McQueen
The Biography
Christopher Sandford

Copyright

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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsEntertainment 2001

Copyright © S. E. Sandford 2001

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006532293

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2017 ISBN: 9780007381906

Version: 2017-01-13

For Robin Parish

‘The soul of the thing is the thought;

the charm of the act is the actor;

The soul of the fact is its truth, and the

NOW is its principal factor’

Eugene Fitch Ware

‘I’m a little screwed up, but I’m beautiful’

Steve McQueen

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Copyright

Epigraph

1 The American Dream

2 War Lover

3 ‘Should I lay bathrooms, or should I perform?’

4 Candyland

5 Solar Power

6 The King of Cool

7 Love Story

8 Abdication

9 Restoration

10 The Role of a Lifetime

Keep Reading

Appendix 1 Chronology

Appendix 2 Filmography

Appendix 3 Bibliography

Author’s Note

Sources and Chapter Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Also By Christopher Sandford

About the Publisher

1 The American Dream

Steve McQueen was dead. It was a strange enough ending for a life that had scaled the heights of fame and plumbed the depths of depravity, laid out in a cold bare-walled room in a Mexican clinic. On this November morning a pale, watery sun came through the barred windows, sending chopped-up light onto the narrow bed. All the grief which marked the last year of McQueen’s life seemed purged by death. His eyes which, oddly, had turned dark grey were blue once more. In his hands was a Bible, turned to McQueen’s favourite verse, ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.’ A doctor and a nurse both noticed the look that came over him at the end. It was the quizzical half-grin he made his own, that frighteningly unamused smirk at once attractive and not quite welcoming. Steve McQueen was himself again.

The king of cool had died at fifty. If the cancer hadn’t done for him, then a human agent had: according to McQueen’s doctor, it is ‘certain’ that a person or persons injected him with a fatal coagulant late on 6 November 1980, his final night alive. His patient was, he says, executed as he lay drugged and immobilised in a hospital bed. But no one should feel pity for Steve McQueen. He was neither broken nor bitter. Sick as he was, the happiest chapter of his life may have been the last one, in the care of Barbara, his third wife, flying his antique planes and slipping anonymously into church. He’d been living first in an aircraft hangar and then in a ranch with a big pot-bellied stove that filled half the room. Behind the house were fields and behind the fields were mountains. Here, in Santa Paula, California reminded Steve of the Missouri heartland he’d fled as a boy but never left. Here, the circle was complete.

A few other circles had been closed, too. McQueen’s first ever appearance on the big screen was as a prowling, knife-wielding punk. For his minuscule role as Fidel in 1956’s Somebody Up There Likes Me he earned $19 a day. Twenty-four years later, The Hunter ended on a poignantly downbeat note with McQueen spark out on a hospital floor. For that picture he made $3 million, plus 15 per cent of the gross. Running as a throughline in between, film audiences met one of the most arresting personalities in American art. Not too many others could hold a candle to McQueen’s striking affirmation of individuality. Far, far from the usual Hollywood pieties, Steve spent his off-duty hours dirt-biking or squatting in the desert with Navajo Indians. As a man, few ever came close to him. As an actor, nobody did. At his worst, McQueen gave off a quietly passionate sense of love and loss, eyes reeling with meaning, which perhaps promised more than it delivered. On peak form, he gave substance to even the thinnest plot. Not since the salad days of Brando had the words ‘movie’ and ‘star’ been in such proximity. Above all, McQueen knew that performance wasn’t a matter of right and wrong but of life and death – of the material. Jim Clavell, who worked up The Great Escape, would say that ‘Steve played suffering perfectly,’ since it chimed so well with his experience.

‘Lo hice – I did it’ were McQueen’s last known words. Towards the end, according to an orderly who was there, he ‘talked a lot about the early days, the farm, growing up and most of all reform school’. His nostalgia for the lost world of 1945 hid a grim truth: Steve had been committed by his own mother and her new husband. The squat bunker of Junior Boys Republic, the burr-cuts and bib overalls, the carbolic smell ground deep into the floor, the reek of the laundry – those were the stinking madeleines of his youth. And as McQueen lay dying, pressing ice cubes to his cheeks, doctors would hear him sob, ‘Three-one-eight-eight,’ over and over, his old school number of thirty-five years earlier echoing his fluttering heartbeat. Steve went out, if not with a whimper, then whey-faced for all the bewildered souls, not for his legendary groupies and least of all for Candyland, but for the ‘real folks’. For those who like their types cast, it was a quite heroic death.

They took him to the mortuary in Juarez, bumping along dusty roads where paparazzi from across the border already cowered behind trees. The Globe and Enquirer stringers squealed like game-show contestants when the car pulled in to the Prado Funerales. On that frenetic morning reporters were attempting to bribe medical staff with $80,000 for a shot of the corpse. In the end it was Paris Match who located McQueen’s body, calmly lifted the undertaker’s sheet and got off a picture for their front page. An orderly took exception and wound up rolling around with the photographer on the morgue floor. Later that afternoon the cortege made its way to the frontier town of El Paso, Texas, where a private jet stood fuelled and ready for the flight to Santa Paula. The sight of more press on the runway even as the plane revved up set off a round of groans and denunciations among McQueen’s friends. It was like the climactic scene from Bullitt. Two hours later they landed in California in thick fog. The plain Mexican coffin, flimsy for even his gaunt body, was loaded on a station wagon and taken to the Chapel of Rest in Ventura for cremation.

It was what McQueen had wanted, another perverse triumph. He’d always hated fires. He was nearly killed by one as a boy and in later years often had occasion to head-butt his demons. ‘You lookin’ at me?’ or a tart ‘Fuck you, candyass’ defiantly masked his inner terrors. Steve once ran through hot smoke to rescue his wife and young baby from a brush fire in Laurel Canyon. Drink and dope were balanced, for him, not only by fast cars but by constantly testing how he felt about himself and nature; and McQueen experienced that sense of challenge again in 1966, when he helped fight a three-alarm blaze at the studio. Ironically, the two worlds of fact and fiction finally merged eight years later when, at a routine briefing with the technical adviser on The Towering Inferno, McQueen responded to a real-life emergency by suiting up to save yet another torched stage. On that occasion a fireman looked over his shoulder, started and blurted out, ‘Holy crap! Steve! My wife won’t believe this.’ ‘Neither will mine,’ said McQueen calmly.

The body was burnt, and the ashes placed in a cheap urn. Steve had wanted ‘nothing fancy’ for himself, and he was famous for his spartan tastes – a can of Old Milwaukee was fine by him. Especially towards the end: by then, instead of goons and gofers, McQueen was keeping company with a distinctly rough-hewn crew of local barnstormers and pilots. Together they shared hobbies and traditions that were already old when Steve was born. They had an overriding love of keeping it simple, and many was the night they sat around the hangar, drinking and hugging themselves against the cold, whooping it up at Hollywood. This new McQueen was, above all, ‘real folks’, which is to say much the sort of person done on screen by the old McQueen. He favoured flying the flag in every school, early nights, and affirming the sanctity of marriage. That never ruled out a beer or a smoke. As for protocol, he didn’t overdo it. McQueen’s language was famously earthy. As far as acting went, he felt as if he’d pissed away about twenty years, wondering aloud what the fuck he’d been doing in half his films, although he always cashed the cheques. ‘You know, guys,’ Steve would say, squinting up at the snowy Rafaels, ‘I only really feel horny when I’m flying.’

They took the urn up in McQueen’s favourite antique Stearman, headed for the coast and scattered his ashes over the Pacific. That big bug. He’d loved it almost as much as he loved wheels. Fumes and altitude, the part of the American dream that went high and fast. Up there in the yellow biplane all the lines and wrinkles and what Steve called ‘broken glass’ were dissolved, blown away in the alpine air. They’d watched him, Sammy and Doug and Clete and the other flyboys, as he’d climbed sheer gradients, swooping with wild speed, and, just as fast, pulling back, rushing headlong towards the mountains, then levelling out at last towards the trails that went up into the hills and the clear sharpness of the peaks beyond. He would waggle his wings and it was exciting to him as though he were living, or at least exhaling, for the first time. That and the ranch and the silvered grey of the sagebrush, the quick, clear water of the Santa Clara and the missionary church were the sights and sounds he’d chosen for himself at the end. He’d always had a great imitative style, attitudes and poses associated with other people. But for the last year at least, Steve McQueen was playing himself.

That flight in the Stearman was a defining symbol of McQueen’s real breakthrough: that worldly success, for which he’d fought the System like two ferrets in a sack, was yet more ‘shit’. He was back to basics. Fire, air and sea were the true representation of Steve’s own words echoing down his last year – ‘Keep it elemental.’ His friends said a prayer for him over the water and came back low across the channel to Ventura. On McQueen’s orders, there was no grave or marker of any sort. His widow moved out of the ranch to a remote cabin in Idaho, and the plane and McQueen’s other goods were mainly given away. That, too, chimed with the ‘poor, sick, ragged kid’ who was father to the man.

Even Steve’s latter-day humility wasn’t enough to protect his cherished privacy. They came from all parts looking for clues, fans and paparazzi alike, doorstepping the ranch and swarming round his figure – soon removed by curators – at Hollywood’s wax museum. More than a few straggled back to the clinic, but none pierced the narcotic smog of medical debate, especially on the knotty subject of ‘alternative’ cancer treatment. Certainly nobody seriously floated the idea that McQueen had been murdered.

William Kelley, a one-time Texas dentist who apparently cured himself of cancer and went on to found the impressively styled International Health Institute, first treated a man posing as Don Schoonover in April 1980. ‘I told Schoonover – who turned out to be Steve – what he had to do. Sure enough, he began to get better…Six months later McQueen was in the clinic in Juarez and wanted to have his dead tumours surgically removed. I advised him of the risk, but Steve, being Steve, insisted. “I’m going to blow the lid off of the American cancer-treatment scam,” he told me. The medical establishment was freaked, shit scared of being exposed by a man like that. I was there the last night of his life, and I know what happened.’

A gutsy pioneer and whistleblower, or a demented nut? When Kelley started his institute, he had no surgical and little enough medical kudos. Even his orthodontist’s licence had been suspended after people complained that he was more interested in treating other health problems than in straightening teeth. A court injunction then briefly stopped publication of his book, One Answer to Cancer. By 1976 Kelley was being investigated by more than a dozen government agencies. For several years he and his wife moved onto an organic farm in Washington state, fantasised as a place of old-fashioned ideals, perfect peace, happiness and wholeness, with good vibes for all. He sold vitamins.

At this stage Kelley expanded his mail-order business and began hawking a ‘nonspecific metabolic therapy’ programme to patients disillusioned, like him, with the American Medical Association. His staggeringly complex nutritional regimen had some striking successes. Nobody knows exactly how many people are alive today because of him. However, after co-leasing the clinic in Mexico, Kelley achieved a series of remissions and apparent cures in even terminal cancer cases, McQueen allegedly among them. Both nurses and surgeons agree that the tumours removed from McQueen’s body were themselves already dead – ‘like cotton candy’, Kelley explains. ‘Steve was cancer-free for the last six months of his life. He died, pure and simple, of an induced blood clot.’ The accusation comes from a man, it has to be said, whose diet- and enema-based remedies landed him on the American Cancer Society’s blacklist. Some of Kelley’s deathbed scenario is also, like his therapy, nonspecific, but when his last doctor says ‘Steve was done in,’ you can be sure it’s because he believes it and not because of some slick dash he’s trying to cut. It would be astonishing if a freelance American celebrity like Kelley were vanity free, and he isn’t. With his treatment of McQueen already on record, he makes sure that people know of his other accomplishments – that he’s survived attacks by the FBI and the CIA, along with the ‘enemy Jew-controlled establishment’, for over thirty years. If Kelley’s racism repels, there’s still another strain in him that attracts as well. He talks fast, with a wheedling energy, but also with a wry humour and a string of wisecracks. Above all, he was there when Steve needed help, almost certainly prolonged his life, and was intimately involved in the events of 6–7 November 1980. Kelley may be a radical; he’s no nut.

Why did McQueen turn to what his first wife, at least, calls the ‘charlatans and exploiters’? The question still fascinates Hollywood’s ruling class who, for the most part, stood in such awe of him. Possibly because he felt so marginal – he never met his father and barely knew his mother – McQueen had the lifelong need to feud, to ‘twist people’s melons’, as he put it. Intrinsic to nearly everything he did was the sense of proving both himself and others. The truculence became part of this pattern, and any attempt to separate it from the gentler, mature Steve would split what’s indivisible. Throughout his life he was a cynic sometimes made credulous by his urge – almost a pathological need – to wing it. And McQueen would have automatically been well disposed towards anyone who, like Kelley, was at war with the world.

Sam Peckinpah, a man whose wit outlived his liver, put it best: Steve was every guy you didn’t fuck with. There are various mysteries about McQueen, shy kid and adult male equivalent of the Statue of Liberty, the chief one being that he seemed to be several different people. He was the insecure boy who didn’t much like being famous. Mostly he liked being alone, driving a straight ribbon of blacktop through the canyon dirt and past the lemon groves and orchards down into the desert. He loved the open spaces. Animals he usually tolerated but didn’t trust. People were ‘bad shit’. If there was any fellow-feeling, it was towards those he saw as other loners. There was the pill-popping and grog-quaffing McQueen who worked out three hours daily in the gym. There was the loving husband who boasted of ‘more pussy than Frank Sinatra’ on the side. There was the dumb hick (his phrase) who fought the studio system to a draw. The charismatic man who brought oxygen into a room. The last true superstar. The great reactor.

McQueen was the character who revels in his rebelliousness, the larger-than-life stud and free spirit who was actually a martyr to self-hate. During the periods when he wasn’t working Steve would get monumentally wasted, one of his typical pranks being when he stopped exercising and drank or snorted himself into oblivion. The pattern became a familiar one. While there was a suicidal component in some of these binges, McQueen didn’t actually want to die – the need for revenge was still too powerful for that. But he depended for his survival on a small but fanatically loyal gang of old friends; and his rude health. When most of those went south, and he made a genuine if tardy conversion to God, it’s not surprising McQueen pondered his options with Bill Kelley.

In the late 1960s, when Steve reached adulthood and suddenly realised he didn’t want to be there, the inverted world of movies was a wonderfully soothing place. McQueen’s personal myth, what he called his mud, ran to the bitter end. Many of the actual parts played were laughably weak, but McQueen was better than his scripts. Character counted with him, because in the end character was all there was. More than anyone, he knew that films exist in a kind of delicate balance with their moment. They can, sometimes mysteriously, either catch or miss their time. His own defining eloquence – a combination of the tough and the goofy – spoke directly to the embattled, mixed-up spirit of a war-torn republic. No one did the Sixties better than McQueen. He was, said Frank Sinatra, who would have known, ‘absolutely the greatest Zeitgeist guy. Ever.’

The designation was hard won. Obviously he wasn’t someone, like a De Niro, who physically aped his characters. The question of full-scale possession remains. All the fear and doubt and past experience McQueen brought to bear only heightened the surface dazzle of his cool under-playing. He didn’t call it a method: it was a policy, a life-plan of realism that was simply a part of him. It was also a good way for him to ‘twist melons’.

Karl Maiden remembers a scene he did with McQueen in The Cincinnati Kid. ‘Steve came on, in character, to confront me about whether I was double-dealing cards. He sprang at me like an animal. McQueen was prowling around the room where we were shooting, and he was absolutely terrifying. His fiery blue eyes were covered with an electric glaze and he was whipping about like a loose power line. He was so tense, I felt like I was gonna see an actor blow up for real…I mean, I was in awe of him.’ And this was a tough guy himself, who’d worked with Brando.

His aggression! People who knew and even loved Steve still marvel at it. It consumed him. The actor Biff McGuire remembers an odd and touching instance of it on The Thomas Crown Affair. This particular take called for McQueen to chip a golf ball out of a bunker, something that could have been done in a minute using a double or some other trick. ‘Steve toiled away at the shot most of the day, trying to hit the ball – going off to rest after a while, but then drawn back to it, totally focused on the job. He’d swing over and over and the ball would dribble up just a few inches and roll back in the pit again. Sometimes the director and crew would encourage him, but mostly I remember him alone, with that blinkered “Don’t fuck with me” expression of his, the club poised, then down, and the little shower of sand would spurt up. But everyone knew Steve would get the ball on the green, and in the end he did.’

He must have holed out just in time for his next – and best – picture, Bullitt. McQueen’s long-time friend (and sidekick in the film) Don Gordon was on location with him in San Francisco. ‘As well as kicking against the producers and suits generally, Steve applied his monster talent for competitiveness every night. First, he had both our motorbikes secretly shipped up from LA – secretly because the studio would’ve thrown a fit. He stowed them somewhere in a private lock-up. Around five every evening, just as the spring light was softening, Steve would yawn and announce he was turning in early. An hour later we’d meet at the garage and zip up into the hills, just the world’s biggest movie star and me, Steve thrilled like a kid breaking curfew but his edge immediately taking over.’ Gordon would good-naturedly watch McQueen put the throttle on and roar off into the dark. He ‘took it hard and fast because he was damn good, but also because he was stoked by knowing someone else was right behind him. I mean, Steve had to win.’

When McQueen died, more than twenty years ago, there was still a mythical America; an individual could still wrap himself in that myth. A large part of the legend had already gone Hollywood – not least in the lens of a John Ford or Frank Capra – before McQueen, but he also created his own. Vulnerability, decency and a real sense of menace all combined to fix him as the ‘new Bogie’, although Steve’s on-screen chemistry with women was the more toxic of the two. Some are put in mind of the ‘torn shirt’ school epitomised by Montgomery Clift and Brando, though McQueen’s reputation was always based on rather more than a few grunts and stylised nasal tics. With rare exceptions, he kept upping the risk, enlarging the dimensions of his own performance both on screen and off. Each of Steve’s roles was a grander and more precariously improvised adventure of the mind. His tragedy was that he could neither change the world nor ignore its creation of him. But it made for a life.

McQueen was able, out of his arrogance, to do something which was selfless. Of course he cashed the cheques, but in the best roles he created the walk, the look and the presence of the truly universal. Steve McQueen’s is the story of our time.

2 War Lover

Many of Steve’s first memories were of machines; they seemed to exert a pull on him from the start. They stood out, conspicuous against the human world, notable for their tireless, solid qualities, their efficiency, their resilience and power. They seemed responsive to his touch, and they were rational. He quickly found his place.

His time, early spring of 1930, was one of uneventful peace brooding over Europe. Britain grappled with its perennial labour and sterling crises and the worldwide trade slump, both cause and result of the Depression. The sovereign people of the US still lumped it under President Hoover, Advisory Boards on everything from Reconstruction Finance to Illiteracy marking the real beginning, three years pre-Roosevelt, of the New Deal. Yet, if lacking in surface drama, 1930 was still a turning-point, with two or three events of real long-term significance. In Germany the first Nazis took public office; on the sub-continent Gandhi began his civil disobedience campaign, with all the dislocation that entailed; and in the American rust-belt Steve McQueen was born.

It was a grim enough time, an icy 24 March, and a grim enough spot, the Indianapolis suburb of Beech Grove. He was delivered at ten that morning in the branch hospital, hard by the Conrail depot, where shabby passenger cars came to be fixed. Among the first sounds he would have heard were of engines. Everywhere more and more machinery was grinding: the city mills were still running at full bore and coal was being quarried in record weight. The factories blasted night and day; the clang of iron plates made a thought-annihilating thunder. The stockyards sent up a thick reek, wooden shacks standing beside animal swamps which bubbled and stank like stewing tripe. Dirty snow hillocks formed along the kerbs and sewage water ran raw and braided in the gutters. The inner slums, like Beech Grove, were already long since pauperised. Even the leprous hospital block was half-enveloped in weeds. This was the place, full of blood, stench and the sulphurous glare of the railyard, that fixed itself in the young boy’s imagination.

It’s often said that McQueen lived five lives, the juvenile and late years and one time around with each of his three wives. Like many people he used to wonder whether, in the last resort, those mewling early days weren’t the happiest and best. ‘I remember running in the hog yards…My people had this big field. And I’d come lighting out from school and play [there] and I remember how buzzed I felt.’ In later life Steve was skilled at softening hard memories with happy stories. His nostalgia for the 1930s and 1940s masked the grim truth that he was odds-on illegitimate, very probably abused and certainly unwanted. The experience left McQueen with the unshakable conviction that he was ‘a dork’, a friend explains. ‘He always described himself exactly that way. Steve was very sold on his being damaged goods.’

His mother, Julia Ann Crawford, known as Julian, was a nineteen-year-old runaway and drunk. In 1927 she’d taken off from the family farm for the city. Julian was blonde and pert, an apparently stylish and independent woman, if not the model of sanity. On closer inspection her very face was demented. Julian’s eyes, small and dark, suggested a substitute set of nostrils at the wrong end of her nose. At moments of excitement her head would loll wildly. She soon made a whole lifestyle out of being fractious. For a while it was only semi-prostitution, but before long Julian was dancing the hoochy-koochy and swigging ‘tea’, which she fortified from a silver flask in her handbag. Lipstick smudged across her pasty cheeks, face drawn, arms frail, black dress cinched round her thighs, stockings rolled down, she lurched from partner to partner, half gone but occasionally soaring into a shrill, manic high. The city authorities often called for her. Long before bi-polarity had a name, Julian was screwing herself in and out of madness.

In June 1929 she met and bedded an ex-flyboy named Bill McQueen. Steve’s mysterious father was one of those old-time rowdies who bent iron bars, pulled trains with their teeth or barnstormed at county fairs. All that’s known of his early days is that he flew in the navy and later toured North America with an aerobatic circus. Aside from drink, his two major loves in life were of planes and gambling. On his twenty-first birthday Bill came into a windfall of $2000. He took the cash and opened an illegal casino called Wild Will’s below a brothel on Indianapolis’s Illinois Street. After the club folded he became a drifter and an alcoholic. Around 1928 he began to suffer so badly from liver attacks and heart trouble that his doctor had to dull the pain with morphine. That set up yet another vicious circle of addiction. By the time Bill met Julian Crawford he was a sick man, in his late twenties but prematurely aged, with death all over him. They lived for a while in a rooming house, riding the trolley down to Schnull’s Block, the commercial zone, looking for work. None ever came. When Steve McQueen was born the following March, his parents had to apply for funds under the Poor Law. Julian took Bill’s surname, though there is no evidence they ever married. The father took off one night six months later, leaving the mother and son in a dismal hotel downtown. Bill came back once, a few weeks later, asking to be forgiven. Julian kicked him out.

Bill headed for the hills.

Steve’s claim that ‘my life was screwed up before I was born’ might be mawkish, but there’s no denying the shadow cast by this earliest ‘shit’, as he called it. Right to the end, he often quoted The Merchant of Venice, ‘The sins of the father are to be laid on the children’, sometimes substituting ‘of the mother’. The rich, famous and fulfilled man the world saw still considered himself a freak maimed for life by that early catastrophic shock.

In both manner and matter, McQueen was firmly tied to the fate of a bastard child of the 1930s. He rarely or never trusted anyone, and knew the value of a dollar as well as a crippling sense of doubt throughout years that were gritty and filled with struggle. It was a new world he grew up in, unique to the place, peculiar to the time; and, his friend confirms, ‘always, to Steve, something of a cross’. On the very morning he was born the weather broke in a filthy shawl of snow. Back in the rooming house the pipes had to be thawed with blow-torches while Bill brooded over his bottles. By day thick fog descended, leaving spectacular rime deposits on Market Street. At night the White river froze solid and the cold seemed to have the pygmy’s power of shrinking skin. Even in early spring, few of the locals ventured beyond the narrow confines of the city canal. Trains would haul freight and animals east, but rarely people. Some did claim they liked to travel, but they meant to Chicago perhaps, 130 miles north, or that they once visited St Louis. Indianapolis had few illusions about ever becoming world class. It was the typical submerged existence of the poor; people accepted it, hardly realising that their destiny could ever have been different. In short, it was the kind of place that teaches a boy to be practical while it forces him to dream of other, headier realities.

The past slowly faded: Civil War veterans, though a few still held court in Military Park; Indians, first as names and then as faces; even the great Jazz Age of the twenties. Culture in the Midwest was a marginal enterprise. The news that March Monday in the Hoosier Star was of Hitler, Gandhi and Stalin, and closer to home of Indianapolis itself, where the talk was of unemployment, foreclosures and the Ku Klux Klan. On the 24th fiery crosses burned on Mars Hill and the downs around Beech Grove, and the Catholic cathedral was pipe-bombed. Thugs terrorised Jewish shopkeepers. That long winter’s gloom wasn’t just climatic; it acted on the streets and the houses, but also on character, mood and outlook. It was a powerful depressant.

Nineteen-thirty was also, on another level, a time of mass escapism. The old music halls had gone, but the dramatic heart of the nation started up again in the movies. Sixty million men, women and children paid at the box office weekly. Mummified ‘flickers’ were fast giving way to modern production values: widescreen action in general and the Grandeur process in particular were blazed in 1930’s The Big Trail, starring John Wayne. The Depression would prove to be Hollywood’s finest hour. Disraeli, The Blue Angel and All Quiet on the Western Front were all soon playing amid a relentless diet of Dracula and primitive adult and slasher films. That same March Al Jolson opened in Mammy, while Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie, started out as an epic and soon mutated into something more, a picture Julian herself saw every night for a week. Between times, she would trudge with Steve to the downtown Roxy or sneak into the Crescent ‘colored house’, full of smoke, chrome and low-budget flickers which faded away to reveal the main visual drama – punch-ups and, in not a few cases, lynchings in the surrounding ghetto dealt out by the Klan. It was here that McQueen first made the acquaintance of sex and violence.

Meanwhile, more and more concerned women’s groups said that children could not be trusted around a cinema.

And yet the Daughters of the American Revolution probably weren’t unhappy. They had one cause of never-failing interest, and that was censorship. That same year Hoover established the Motion Picture Production Code, the so-called Hays Office, to police a growing trend towards blasphemy or crude Scandinavian naturism. Later in 1930 Loew’s on Meridian Street was actually raided during a live illustration of ‘civic hygiene’ involving two women, a tub and their silk smalls in a striking combination. According to the deadpan police report, ‘The sexual parts, around which the pubic hairs seem[ed] to have been shaved off, [were] clearly visible and so imperfectly covered by the wash cloth, that the lips bulge[d] out to the left and right of the towel…The glands were uncovered.’ Mae West’s celebrated trial on a similar morals rap opened in New York. This early, seminal association of the lively arts with sex and rowdyism was one Steve soon learnt and never forgot. Play-acting would give him the licence to be dirty, sweaty and lewd, the licence to get even, to make the real world vanish – and, eventually, to blow town. Once he started emulating the hoary two-reelers from Hollywood, it was only a matter of time for him and the rust-belt.

The pre-war decade was also a great flying era. Stunt pilots, barnstormers and wing-walkers attracted crowds undreamed of in the 1920s. Air displays sold out. In the same three-month period Charles Lindbergh and his wife set a transcontinental speed record, Amy Johnson made the haul from London to Sydney and Francis Chichester brought off the first solo crossing by seaplane from New Zealand to Australia. Bill’s intense devotion to this world reflected the same recklessness his son later experienced in drinking, drug-taking and dirt-biking. Like his father, Steve put himself on the line, on-screen and off; he dared all and he ‘went for it’ until self-destruction, or a sense of parody, kicked in. His whole career was the celluloid equivalent of the Barrell Roll. Long before he went aloft in his own vintage Stearman, McQueen had already flaunted his patronymic DNA – what Julian called the ‘butch, brawling, ballsy’ school of life. The winging it.

Born to poverty and bred to insecurity, Steve soon thrived on loneliness. He could never pinpoint how old he was when he first began to feel wretched in his own skin, but the critical scene haunted him the rest of his life. Running upstairs to the dive he shared with Julian, he suddenly heard her screaming, ‘hollering and howling [like] she was bein’ done in’ but accompanied, curiously, by gales of mirth from the neighbours’ stoop. His mother was in bed there with a sailor. ‘We ragged him,’ says a childhood friend, Toni Gahl. ‘Steve was very sort of geeky in those days. He was dirt poor, wore britches and Julian was no more than a prize slut. The other kids were down on him.’

So, suddenly, life became bewildering, and before he could even read or write McQueen was a reformatory case. His fate to always be the outsider was blazed early on. He was old enough to know he was ‘trash’, and young enough to dream about being part of a fantasy world in the movies. An imaginative, hyperactive child who would always rather be elsewhere, doing something else, Steve came to hate his mother even more than his runaway father. Every night he wandered among the drunks and rat-infested garbage while Julian turned tricks in their bedroom.

McQueen’s later binges were also a legacy of Bill’s – and Julian’s – world. What went into his movies was part of what went into his monumental craving for sex and drugs. The plethoric screwing, in particular, wasn’t normally for fun or pleasure; nor, says a well-placed source, was it ‘likely to thrill the girl. Steve was very much a wham, bam guy, not the kind to pour sap about love in your ear.’ That, too, echoed his father (motto: ‘They’re all grey in the night’), whose mark was in the boy’s marrow. His very names, Terrence Steven, were in honour of a figuratively legless, literally one-armed punter at Wild Will’s. The ‘McQueen’, from the Gaelic suibhne, meant ‘son of the good or quiet man’. As a derivative it was strictly out of the ironic-name school, and in fact, two choicer words could hardly be used to describe Bill. His own father had been a soldier, from a family of soldiers or sailors, who had moved from Scotland around 1750. By the early nineteenth century the McQueens were living in North and South Carolina before fanning out west at the time of the Civil War. An Arian (the ‘me’ sign), Steve was by a neat twist, within a few weeks’ age of both Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood, the three great ball-clanking icons of their era. The 24th of March was also celebrated in ancient Rome as the Day of Blood. Any child born that day was likely to be punished by an early death.

Julian’s people were devout Catholics and tradesmen in Slater, Missouri, gently rolling farm country midway between Columbia and Kansas City. For most of the 1930s she and Steve would shuttle from Indianapolis to the heartland and back, boarding with her parents and fostering an arbitrary highway persona, equal parts brief, ad hoc arrangements and cyclical transience, which he never broke. Much of McQueen’s on-screen insight came from the highly imaginative and disturbed five-year-old who once clutched his mother’s hand in genuine perplexity:

‘What’s wrong with us?’

Julian remained mute.

‘I’m starving, Ma.’

Julian was unaware of it at the time, but he was consumed with envy when he compared life even to that of the other slum kids in the city. Most of his peers were living in semi-comfort, while he had to content himself with cast-off clothes and meagre, wolfed-down meals. Toni Gahl remembers that Steve ‘didn’t say a lot. Basically he was pretty much of a clenched fist.’

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?’

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?’

She shook her head, and he smiled. ‘You picked it up, didn’t you? Well, you can pick this up too.’ Then he leant over, kissed her, and said simply, ‘I’m with you.’

She enrolled at the Playhouse, ‘and because Steve was there I had the time of my life. My God! What an operator, and what a beautiful man.’

Largely thanks to the missionary work of Brando and Montgomery Clift, by 1951 a mainstream acting generation was still – just – running the show. A Method-acting generation was coming up behind, fast. Those who belonged to the new, so-called ‘torn shirt’ school, or were linked with some other group opposed to established convention in the arts, were already the critics’ darlings. Meisner’s class drew in a small but distinguished house. Talent scouts and even a few directors would come to the Playhouse’s annual revue, a combined graduation and gala night. This new cult of anti-hero duly attracted an agent named Peter Witt to the Christmas production of Truckline Cafe. Witt ‘loved the kid in the sailor suit’, whose near-actionable Brando parody both cribbed and surpassed the original. Peers like Rydell also began to talk up the novice who upstaged nearly every other actor in the intensity department. To them McQueen had an ‘air of wild rage’, even if, to others, it was really more Method with an animal glaze. Voice, movement, technique. Steve quickly made a whole system out of his childhood. He did anger so convincingly that, for the first but not last time in his career, he made people’s flesh creep. McQueen had few duties in handling such a slight role on such a small stage, chief of which was to look animated, and to make the other actors shine. He proved incapable of doing either, but otherwise used the play well. ‘Steve was spellbinding,’ says Yanni.

Meisner saw quite another thing in McQueen:

‘Professionalism, always the professionalism. Dog tired, he’d put his feet in a bucket of ice water to jerk himself awake while he learnt lines.’ There were plays and scripts to be read. Steve threw himself into it all with an energy born of ambition. He’d set out to become, he announced, a great American actor.

His commercial debut followed that spring of 1952, in a Jewish repertory production on Second Avenue. The very first words McQueen uttered on stage, in Yiddish, were direly prophetic: ‘Nothing will help.’ After the fourth night he was fired.

That same season on 25 May 1952, Steve transferred to the Hagen-Berghof drama school. He celebrated by buying his first racing bike, a used K-model Harley. On that note, and clutching a few wadded dollars, he again took off for Miami while classes were out for the spring. One moment that should have lived but hasn’t, not least because in an increasingly photogenic career no one yet had a camera on him, was Steve tearing up Highway 1, bare-chested and laughing, under the swaying royal palms. Once on the beach, he soon found the saloon that would become his home from home during the New York ‘shit season’, a dark cave with a bar where the owner remembers McQueen for his ‘bleached hair, bronzed body and faintly bad smell’. He ate with a burger in one hand and a slab of pie in the other, gulping down his beer at breakneck speed. Much the same intensity characterised his policy on women. Steve was rarely without an aspiring model or college co-ed in tow, and within a week he enjoyed the local handle, before it was ever a retail cliché, of ‘Big Mac’.

McQueen often went diving in Florida with an old marine buddy named Red. Early in June, about three miles out in Biscayne Bay, Steve spotted a small shark which, characteristically, he chased to the ocean floor. After failing to bring it up on a gaff so that Red could net it, McQueen surfaced dangerously fast and punctured his already bad left eardrum. That evening the two men returned to Miami to get a doctor to test Steve’s hearing. It was further seriously damaged, and even though he laughed it off himself, his voice coach in New York was furious with McQueen for his carelessness.

Soon after getting home he was cast in no fewer than three provincial shows. Though none rang bells in the far universe, McQueen made both a small name and a thin living for himself on the road. During the last, Time Out for Ginger, he was able to put down $450 for a red MG roadster.* Steve needed a replacement because he had just wrecked his previous car, a hearse, racing it zigzag across Columbus Circle, actually flipping it upside down, the long black roof shedding sparks at the point of impact, McQueen himself walking away. That incident cost him financially, but it did wonders for his reputation. Thanks in part to his poker money, Steve was flush enough to give up non-theatrical work and now focus full-time on acting. He did a verbal deal for Witt to represent him. As McQueen said, it was ‘grooving together’. He’d made ‘people talk’ about him. It was all, at least locally, paying off. Bloody-mindedly, he’d pay Julian back in a way that would brook no more ‘shit’ or sarcasm.

He would become a legend.

With at least a first whiff of success Steve worked, if possible, even harder. ‘Busting my ass to read,’ he said, let alone memorise the texts. Line by dismal line—a triumph of will over semi-literacy. But he allowed himself to unwind, too. Behind his volcanic rage he was capable of something approaching real charm. The perfectly timed smile, the easy, apt jokes and above all the brilliant send-ups, not least of himself, all testify to the fact that Big Mac was tempered by his sweeter kid brother, Little Steve.

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.

With Gazzara, at least, the character had existed in the round. Steve never combined the same sense of insight into personality and condition with that seemingly easier thing, a good voice. Whereas the loudest noises in the house had once been the shocked gasps of the crowd, for McQueen audience vocalisation tended to be in the form of sniggering as lines like ‘Watch my back!’ broke into falsetto. Physically, his Pope thrummed with a wildness that was all the more dramatic for being contained and controlled; but when Steve let go vocally, he squeaked. Only six weeks into his run he was fired from Hatful, though he briefly returned to it on tour. By then, of course, accepting rejection had long since become a part of McQueen’s resume, under the bold heading of ‘Skills’. But 1956, the year he flopped on Broadway and first discovered film, was a true turning-point. Steve never worked in the theatre again.

What made McQueen still run? His pride, obviously, but also the fact that he was slowly carving out a name on two coasts. Even fucking up in lights, as he put it, was something. He knew the significant prestige of failure. Among a loyal if obscurely positioned cult, meanwhile, Steve was a man to watch. Their patronage may not have pulled much with the critics, but it meant a lot to McQueen. MCA’s support was also critical in allowing his idiosyncratic and highly individual talent to flourish. All he had to be now was strong enough to survive the wait. The truly charismatic, he knew, are never long delayed by the paroxysms of the second-rate.

His first night in Hatful, a middle-aged fan had rushed the stage, flinging at McQueen a pair of red silk panties.

From the beginning, Steve wasn’t only worshipped by a group of T-shirted male admirers, barrio types, he was a virtual religion among women. Tooling around on his bike, the blender and a bottle permanently clamped under his arm, McQueen skilfully exploited the first free-love generation, the main source of his ‘juice’, says Emily Hurt, being his shrewd understanding that ‘the smiley-tough look would get those undies down’. Aspiring actresses loved him. Back in East 10th Street he always seemed to understand what they were driving at, believed that it was the right thing, and enthusiastically did what he could to help. He invariably told them he thought they were talented and wanted to hear them read. Many of these ad hoc auditions lasted to all hours. According to Hurt, ‘Back in those days, Steve was virtually a sex machine. You were either sleeping with him, or you knew someone who was.’ His partners knew he could be foul-mouthed – snapping at a lame suggestion, cursing his luck with producers – and deeply bored by subjects that didn’t personally move him. But that wasn’t the Steve McQueen of their common experience. On countless nights a woman like Dora Yanni had seen him charm a guest by ‘a quiet tear or that billion dollar grin’. It was the same for Hurt. ‘Steve already knew how to moisturise his audience. He may not have made it on Broadway, but he was a true superstar in the Village.’

More and more, words like ‘fucker’ echoed around when either sex spoke of him.

The horizontal skirmishes were legendary, and followed broadly down the maternal line. ‘Steve was addicted to being thrown off-balance,’ says Hurt. ‘Because Julian had been crazy, he expected that from his mate.’ That autumn of 1956 McQueen took a pale, flapper-thin girl named Mimi Benning to a movie or two and then made her cry in a taxi. Numerous others went out on variants of the same ‘yo-yo date’, as she puts it. Consummation would come almost immediately after these trips to Loew’s or the Quad, and was guaranteed by the sort of groping that was mandatory in the back row. One casual partner remembers being fed blueberry pie and beer by Steve in 10th Street after a showing of Giant, and being told, ‘I’ll never make it – as a man or an actor.’ Yet within a few weeks McQueen was in and out of lights on Broadway; and he fell in love.

Her name was Neile Adams, and when he met her she was already starring in her second musical, The Pajama Game. This lucky and talented showgirl, then just twenty-three and with a pixieish vigour, had, like him, never known her father. Neile was brought up by her mother in the Philippines, and eventually spent three years there in a Japanese concentration camp. After that, the teenager was sent to a convent in Hong Kong and boarding school in Connecticut. As if not already exotic enough, after seeing The King and I Neile then announced her intention of becoming a dancer. Against all odds, she made it. With her dark hair cut short, gamine-style, dressed in a silk shirt, scarf and toreador trousers, Neile was a frail, classic beauty with a surprisingly loud, throaty laugh. They met at Downey’s restaurant – where McQueen made his move over a bowl of spaghetti – and the fascination was mutual. As an admiring friend says, they might have won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. There was also the old saw of opposites attracting. Whereas Steve lacked the ability to make light of misfortune, Neile presented a more straightforward type: the outgoing young ingenue who ‘dug people’. Her inner life, while rebellious, found its outlet on stage.

Later that same night there was a knock at Neile’s apartment door. It was Steve. She said, ‘I’m going to crash.’ Then he said, ‘Yeah, I am too.’ He couldn’t learn to clean and would sooner starve than cook but he did, nonetheless, light up that small, cluttered bedroom.

‘Boy,’ says Neile, ‘was I happy.’

He was disguised, veiled, going through social motions; she was enjoying herself, displaying what she was, opening herself up to immediate experience. One was playing for time, the other was full of life for the moment. A koala and a leopard, they somehow found themselves on the same limb of the tree. Sure enough, Neile joined the long list of lovers, though for once Steve, radically for him, was on turf well beyond what Benning calls ‘Olympic screwing’. After exactly a week he moved into Neile’s digs at 69 West 55th Street. McQueen arrived carrying a battered suitcase full of old clothes, his crash helmet and the barbells. As Neile says, ‘The man was obviously used to travelling light.’

That September, once fired from Hatful, Steve took off on his new BSA through Florida and, from there, to Cuba. The ominous signs of revolution were already brewing when McQueen got himself arrested for selling yanqui cigarettes in a bar. On 3 October 1956 Neile was handed a telegram at her hotel in Hollywood, where she was then testing for Bob Wise’s film This Could Be the Night:

I LOVE YOU HONEY SEND ME MONEY LET ME KNOW WHATS HAPPENING IN CARE OF WESTERN UNION CON AMOR

ESTEBAN

The central theme of all McQueen’s adult relationships – that contempt for those who caved to him had its parallel respect for those who didn’t – was quickly brought home when Neile turned him down. Steve limped back to West 55th, having sold most of his clothes and cannibalised the BSA for bail, with the words: ‘It’s all right, baby. I admire your spunk.’ Then he sought out a jeweller friend in the Village and talked him into designing a twisted molten gold ring for $25 down and eight further quarterly instalments. Two years later Neile herself finally paid off the balance.

Steve, who had an instinct for reality, would remember the shabbier details of the next month all his life: the ‘dark pit’ when Neile returned to California to film This Could Be the Night, the two or three now suddenly tacky ‘honkings’ behind her back, the constant trickling rain of New York, the flow of reverse-charge calls to the coast; and finally, the guilty sale of Uncle Claude’s watch to raise funds. McQueen himself arrived in California on the morning of 2 November 1956. Bob Wise recalls ‘the kid from Somebody suddenly holed up with Neile in the hotel. Fair enough, but when he also hung around the lot, I had him barred.’ As Wise saw it, despite her own rough knocks, ‘the girl in my movie was young and impressionable’, and McQueen, a hard man to resist, had definitely hustled her. Her manager Hillard Elkins remembers ‘Neile asking my advice, and me telling her she was being a shmuck. In those days, I didn’t know McQueen as an actor. What I did know was that he screwed anything with a pulse, and I thought he was wrong for her.’ On the other hand, Neile and Steve had a peculiarly dire family past in common. They’d already bonded with each other’s mothers in New York. Carmen Adams took to him as one orphaned, deprived, too thin (if sadly lacking in manners) and fed him on nourishing Spanish dishes. McQueen had also introduced his fiancée to Julian, whom she liked. ‘Whatever she’d done or hadn’t done for Steve, as a woman I empathised,’ Neile says today. ‘When she had him, she’d only been a kid herself, trying to find her way in the world.’ The Adamses, too, had had troubles at home. ‘It was two damaged birds flocking together,’ says Neile. ‘Plus, I really loved the man.’

That same Friday night Steve and Neile climbed into a rented Ford Thunderbird, waved to the film crew and headed for the border. The two lapsed Catholics decided on a whim to marry in the mission at San Juan Capistrano, twenty miles south of LA. When that was vetoed by the nuns on the unanswerable grounds that no banns had been published, McQueen exploded. For a while back there, courting Neile, he’d been fine. His truncated vocabulary and make-do syntax had both risen to the occasion. But now he had a schedule to keep. Fuck the banns. Nor were anxieties about the ‘young people’s’ piety misplaced. ‘Open a vein,’ McQueen snarled, and took off again in a crunch of gravel. A few miles further down the coast the now fugitive couple were stopped by the police for speeding. What followed was a scene at the very edge of a Chaplin skit as the law, once briefed by Steve, hurriedly escorted them to a local Lutheran minister. The McQueens were duly married, just before midnight, in a small chapel in San Clemente. The legal witnesses were the highway patrolmen who had pulled them over an hour earlier. ‘It was far out,’ Steve recalled. ‘Here we were getting hitched, and these two big cops with their belted pistols an’ all. Felt like a shotgun wedding.’ By now he’d known his wife for just over three months.

The man Neile Adams married was as gritty as a half-completed road. McQueen wasn’t yet the popular notion of the alpha male – the ape who gets to have sex with all the females and swagger past the competition – but he was getting there, fast. Neile remembers that he rarely or never had any money, gobbled down his food and had a fondness for both Old Milwaukee beer and pot. Steve was ill-read, indeed semi-literate (his next wife famously complained that he couldn’t spell the word ‘blue’). As for social graces, he didn’t overdo them. When Elkins invited him to lunch in the Polo Lounge, McQueen gazed dolefully at the French menu before finally asking if he might be allowed a burger and a shake. He did, however, Neile saw, have that much rarer thing – instinct. ‘Steve could always tell the very few good guys from the phony.’ As the nuns had rightly feared, he wasn’t religious. Besides Neile, McQueen’s sustaining love was of machines, and for him happiness – its possibility and reality, its attainment and capture – came out of a finely tuned call-and-response with the internal combustion engine, the channelling of some great unknown, copulating force that called for the perfect alignment of man and motor. ‘A good set of wheels gets me hard,’ he’d say. In a race, Steve always felt that his own car, like a woman, was personally challenging him.

His competitiveness! No one who knew McQueen ever forgot it. The actor Dean Jones saw the classic, turbo version of it around the late 1960s. ‘Steve and I used to go biking, and he couldn’t stand – I mean he pathologically hated – being second. The reason McQueen got in so many wrecks is that, good as he was, he overcooked it.’ A charger, in race lingo. No piss-ant limits, he always said, for him. Stirling Moss, one of the few men Steve deferred to on four wheels, encountered the same thing whether on the track at Sebring or driving the canyon roads of Bel Air. ‘McQueen was fast, but he was also undisciplined. My God, the fearlessness of the man. But that was his whole life.’ Sure enough, Steve offered continual homages to ‘mud’ both on and off the screen. He’d already lived too long with the rules and restrictions which pettily obstructed his happiness. Far too fucking long. McQueen ‘constantly had to be proving himself,’ notes Neile. It was the same whether at poker, pinball, sex, fighting or acting. ‘You didn’t win, he did.’ No doubt it was this ‘madness and fire’ that led men like the director Buzz Kulik to portray the Steve of 1956 as a ‘little shit’. A perceptive friend noticed that he ‘was never difficult with people he didn’t like, the people he didn’t take seriously. He was the world’s most charming guy to waiters. On the other hand, he fell out at one time or another with almost all his cronies.’ To Dean Jones, ‘Steve’s film career made a virtue out of his flaws as a man. For me, he had the edge and frenzy of genius.’

The newlyweds’ honeymoon in San Diego and Ensenada was a balmy bit of upward assimilation, but soon enough they came down to earth again with a bump. Only two days later the McQueens drove back to Neile’s Culver City hotel. After twenty-four hours of continuous drinking and drag-racing the Ford, Steve promptly fell asleep over the soup course of their welcome-home supper. Various members of the film crew picked him up and put him on a couch. McQueen apparently slumbered for a few minutes, suddenly waking up again to telephone an order for two cases of Old Milwaukee, together with a fleet of taxis to take the entire Night cast out to a club. Bob Wise, who still had his doubts about Steve’s acting, was impressed with the pair’s mutual spark and kept an image of them as romantic lovers. He felt protective of the woman. There was something ‘young-boyish’, too, about the nearly middle-aged man. At weekends Steve and Neile started on a search that continued for some years for his lost father Bill, then thought to be living in California. Most other days, while Neile worked on This Could Be the Night, her spouse mooched around the Ballona Creek bars, tearing off into the Baldwin Hills on the 650 BSA or in the couple’s new VW (traded in, with Neile’s next pay cheque, for a Corvette, then a second red MG). Passers-by couldn’t help but notice that McQueen liked to ride the bike bare-chested and that he carried a bullwhip over the back wheel.

California had opened Steve’s eyes, but it hadn’t made him much money. He wound his way back to New York at Christmas. Between filming, guesting on The Walter Winchell Show and starring in a Vegas revue, Neile was now among the most prolific and commercially hot women on the stage. Creativity like that is usually part discipline and part indiscipline. Hers was all discipline. Steve constantly demanded Neile’s attention, particularly now that he – the ‘guy who [couldn’t] get arrested’, as he put it on honeymoon – paled, professionally, next to her. The cycle that emerged was explosive. One night, rushing to the theatre, she served him up a quickie TV dinner. McQueen said nothing, merely acted. In a single swoop, turkey bits, reconstituted peas, diced carrots, instant mash and the plastic sauce cup splattered the far wall. Frozen shit. According to their next-door neighbour, it was a 1950s role-reversal, the man ‘always flopping around the apartment’ while the woman, saintly in just about every account, ‘did everything, everywhere, all the time’. More to the point, Neile, though ‘ambitious and hyperactive – a mini Audrey Hepburn’, was also fanatically loyal to her husband’s cause. She introduced him, for instance, to Hilly Elkins and her agents at William Morris. Between them, they got him a role in a TV drama called The Defenders, opposite Bill Shatner of later Star Trek fame. Steve used to read for the part, alone or with his wife, in that cramped flat with the strong reek of damp and Lucky Strike cigarettes, honing his gift to affect any identity at the drop of a hat – to become, in a split second, according to the demands of his public, a hick, a thug, a greaser, a romantic hero, while remaining at bottom a world-weary child. As they walked around a New York which has since disappeared – open drains that stank, and horsemeat burgers he devoured as if they were famine relief – she encouraged him to see everyday life as a form of rehearsal. Steve’s mind would latch mathematically onto the number of steps he took between lights, or the exact beat of each foot, and then how he could fit his stage lines to the rhythm. It was Neile who gave him the great advice to show more of his ‘wonderful smile’ and childlike wit on screen. She told him frankly that he’d ‘stunk – done a bad Brando’ in Somebody Up There Likes Me. Neile’s support helped him sidestep many of the struggling actor’s other occupational hazards. Steve had always hated having to wash dishes or do anything too low to make ends meet. Nowadays he no longer had to. In the first year of their marriage McQueen and his wife earned $4000 and $50,000 respectively, which they pooled evenly.

Then he began to catch up.

If Somebody’s, Fidel had to a large extent been an imaginative manipulation of Steve’s own life, the killer role in The Defenders was almost pure invention. ‘McQueen was brilliant,’ says Hilly Elkins. ‘Everyone knew the material was lame – there was a certain amount of shtick involved – but looking at Steve’s face, seething with passion, even the most gnarled cynic melted. What struck me most were those eyes. God, but he had presence.’ The other thing McQueen had was a voice. Perfect pitch. Diction: dramatically improved. Gone for ever was Johnny Pope’s castrato croak, replaced by a rich, full-toned instrument which Steve lowered pointedly when he was most threatening, and raised when irony called. After that broadcast of 4 March 1957 the CBS switchboard took dozens of calls from fans praising his performance.

It was the last year of Steve’s long education. While Neile signed on for a revue in Vegas he took another job for CBS and severed his final ties with the Actors Studio. From now on, the ‘mad Hungarian’ Pete Witt, still clinging doggedly to his protégé, Elkins and the William Morris agency, suddenly all dancing crisply executed gavottes around their ‘kid’, would work together day and night to ‘break’ him. Three more television spots quickly followed. McQueen would later blame ‘a lot of [his] early marital shit’ on the fact that he awoke each day ‘knowing that either the wife or I would be out grooving away’ on location. On many of those days Steve would have to go for an audition, shoot a test or do a reading. In retrospect it was astonishing that he could combine such stress with a relentlessly full social life. Somehow, he always found time for play. When not shuttling between coasts, he was still busy around the bars and fleshpots of Greenwich Village. Once Neile was gone Esteban quickly became Desperado again, haunting the back room at Louie’s, where women in tight skirts loitered round the pool table. Commitment was fine, he said. He’d never abuse it. It was just hussies he wanted, the little sluts.

One night Steve showed up at Louie’s on his BSA, brandishing the bullwhip. By his own account, he drank ‘about a vat’ of Old Milwaukee. Much later on, some sort of ruckus broke out with another actor, a young Disney star who, in his own wry homage, carried a white rodent named Mickey in his breast pocket. There was a brief fraternal punch-up over the green baize, the pet mouse carefully avoided. Then Steve announced he was buying everyone a drink, to keep him company while ‘the old lady’ was out of town. Two women, encouraged, followed him up to the bar. Discouraged, one of them called him a shit. Towards dawn the other one accompanied Steve to 55th Street.

Many of those TV spots, not least the one called Four Hours in White, were tours de force, as McQueen first found and then glossed what Emily Hurt calls his ‘smiley-tough combination’. In that particular soap he appeared as cool and detached as a Strand cigarette advertisement. Even in the grainy, low-budget production values of early television, men like Elkins recognised a remarkable face and presence that could, with a year or two’s more work, trump even a Bogie or Walter Brennan. Thanks to Elkins, McQueen’s seismic break would follow in the summer of 1958. Seven years to the month after he first applied to stage school, he finally had a hit. From then on McQueen was a seller’s market for twenty-two years, the terms increasingly in his favour, right through to the end.

Professionally as well as sexually speaking, Steve was often told he was a shit in those years, and he didn’t disagree. Even Bogart, as McQueen was always reminding people, had had to claw his way to the top. As he also never tired of saying around Louie’s, ‘When I believe in something I fight like hell for it…All the nice guys are in the unemployment line.’ Even – or perhaps especially – at this first rip of his career, Steve was continually pushing for more ‘face time’ and wasn’t above throwing a fit, or walking off, if denied. He was a virtuoso self-promoter. Sometimes it worked, as when he told a TV director, ‘You’re photographing me, not some fucking rocks,’ and then had him swap a lavish, colour supplement shot of Monument Valley for extra close-ups of himself. Sometimes it didn’t. A friend remembers a scene in 1959 when the producer of McQueen’s series tore a strip off him for ‘bullying’ some of the crew.

Puzzled, Steve asked what he meant.

The suit replied that he meant McQueen was being a shit, that’s what.

Unbelieving, Steve replied that he only wanted what was best for the show, and besides, ‘I don’t need your stinking $750 a week – I’ve got bread in the bank.’

The mogul calmly pressed the button on his office speaker and said, ‘Find out how much money McQueen has in the bank.’ Five minutes later the machine spoke back: ‘Two hundred dollars.’

McQueen never fully understood acting, or he chose not to, which made him carve away at it all the more. For all the voice lessons and facial drills in front of the West 55th mirror, there was something more innate than Methodic in the way he rubbed grit into even the blandest lines. By the end of 1958 Steve was being touted as a TV star, but always wanted to work on the big screen; the transformation was so successful that he virtually invented the crossover, fully five years and ten pictures before Clint Eastwood. His new style, which he discovered almost immediately, was bluff and laconic – he hid behind silence as behind a bomb-proof door—and yet, like Steve himself, it had an unmistakable elegance and wit. It was perfect cool with a flash of menace.

McQueen’s second film was five star gobbledegook. The role itself was less scanty, if not much better than the first. Largely through Peter Witt, he landed the part of a young Jewish lawyer in Never Love a Stranger, Harold Robbins’s latest effort to fillet the sex from a thin, not to say gaunt plot. This queasily melodramatic tale of the Naked City wasn’t released for nearly two years, and then tanked. As a story, it was reminiscent of a bad episode of The Untouchables.

There was no pretence at range. The whole thing seemed to shrink down to a stage play and then simply to have forgotten to tell the cameraman to stay home. Stranger was located along a narrow strip of the Hudson river, which served as a central metaphor for the soggy, meandering plot. Most of the acting conveyed the shrill, one-note dramatics of Ed Wood on a much lower budget. For once McQueen’s damnation of an out-and-out bomb, and his own part in it, was underdone. Dick Bright, best known as the omnipresent Mob crony in The Godfather trilogy, thought Steve ‘shit’ in Stranger, yet sagely guessed he was still ‘working on a formula’. In that eventual blueprint, the voice, the sense of mood and action would be so well crafted that it would – and did – take pages to even review the underlying sense of danger, the hidden motivations McQueen could pack into a few tart lines of dialogue. Before long, he would play it tight and hard in even the most asinine soap opera. At this stage, Steve was still more concerned with merely acting than he was with pace or narrative drive, but his Cabell was a heroic failure. A star wasn’t born.

The reviews shook him – McQueen a ham? Back to grunt work, weekly handouts from his wife? – as if he’d been slapped from a trance. After that, Steve rehearsed twice as hard as before. Not the least of the lessons from Stranger was that if he dominated the rest of the cast backstage, he could handle them on screen, too. Especially the women.

That cramped little crew hotel.* Steve made a start towards super-stardom by following the lead of young actors who became notorious for their behaviour. The leading man John Drew Barrymore, for one, had already run afoul of the law and his own temper, landing himself first an arrest sheet and then a year-long suspension by Actors Equity. Barrymore spent most of his evenings in the unbuttoned privacy of the ‘sin bin’ or crew lounge, convivially doling out what were probably cigarettes. Some of these, along with Barrymore himself, would in turn make their way to the junior actresses’ room known as ‘the dorm’. McQueen, failing to heed the film’s title, soon began an affair with his co-star Lita Milan. This, too, had some of the properties of a St Trinian’s romp. The couple signalled each other excitedly at night with torches from their adjacent suites, and at one point Steve climbed into an empty maid’s room to eavesdrop on a call between Milan and a girlfriend immediately below, repeating the intimate conversation to her in bed. There was an abandon and fun, even frivolity, about the place, though Robbins and the movie itself were a lurking presence. Most nights, Steve would stop off for an Old Milwaukee in the lounge, dine on a burger, and then join Milan in the room with the red neon light from the Chinese restaurant flickering outside. At weekends he drove back to Neile in Las Vegas.

Emily Hurt saw McQueen becoming a star before her eyes. They still ran into each other around the Village, and he told her about Lita Milan. On the other hand, he had a marriage, and ‘Steve was intent on having most of its vows kept’, specifically the one about the woman obeying the man. He told Hurt that Neile gave him the royal treatment, and asked only that he ‘be careful’ – discreet, in other words – with the overcaffeinated young starlets who filled his time between one take and the next. Neile was well aware of the casual screwing that went on throughout their marriage. She tolerated it. When McQueen coined the admiring phrase, ‘Slopes are different’ he was talking about several characteristics peculiar to Eastern women – but mainly the way they give men a long leash, even if all the leashes ultimately are held in female hands. He usually confessed to his wife straight away. ‘Oh, Steve,’ she would murmur as he started in, silently pour them both a drink, and say no more until a quiet ‘Why?’ or ‘It’s all right, baby,’ as he finished.

As Neile writes, ‘My combination Oriental and Latin upbringing had taught me that men separated love and marriage from their feckless romps in the hay…So, OK, I thought. I can handle it – I have to – as long as he doesn’t flaunt it.’ And McQueen didn’t, says Hurt. ‘He wasn’t stupid. Steve nearly always told Neile before someone else did.’ Sex, fear, guilt. ‘Scared shitless. What am I gonna do about the fuck-flings?’ he’d ask Hurt, one of the flung. Worse, ‘What will the wife do? I can’t live without her.’ Luckily for him, McQueen had chosen an exceptionally stoical mate. It was only when Neile cast back over their lives fifteen years later that the carefully preserved biodome cracked, under the twin stresses of drugs and madness, with shattering results.

Somebody and Stranger may not have been much, but between them they formed a hyphen linking the Cornflake to the king of cool. In the late fifties Steve was still inclined to bad Brando and Dean parodies, but as he got older he began to prefer acting that was formed out of the actor’s own ‘mud’, simple and to the bone. He was fond of a remark by Hitchcock, who held that true drama involved ‘doing nothing well’. Steve rightly liked to say that he’d lived, and it showed in his work. The strong jaw and X-ray stare gave him a knocked-about look. McQueen seemed much more grown up than most of Hollywood’s new crop of pretty boys. His range as an actor may not have been wide, but it was profoundly deep. He was the self-sufficient male animal, the kind of Hemingway hero who combines complexity with reserve to portray a tortuous emotional life. In film after film he carried himself like a regular guy, fissile but superbly taut, and Steve could no more slither into histrionics than he could enjoy a night out in women’s clothing. The sheer intensity of his second twenty-five years was certainly deepened by the horrors of the first. As Hurt rightly says, ‘Steve McQueen could have been a character in a Steve McQueen movie.’

He served up some other fare in 1958–9 and did well, using the same skills he’d honed in The Defenders and adding touches brought by Neile. She urged him, for example, to finally drop ‘Steven’ for the more freewheeling Steve. ‘When I met [McQueen] he’d no name or stage presence – that came later – but he did have a great head on his shoulders and he learnt fast.’ She wasn’t the first woman to groom a star, some would sniff jealously; but Neile was, nonetheless, stunningly successful at converting the B-film hack into a potent Hollywood player. Now more than ever, she hammered his case with Elkins and Stan Kamen of William Morris. Thanks in turn to their all-hours agentry, Steve won the lead in The Great St Louis Bank Robbery, his first ever above-the-title billing – a modest caper directed by Charles Guggenheim and funded by family money. The idea behind this vanity picture was to show, in excruciating detail, how an actual heist might be planned, intercut with doomed efforts to convey ‘character’. McQueen played the getaway driver. His wholeheartedness offset what, on the most charitable view, were the gang’s familiar cardboard types: the muttering hophead, the rough diamond, the gentle weakling and the voice of reason – the hero’s girlfriend, played by one Molly McCarthy. Against this cut-out backdrop, Steve did his best, at once glamorous and tragic, but St Louis soon tipped into farce. Real indignity befell the climax, with McQueen sobbing, ‘I’m not with them!’ as the cuffs went on. By then the script seemed to have lost all interest in suspense, either in this particular rip or within the larger saga; although the Guggenheims talked about a sequel, their services as film moguls weren’t to be required again.

Steve auditioned every chance he could, on his way to being one of the envied stars in a town full of them; Neile and Elkins and Kamen pounded on every door they could, bulk-mailing his glossy to scouts and producers. With talent and support like that he was picking up speed like a competition-tuned Ferrari, bigger and more menacing every time anyone glanced in their mirror.

Along the way McQueen also took some desperately lame roles, simply in order to have somewhere to go in the mornings. At least one of his self-coined ‘fuck films’ would make St Louis look like Sophocles. This was The Blob, his last ever ‘something or anything’ picture, done, according to Elkins, ‘pure and simple to get Steve seen’. The three-week shoot with a threadbare air to it in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, cost a total of $220,000. For his part as Steve Andrews, the local high schooler, twenty-eight-year-old McQueen was offered $3000 or 10 per cent of the film’s gross. He opted for the cash. To date, close to $20 million has rained down for The Blob, a figure as over the top as most of the acting. Steve fumed about this miscalculation for the rest of his life.

Mixed-up kids, authority figures and the definitive, gelatinous red menace. With all the stock types and plot cued by contemporary culture, The Blob actually had its moments. The story, daringly for its day, unfolded in very nearly real time. Between them, director and producer pulled two masterstrokes. First, The Blob conformed to – in some ways defined – the late fifties morality tale about the small town that refuses to listen to its teenagers. Then, instead of the usually confident, not to say cocky lead, they cast McQueen as a bolshie but well-meaning mug without the faintest idea how to cope. The loner and anti-hero legend effectively started here. As Bob Relyea, Steve’s later business partner, says, ‘Oddly enough, most of the famous looks and grunts were present and correct in The Blob. The way McQueen plays off the other kids, I always think, gives a hint of the Don Gordon relationship in Bullitt.’ Finally, the whole film was a minor miracle of stretching a little a long way. In particular, the miniatures and special effects, shot in the basement of a Lutheran church, gave at least some gloss to the deathless ‘Omigod, it’s alive!’ rhetoric of the budget sci-fi romp. But that was about all you could say for The Blob. Every day McQueen would drive in from Philadelphia to be directed by that same church’s vicar in scenes opposite a man-eating Jello. Then every night he would drive back to the hotel and ‘vent’, as she put it, to Neile.

The real star, as Steve used to complain, may have been the amorphous slime oozing down those Pennsylvania streets. But he did for it in the end. The simplicity of the part’s trajectory – rebellious dope to town hero – mirrored at least some of his own story. In the movie’s satirically duff climax, the Blob, seen a minute earlier steamrollering entire houses, beats a quivering retreat from McQueen and a lone fire-extinguisher. Wooden acting and a smoochy theme by Burt Bacharach added up to a film equally wobbly, with even basic drama unaccountably glossed over. From there the credits worked their way to ‘The End’, only to have the letters swirl into an ominous, sequel-begging question mark. Long before then, The Blob had lapsed into truly ham-fisted efforts to convey danger, as in the epic scene between McQueen and his date Aneta Corseaut:

SM: You sure you wanna go with me?

AC: Yes.

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’.*

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

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’.* 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.’

Shooting began early that spring in and around Cuernavaca, fifty miles outside Mexico City. McQueen headed south, Harry Mirisch recalled, ‘like a bat out of hell bound for glory’. He arrived at the Hotel Jacaranda alone on a Monday evening, his wife remaining behind to nurse Terry and hear more of McDermott’s convulsions. By Tuesday morning he was in bed with one of the Indian extras. McQueen loved Mexico: after his honeymoon there, he’d often driven back and he once offhandedly spoke of settling down to ‘live, die and be buried’ there. In Cuernavaca the streets were lined with strolling mariachi players and locals eager to entertain the famous star.

At the same time, McQueen was preparing for what he rightly knew could be his breakthrough, constantly lobbying Sturges for more ‘juice’. He had exactly seven lines, but they, too, were magnificent, including ‘Never rode shotgun on a hearse before,’ and ‘We deal in lead, friend.’ Steve’s tantrums on location were both logical and unnervingly dislocated. A full litany followed on his character, Vin, written, he complained, as ‘a kind of ass-wipe to Yul’. But McQueen was shrewd enough to play on Sturges’s vanity, and the director soon became his knowing patsy. With Brynner partly footing the bill, The Magnificent Seven, Sturges promised, would ‘give Steve the camera’.

McQueen’s relentless preoccupation with McQueen took various forms on set. While others cheerfully improvised, Steve took the attitude that the stage was a laboratory for precisely calibrating each setup. He spent hours correcting and editing his own lines in a maze of inserts, arrows, zigzags and fussy, infinitesimal revisions. That was for starters. McQueen liked every shot to be a completely rehearsed and blocked routine where each step and nuance was perfected down to the last detail. Eli Wallach, playing the heavy, remembers pulling his pistol on McQueen during a run-through. ‘Hold it exactly at that angle, not an inch left or right in the take,’ Steve told him.

‘But it’s an action sequence.’

‘Try your best.’

Onstage, McQueen was the most fiercely competitive of an overadrenalised cast, constantly ‘catching flies’, as Sturges put it, waving his white hat or rattling his bullet-casings around behind Brynner’s head. Offstage, he earned the half-fond, half-cagey nicknames Supie (for superstar) and Tricky Dick. ‘Most of the Seven, including Yul, would at least play cards together,’ says Bob Relyea. ‘Steve, by contrast, seemed typically self-contained.’ Another of Sturges’s crew notes that ‘McQueen tended to be standoffish – when he wasn’t screwing for America – which is what a star needs to be.’ Actors have always indulged themselves in dewy-eyed rhapsodies about their fellow luvvies. But, as Olivier once asked, ‘Why should the film set be treated any differently from the office?’ And why should entertainers be expected to get along any better than, say, a firm of suits? Steve never found rivalry, or a degree of insulation, unseemly. ‘Not my favourite part of a movie,’ he once muttered, as the cast gathered for a team dinner in the Jacaranda.

Film-making, McQueen maintained, was a state of war. For him the hostilities were made bearable by the money, a pretty wife who visited at weekends, and plenty of Mexican pot. Even so, he saw himself as the underdog.

With McQueen getting tetchier by the day, ‘a bust-up was inevitable’, says Eli Wallach. ‘He probably respected Yul the actor. But Yul, don’t forget, was also very much the shah of Brynner. He had his whole court, with someone taking his coat and someone else lighting his cigarette for him. Big movie star treatment. Steve, I’m sure, thought, “I’m not gonna buy that crap”…And he didn’t.’ McQueen not only trawled for scenes – the taunting ironic practicality of scooping up water in his hat while fording a river – he actively played Ahab to Brynner’s great white whale. He taught him, for instance, to draw his pistol so slowly, ‘I got three shots off before he even had his gun out of his holster.’ Another time, Elkins remembers, ‘Yul built himself a mound of dirt to stand on in one of his scenes with Steve. McQueen, during the shot, began accidentally-on-purpose kicking away at the pile, so Yul began looking shorter and shorter. By the end of the take, Brynner was disappearing down a hole.’ Sturges, for his part, wasn’t afraid to go it alone against the Mirisch brothers or the cast. What he was loath to do was side openly with one highly touted star against another, especially McQueen and Brynner, reflex foes who ruffled easily at real or imagined snubs. ‘Total mutual paranoia,’ says Wallach. However loose the two hung on stage, their private feud was rock solid, especially after a scoop about ‘creative differences’ appeared in the trades. When Brynner confronted McQueen about the story by grabbing his shoulder, his reply, hissed an inch from his co-star’s face, spun heads the length of the hotel:

‘Get your stinking hands off me, or I’m taking you down to the pavement.’

For the next twenty years, if you brought up Brynner around McQueen’s house, you wouldn’t be invited back. ‘He was one uptight dude,’ Steve informed the press. ‘He didn’t ride very well, and he didn’t know anything about quick draws and all of that stuff. I knew horses. I knew guns. I was in my element and he wasn’t.’

The Magnificent Seven opened worldwide, amidst an $800,000 publicity blitz, on 23 October 1960. While the critics’ thumbs twisted up or down, the consensus was that Sturges had created a splashy yet lucid morality yarn, in which character mattered as much as action and both combined to make the most of an unwieldy script. Part of the fun of the film lay in seeing several actors, notably James Coburn, launch their careers. Moreover, as the story was played out, the audience watched the spectacle of a superstar being born. Long after the last Panavision shot of the range, and the climactic chord of Elmer Bernstein’s score, there was the physicality and intelligence that made you appreciate Vin’s strength and humour, not to mention his hunter’s eye. Steve’s character was as sly and quick on the uptake as he was on the draw. Even more than the epic low-lying photography, those scenes stolen from behind Brynner’s back were the greatest of Seven’s many pleasures. Vin outdid himself as a virtuoso among equals, stretched tauter than the rest, with a temper fused as short as he was. Witty, lewd, allusive and violent, Steve played fast and loose with stereotypes, earning himself some of the critical yappings and shin-bitings that invariably greet true originals, while the public promptly sat up and bayed for him. In terms of buzz and hard cash, he now duly got his first real juice out of the business. McQueen missed his self-imposed deadline for fame by exactly seven months.

To the surprise of the few people who got to know Steve at home, he didn’t look the slightest bit driven, twisted, crazed, gnarled or bitter. He looked tired, though. On 3 May 1960 Four Star told him they were exercising their option to do another season of Wanted. That same week McQueen signed a contract for a thirty-minute TV drama called Masquerade Party, to be filmed live in New York. Three days later he shot yet another promo for Viceroy’s parent firm, Brown & Williamson. Add his responsibilities to his wife and young family and a taste for beer and late-night dirt-riding, and it’s easy to see how the strain could begin to tell.

McQueen, whose favourite outpost remained the racing circuit, was a man who was driven incessantly, the manic type who can achieve wonders but occasionally has to be hospitalised for his own good. He could also put unbearable pressure on others. Coburn, who quite plausibly insists ‘I loved him dearly,’ also admits, ‘There was kind of an evil streak to him.’ Tales were told of his self-obsession, the hours he spent each day muttering about his childhood and plotting revenge. Nobody denied Steve his refuge in the world of make-believe, or his chance at personal success and redemption. The unrelenting gloom of his upbringing made even a Brando’s or a Dean’s seem like Happy Days. But it grated to hear McQueen speak of ‘us’ or the ‘gang’, when a study of his actions behind the scenes shows that his first and overpowering loyalty was to himself. The only time he liked making a film, he quipped, was on payday.

In what seemed like a moment, Steve had made a breakthrough, cordoned off from his old life; leapt from sci-fi flummery in The Blob into a stylistic and original world of his own. He quickly picked up the pace. Nowadays, most mornings McQueen could be seen stalking the studio halls, hunched and scowling with the burden of his latest character. He needed people to follow. Those who did found him outrageous at times but often stimulating, a tonic, and generous in his loyalty as well as his rewards. He could even countenance inefficiency if enough talent came with it, as with Sam Peckinpah. To others, though, Tricky Dick was perhaps all too cleverly named for his own good.

A year later McQueen locked horns with the director of his eighth film Hell is for Heroes, who, like Sturges before him, saw it as an ensemble piece rather than a star vehicle. The director was fired. Something similar happened on The Great Escape, whose writer would call Steve ‘an impossible bastard’. The stamp-feet-and-sulk factor bulked large in both The Sand Pebbles and Thomas Crown. Meanwhile, McQueen’s friend Mark Rydell, who worked with him in The Reivers, remembers that ‘He was hard and he could be mean…He wanted to feel that nothing could happen without him.’ Him first, everybody else nowhere, people remember. Sturges himself walked away from McQueen’s next film, terminating their friendship. When Steve came down with flu – or a very early intimation of cancer – on 1972’s The Getaway, the exasperated crew put it to a vote (70 for, 49 against) whether or not to buy him a get-well card. There were more run-ins with the screenwriter of The Towering Inferno and the original director of Tom Horn. The list isn’t exhaustive. For twenty years McQueen was in and out of production meetings in black leather, pondering budgets and scripts. His rudeness Sturges believed to be part of his idea of thrift, a need to eliminate all time-wasting. Steve expected immediate answers to hard questions. Don’t think. Do it. The legendary profanities tumbled out in a verbal pile-up. Christalmighty, whaddyamean, goddammit. McQueen’s intensity was compelling, he demanded complete attention. His chilly blue eyes under the thatchy hair bored in relentlessly as he enquired about a term or condition, and gave it the drama of an international crisis. One Hollywood producer would compare negotiating with him to ‘dealing with a six-year-old who was carrying a nuclear bomb in his lunch-pail. Any meeting’s greatest potential was for an explosion.’

The alternative idea of his trusting Hollywood was and always would be pathetic.

As soon as he banked his Magnificent Seven money, Steve moved both upmarket and uphill to 2419 Solar Drive in the city heights. The Continental-style house, costing $60,759.84, was one of the very best situated in town, craning over Hollywood like a hippie Berghof. From the terrace and back garden the view swept towards mountains in the west, the Mojave desert in the east and downtown below, the far side of Silver Lake. Here ‘Supie’ became plain Steve, or Esteban again, playfully wolf-whistling at the woman he now called Nellie. There were moments of genuine empathy between the couple – as when they hosted elaborate Thanksgiving dinners for local children or stray race drivers – and, in the proper mood, they could give stunning performances of husband and wife. ‘A good woman can take a bum from the streets and turn him into a king,’ he said. In January 1960 Alfred Hitchcock cast Steve, with Neile as his co-star, in two of his TV melodramas, including the famous Man from the South episode. (One man bets his new Cadillac against another man’s little finger that he can’t flick a cheap Bic lighter ten times in succession.) ‘For kicks’ they did a number of shows together after Terry’s birth, including slots in the Bob Hope and, of all people, Perry Como revues. They made a good-looking couple, the bullet-headed tough, who could also be soft, and the small, stunningly svelte dancer. As Steve ascended, they might yet have become a hip version of Burton and Taylor, but it wasn’t to be. Shortly after testing for the film of West Side Story that spring, Neile learned that she was pregnant again. The role she settled on was at once stranger and more ordinary than anything Hollywood could have scripted, that of ‘plain Mrs Superstar’.

Meanwhile, the so-called ‘tail’ kept coming. McQueen pulled women, as one of them puts it, ‘like a magnet does iron filings’. Those with long memories made the connection to certain well-slept stars of the recent past: the Clark Gable, Errol Flynn type. He doted on Neile and the children, but he liked to mingle too. At parties Steve’s beautifully groomed hair positively glowed. His lithe, pumped-up body fitted perfectly into Fashion District denim and patent leather boots. The girls crowded round him panting. They obviously wanted to touch the hem of his garment, and frequently more, and it was all McQueen could do to fight them off. He didn’t always bother. A woman called Natalie Hawn remembers a scene where ‘some bit sidled up to him. “I wore these for you, Stevie,” she said, hand[ing] him a pair of panties. After she moved out of earshot…[McQueen] turned to me: “That’s the kind of shit I have to put up with.”’ When Steve, in turn, wound up alone with Hawn, she found him ‘a sweetheart’ and says that, just as McQueen was the quickest draw in Hollywood, so something similar went on in bed. He told Hawn he’d hustled both men and women while down on his luck in New York, but was ‘cured’ by the time he met Jack Kennedy a few years later in Santa Monica. The then President apparent had taken Steve aside and asked him, ‘Don’t you find you get a headache if you don’t have at least a poke a day?’

Around 1960 McQueen was nearing Kennedy’s ideal. The tally was ‘two or three hundred’ a year.

There were rumours that he was manic depressive, and unburdened himself to his woman friends. Hawn also remembers him ‘raving’ about Julian and then, in answer to her questions, discussing his childhood – if a mumbled ‘yep’ or ‘nope’ could be elevated to the level of discussion. These were the times when he should have been with his family, when it might have been possible to scale down if not vanquish his furies and acquire much-needed perspective on the misery of his youth. But not for the son of Julian Crawford.

Hawn adds, ‘Sometimes Steve would turn up, and sometimes he wouldn’t. My instructions were that, if he was in town, I’d wait by the phone for him to contact me. We’d meet and then, as he put it, shtup. Towards the end I had to sit in all day, because I never knew when he’d call me. As it turned out, he never did. And I never found out where he went.’

His close male friends rhapsodised over McQueen, and with good cause. Don Gordon calls him a ‘straight arrow – almost uniquely for [Hollywood], totally bullshit free’. His biking partner Bud Ekins talks of Steve’s personality with perhaps more understanding than anyone. Ekins claims that this ‘complicated guy’ who ‘basically trusted nobody’ and ‘did best one-on-one, and then only from amongst four or five people’ was ‘unknowable…It was almost impossible to pin him down. He was first and last an actor. But to a few people he was the best company, the most loyal guy on earth.’ Steve always made it abundantly clear that, whereas he admired anyone who could ‘hold his mud’, he only really had time for a few dirty-faced peers prepared to pit themselves against one another. Most or all of the inner circle, like Ekins, Gordon and McQueen himself could handle themselves on wheels. In 1960, while on location in Cuernavaca, Steve was named Rookie of the Year by the American Sports Car Association. He let it be known that the award meant more to him than ‘any fucking Oscar’.

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