McQueen: The Biography

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.