as well as his stock in the company. After the yelling had died down, he then rang the Mirisch brothers and upped McQueen’s fee for The Magnificent Seven. ‘I told ’em, “This is a guy who’s going to be huge and I’ll let you have an eighteen-month option on him.” They went for it. Steve did the film and the rest is history.’
