McQueen: The Biography

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.