McQueen: The Biography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SM: You sure you wanna go with me?

AC: Yes.

SM: I wouldn’t give much for our chances…you know, wandering around in the middle of the night trying to find something that if we found it, it might kill us.

AC: If we could only find a couple of people to help us.

SM: Who?

AC: Why, your friends – Tony, Mooch and Al.

SM: [Excitedly] Hey! You know, that’s worth a try.

In time, The Blob became that then rarity – a cult that gave tangible as well as critical meaning to the word ‘gross’. After Paramount bought the rights and pumped in $300,000-worth of PR, it earned an initial $2 million, the first wedge of what, for them, became a stipend. McQueen would soon and long regret having taken his flat fee. In chronological order, the film became first a fad, then a full-blown hit, latterly a video staple, made the producer Jack Harris a rich man, spawned both a sequel and a remake, warped into one of those camp classics loved precisely for being bad and finally found its true home on TV – The Blob is on somewhere most Friday nights, and features in virtually every trivia quiz show. Its entry in the reference books invariably includes the footnote, off by two years, of being ‘Steve McQueen’s first film’.*

Around William Morris they were soon celebrating, and the PR office began concocting what was the prototype of so many puff pieces: ‘Young people today want a new hero to relate to, someone whose success isn’t for himself but for his fans everywhere. Their enjoyment [of the film] is his best reward of all.’ But Steve’s true feelings hardly amounted to pride. He reacted to The Blob with a mixture of hilarity and embarrassment. After fame finally struck, he tended to shrug it off – suggesting they hang a poster of it in his executive john – when not quite seriously denying any knowledge of it. Near the end of his life McQueen told his minister Leonard De Witt that he’d always rued not having taken the points on The Blob, ‘but at the time he did it he was flat broke – being evicted’. The man with the by then legendary clout around town ‘just laughed at the whole mess’. But that was later. In 1958, according to Neile, ‘Steve was shocked – it was like, “Jesus Christ! I’m in one of those things.” Total horror. On the other hand, that’s when he knew he was on the way.’

Ambition, money, sex: whatever else you said of him, McQueen didn’t skirt the big issues in life. Many Hollywood producers, with their penchant for docile idiots, hated him on sight. But he was hard-working and talented, and with others that nearly cancelled out his quirks about ‘face time’ and close-ups.

A man like Jack Harris saw McQueen as taut and tightly strung, physically as well as in type. ‘Steve had a reputation for being trouble,’ he’d say. ‘He was always hard to handle.’ Another actor remembers that McQueen ‘walked tense, and when he walked he’d really strut out. Bang, bang, bang. Onto the set. I mean, he didn’t have a leisurely, graceful walk.’ On stage or in the hotel, Harris and the rest watched him act or sulk or argue aggressively in an obvious and deliberate effort to overcome his basic shyness, to win the very approval his intensity often prevented. ‘I don’t think he ever had an ounce of self-confidence.’ To others, though, the effort was all too convincing. ‘Steve had an almost animal streak about him,’ says Hurt, ‘which was why some people gave him a pass. He could be wild.’ And violent: one morning in New York McQueen and his wife were out walking in the park when a man wolf-whistled at Neile from a passing convertible. Steve immediately ran after the car, caught up with it at a light, dragged the man from his seat and forcibly extracted an apology. The alternative to this solution had been ‘a pop in the chops’.

McQueen’s flip side, in contrast, was a childlike insistence that life was supposed to be fun. He had the great capacity to take things solemnly but not seriously, and a part of him remained firmly rooted in 1938, the shy but self-contained boy on the hog farm. (Soon after Steve married Neile, he took her to meet Uncle Claude – carefully bypassing Slater itself.) Although he was a realist at heart, he never quite lost Claude’s own conviction that life not only should but could be enjoyed, and in the right mood, says Hurt, ‘McQueen had a great sense of humour – always provided the joke was in the proper context.’ Friends remember his helpless laughing jags when Steve simply abandoned himself. A roar with a giggle in it, and quite often hysterics. ‘Knock knock’ gags sent him into fits. Not quite Oscar Wilde then, this man-child, but warm and witty enough to offset at least some of the darker side.

That first year or so after Neile met him, McQueen ‘virtually invented a new way to live’: gunning the bike down New York alleys, adopting the ugliest pets – mutts in the street always seemed to follow him home – jogging into the apartment, hot and fetid (if not an accomplished athlete, a spirited one), then running downtown, unchanged, for beer and burgers and yet more belly-laughs in Downey’s. In other words, Steve was the consummate mood swinger – Hollywood’s swinger. ‘When something bugged him, he let you know it,’ says Hurt. ‘But, otherwise – God, what a smoothie.’

Above all, Steve doted on Neile and, eventually, even came to trust her. He may have avoided being ‘head-over-heels in love’, but, he asked, who wouldn’t? The accident of being worked over by a woman was one thing. Courting such grief was another, and if a charge of aggressive intent were lodged against McQueen he answered it with a plea of self-defence. ‘I try to get along, and I’ll continue to get along. In fact, I plan on doing as much getting along, with as many folks, as possible. I will get along until I drop. How ’bout that?’ He seldom bad-mouthed a woman or a colleague in public, rarely displayed his obvious first-strike potential and never jilted a friend. Or not yet. Everything else, as he often said, was ‘just business’.

Within only a year or two McQueen was one of the few stars who could ‘open’ a picture, a man apparently with his finger on the pulse of the mass audience. Strangely enough, he was never ‘one of the people’ himself. Steve essentially went from zero to eighty without feeling the need to level off at forty or so en route. Late in 1957, cheered on by wife, manager and agent, he duly made the full-time move west. He had never spent more than a few weeks, at least at large, in California, and his prospects there were as unpredictable as the country. But Elkins, particularly, was all for it. He and Stan Kamen went to work on Steve, still the sweatshirted hipster, getting him first into chinos and suede jackets and then on to a plane. Kamen took him aside and talked out his reasoning: ‘Kid, you can be one of the chorus line in New York or you can make for Tinseltown…I know it’s a risk to take. Do you want to fold your cards, maybe, or raise the ante?’

Go for it.

He and Neile arrived deep that midwinter and rented their first house, admittedly not much more than a shack, beside an auto shop and a Mexican cantina on Klump Avenue in Studio City. At the time he moved in, McQueen owned his clothes, a bike and a car, and one Indian quilt. He loved the place. Klump may have been no Beverly Hills, but it was, nonetheless, Hollywood, and Steve would never forget riding his BSA up into the canyon trails, cruising under winter skies streaked with red and purple. His whole life now went from noir to Technicolor. By the end of a new year that had begun in 55th Street, he was a sunny fixture in a town gaudily decorated in 1920s Moorish, fêted if not always loved, rich, famous, and a serial collector of unpaid tickets in his fancy Porsche Super Speedster. He would never again go back to live in New York.

Steve settled in California at Christmas, and got his break by Easter. He still had no real reputation except the one Neile gave him by her support and flattery, but because she yielded so freely, he began to grow in confidence. McQueen now regularly met their mutual manager for planning sessions: and like others Elkins came to love his private lack of pretension, his habit of breaking into fits, telling little stories, making irreverent jokes about The Blob, his uncanny impressions of famous actors. Klump soon became the unlikely command post for Steve’s next offensive. It started with the familiar combination of talent and good luck.

Elkins happened to also represent one Bob Culp, then starring in the weekly CBS series Trackdown. ‘The producers, Four Star, hit on the then novel idea of a companion piece. The spinoff was about a bounty hunter in the old West. I immediately knew that McQueen, playing this quasi-heavy lead, wouldn’t only be perfect for the part – he’d use it as a launch pad for stardom…I made my pitch to Steve and to Four Star. He did the pilot, then made The Blob while the jury was still out. The Western was a smash and the rest is history.’ Instead of doing more B-films, McQueen suddenly found himself being rung up and chauffeured to the Four Star offices. The first of the four he met there was David Niven, who, like Elkins, soon also grasped the fact that ‘Steve had “it”, and that “it” – whatever it was – was the future’. One of the great Hollywood icons of the then recent past, merely by launching McQueen, thus illustrated that legends of their day would inevitably become prey for those who followed them.

The only way Steve himself could avoid this fate was to establish a character for the long haul.

An actress friend was invited to dinner at Klump one night that summer. She remembers that McQueen ‘actually put down his knife and fork to take an enormous script from his coat pocket to bounce ideas off everyone’. For the remainder of the meal Steve chewed over the text as much as his food. Later that same evening, he was still up ‘trying out voices, practising quick draws, doing funny little moves, going over scenes where he needed a reaction’. It’s doubtful that McQueen’s guests did any serious advising. By then Steve was an uncontrollable ball of energy, his voice sometimes soaring back to Hatful register and the peak of blond hair rising on his head, his hands flapping and his feet in biker boots stamping up and down. His rehearsal was a gala performance in which he sang and played all the parts.

McQueen’s Trackdown slot aired on 7 March 1958. CBS and Four Star both liked what they saw and bought the series. Wanted Dead or Alive, as it now was, made its prime-time debut that September. Virtually overnight Steve became the first though not the last TV cowboy to shoot his way towards the big screen. But where Richard Boone, Chuck Connors and the other fauna of the half-hour ‘oater’ barely made it onto film, McQueen would leapfrog the entire Hollywood pack. The breakthrough was stunningly achieved. In 117 straight episodes, whether riding into the sunset or daringly allowing his character to be human, Steve staked out a claim bordered by Bogie’s eruptive cool and Gary Cooper’s suave languor. Though McQueen soon had company on that turf, he drew more from it than most. He became a star. Men like Niven and his partner Dick Powell now related to him as a virtuoso peer, as well as a self-dramatist. Trade reporters who had barely heard of McQueen in 1957 now began to speak in his voice and wrinkle up their noses at things that had a bad smell for him. A few fans doorstepped him at Klump. Steve’s relationship with Neile also changed. She remained his friend and gatekeeper as well as his wife, but he was no longer her project. Steve himself affirmed this when, the same week Wanted went on the air, he asked her whether it wasn’t time to settle down and have a baby. By mid September of that year Neile was pregnant.

Then, for fifteen years, she stopped working.

McQueen, meanwhile, never resolved his feelings towards the paired universe of his own childhood, the lonely son of the absent father and the mother who was a nervous wreck. This legacy gave rise to the ruthless demands he made on himself and others. When Wanted first went in front of the cameras, Steve was twenty-eight and pretty much fully formed. He was intense, grim (except when he collapsed in giggles), insecure, prickly and exceptionally focused – a flinty product of fly-by-night adventurism and naivete, hardened by reform school and the Marines. It took all his combined experience, ambition and sheer nous to lift Wanted out of the mire of competing horse operas. Cheyenne, Wyatt Earp, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Maverick and Zane Grey were only the upmarket end of a genre tethered by the likes of Rifleman and Wells Fargo. McQueen’s series went out in the cut-throat 8.30 p.m. slot on Saturday nights, after an hour of Perry Mason and directly opposite Perry Como. Steve declared a private ratings war on the famously smooth, cardigan-wearing crooner. Como’s weekly guests – an assortment of ‘real folks’ such as construction workers, on hand to make requests – never looked half as real as McQueen himself, sporting dirty boots and a sawn-off Winchester shotgun dubbed the ‘Mare’s Laig’. More than forty years later, rerun episodes of Wanted are still saddled with a Violence rating.

Steve very soon changed and then embodied most people’s stereotype of a cowboy. Rugged, wan and bow-legged like a prairie John Wayne, self-contained, cool, he also liberated the postmodern, ironic school which sprang up in the years ahead. In an equivalent move, thousands of female fans – many of them defecting from Como’s jacuzzi – duly responded to the all-action hero who had the nerve to, as he put it, both ‘fight and think’. Men simply wanted to be like him.

Elsewhere, however, it was another story. Behind the scenes, among at least some of Wanted’s crew and cast, it’s fair to say that McQueen wasn’t just not liked, he was disliked. For one, there was his relationship with the show’s primary advertiser, Viceroy cigarettes. Steve’s contract called for him to be wheeled out, in character as the star Josh Randall, to make his periodic pitch (‘It’s good entertainment for the whole family…yessir…and that’s what’ll sell any product’) for both sponsor and series. Somehow, the way he did it was always thought to be lacking in warmth. One ex-Viceroy mogul, Nick Payne, recalls McQueen working the company’s convention, ‘cruising the room like a zombie…He’d stare at you with that squinty, butch look, offer a “Howdy, mac” and move on, his arm outstretched to his next mark. What I remember him telling us was that he’d sold millions of cigarettes for us, for a few bucks’ return,’ says Payne. ‘Been there, done that. It was extremely flip.’ McQueen’s tone was cool, his grip cold and clammy. Nor did he exactly endear himself to the Viceroy suits by ostentatiously smoking one of their rivals’ brands. ‘It was obvious to most of us that Steve was a so-so salesman, and that the product he was really plugging was himself.’