McQueen: The Biography

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.