McQueen: The Biography

McQueen became a star, but he didn’t immediately decide who Josh Randall was. It was an important question, quite apart from its personal stake for him, because it involved the whole business of anti-heroic acting. Steve began his invention of the future by going back to the past, specifically to the hoary Western star Randolph Scott and his 1954 The Bounty Hunter. He worked out characteristic poses, moves, both by constant rehearsal and by studying the masters. But McQueen was always much more than a clever copyist. For one thing, he was small for a leading man, giving Randall the advantage of the underdog. Trackdown’s producer Vince Fennelly would remember that ‘I needed a kind of “little guy” who looks tough enough to get the job done, but with a kind of boyish appeal…He had to be vulnerable, so the audience would root for him against the bad guys. McQueen was just what I had in mind. I knew he was my man the minute he walked through the door.’ When the character got in a fight, he’d do exactly what his alter ego did to his old marine buddy Joey – wait until the odds were even, and then deliver a quick beating. There was nothing particularly macho about Josh Randall. When two or three men came at him at once, he either high-tailed it out of town or, at a pinch, pulled the Mare’s Laig – his whole weight leaning into the gun, levelling it as easily as if it were a pistol. It was an extension of McQueen’s nervous system. Steve’s control of both his props and his body was always masterful, with no energy wasted. Finally, for authenticity’s sake, he got rid of the designer jeans and starchy shirts and wandered around in what looked like Scott’s old duds and a scuffed hat. It was the reverse of the classic Hollywood makeover, and it worked.

Much as McQueen had superb control of his body, he was also (as Viceroy now dubbed him) the thinking man’s cowboy. In 1979 he startled an old guest star on Wanted by recalling how ‘something in my look had once moved him during a take, and instead of punching me out, as we’d rehearsed, he’d just gently helped me up onto my horse. That’s the way we shot it, and I kept thinking Steve had obviously gone nuts and that it was now a lousy scene. Then when I saw it on TV, I couldn’t believe what came across. McQueen made it deeper and subtler, less bad cop and more Jimmy Stewart, and he did it all, I finally learnt, on the fly.’ Steve would never talk much about that dread word ‘motivation’. But he revealed clearly enough to men like Elkins the churning McQueen interior that so drove his work, and so embedded another actor’s scared look in twenty years’ memories of pity. His character, he once rightly said, was a ‘contradictory dude’. He was talking about Randall, but it was a self-sketch if ever there was one.

Besides the audience, Steve’s only other long-term relationship on Wanted was with trouble. He yelled at directors, writers, wardrobe men – particularly the last if their gear wasn’t pilgrim enough, namely too clean. Everything had to be perfect. If it wasn’t, you fixed it. ‘He was a shit’ comes Wanted’s echo of him again and again. Always, everywhere. McQueen even fought with Ronald Reagan over a script for the latter’s ‘General Electric Theater’. He wasn’t doing any stinking guest spot, he announced. Compared to Steve, Reagan ambled along as loose and haphazard as a tumbleweed.

Two men got closer to him than most. One was Dave Foster, his publicist and later co-producer of The Gateway. Foster was to play a major part in the unfolding drama of McQueen’s career and, particularly, his morbid distrust of the press. He also met his stunt double of twenty-two years, Loren Janes. Janes got the job only after Steve had fired three other stuntmen – two because they had the wrong look, the third because he ribbed McQueen about his name – on the very first day of shooting. To colleagues like Janes, the pattern was jagged but constant. They generally accepted Steve with affection and respect for his sincerity, talent and total absorption in the part. They smiled a bit over his petulance, particularly towards those above him on the food-chain. ‘McQueen raged nonstop at the suits,’ says one of the Wanted crew. Contrarily, and particularly to those below him on the food-chain, he developed a reputation for being, on a whim, ‘either a prince or a royal pain in the ass’. Mostly, they felt that he tried too hard and had too much front, and they were uncomfortable with his obsessive concern with future glory, which he couldn’t resist airing from time to time.

He had no close friends.

The same colleagues were divided on whether McQueen was a shit or merely too serious: pathologically nasty or exercising a due quality control. But the results were clear enough. In the three years it was on air, Wanted became a proving ground for several noted directors of the near future, including Dick Donner of Superman and Lethal Weapon fame. Steve gave Donner ‘utter crap’ when he first appeared on set, blaming him for every conceivable hassle from the script to the quality of the canteen lunch. Donner was driven home that night quite literally in tears. When McQueen decided to bare fang like that, there was a touch of the bad cop. Not Jimmy Stewart. It was a side of him that alienated many co-workers and ‘didn’t allow him to be accepted as much as he might have been’. Things were hardly less ugly further down the evolutionary ladder, with Josh Randall’s horse. This jet-black bronco, named Ringo, was once called upon to stand patiently behind McQueen as he rehearsed a scene with another actor. Instead, startled by the noise and lights, the animal first head-butted and then reared up and stamped on Steve’s back. As McQueen spun round, his mount at once made ready to bite him. Steve cocked back his fist, popping it in the ‘chops’, then hurled his script into the air and, as Ringo snapped its halter, ran for his life. After that particular chase petered out, McQueen and his horse got along famously together.

Wanted took a season to find its audience, but Steve became an instant cult. Suddenly, he was an early middle-aged golden boy who had views on everyone in town. Hollywood, in turn, sat up and noticed McQueen for one reason or another; he didn’t inspire many lukewarm feelings. The airwaves and hoardings were dominated by pictures of him in character, posing on the prairie in chaps, boots and Stetson, and brandishing his long gun. He was making a steady $750 a week, plus endorsements. Out of his new earnings McQueen bought his first Porsche and an underslung, production model XK-SS Jaguar – the ‘green rat’. A replica Winchester was bolted to the hood, the snub nose tilted against the sky like a live cannon. Steve collected so many unpaid tickets in these two machines that, within a year, his driver’s licence would be torn up. He also, much less publicly, embarked on a gradual self-improvement course at the Amelia Earhart branch of the LA library, immediately around the corner from his house. Steve’s autodidactism sprang out of genuine simplicity and humility, as well as the familiar, nagging doubts about his long-term security as an actor. ‘I don’t want to grow old living in a street called Klump,’ he explained to Julian.

His wife stayed home now, barefoot and pregnant, allowing Steve to indulge his quite unmodified, pre-Aids lifestyle. Nor, in that bygone era, was sexual equality ever much of an issue. ‘All I can say is, that so far as I’m concerned, a woman should be a woman. By day she should be busy making and keeping a home for the man she loves. At night she should be sleeping with him.’ To this stark ideology Neile would add that ‘[Steve was] the quintessential male chauvinist pig.’ The flesh, meanwhile, kept coming, whether on set or in the room McQueen sometimes kept downtown, described by one guest as ‘conceding nothing to romance…the brown walls were peeling, the wooden bed creaking and the three greasy windows covered with yellow tar paper’. Another colleague from Wanted happened to see Steve setting out from this establishment late one afternoon in 1958. The short journey west down Sunset towards Laurel Canyon amounted to a one-man demolition of the Highway Code. It was driving Le Mans-style, foot hard on the gas, stamping on the brake, lurching, squealing, once swerving away from a pedestrian and mounting the pavement.

‘I didn’t know where he’d been or where he was going, but I can see him now in that hopped-up rat, doing about eighty, scattering people left and right. A real man on the move…Then that same week, I was watching TV and there was a trade show where they praised Steve to the sky for having the right stuff, and saying that with a few other things in place, he was bound to get better still and become a worthy successor to the John Waynes and Gary Coopers, and even to be – I’m quoting – the baddest star in Dodge.’

4 Candyland

McQueen never really enjoyed being a TV star. He had a riff, which he gave to anybody who would listen, entitled ‘The Factory’. Every trade reporter Dave Foster brought him heard it, to the extent that it induced affectionate eye-rolling when it came up. ‘The Factory’ was based on Steve’s dislike of having to get up at five in the morning in order to report on set for a full day’s filming. ‘They just want it slam-bang, one take and onto the next. Assembly-line stuff. I didn’t bust my ass all those years in New York just to end up acting in some factory.’ Behind McQueen’s self-pity lay a broad streak of professionalism, even perfectionism. He wanted every shot and every show to count and he wanted to grow as an actor. When not berating a Donner, Steve would often stand at his director’s shoulder, asking about camera angles and lighting. McQueen ‘had only to be exposed or shown, and he never forgot…He absorbed knowledge of any kind like a blotter.’ Across that nightmare first season, and into its second, Steve became Wanted’s player-manager, suggesting scenes and set-ups, quite complicated shots like ‘Let’s track fast to the gun, then pull back in a smooth flow – tension and release’ or, ‘Dolly-out on the silhouette, Dick’ – advice that could raise hackles as well as the show’s quality. In a format where time was tight, most directors had no higher ambition than staying in focus and nobody bothered much about motivation, it was inevitable that people would talk about the new kid in town who wanted everything done right, or, failing that, his way.

They did talk. Men like Janes saw how ‘Steve was fixated on the part. He wanted to make it unusual, and also to [break into] films…So he’d get furious…he was so focused on what he was doing,’ crashing back and forth between set and trailer, a brute even by Hollywood TV standards. To many who watched him work, McQueen – with his tendency to kill a weak scene with a curt Shit – still did a fair impression of a ‘royal pain in the ass’, however apposite and penetrating his remarks. According to Nick Payne, ‘he was combative rather than conciliatory,’ but then contradictorily would take the entire Wanted crew and their wives out to dinner. Another colleague remembers that ‘McQueen usually arrived on set looking like thunder.’ But this soon broke and followed a familiar pattern. ‘He’d be a turd and the director would snap,’ he says. ‘Then they’d make up.’

Steve’s arrival on his motorbike for the day’s shoot, at least early on, was the signal for muted groans, the respect accorded an admittedly gifted but temperamental child. The first cameraman on Wanted claimed he could tell his boss’s mood by the clothes he showed up in. All-black leathers evidenced a storm – trouble ahead. A denim rig with a loud shirt was the sign of good humour – a day when he was approachable and nearly an entire episode could be shot. A neutral outfit with dark glasses signalled the unpredictable. This last look was the most common.

Despite or because of the tension, Wanted soon began to improve. As a rule, the scripts had no pretensions to subtlety. In a typical plot Randall would chase and get his man (first act), be foiled (second act), then resolve the crisis in a mild twist (third act). Justice was done, loose ends tied up, and there was never a dull moment, a scene that unfolded merely for its own sake. But within a dozen episodes, and thanks largely to McQueen, Wanted was breaking new ground. Then, it had been a formulaic channelling of John Wayne. Now, it toyed with the familiar genre of half-hour Westerns while skilfully distancing itself from almost all cliché. Daringly, Steve played the role with an ethical centre closer to Bogie’s in High Sierra. But he went vastly further than that onto what had hitherto been the stage’s traditional turf: his hero wasn’t a shoot-’em-up hard man with no time for metaphysical asides, but instead the critical study of a morally aware adult willing to do anything reasonable, but no more, to get his bounty back to town. Once or twice Randall even let his man go.

Sympathetic, low-key, physically active; there was both charity and cruelty in this radical hybrid of McQueen’s.

Wanted barely troubled the Nielsen ratings for its first six months. But by late March 1959 it had moved into the charmed circle of the Top Ten, with a 30.6 share – 15 million viewers. Everything now went overboard. Week after week, Steve’s picture appeared in the trade press and the Hollywood fanzines, some thirty hits in all. As well as Foster’s ‘awareness campaign’, there were hand-outs, potted biographies, glossies and souvenirs, all coupled with a strategic year-long blitz by CBS that would lead to stories in Variety and Photoplay. People who would never go near Broadway now knew the name and, above all, the face of Steve McQueen.

The camera loved him. To Four Star and the network he was blue chip – even in black and white, a glossy shot of him, tanned, trim and hardy, with a thatch of fair hair, big eyes and a quizzical grin was enough to bring the sponsors running. Not that Steve just stood in front of the lens and allowed himself to be photographed. He had certain tricks and impenetrable mannerisms like the ‘squinty, butch look’ (at least partly a response to deafness) and the lopsided, crinkly smile; but the forging of a direct personal link to the audience, a vector of just-you-and-me was something they didn’t, and couldn’t, teach him at stage school. One obvious form of it was that McQueen always looked another actor dead in the eye when he spoke or, more typically, listened. It was the instant way of establishing that he was missing nothing, and that he knew what to do about it. Steve was never an all-out action hero in the sense of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger. At the same time he was a man who gave the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he would stop at nothing. If he decided to kill you, he’d kill you; if he thought it sufficient to walk away, he would. What’s more, he patently had a wry, deep awareness of the inherent failings of human nature; the ultimate slipperiness of all relationships. Steve’s internal gyroscope – his ‘bullshit detector’ – never stopped turning. On screen, as in life, precious little got by him. Wayne Rogers, who guested with McQueen on Wanted, particularly remembers his ‘taciturn, Gary Cooper quality that made one feel he was always thinking a lot more than he was saying’. Nick Payne also cites the ‘less-is-more vibe’ that made McQueen the sharply prejudiced, brilliant observer he was. ‘It’s the obvious analogy of the killer iceberg – most of him was submerged.’ Even in those prehistoric days Steve was proving his key theory that what the actor omitted was as vital as what he did. Neile, for her part, remembers his heroes as four men – Cooper, Bogart, Cagney and Walter Brennan – not exactly known for their hamming.

To some people in 1959, McQueen wasn’t so much an actor who knew how to cope as a man consumed with violence. The controversy simmered throughout the series’ first season, at which point it boiled into a crisis. According to a Variety report published in mid-run, Wanted was a ‘brutal, hard-boiled actioner [some] feel single-handedly responsible for the big business pickup in the sale of pistols and shotguns’. The complaint duly made its way to the FBI, who opened a file on both show and star that 12 November. Meanwhile, The Great St Louis Bank Robbery was finally released to an indifferent audience and critics who also used it as a weapon to beat the man who seemed to be ‘blasting at the rest of the world…a loner…obviously the hard type’. While partisan, the description reflected much of what Steve’s closest colleagues felt as well.

At the same time, money was nudging McQueen out of his dark haze. The couple moved upmarket in 1959, buying their first home together in Laurel Canyon’s Skyline Drive, a semi-private street hidden by thick ivy and bougainvillaea. A sign read ‘Patrolled by Armed Security’. Number 8842 with its high window and skylight was, however, fully visible from the road. Standing on a neatly manicured plot landscaped with a trellis and bushes, the back of the house enjoyed a view over Hollywood. Pharaohs like Marlon Brando lived nearby on Mulholland Drive. Steve liked to gun his cars up and down the steep access road, duly collecting more tickets; after he appeared in Long Beach District traffic court that spring, Neile became his designated driver for several months. When not actually working or on the trail, McQueen spent whole days at the Union 76 station on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura, where he oscillated between being a regular guy – talking shop with the mechanics – and that old ‘royal pain in the ass’. He wanted his Porsche hand-waxed for free whenever he bought gas, he announced once. The help scoffed at this. No, it would be good PR for them, Steve insisted, thereby demonstrating the yawning gulf between Hollywood and real life. He also loved to browse at the nearby flea market, where he’s fondly remembered for once having ‘chiselled the price of a Johnny Mathis LP from fifty cents down to something like a dime’.

It was a rare day when McQueen didn’t have at least one row about money. He under-tipped, his cheques bounced. Steve seemed to get tighter as he got richer, and the general theory was that he feared he could lose it as quickly as he’d made it.

Even while he banked $750 a week on Wanted, McQueen used to talk to Neile and a few others about quitting and ‘emigrating to a sheep farm in Sydney’.* To Julian, whom he never saw but wrote to intermittently, he soon began to send curt, moody, often despondent accounts of life, pouring out the frustration and discouragement he felt over the reviews and ‘The Factory’ generally. Steve was never to talk openly about how near he came to chucking Hollywood. Twenty years later, he did recall his misery in a conversation with a flying friend in Santa Paula. ‘I was as confused and down as anyone at one time or another,’ he said. ‘But acting still had all the other jive beat.’ McQueen invariably met such jive by desolation, despair and the threat to quit, quickly followed by a grim if still uncertain determination. By mid 1959 he had begun to cultivate a few key contacts in the industry, like the gossip queen Hedda Hopper. Hopper adored him. She noted affectionately how Steve used what she imagined was his ‘formal’ vocabulary whenever he did interviews. But around the house, or on set, he adopted the lingo of the mudlark he once was: words like ‘bread’, ‘juice’, ‘pork’, ‘jive’ and ‘gas’ would come around like pit-stops on a race track. ‘He was insecure,’ Hopper shrewdly observed. It was a measure of Steve’s depth and strength, though, that ‘he could talk to me about stagecraft, then go out and basically be a grease-monkey for the rest of the day’.

According to the actor Dean Jones, Steve was ‘an odd mixture of ego and immaturity’ when they worked together in 1959. McQueen ‘would always bring his Mare’s Laig with him wherever, and show the rest of us how he could handle it. Look guys. By then he was really fast on the draw. Impressive and endearing as it was, with Steve there was also that sense of a sleeve being tugged for attention.’

A year or so later, Jones was shooting a TV series on the next-door lot to McQueen’s. ‘I remember seeing Steve once going down the cafeteria line at lunch, except, being Steve, he was actually behind the counter, helping himself from over the cooks’ shoulders. I ribbed him about it and he turned on me: “When your show’s a big hit, you can come back here, Jones.”’ But it was a sign of McQueen’s complexity that while still enveloped in his own ego trip he could, and did, reach out to others. Jones also remembers that during one discussion McQueen made a crack about a mutual girlfriend. ‘I turned on my heel, walked out of his dressing room and started up the street. Steve must have sensed my feelings, because he ran after me calling “Dean! Dean!” and apologised with tears in his eyes.’ Genuinely stirred and charmed, Jones realised that ‘McQueen’s fear of being rejected and outdone was what motivated his outer behaviour. When and if he ever relaxed, he was capable of radiant kindness.’

Then, for hours, he was the best company in the world.

The gesture to Jones remained private, though there were similar acts of warmth his fellow actors saw more openly. Sometimes with his director, more often alone, McQueen would spend long afternoons entertaining in the children’s ward of Midway hospital. He befriended the very old and the very young as few others, and later, throughout his life, quietly gave tens of thousands of dollars to medical charities. Nurses who watched him at Midway recall vividly how he listened intently to each child, how, with his already asbestos-worn lungs, he grunted and staggered as he carried them piggy-back, how gently he set them down again, then stayed until nightfall telling stories and laughing with his thrilled fans. Wayne Rogers saw a similar sensibility after he and McQueen did an episode of Wanted. Steve was typically tense and focused during the shoot, but still went out of his way to help the lesser cast shine. Once actors have made it, it’s assumed, without being a given, that most of them will be supportive enough of their peers. They’re all in the same designer padded cell. Even in this context, McQueen stood out as unusually loyal. ‘Steve was an incredibly [sincere] person and helpful to many people.’ Jones, sick children, Hopper and Rogers – the brooding, uptight TV star showed them much the same empathy and tenderness his wife and a few close colleagues saw in him, the ‘real Steve’ that was somehow tragically warped by the orphan he’d been and the legend he became.

He never met his natural father. Ironically, by 1959 Steve was living less than ten miles away from Bill McQueen in Los Angeles. Ever since marrying Neile, and becoming an expectant parent, he’d grown more inquisitive, if no less resentful, about his own upbringing. His feelings on the subject were fast-moving, tiered, and sometimes nostalgic. Bewilderingly changeable, because the bedrock truth was that he didn’t know what he’d do if he found Bill. Following a tip-off, Steve began to methodically comb the Echo Park neighbourhood, close to where he’d lived so miserably with Julian and Berri in 1942. His persistence paid off. One night a woman called, identifying herself as Bill’s common-law wife, and inviting Steve to visit. He arrived at the rundown apartment block only to be told that his father had died of heart failure three months earlier. The woman added that Bill had always watched Wanted on Saturday nights and wondered whether the star wasn’t, in fact, his son. She gave McQueen his father’s photo and an engraved Zippo lighter which, Steve told a friend, ‘I slung down the gutter…Then I went out to a bar. And that was the end of me and the old man.’ Even though the friend, Bud Ekins, ‘believed Steve implicitly’, it was a lie. McQueen kept the photo and left the lighter to his own daughter. After he died, Bill assumed a more prominent and warmly human role in Steve’s life than Julian ever could. A wary affection showed through whenever he talked about either his father or Uncle Claude, who also died that winter. Steve heightened the poignancy of the Indianapolis and Slater years by often drawing attention to the timing of this double blow. As a dedicated actor, he understood and rued the ‘motivating shit’ he saw in both men’s lives. He no doubt regretted it as much as the shit in his own.