McQueen: The Biography

The two rubbed along together during those next five years of graft. Fame, for McQueen, wouldn’t suddenly come calling after one audition; he had to ring the bell, pound on the door and finally smash on through. Witt, though aquiver for new talent, never quite turned creative vision into commercial triumph. Until 1958 nothing could avail against that hard truth. That Steve did, in the end, make it was due, in roughly equal part, to talent, luck and others’ unshakeable faith in him; that and an underlying self-confidence that he wasn’t only in the right place, but there at the right time. ‘I found a little kindness,’ as he later said. ‘A joint where people talked out their problems instead of punching you.’

There wasn’t a city in the world where an alert twenty-two-year-old could have had a better day-to-day sense of possibility than New York in the early 1950s. The place was awash with actors, especially those who trod in Brando’s huge, ‘slabby’ (as McQueen put it) shadow. The rehearsal group known as the Actors Studio had opened in 1947 in a semi-converted church, apt digs for what now became, under Lee Strasberg, a bully-pulpit for teaching Stanislavski’s Method. It was a wide-open enterprise still, more than living up to its fame. After A Streetcar Named Desire threw off the yoke of what a star was meant to look and sound like, diners like Louie’s and the dives around Sheridan Square pulsed with men in biker gear who drank and fought and then slouched their way to the school on 44th Street where, during the summer rush, a Ben Gazzara or a Marilyn Monroe took turns at the switchboard. When McQueen was eventually accepted in 1955, he was as busy and happy – if broke – as he’d ever been. Irrespective of the value of what it actually produced, the benevolent originality of the Studio would reverberate for the rest of his life. Steve bought a leather jacket. He had his glossies taken. At an informal reading he stood toe to toe with James Dean and took turns to recite ‘Sailing to Byzantium’.

Eli Wallach, who, ‘like the great McQueen’, trained at both the Playhouse and the Studio, believes ‘Steve already had the raw skill. But what he learnt to do [in New York] was what separates the true artist from the ham – to watch and, above all, to listen.’ In an impressively short time ‘McQueen was the best reactor of his generation.’ Peerlessly, he arrived.

A few brief years later various agents and loon-panted studio heads would fall over themselves to claim him as theirs, an accolade that, for Steve, had a lack of fascination all its own. He flattered but never fawned over his real mentor; he seems to have recognised that success was a more lasting and effective plug than obsequiousness. McQueen did what he could to notice those who had noticed him. ‘I had that gift in me,’ he said, ‘but [Strasberg] had the key to unlock it…Nobody gives you talent. You either have it or you don’t. What Lee gave me was definition.’

He did. But someone less attuned than he was to ‘being’ and more to theatrical elegance could never have kept in character, as Steve did, for a quarter of a century. And the character he kept in was both riveting and surprisingly versatile. Unlike some of the lesser lights at the Studio he was never just brazenly ‘acting’, an exclamation without a point. At worst, McQueen beamed what Meisner called his ‘exquisite innocence’. In top gear, he had the rare gift of understatement, and even wizened hacks would come to admire how his each look adapted to the scene, how subtly and lightly he angled for the shot, every line dropping like a fly on the course. The brute realism was there, too: McQueen followed Bogart and Garfield and narrowly preceded the likes of De Niro in showing what it was like to actually live a life, how to elicit respect, how to bear up under misfortune. In what seemed like a flash and was only a few months, those qualities would mark him for a star.

Plausibility was Strasberg’s business. And in Steve he had an actor who was all too blazingly real, human – and male. His love scenes, like his love life, soon became gladiatorial. According to the school’s Patricia Bosworth, McQueen and his actress girlfriend once improvised a scene in bed at the Studio. ‘They were really rolling around – we actually thought they were screwing and everybody wanted to take this girl’s place…I just kept staring at him. Finally Steve came over and said, “Do you want me to take you out?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “OK. I’ll take you out.” I hopped on his motorbike and off we went.’

His key moral notion remained that actresses ‘did it’.

McQueen, of all those who rose from the assembly line, was the most famously well slept. Here, too, versatility was the keynote of all his couplings, whether taking his women singly or in pairs, together with a lifelong fondness for the phrase ‘I’ll call you’. Some around New York thought Steve’s eclecticism even swung to his own sex. There was, for one thing, the way he looked. For an alpha male, McQueen was disturbingly epicene: like something made by a jeweller’s art, body perfectly honed, facial planes expertly turned, his china-blue eyes ornamented by long lashes. From his beauty spot up to the sandy hair he had artfully pouffed each week at a Chelsea salon, Steve was exquisite designer crumpet. His narrow head accentuated the sallowness of his skin. Like his acting, he had a wide expressive range – ‘a Botticelli angel crossed with a chimp’, in one critic’s arch review. For several years McQueen alternated his Wild One leathers with a pair of Bermuda shorts, almost a specific, around the Village, against being ‘straight’. Then there was the whole begged question of his name. More than one of his stage-school friends would blithely drop the prefix ‘Mc’, while McQueen, when once using the Studio bathroom (the one Strasberg labelled ‘Romeo’), was shocked to see his surname daubed on the wall, with the last letter twisted into an ‘r’.

Steve at times liked to play the caricature of a luvvie in class, insisting that he had the right, as well as the duty, to stretch. But outside 44th Street this tendency to see himself as both Steve the tease and McQueen the stud wasn’t necessarily a good move. As one ex-friend puts it, ‘He forgot that some folks didn’t make the distinction.’ It was no doubt this role-playing that led to the buzz that Steve was bisexual; bent. The photographer Bill Claxton, for one, speaks of being taken by McQueen on a voyage around his old New York haunts. ‘He would show me where he’d lived…places he worked as a hustler. He had some pretty wild stories.’ A persistent Studio rumour that McQueen dabbled in cross-dressing (frocks particularly) was a vile slur, but expressed a view some people had of him.

Both the book Laid Bare and a California radio DJ similarly offer, even today, any number of plausible ‘McQueer’ scenarios, if few real details. There may not be any. It is certain, though, that he idolised James Dean – whose act he shamelessly filched in The Blob – and that a friend of Dean’s, Paul Darlow, was firmly under the impression that ‘Jimmy and Steve were swishes’.

Those scenes in Dean’s room at the Iroquois Hotel didn’t create the gossip, but they did nonetheless colour it. Darlow and several other men were present one night in 1954 after a drinking binge uptown at Jerry’s Bar. ‘Like to do my hair?’ Dean asked McQueen, helpfully drawing it back from his forehead as if clearing his mind, and producing a brush. Steve sat down behind him and patiently back-combed the famous quiff, thick and shiny as a mink’s, breathing or perhaps lightly chuckling down the back of Dean’s neck. Darlow then witnessed the following:

‘Would you do mine?’ Steve asked.

‘Drop dead.’

‘Come on, JD. Don’t you dig my fur?’

‘No,’ Jimmy replied, ‘it always looks so dago to me.’

Dean treated McQueen gingerly, once inviting him backstage at a performance of The Immoralist but then dropping him. Less than eighteen months later he was dead.

For the rest of his own life an undercurrent of all McQueen’s relationships, marriages and affairs alike, was the nagging threat of homosexuality. He was legendarily touchy on the subject. According to the Londoner who first offered Steve ‘a fag’, he promptly ‘threw a fit, prodding his fingers at me and yelling, “Fuck you! I’m Steve McQueen! Kiss my ass.’” (It was his girlfriend who explained that in England they came twenty to a packet.) Six years later, in January 1968, Steve took a phone call at home in California. The anonymous party told him, ‘There’s a new book coming out that lists all the celebrities who are queer. I thought you’d like to know your name is in it.’ He hung up. According to his ex-wife, Steve became phobic – ‘possessed’ is the word she uses – from that day on, greatly accelerating his paranoia and, not incidentally, her own exit. On the set of The Getaway in 1972 McQueen was ‘seriously freaked’ at shooting a nude scene with ‘real cons who happened to be gay’, says Katy Haber, who worked on the film. And two years later, when Paul Newman broached the idea of his taking a homosexual role, McQueen told him, ‘I could never play a fag.’ It was an expression of disgust and also, so it seemed, of fear.

Mostly, though, Steve shrugged all that off. Publicly he bore most of his hangups in silence.

Back in the fifties there was something almost defiant about the flaming heterosexual whose line of active bachelorhood would fix two words on the New York stage scene, just as it had on the Florida beach. Big Mac: the serial seducer who dazzled his women with a neat mix of the goofy and the gothic. It was the end of December 1954 when several Playhouse students met in an automat off Times Square. Steve was there when they arrived. He startled one actress, Emily Hurt, by ‘jumping to his feet and rolling his eyes while sticking his tongue out, like a mad kid’. McQueen’s meal, she says, was ‘hoovered down – he ate as though he was on fire, then calmly reached over and speared the meat from my plate’. There was also beer. ‘Steve was sort of writhing around in his seat. He’d go into a slump and then suddenly toss off one-liners in a screwy way that reminded me of his acting.’ One of them was in the form of a question: ‘Why not come back for some New Year grog at my dump?’ Steve appears, from the accounts of this dinner, to have behaved like a badly neglected child, because he now asked, according to Hurt, ‘Want to see how a farm boy eats chicken?’ Whether or not anyone took up the offer, he ‘grabbed a drumstick and began ramming it in and out of his mouth, sucking it ostentatiously’.

The party broke up. ‘Steve was kind of slouched there alone. His face was grim and set, and by now his shoulders were hunched. I held back, too, and I remember that he looked up and said something that shook me.

‘“How would you treat a suicidal nut? Just the same as any other guy, or make an exception?”’

On that note the two of them walked arm-in-arm down Seventh Avenue to Sheridan Square. Once inside Steve’s bleak apartment, ‘he again became the hyperactive kid, bouncing off walls and pleading with me to feed, by which he meant breastfeed, him’.* Broadly, according to Hurt, ‘Steve loved anything with wheels or tits, probably in that order…All in all, a very torn-up guy. We became lovers. God knows, he shouldn’t have added up to much, but that came from his sweet, klutzy side and the charm he could turn on like a switch. Nobody played the hurt puppy like Steve did.’

It was doubtless these same mood swings that led to the New York rumours he was bisexual, as well as bi-polar. McQueen’s Bermuda shorts made for a particular talking point around the Studio. To others, the mumbling actor was but a lisp away from the drama queen. The truth is, at bottom Steve was an old-fashioned (and deeply unfashionable) man who wanted his partners, as most confirm, barefoot if not pregnant. While they ‘took the precautions’, says Hurt, McQueen wore a condom over his heart. Feeling himself let down by the first woman he knew, he never again let go with a woman.

Somehow, alone or with a mate, Steve managed an ever more wild pace. Whether tearing up Broadway on the Harley or wolfing his food and drink, he seemed to be an actor in a race with life. A twitchy figure in black, McQueen hustled along at a bouncy clip, with his toes cocked out at an angle, his very shoes – scuffed trainers – of a piece with a man on the move. Even his music was right: Steve listened nonstop to ‘Fidgety Feet’ and the jump-jive of a Louis Jordan. Aside from an ancient gramophone, the bike and the car, his few possessions were athletic: sweat pants, a punching bag, the barbells. When not actually working out, McQueen did most of his weightlifting with a fork and mug. The otherwise spartan flat was always well stocked with junk food. His only kitchen appliance was a blender, in which he mixed up an unholy brew of eggs, mouldy yogurt and coffee every morning. According to one visitor, ‘Steve got up dead, but after the second hit of that crap he was like a dog off the leash. People had to run just to keep up with him.’

As an actor, McQueen was emerging almost fully formed. He was poised; he was go-getting. He was also – and always – spoiling for a fight. In his wordless way, a clear plan of attack grew out of his five-year apprenticeship.

By his twenty-fifth birthday Steve had been in three plays far off Broadway, and had a reputation for being both talented and difficult. The money from these productions was long since gone. Early that winter he was forced to trade down to a fifth-floor slum on East 10th Street with a tin bathtub in the kitchen. His previous place, he now decided, was ‘fucking near the Plaza’ by comparison. McQueen sold the MG and took part-time work as a mechanic in an Upper West Side garage, where he once suffered the indignity of having to service James Dean’s Harley. Something about the flush to his face when he handed back the keys suggested, to a mutual friend, that ‘Steve was jealous of Jimmy, and was busy figuring out how to deal with it’. Aside from a brief encounter at Jerry’s, that was the last time the two actors ever met.

Steve did, however, reluctantly put in several man-hours of hard work with Julian. They eventually got back in touch. Whatever his normal code on women, these tedious and often trying interventions were much to McQueen’s credit. Two or three times that winter his mother called him to discharge her from hospital, where she was being treated for acute alcoholism. He always went, walking her home from Bellevue through Gramercy Park and down Irving to East 18th, where Julian liked to stop in for a beer at Pete’s Tavern. By any account there was something heroic about Steve’s self-control: he was able to rally round Julian while never again daring to trust, let alone to love her. As Dora Yanni quite rightly says, ‘That woman put the iron into Steve’s soul.’ Iron, she adds, that ran deeper than blood. Without Julian he would never have been a great tragedian, as opposed to another pantomime punk figure. Yanni happened to see McQueen hurrying into the hospital one evening, his white gym shoes snapping against the polished floor. ‘She’s frothing,’ he told her.

Implacably, Julian’s influence was everywhere.

Meanwhile Steve continued, as Yanni herself knew, to ‘root himself stupid’ around New York. For other actors the most seductive aspect of Big Mac may not have been his innocence, but the startling, pre-emptive willingness to do literally anything to make it. When McQueen auditioned for Strasberg, he was one of only five actors out of 2000 applicants to be accepted that season. He also lobbied Witt nonstop for work. Later that spring of 1955 he landed a spot in an hour-long dramatic NBC anthology series, the Goodyear Playhouse. Both ten ratings points lower and twenty IQ points higher than current TV fare like I Love Lucy, The Chivington Raid, broadcast on 27 March, was McQueen’s screen debut.

He followed it by launching himself, as Yanni says anachronistically, ‘like a Scud missile’ at a play called Two Fingers of Pride. This pro-labour harangue, set in the New York docks and broadly in the mould of On the Waterfront, was being cast by its writer Jim Longhi and the director Jack Garfein. Steve read for the second lead, having assured them that he, like his character, was Italian-American and twenty-two years old. Neither was true, but otherwise McQueen fitted the part well. He then borrowed $35 (never repaid) to buy his first Actors Equity card. Even though the show never transferred from summer stock in Ogunquit, Maine, Steve’s ‘original, primitive’ portrayal of Nino the longshoreman was noted warmly by the New York Post and without insult in the News. Garfein managed to get McQueen an appointment with the talent agency MCA. Steve arrived for his interview at the glass-and-marble office on Madison Avenue by riding his Harley through the lobby, into the lift, and up to the eleventh floor. MCA accepted him.

Later that winter the director Robert Wise was in New York casting his biopic Somebody Up There Likes Me, set in the roasted light of Hell’s Kitchen and the prize ring. Wise remembers an audition when ‘this kid came in, cocky, wearing a sport jacket and a beanie cap, and told me: “I’m your man.’” There were dozens of other actors in immaculate black denim up for the bit part of Fidel (often wrongly given as Fido), the blade-wielding punk. Wise had never heard of McQueen. He did, however, recognise the potential of the ‘lean, tense boy you felt could slug you as fast as smile’ whom MCA brought him. Steve got the job. For $19 per diem (rising to $50 on the few days he had any lines) he got to play out scenes from his own adolescence.

Somebody was a remarkable case study of the transaction between life and art, at its core dramatising the career of the boxer Rocky Graziano. McQueen came on as a greaser, whose sudden eruptions of energy – ‘You lookin’ at me?’ – lent, with their De Niro-like emphasis, a touch of added menace to the proceedings. His safari down the back alleys of New York was freighted with three obsessions—hubcaps, pool and mob violence – as well as a touch of mimicry, specifically a disgruntled Brando mushmouth. It was the first, though not the last instance of Steve’s knack for projecting his own life’s path on screen. Somebody was good, hard-bitten stuff.

As a member of Graziano’s street gang Steve offered his usual concentration, quickness and stern, appraising gaze. Appearing in only the first fifteen minutes of the film, he cut a slick dash as well as a tone that was satirical and vicious to the outside world, yet warm and accepting of friends – the distinctive McQueen tone, in his first fully confident role. Following the style of the movie as a whole, Steve’s movements were crisp and taut, his voice gruff, his type now cast as a threatening hardnut, yet whose performance was never sacrificed to the action. Mostly, of course, the critics still ignored him. McQueen’s role was uncredited, and thus somewhat below a Variety’s radar. His few notices in the trades were good enough, but what struck Steve more, if possible, was the wallop he had on Hollywood. Men like Wise and MCA’s John Foreman now sat up for the ‘kid’ whose talent for engaging menace was complemented nicely by a slit mouth and the shaggy-pup eyes.

The man who played top dog to Steve’s Fido was a thirty-year-old actor in only his own second role. From then on, Paul Newman’s career became a kind of pace car for McQueen’s. Steve’s first director is only the most compelling witness to the fact that it was ‘undeclared war’ between them, two physical types whose commonplace, yet heroic qualities inspired, on one level, several PhD theses and, striking a lower note on the academic scale, Erica Jong’s orgasm in Esquire. ‘Who has the bluest eyes? Newman or McQueen? It’s difficult to say, but McQueen’s twinkle more. He makes me think of all those leathery-necked cowboys at remote truck stops in Nevada. Does he wear pointy boots? And does he take them off when he screws?’ The most charitable reading of this rivalry is that it neatly relit the torch once carried by Steve for James Dean (originally slated for the Graziano role) before the latter died in September 1955. It reached its shining apogee, or leaden nadir, when the two stars came to debate their billing, eighteen years later, in The Towering Inferno. A compromise was eventually reached whereby McQueen’s name would be on the left, and Newman’s a shade higher, exactly a foot to the right, on the marquee. Steve knew very well the direction in which people read. That twelve-inch gap was supremacy superbly controlled.

Mutual ambivalence, meanwhile, bordered on open war. Only this can explain the bile which seeped out of McQueen’s private assessment of Newman like an oil leak. ‘Fuckwit’, he dubbed him at moments of stress.

Frank Knox, an extra on Somebody, remembers Steve as the ‘sweetest guy’ off the set and a ‘bear in rutting season’ on it. One night after work the two of them went out for a beer at Pete’s. When the time came for McQueen to talk about acting, according to Knox, he ‘outlined his positive accomplishments to date, noted that more needed to be done, and promised that it would be’. Steve ended the evening by pledging to ‘pull [his] shit together’, to ‘grab the brass ring’ and, all in all, to ‘get some sugar out of this business – to be a big star’ by his thirtieth birthday.

Fighting words, but for Steve McQueen, who believed in doing rather than talking, they raised a flag. There was no way, says Knox, McQueen would ever settle for the sad fate of most struggling actors’ careers. ‘You got the impression, with him, it really was Hollywood or bust. He’d either go under or hammer a few million bucks out of the system. Even then, Steve was always ten per cent more rabid than the rest.’

Work, in Tinseltown, bringing more work, McQueen appeared on TV again early in 1956. He walked through the ‘US Steel Hour’ drama unobtrusively, wearing a shapeless grey suit that somehow on him looked suave, draping him like folded wings. Steve was quiet, small and slightly stooped, but the wooden appearance was deceptive: there was a nervy concentration about him, his half-hooded glance murderous and sharp. Aptly enough for McQueen, that particular episode was entitled ‘Bring Me a Dream’. Soon after it aired, he was badgering Strasberg, MCA and both the director and writer for a part in the watermark play A Hatful of Rain, a stark depiction of the misery, though occasionally blissful mundanity of drug addiction. After weeks of brutal jockeying the role of Johnny Pope, the doomed greaser lead, went to type in the form of the Studio graduate, McQueen’s rival Ben Gazzara. By then, Gazzara also had a contract for the film The Strange One. He soon left New York for an oddly unfulfilled career in Hollywood. Without him, the play’s future was uncertain.

McQueen wanted Hatful, but he was trouble. What with the pay demands and the firings he had, over the last four years, cost producers plenty – ‘a lot of freight’, as they say in the business, to carry for an actor many thought unemployable at worst and a long shot at best. But he was persistent. McQueen always had a hawk eye for where real power lay, how to scam a casting. He kept up a nonstop flow of notes and cards, not only to the suits but to their wives: ‘Roses, always roses,’ says one of the latter. That spring McQueen spent time amongst real junkies in Hell’s Kitchen. He read, rehearsed and understudied. He offered to defer his modest salary in exchange for a percentage of profits. ‘Short of some shtick involving a horse’s head,’ says Frank Knox, ‘it’s hard to think what more Steve could have done.’ In a bravura ploy beyond his own means he even had his few trade notices photocopied, professionally bound and sent round.

It was a full-time siege, and it worked. Stockholm syndrome, the obscure love that flowers between ransomer and captive, paralysed the producers’ will. By midsummer Steve had the job.

The critics weren’t happy. McQueen threw himself into the role, never missing a cue, much less a trick, and even dying his hair black. And yet, with all his intensity and his million-toothed smile, his performance was oddly earthbound: it came down to inexperience, earning Steve the backstage name Cornflake. He never settled into a rhythm or pitch that brought out the best in his speeches.