McQueen: The Biography

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.