McQueen: The Biography

In fairness, though no ‘candyass scam’, as he later put it, Chino certainly wasn’t the borstal sometimes portrayed. The 200-acre campus was encircled not by bars and fences, but by cottages and open fields, and the regime stressed hard work, not punishment. It was an enlightened and even quite radical experiment in building character and self-respect. None of the ‘trusted’, as opposed to solitary, inmates was ever physically locked up. But if the security was lax, the story was sturdy, and duly found its way into the early McQueen fiction. ‘Ex-con’ was the fell phrase used in one biography. The reality of Boys Republic was more like a boarding school, with an elaborate system of rewards and fines. Its house motto was ‘Nothing Without Labor’ (almost too perfectly, though quite unconsciously, Himmlerian), the prime trade the manufacture of fancy Christmas wreaths for sale around the world. There was an emphasis on practical discipline. For the first time in his life Steve made his own bed. He learned to lay and clear a table. Most afternoons he was at work in the laundry, whose close, chemically scented walls still haunted him years later; McQueen would vividly recall that reek on his deathbed. The next time he ran away, over Gary Avenue and through Chino’s southern outskirts towards the mountains, the Republic’s principal gave him twenty-four hours before he called the law. They found Steve hiding out in a nearby stable. It was the second of five escape attempts, which appear to have been concerned less with actually absconding – he never made off by more than a mile or two – than with proving he could. The bolstering idea was rebellion.

Boys Republic would only be one part of McQueen’s breakout theme, first switched on with such voltage when he ran downtown to the bright lights of the Roxy. After Chino, he would jump ship and go AWOL from the Marines. He bailed out of literally scores of affairs – ‘fuck-flings’, he called them – as well as two marriages. Right to the end Steve would quite seriously talk of ‘getting away from it all’ on a sheep farm in Australia. Commercially, The Great Escape was in a long line with The Great St Louis Bank Robbery, Nevada Smith, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Getaway, Papillon and Tom Horn as variants of this – to him – magnificent obsession. Short of beating off Harrison Ford to The Fugitive, it’s hard to see what more McQueen could have done to make the point. When they hauled Steve back to the Republic for the fifth and final time, he actually knuckled down for a few weeks and was elected to the Boys Council. That last stretch of his year-plus there was always the one he later referred to nostalgically. But this seems to have been a ceasefire, not a real truce in the war between Steve and the powers that be. ‘I didn’t hang around with no crowd that dug suits,’ he confirmed.

Steve would spend fourteen unremittingly long, character-shaping months at Boys Republic. His mother never once came to visit him. One Saturday morning, not long after Berri himself left her, Julian rang Chino to say she wanted to take her son out for the weekend. Steve spent the whole day, from breakfast until supper, sitting on a chair by the front door. Towards evening he began to whimper quietly, raking his hands up and down his dust-caked overalls. The visit was finally cancelled hours late, and Steve sent back to the dormitory with a brusqueness that turned mere disappointment into mad fury. ‘I remember what I did that night,’ he’d say – namely went on the rampage: the cottage door with its sliding panel, the walls, bed, table and windows were all beaten and spat on. To face, on his own, not only incarceration but now rank betrayal was a formative experience. When Julian did at last send for him to join her, at her new lair in New York, he left Chino at a clip, a bone-thin teenager in blue denim and an institutional haircut, with the general aspect of a ‘whipped cur’.

After a week-long bus journey Steve arrived at the Port Authority depot in Manhattan on 22 April 1946. It was another catacomb. There was the familiar brief, stilted reunion with Julian, now technically a widow (Berri had died just before the divorce went through) and living with a man, also on the fringes of the film trade, named Lukens. The three of them walked in the rain down Seventh Avenue to Barrow Street. As usual, Julian’s new apartment had no pretension to elegance. An iron gate gave on to foul-smelling steps, the stone worn to the thinness of paper, leading down to a sort of crypt. This subterranean pit was divided from its neighbour by a narrow barred window, or squint; through the iron grille two men could be seen lying on a bed in each other’s arms. Lukens mumbled, ‘Here’s your place,’ and pushed the boy forward. Steve peered through onto this scene and, a moment later, started to cry again. At the same time he began to shake his head, apparently in violent refusal, but was prevented by the bars from making the gesture at all adequately. It was another captive moment. McQueen’s final response to these dire living arrangements was theatrical: he threw up. Then he took to his heels and ran up Seventh, round a bend and effectively out of his mother’s life for ever.

When Julian died nearly twenty years later, Steve McQueen was a rich and famous movie star. The triumph of perseverance and reconstruction that had, almost incredibly, led to this coup had begun in 1933, when she first took him to the Roxy in Indianapolis. He owed her, in one sense, everything. But she almost destroyed him, too, and was single-handedly responsible for most of the ‘shit’ of his early life. The emotionally stunted boy duly grew up into a man clear-eyed about the precariousness of love, as ‘tight as a hog’s ass in fly season’ towards women, says one of the Thomsons. There was a vampiric duality to McQueen’s sex life. By day, he was the picture of reasonableness – usually or always courteous to the ladies. By night, though, Steve sluiced new blood into his dark self through a series of fuck-flings. Promiscuously, quite often cruelly. Once or twice violently. ‘He treated females badly,’ notes Gahl.

McQueen’s ambivalence on the subject was legendary. Whatever he thought about them as ‘chicks’, he distrusted them as people, and his suspicious mind frequently crossed over into that less attractive realm, paranoia. Some of this equivocal mood was on show at Julian’s funeral in October 1965. Steve, acting as officiant, variously ranted, raved, knelt, implored and suddenly wept, before looking down and weakly muttering the word ‘Why?’ into the open grave. In later years he always spoke of her in the same bewildered tone. McQueen’s mother could never lie in peace; she could be dug up precipitously, her praises might be sung – but more often, her old sins would be remembered.

With nowhere particular to go Steve took in all New York had to offer, and he liked it. He won a few dollars in pool tournaments, bought a used Vespa and befriended the streetwalkers and other people of the night. He already knew something about sex. One plausible but unproven theory is that, long before that dungeon in Greenwich Village, he’d been in his share of deviant physical dramas, even that he was homosexually raped at Chino. As McQueen later recalled it in his dramatic hint, ‘I lost it big-time when I was [living] in California,’ thus leaving all his biographers to speculate on the identity of the other party – a boy? an older woman? – who initiated one of the twentieth century’s red-hot lovers.

According to a New Yorker named Jules Mowrer, who still lives in the city, ‘I met Steve McQueen in the summer of ’46 and wound up, when they were out, at my parents’ brownstone uptown. “Nice place,” he’d say. I always got the feeling Steve knew life could be better for him. He yearned for something more.’

Something more, at that moment, turned out to be sex. ‘Steve had a broken heart. That was the reason for all the attitude. And I think it made him hard – what I mean is, I think it gave him that edge. For a fifteen-year-old [sic], he knew exactly what he was about…I remember Steve took all my clothes off and casually looked me up and down. He posed me, and it was made clear that I was only one of his harem.’ (The voyeur routine resurfaced when McQueen’s later partners were told to ‘sit for me’ and his wives’ bodies were subjected to minute inspection.) ‘Steve was a dear, even if he rushed things a bit in bed, sweet and with a dozy smile like a little boy who’d just woken up. Naughtiness and innocence – that was my Mac.’ McQueen told Mowrer that he’d lost his virginity to another teenage girl ‘in an alley someplace’ behind one of the Silver Lake night spots. Moreover, anyone who had regularly hitched his way along Sunset into Hollywood was unlikely to be a stranger to ‘straight’ prostitution.

Mowrer remembers Steve ‘hunched up, no money, no food’, leaving the brownstone for the last time to ‘go do the world’. In a bar in Little Italy he duly fell in with two comic-opera chancers, Ford and Tinker, who stood him several drinks before asking him to sign a scrap of paper. After the hangover died down, McQueen found himself in the merchant marine. He shipped out, bound for Trinidad, on board the SS Alpha, and jumped it a week later in Santo Domingo. There Steve lived in a bordello for three months. It was a heady scene: a thick vine jungle lay between his room and the ocean. The cathouse itself, made of palm fronds and tin scraps, provided viable winter digs in return for odd jobs and physically extracting the customers’ dues. Something similar happened after Steve worked his way back to the Texas panhandle. His burgeoning career as a towel-boy in the Port Arthur brothel was, in turn, cut short by a police raid. Next he signed on as a ‘grunt’ labourer in the oilfields around Waco. He sold pen-and-pencil sets in a medicine show. January 1947 found him starting out as a lumberjack in Ontario, Canada. There, with a partial reversion to his original name, he emerged as ‘Stevie McQueen’. Several other such stints followed, including prizefighting and petty crime. If he never thought about acting, that must have been the one job he failed to tackle, though McQueen’s permanent audition for the role of Jack Kerouac hints otherwise. ‘I got around,’ he understated.

While spending an Easter break in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, on 7 April 1947, Steve wandered into a bar and saw a recruitment poster advertising the US Marines. This appealed to his sense of adventure, not to say of the ridiculous. Exactly three weeks later, after one final binge in New York, he became Cadet McQueen, serial number 649015, rising to Private First Class and training as a tank-driver. It wasn’t so much the breadth as the speed of Steve’s apprenticeship that struck friends. As he quite accurately put it, ‘I was an old man by the time I was seventeen.’

After boot camp, McQueen was sent to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina. Here he carried out basic training, as well as such extra duties as lugging beds, bedding and clothes baskets for the officers when they moved to new quarters. It was the ‘same old shit’ as Chino, he griped. After three frustrating and uneventful months as a private soldier, Steve was ready to desert. The sole surviving photo of him in khaki shows a teenager with a face so taut his garrison cap is sliding down it; scowling, thick through the shoulders and chest but cinched at the waist, Steve looked like a welterweight boxer with submerged psychopathic tendencies. Colleagues remember his legs were constantly restless and his feet ‘gave nervous jerks’. Below, shuffling energy; above, coolness and poise, a certain menacing handsomeness. His best friend in the corps recalls how ‘that look of Steve’s bothered you until you got to know him, and then it bothered you some more…There was nobody better in the world to have on your side, and nobody worse to cross, than McQueen.’

Speaking of this era to the writer William Nolan, Steve described his technique for dealing with a platoon bully:

His name was Joey, and he was always with this tough-looking buddy of his. Real big dude. These two were like glued together, and I knew I couldn’t handle both of ’em at once. So I played it smart. I hid inside the head until Joey came in alone to take a piss. I said, ‘Hello, pal,’ and when he turned around with his fly unzipped, I punched him in the chops.

After that, harassment never visited Private McQueen.

Another marine walked into the barrack hut one day and found McQueen alone on his bunk, writing a letter to Julian. What struck the other man, whom Steve called over to help with his grammar, was the opening statement, scrawled in an ink that looked uncommonly like blood – ‘IM MY OWN MAN NOW, fuggit!’ – and which went on from there to get angry. There would never be a more accurate or succinct description of McQueen’s three-year hitch in uniform. Those first four words, in particular, expressed the whole throughline of his career. His own man. Fuggit. While most of the grunts tore about the camp in quick-moving, impetuous gangs, seeing almost nothing, Steve was watchful, curious, even as the rawest recruit, about the way people behaved. The military, as a rule, humiliates the individual, but never so McQueen. His rebellion turned on the familiar devices of sarcasm, cunning and obliging charm – Why didn’t he wash everyone’s jeeps? ‘I’ll make ’em glow!’ – again and again.

A note of satire, needless to say, lurked just below the smile. ‘Steve was always on the side of Steve,’ is one ex-marine’s fond memory. Yet another contemporary account of Camp Lejeune has McQueen ‘marching up and down, mumbling obscenities and doing hilarious impersonations of the officers under his breath’. He was a gifted mimic, and now military ritual was feeding his inborn talent as fast as he could hone it. Not surprisingly, Steve got involved in his unit’s biannual revue, and in later years he always felt that his time in the service had made it natural for him to ‘hang with show types’, and even to join them.

Gambling, whether for high stakes or laughs, played a large part in 2nd Recruit Battalion life. McQueen played too, but only when there was cash on hand instead of chips. Poker was a key factor in Steve’s judgement of his friends; he was said to form an opinion of a new recruit’s ‘mud’ – his basic code – only after he’d played cards with him. McQueen was one of these games’ fiercest competitors and one of their most engaging personalities. He was highly disciplined at the table, as well as a natural bluff – cool-headed, daring and independent. His only interest was in winning, but his best friend at Camp Lejeune insists that ‘Steve would frequently, and on the QT, slip back what he’d taken off you…The key factor was always whether or not you’d had the balls to “see” him instead of folding. That kind of style counted for a lot with McQueen.’

Besides the fighting and gambling, Steve’s only other long-term legacy from the military was his cancer. The exact illness that led him to Dr Kelley was mesothelioma, an acute form of asbestos poisoning. In those days the stuff was everywhere, including in the tanks he drove at Camp Lejeune. It was also used for such insulation as there was in his barracks. In one sorry incident (part of a punishment for his exploding a can of baked beans) McQueen was ordered to strip and refit a troop ship’s boiler room. Most of the pipes there were lagged with asbestos. The air was so heavy with it, Steve would say, ‘You could actually see the shit as you breathed it.’

Ample evidence, including his own, documents that McQueen’s visceral mistrust of ‘suits’ continued to harden in the Marines. Free, fast-living, for him all discipline offended. Specifically, Steve wanted no such austere figure as his CO interfering in the schedule he meant to set himself. Long experience had taught that with any brass restraint, even ‘shit’, was inevitable. As McQueen encountered more authority, the bones of a deeply individualistic, anarchic view of life emerged more clearly. He was no ideologue. Rather, Steve was romantically attached to certain personal principles which weren’t necessarily owned by the left or right. One army buddy recalls him ‘reading his rights’, as he put it: the right to drink, to get laid, to race bikes and to tool around in his souped-up jeep. With that agenda a clash with authority was ordained, and duly came. From then on, Steve’s insubordination became proverbial. The one moral or intellectual datum it brought with it was a programmed response – one of his crisp variants of ‘Fuck you’ – to being cooped up. McQueen hated fences.

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?’ (#ulink_be33ce11-f2d9-5aa1-adc1-fcb94aedf521)

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?’