Steve McQueen Read online

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  Copyright © 2011 by Rebel Road, Inc.

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  www.crownpublishing.com

  Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Eliot, Marc.

  Steve McQueen : a biography / by Marc Eliot.—1st ed.

  Includes filmography.

  1. McQueen, Steve, 1930–1980. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States—Biography. I. Title.

  PN22287.M547E45 2011

  791.4302′8092—dc22

  [B] 2011002262

  eISBN: 978-0-307-45323-5

  Jacket design by Laura Duffy

  Jacket photographs: Front and spine: © 1978 William Claxton/mptvimages.com;

  back, fourth down: Courtesy of David Foster; all others from the Rebel Road Archive

  Author photograph: Courtesy of Marc Eliot

  All photos are from the Rebel Road Archive unless otherwise credited.

  Frontispiece: © Bettmann/CORBIS

  v3.1

  For bee bee and little Sweetie Pie

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Introduction

  PART ONE

  Beautiful Wanderer

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  PART TWO

  Big-Screen Wonder

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART THREE

  Big Wheel

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Photo Insert

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  PART FOUR

  Bedeviled Winds of Change

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  PART FIVE

  Cut to Black

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Filmography

  Sources and Notes

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phrase—I love you.

  —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, “The Offshore Pirate”

  Introduction

  TERRENCE STEVEN MCQUEEN WAS THE PRODUCT OF A one-night stand that stretched into a year and six months of misery between Terrence William McQueen, a handsome, philandering stunt pilot for a traveling circus, and Jullian Crawford, a teenage alcoholic prostitute. Terrence William left Jullian and Steven for good six months after the boy was born. Unable to cope with single motherhood, Jullian soon abandoned Steven. As casually as she changed clothes (or took them off), Jullian passed him off to her uncle, the wealthy but emotionally distant Claude Thomson.

  These early traumatic events helped shape the fragile, needy psyche that for the rest of Steve McQueen’s life would bubble just beneath the deceptively smooth surface of his very good-looking exterior. Physically beautiful but emotionally insecure, this shy and withdrawn little boy would grow up to become an international movie superstar. He would be loved by millions from afar, but unable to handle intimate commitment and often lash out at those women who tried to love him in real life.

  His emotional insecurity left him extremely sensitive and wary, a combination that would aid him enormously in his early days as an actor, and lead to his powerful attraction to and essential distrust of females—a pattern that began in childhood with his mother and continued into adult life with the three women he made his wives. Marriage to Steve meant swimming in a pool of emotional turmoil. The promise of commitment tempted him, but the fear of abandonment compelled him to run away. He was a lover and a fighter whose emotions were always stoked to the peak of their heat.

  Film directors favor those actors who can take their considerable inner turmoil and use it to infuse the characters they play in the movies with a heightened and compelling sense of drama. It is what is called talent in Hollywood, and those who have it, despite the high personal price they pay, are highly coveted.

  Steve McQueen had it. His special, unique talent was his ability to balance his inner heat (his emotional rage, his distrust of older authority figures, and his defiance of them) and his cautious, careful, catlike wariness that so beautifully translated to the screen as the ultimate in cool. Although much of what he managed to accomplish in film was the result of his ability to trust his instincts, his emotional balancing act gained him the reputation as one of the best practitioners of the then in-vogue acting style of moody, brooding strength that was the by-product of the so-called Stanislavsky Method. He had studied the Method while a struggling actor in his early New York days, and it gave him a disciplined approach to acting. McQueen’s raw intensity—his talent—was always there; he was, in life, an emotional time bomb who ticked with metronomic precision—tick, the need to hold in all the rage; tock, the need to let it all out—on-screen or off. This was what gave his characters their power, and despite all the acting classes, keeping the beat was the only real method he ever used and the only one he ever needed.

  In 1958, after struggling as a stage and live TV actor, McQueen hit it big in the filmed TV series Wanted: Dead or Alive, his gateway to Hollywood and the twenty-eight feature films he would make in his lifetime. His resume is admittedly brief, with barely enough credits to admit him into the pantheon. His output is not only qualitatively minimalist but quantitatively minimal when compared with the 217 one-hour episodes and more than seventy features made by his contemporary Clint Eastwood (who is still going strong). People tend to forget that Eastwood and McQueen were born the same year—1930—and that their TV and film careers began approximately the same time (Wanted: Dead or Alive in 1958, Eastwood’s Rawhide in 1959).

  Interestingly, neither McQueen nor Eastwood ever appeared especially comfortable in cinematic scenarios of romance (although both were very much players in real life). Eastwood, with his poncho, cigarillo, and regal loneness, was able to externally fetishize his ability not just to exist but to thrive on-screen without women, while McQueen seemed too emotionally inhibited, his eyes too haunted, too downcast, to be a truly romantic leading man. Auteurist critic and historian Andrew Sarris pointed out after McQueen’s death that he was “that rarity of rarities, a Method Action Hero.”

  The Method played a key difference between McQueen’s approach to acting and to his career and Eastwood’s (who is a purely instinctive actor). The Method did to McQueen what it did to a lot of aspiring actors in the mid-to-late 1950s: it held up Marlon Brando as an ultimately unattainable icon to try to emulate. It confused and intimidated novice actors such as McQueen, who didn’t fully understand the essence of the Method—that it was intended to personalize performances and liberate emotions within
the context of a reality already existing in the actor. In McQueen it led to fake impressions rather than true expressions of pain and personalization, and all the posturing that went with that falsity. (To many of McQueen’s teachers, good imitation Brando was better than no Brando at all.) For the rest of his career, McQueen would be saddled with the burden of trying to prove he was an “actor.” It led to Method-gone-mad disasters such as An Enemy of the People (George Schaefer, 1978) and narcissistic Method-gone-motorized failures such as Lee H. Katzin’s Le Mans (1971), the latter a dispirited failure that left McQueen’s spirit broken and his life, career, and finances in shambles.

  Eastwood, on the other hand, from the earliest days of his career, couldn’t have cared less about any method but the one that worked for him—looking good in front of a camera and trusting his director enough to know how to make him look good on-screen. His detached professionalism exemplified the angry “old Hollywood” joke that proliferated at the height of Brando-mania. A director tells an actor to cross the set, and the actor asks what his motivation is. “Because I told you to do it!” replies the director. Eastwood not only did it but learned from it, and laid out a plan for himself that would take him from acting to producing, to directing, to acting in films he produced and directed, to forming Malpaso, a production company that operated like a mini-studio and became his Hollywood powerhouse. Ultimately, Eastwood was a businessman who used films to make money, and he was good at doing both. He rarely challenged his own image, and he played essentially the same easy (for him) character over and over again, honing and perfecting it to broaden his films’ appeal to the everlasting delight of his enormous fan base.

  When Eastwood hit upon the character of Dirty Harry, a rebel detective with virtually no insight or visible sensitivity—a living manifestation of his Magnum .45 who enjoys blowing away bad guys (a contemporary version of the Man with No Name)—he churned it into a mini-franchise, and made a fortune doing so. And he never broke a sweat over how to “act” the character. “Acting” to Eastwood was, in truth, almost beside the point. Eastwood is known for first takes and making it to the golf course in time to play a full thirty-six. If Harry Callahan’s eyes are vacant, it’s because Eastwood didn’t feel the need to provide them with anything beyond his famous squint.

  McQueen, too, created his own company, Solar Productions, but was fatally hampered by the residue of his Method-induced integrity that insisted he make personal films to show off his acting abilities even if those films broadly distorted his persona to the point of unrecognizability (The Reivers and An Enemy of the People, to name two). Steve wanted to make a movie about auto racing, and built and operated Solar for the sole purpose of raising the money to make it the way he wanted, even as more commercial opportunities either passed him by or were let go by him.

  When McQueen made Bullitt, three years before Dirty Harry, it was the closest he would ever come to melding his turbulent personality with his on-screen persona, and the film was a huge success. However, McQueen felt the character of Frank Bullitt was too intense, too aloof, too internal, too Method for him to take it any further, and he turned away from what would have been a franchise that might have rivaled the success of Dirty Harry. He also feared he would become trapped within the same single-character gerbil cage his TV series Wanted: Dead or Alive had put him in, and that his reputation as a real actor would suffer as his reputation as a real action star grew. To McQueen, Bullitt was about acting, not money.

  To Eastwood, Dirty Harry was about money, not acting. With an eye toward a franchise, Eastwood saw Dirty Harry as a step into his future, a new beginning. And while Eastwood would happily turn Dirty Harry into an icon that would spark a social debate about violence in film and create for himself a lucrative franchise, McQueen never again made a movie that even remotely resembled Bullitt. Nonetheless, it remains his most original, complex, and memorable character and movie. Moreover, Dirty Harry was clearly derivative of Bullitt, the true original that has no easy or obvious cinematic antecedents. Clint Eastwood loves the game and knows how to play it. Steve McQueen hated the game.

  There are two other reasons McQueen’s body of work does not have the kind of staying power Eastwood’s does. First, from an auteurist perspective, while McQueen worked with a number of competent directors, including Robert Wise, John Sturges, Don Siegel, Sam Peckinpah, and Peter Yates, several of them more than once, his career suffered from almost never having worked with one whose personal vision was strong enough to push McQueen’s acting beyond the limits of his formidable star power. McQueen’s directors were simply not as forceful or charismatic behind the camera as he was in front of it. They couldn’t challenge, push, and stretch him; they didn’t know how to convert the tension between McQueen’s internal fires and external flourishes into memorable cinematic characters (as, early on, Sergio Leone had managed to do with Eastwood, creating his first franchise character, the Man with No Name).

  Without that type of directorial vision and guidance, over time McQueen’s intensity, inner turmoil, poor choice of scripts, and reliance on directors he knew he could control reduced him to the level of a two-dimensional actor, leaving his audiences to look for newer heroes. Ironically, the power he had accumulated through his best mainstream films allowed him to eventually run his career off the rails. One can only wonder what type of performance visionary auteurists such as John Ford or Howard Hawks or Francis Ford Coppola or even Sergio Leone could have delivered through Steve McQueen.

  Another factor is early death. That is why James Dean will forever be celebrated as a rebel without a cause while fewer and fewer audiences actually see the three features that made him a forceful and driven actor very much with a cause. After McQueen’s comparatively early passing, his image quickly ossified into that of the tough, good-looking, blue-eyed, two-fisted kid, the afterburn lasting in the mind’s eye of his fans far longer than the recollection of his actual performances. He is remembered today mostly for his boyish cuteness and physical grace in The Magnificent Seven; his all-American baseball-glove-and-motorcycle rebel POW in The Great Escape; his blue-eyed poker prowess in The Cincinnati Kid; his laser-intense car-crazy lawman in Bullitt; his psychotic, wife-beating ex-con in The Getaway; his obsessive prisoner in Papillon; and his heroic fireman in The Towering Inferno. Of these magnificent seven, not one casts him as a traditional Hollywood romantic lover boy, despite the fact that he was considered one of the major sex symbols of his day; audiences tend to remember his action films more than the early black-and-white romance-novels 1963’s Love with the Proper Stranger and 1965’s Baby the Rain Must Fall (both films directed by Robert Mulligan and produced by Alan Pakula). In the end, traditional action embalmed McQueen’s memory more than offbeat romance could keep it alive.

  Early death also robs movie stars of their deeper legacy when the circumstances of their passing take on far more (often ghoulish) importance than any of the films they made. Who remembers the details of any actual movies starring Rudolph Valentino? Or Jean Harlow? Or even Marilyn Monroe? They are the victims of their disturbingly early deaths rather than victors of their tragically forgotten films. Had Clint Eastwood died at fifty, the same age Steve McQueen was when he died, Eastwood never would have matured into the actor and director he did in his middle-to-late period. His career would have ended with a couple of spaghetti westerns and a few offbeat policiers; if he was to be remembered at all, it would be as the Man with No Name or Dirty Harry, rather than the deeper, more complex, talented, and unnerving director of such later classics as Unforgiven, Million Dollar Baby, Flags of Our Fathers, Letters from Iwo Jima, The Changeling, Gran Torino, Invictus, and others. It is both tragic and tantalizing that McQueen did not live long enough to direct, and direct himself, although he came tantalizingly close to getting there. Late in his career, McQueen wanted to take over the direction of his final film, The Hunter, but because of a tangle of union regulations, he couldn’t do it, and he never got another chance.

  Nonethel
ess, Steve McQueen remains one of our most perfect cinema gods. His unforgettable physical beauty, his soft-spoken manner, his tough but tender roughness, and his aching vulnerability were part Dean, part Brando, part Eastwood, part Paul Newman, but all McQueen. We see his screen legacy today in actors such as the sensitive and beautiful James Franco, the all-American good-bad boy Brad Pitt, the charming but elusive George Clooney, and the dagger-blue-eyed, icicle-veined Daniel Craig. All of them owe more than a little to McQueen’s style, manner, and attitude, but none can duplicate his unique blend of romantic aloofness and charismatic chill.

  In every movie he made—the great ones, as well as the misfires—his star-studded appeal could not be disguised. Perhaps Steve McQueen’s greatest talent was to be able to convince audiences that he was who he really wasn’t, even as he tried to prove to himself he wasn’t who he really was.

  Wanted: Dead or Alive, 1959.

  I left home at the age of fifteen because there really was no home.… I have had no education. I came from a world of brute force.

  —STEVE MCQUEEN

  TERRENCE STEVEN MCQUEEN WAS BORN MARCH 24, 1930, or thereabouts, in Beech Grove, Indiana, a suburban community in Marion County.1 His middle name was a joke given to him by the father he never knew. “Steven” was the senior McQueen’s favorite bookie and the name Steven preferred, Terrence being a bit too soft for him. Terrence William McQueen, Bill or Red to his friends, was a onetime navy biplane flier turned circus stuntman who had no idea what fatherhood was beyond the losing bet on a careless roll with a blond-haired, blue-eyed flapper he called Julia, whose real name was Jullian. He impregnated her the first night they met. He married her out of an uncharacteristic burst of honor, and an honest stab at normalcy that lasted all of six months. By then, the unusually handsome McQueen had packed his travel bags and left Jullian behind to take care of herself and the baby.