McQueen: The Biography

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.

The losses killed whatever hopes there might have been that Steve would square his past. Like the Jaguar fish-tailing down the canyon lane, he began to accelerate now.

One late afternoon in May 1959 Steve and a heavily pregnant Neile went shopping for baby clothes on Rodeo Drive. It was a moment of real crisis for them, since one of McQueen’s flings had recently taken to phoning the house and Steve evidently felt the need to confess. According to Neile, ‘For the next few days he brought me flowers and presents and cards. For a while I was so hurt that I refused to speak to him, but eventually we again became a happy couple.’ On this particular hot spring evening Neile began to blanch as she stood at the sweater counter. She fainted away in Steve’s arms just as a young fan approached, her own face wreathed in goofy goodwill:

‘I know it’s a bad time, Mr McQueen. But could I please have your autograph?’

As Steve recalled it, he went ‘fucking nuts’, raving at the girl while simultaneously helping to revive his wife. Neile soon recovered, but McQueen never willingly signed his name for anyone again. It was, for him, the first of several hopeless gestures to privacy.

The McQueens’ daughter, Terry Leslie, was born in Los Angeles that 5 June. With the actor’s instinct for detail, Steve made notes on his first child that night: ‘Oh God, looks like me. Isnt she smart, though – just perfect.’ A boy, Chadwick Steven, followed on 28 December 1960. Steve’s son inherited his mother’s looks and soon settled into his father’s lifestyle. ‘Always smells like hot brakes,’ McQueen would say of Chad approvingly. It was a neat simile. The amount of engineering in Steve’s conversation was impressive. Cars and parts were always apt to have a symbolic importance. Being ‘full of juice’ was as high a tribute as he ever paid to man or machine. Like many of his fictional heroes, McQueen, too, sensed an affinity between happiness and hardware.

But Steve in the flesh kept rather less to the straight and narrow than one of his famous Porsches. Weeks after Terry’s birth, he was keeping company again in the hotel room downtown. He also began entering sports car heats around LA – he won his first ever event, held at Santa Barbara airport – despite promising Neile he’d stop as soon as their first child was born. Instead, semi-professional racing became a sub-plot of Steve’s career; whenever he got behind a wheel he suddenly realised he no longer had to defer to any ‘fucking suit’ – he had what he called the ‘big jolt’, the thrilling alchemist’s gift of turning an inert object into something else. And racing provided a sort of equaliser, particularly for a man with McQueen’s nagging sense of guilt that his day job was ‘candyass’. ‘It gave me a fresh identity,’ he said. ‘I was no longer just an actor, I was a guy competing. And it was real important to me – to have this separate identity.’ The other thing both racing and fatherhood gave Steve was insomnia. Already having trouble unwinding at night, Neile recalls how he snapped when ‘a work crew put up a big new street light which shone right into our bedroom’. When the City refused to move the light, McQueen solved the problem by promptly shooting it out.

One lunchtime that same summer Steve rode his Bonneville into Bud Ekins’s motorcycle shop on Ventura Boulevard. Ekins, both as a dealer and an all-round biker, was the very best of the breed – a triple-A rider who was gruff, cool and toadied up to no one, including McQueen. ‘I knew Steve from Wanted and thought he was a pest. He used to hang around the shop.’ Gradually, however, Ekins began to warm to the man he describes as ‘totally paranoid…Not only didn’t Steve trust people, he kept them separate from each other. You’d never meet his other friends.’ A complicated man, McQueen – even then, an embarrassment of paradoxes. ‘Basically, Steve couldn’t ever make up his mind whether he was a big star or a little kid made good. I always remember how he’d put on a fake beard and shades in order not to be hassled, then get pissed when no one recognised him. Other times, when they did come up for autographs, he’d flip.’

Gradually, this serene middle-aged outlaw began to notice key differences between his new buddy McQueen and the other groupies who passed their time on Ventura Boulevard. There was, first of all, his natural flair. The two started going desert-riding together, and Ekins found that ‘Steve was good – great reflexes and fast, even if reckless. He’d hit everything en route.’ Two additional traits grew out of and complemented that talent: an intense curiosity and a slow but profound ability to bond. McQueen wanted to know all that he could about motorcycle history, and he’d ‘try to get a rise’ from people until he narrowed the field down to a few trusted cronies. Ekins evidently passed the test, because he and Steve were close for the next twenty-one years.

Then there was Don Gordon, a thirty-year-old actor living near McQueen in the Hollywood hills. ‘Steve would literally go by the front door on his way to work and sort of announce himself. It happened over two weeks, in four phases. First, he’d just drive by and stare; not a word. Then he’d drive by and wave. Next he’d drive by more slowly and smile. Finally, he actually stopped and said, “Hey, I’ve seen you on TV.” I said the same, and that’s how we got tight.’ Soon enough, bolstered by the power of his ratings, McQueen offered Gordon a guest spot on Wanted. ‘In those days Steve was still groping his way through the maze, discovering what did and didn’t work for him. For instance, that smile and a particular kind of walk were in. Surplus dialogue was out.’ Yet when he talked to Gordon about bikes, the mouth that chewed fastidiously on lines like bits of gristle suddenly relaxed and grinned, ‘Beat you to the top, man.’

Once you got used to him, you found he was a very nice person.

McQueen’s perfectionism and his undying paranoia did for him with at least some of his peers. But, for others, the over-intense actor was but a ‘Cut’ away from the passionate friend. ‘I loved the man,’ says Gordon. ‘Many was the night he’d come by late, I’d grab my leathers and we’d literally ride off into the hills. Great times.’ As for how Steve in turn treated his friends, nine years later Gordon was invited out of the blue to read for a film being shot at Warners. The title was Bullitt. When Gordon tried to thank McQueen for getting him the job, ‘Steve looked me in the eye and said, “I had nothing to do with it.” That was typical of the guy. It was endearing, and it was also total crap. Steve didn’t want me to feel beholden to him.’

That same summer of 1959 MGM put together a budget for Never So Few, the screen version of Tom Chamales’s World War II novel set in Burma. It was a solid melodrama starring Frank Sinatra and, as was his wont, a few of his clan, including Sammy Davis Jr. After Davis talked himself out of the job, Stan Kamen at William Morris rang his own friend the director John Sturges. Kamen not only had a replacement for Davis in mind. He told Sturges that he could get him Hollywood’s ‘next Bogie’ for ten weeks at just $2500 per week.

McQueen then had to report to Sinatra, who laid it on the line. ‘Steve, baby,’ he said, ‘here’s how it’s gonna be. I turn up, I say the lines, I fuck off back to the hotel. They got any light left, I’ll tell ’em to focus on you. Dig it?’

McQueen dug it.

Perhaps the most winning quality of Never So Few lay not in its deadpan, pre-ironic swashbuckling, nor in the jungle locations (largely faked in Hollywood and Hawaii), nor even in Sinatra himself, but in the gum-chewing Ringa, the renegade army driver played by McQueen. He was brilliant. More than a year in front of the camera had taught Steve how to react. But his first appearance, leaping down from the jeep with a feline grace and giving his signature crinkly grin, was so naturally deft, and the impact so sudden, that if Gene Kelly had done it audiences couldn’t have been more impressed. At the New York premiere Sturges heard people actually gasp at the scene. McQueen photographed like a god, yet basically carried and conducted himself like a regular guy. Somewhat taut, watchful, but with a touch of shyness, he was never more human. Steve was so cool and lithe, with his muscle shirt specially cut for him by Neile, that gnarled, goateed Sinatra never really got to grips with being the picture’s star. I’ll tell ’em to focus on you. Sturges and MGM also picked up on McQueen instantly, the studio signing him to a non-exclusive contract. Finally, Steve made a friend of the assistant director Bob Relyea, who worked closely with him throughout the sixties. After twelve years of puzzled study and a further thirty since they split, Relyea gives his wry assessment of McQueen’s career. ‘Steve in some respects – the way he was always on his toes – was the same offstage and on. But he did more than just hold his character. For all the defensiveness and deadly mood swings, McQueen had the best instincts I’ve ever known for what he could and couldn’t get away with. His choice of scripts was masterly. The man was a genius at planning his next move.’

Mood swings a problem? Some would say they were Steve’s meal ticket. Critics loved the gregarious loner, the anti-heroic McQueen; his family and few friends were proud of the ‘regular guy’ who liked nothing more than to swig beer and talk mechanics. No one, however, ever responded more enthusiastically to Steve’s taste for low comedy than Sinatra did. It matched his own – no small accolade.

If a staccato, comradely bond characterised the two men’s relationship in Never, then the same quality regularly surfaced off screen. McQueen and Sinatra were ‘both children emotionally’, as Steve put it. One afternoon on location McQueen was diligently reading his script when Sinatra crept up behind him and slipped a lit firecracker into his belt. After the explosion had died down, Steve levelled his prop tommy gun and let off a full clip at Sinatra’s chest. At that range the paper wadding from the blanks actually bruised him; the director ‘heard Frank gasp out’. After that there was a long silence, finally broken by Sinatra’s admiring laughter. ‘You got stones, kid,’ he said. From then on the two of them could be seen zipping off to one bar or another, a surfeit of Y chromosomes rasping along in a liberated jeep.

Every account of the Never shoot depicts it as a summer of frat-house antics, dissipation and frequent practical japes, usually involving fireworks. It was the summer in which Steve, in a fit of beery hi-jinks, detonated an ‘entire fourth of July show’ inside Sinatra’s dressing room. In some versions, Sinatra was tickled by this display; in others, he emerged singed and ranting, like Hitler after the generals’ plot of 1944, and began demanding blood. It was the summer in which the stars nearly killed Loren Janes by blowing up his trailer, dragged another crew member to the edge of a cliff, promising to push him off, and threatened to dunk Charles Bronson, claiming there was no danger since, like his acting, he was ‘all wood’. It was the summer in which McQueen, banned by MGM from riding his motorbike on set, asked if he could borrow Dean Jones’s Triumph – and Jones said yes, only to have Sturges appear later and tell him, ‘McQueen’s just driven through a fence; now you’re both banned.’ Above all it was the summer in which Sinatra’s first words on screen to Steve – ‘You interest me, Ringa’ – echoed real life. He’d found a protégé who was tough, playful and bad-assed; and that was certainly part of the truth.

In the end, salty performances kept Never So Few from sinking in its own melodramatic plot. One reviewer called it a ‘schizoid war romancer that, when it comes to split personalities, is up there with Sinatra himself’. Sadly, he was wrong: Never So Few had precious little personality to split. McQueen’s own sense of humour and spirit, at least, was well done. There was a steadiness there which carried him through. All his war films would manage the rare feat of combining rebellion and charm in equal parts. Cocky, unfeasibly bronzed and swaggering, McQueen’s Ringa announced the arrival of a major talent.

The comer.

Sinatra, says Bob Relyea, ‘encouraged Steve to be the next officially tolerated bad boy in town’. The two men and their families were inseparable that year. Sinatra and the McQueens spent a week together in New York, where they ate at Louie’s and took innocent pleasure in demonstrating how far each had come. One evening McQueen stood at the window of his hotel suite, pointed a finger down Fifth Avenue and said, ‘It’s a lot longer from Barrow Street to here than you think.’ That Saturday night the McQueens went backstage at Sinatra’s homecoming concert in Atlantic City. Steve was mistaken for one of the band and mobbed. ‘That’s it!’ Sinatra remembered him yelling. ‘That’s what I want.’ Feverishly excited, Steve and Neile then flew to a preview of Never So Few in Hollywood. As the final credits rolled, Sinatra turned to McQueen, slapped him on the back and said, ‘It’s all yours, kid.’ Neile recalls running across the parking lot, two figures whose doll-like smallness gave them the air of kids breaking curfew ‘beside ourselves with glee. “The pope’s just blessed you,” I told Steve, and then we hit Cyrano’s to celebrate.’ Thanks to luck, talent and timing, McQueen’s dues-paying years were over. Hollywood’s idea of a hero was ruthlessly tumbling forward, and Steve triumphantly captured the moment. After Never So Few he became the consensus superstar-in-waiting. ‘I remember going to a party where all the A-list flocked around Steve,’ says Neile. ‘Jennifer Jones and Rita Hayworth were both jostling to get a look at the “next big thing”.’

They weren’t alone. Over the coming few months an unlikely friendship developed between the sixty-nine-year-old Hedda Hopper and the ‘young gun’, as she dotingly called him. At eleven in the morning, as soon as Hopper awoke, she began her day by phoning Steve on the Wanted set. The venerable columnist and one-time vamp followed down a line from Powell and Niven as stars of an earlier era for whom McQueen now became a kind of mascot. ‘He excites,’ she said. ‘I knew he had a past after one look at that hardened face.’ Evidently, he also had an effortless kind of glamour from the rear – ‘such an arrogant back’, Hopper added. As well as promoting McQueen nonstop in print, she cannily advised him to turn down Sinatra’s Execution of Private Slovik and Ocean’s Eleven by posing the stark question, ‘Do you want to be a Rat Pack flunky, or say no to Frank?’

Say no to Frank.

Steve returned the favour by, allegedly, taking Hopper to bed. He always referred to her around town as a ‘great lady’, often dropping a syllable amongst friends. After her death in 1966 lavish, black-bordered tributes to Hopper appeared in all the trade press. The mourner was anonymous. But Hopper’s staff, by dint of detective work, tracked him down. It was McQueen.

In the autumn of 1959 Steve reluctantly went back to Wanted and the small tube. It’s difficult today to imagine the power and the precise chemistry he and Josh Randall had together – and how receptive pre-Vietnam America was to the adage ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’. The initially sparse audience for McQueen’s frontier show had first made it a cult and then a phenomenon. By the end of its second season Wanted was firmly atop the ratings and sponsors were beating a trail to CBS’s door.

Steve responded with a new frenzy of bickering with the series’ producers. For him, there was no inherent contradiction between titanic personal ambition and a genuine commitment to getting it right. Although he asked for, and won, a pay rise – now $100,000 a year from all sources – his real leverage went towards upping the quality of the show. The quickest annoyance duly came with the arrival, on set, of a suit. McQueen often seemed to conflate all his authority figures into one vast anti-Steve conspiracy. ‘This is jive,’ he’d tell Dick Powell. Or: ‘You’re twisting my melon, man – screwing me.’ Once, on being told an episode was behind schedule, McQueen carefully counted off ten pages of script, ripped them out and snarled, ‘Now we’re on track.’ The pages never went back in. He ranted when CBS talked about changing Wanted’s transmission time, then ranted when they didn’t and a rival network scheduled Leave It to Beaver in the same slot, inviting viewers to choose between Steve and one of America’s pet sitcoms. Most of all, he ranted about Josh Randall not being ‘real’. Often he would break off and snarl at the malevolent figures behind the lights:

‘Bullshit!’

As McQueen told one of the show’s writers, Bill Nolan, ‘I wanted to play [Randall]…as a guy trying to do a dangerous, unglamorous job with a minimum of fuss. But the Four Star dudes kept trying to turn him into a jaw-busting, sure-shot hero. I had some bad times with them over this.’ Steve’s manager Hilly Elkins confirms that ‘McQueen’s wars weren’t about bigger trailers or more lines – usually they were about less, but better lines.’ The view that Steve simply tried too hard was a common one amongst detractors. ‘McQueen always wanted it to be Hamlet,’ a well-known Wanted guest star says. ‘That was his strength, but at a certain point it became a weakness. It was only a cowboy show, for God’s sake.’

‘The Factory’, with its 5 a.m. calls and work-sheets, was McQueen’s great theme, but there were rewards too. With his combined big- and small-screen earnings, Steve had bought land and blue-chip stock in Dow Chemical, as well as a new Lotus Mark XI. Early in 1960 he formed his own production company and began to talk of developing a racing film with the title Le Mans. This particular obsession would tick steadily away for the next ten years, at which point it promptly exploded. ‘Steve was so up around then,’ says an ex-family friend; ‘he was twenty-nine, tanned, rich and had that manic zip. The guy was fresh goods.’

There were also some darkly revelatory moments around the house on Skyline Drive, frequently after McQueen had overdone his beloved Old Milwaukee or Peruvian flake. He never forgot a slight, real or imagined, wrote off anyone who crossed him and, as Neile says, ‘trusted exactly one soul in the world – me’. Steve’s paranoia could be as heated as his affection. ‘If anybody hurts my family, I’m gonna put them down in a little black book.’

One balmy evening in late 1960 Steve, his young daughter and their dog went for a walk up the canyon road. Far below them in the valley the jumble of downtown LA and Century City were strung with Christmas lights. In the spirit of the season, McQueen knocked on the door of a neighbour, one Edmund George, to make peace. Recently, there had been complaints about Steve ‘partying’ and ‘scaring the shit out of the street’ by gunning the Lotus on his midnight rounds to and from Hollywood. When the neighbour came out and his attitude wasn’t satisfactory, McQueen socked him in the mouth to make it so. Out of sheer shock and frustration, George allegedly retaliated by punching not Steve but his own wife. Meanwhile, the dog went berserk. McQueen then strolled the few yards back to his house where, sure enough, he was promptly hit with a lawsuit. (It was thrown out of court several months later.) A tangled contradiction for a man who continually wanted his TV series to be ‘less violent’.

Why did Wanted succeed?

‘Impact,’ says Don Gordon. ‘A fresh approach. Steve wasn’t a worn-out ham. The very few great screen actors know to break through that veil between them and the camera. They just do. It was McQueen’s greatest strength and his greatest hassle – he busted his ass. He worked. That’s what people forget when they talk about a big star.’ Among the ‘business’ Steve would perfect was his trademark, swivel-fire technique with the Mare’s Laig and various other quickdraw stunts he practised hours on end. He researched countless books on the correct 1890s-era wardrobe. There were his other finely-tuned mannerisms, like the way he walked or mounted a horse. McQueen would give certain scenes an hour or two while he pondered a move. Cast and crew got used to hanging restlessly on until the spirit moved him, at which point he would emerge at a run, once skidding at top speed into a prop cactus as he bawled excitedly:

‘Roll ’em.’

Once an idea was lodged in McQueen’s mind, he was raring to go and, as soon as the sets were ready, plunged in with his ‘manic zip’. Beneath it all was a hard unsaid truth. He was manic, he was depressive. The imitative, or impressionable, in Steve was there too. He was still given to his cherished Brando and Dean impersonations. Often it came through off set, as in his hi-jinks with Sinatra. And yet, by 1960, one look at the hardened glint in those shaggy-dog eyes told you there was something there rather deeper than mere mimicry. McQueen had unbeatable film sense. As Eli Wallach, who worked with him that year, says, ‘Steve’s great skill – the word genius comes to mind – lay in being observant. He could always find what it had been in an earlier scene that led, logically, to what he was doing just then. Nobody quite grasped the poetry in the flow of film like him.’ McQueen’s latter-day refusal to truck with decorative flourishes, but simply to wire back the facts, was also what struck Gordon. ‘Jimmy Cagney said it best: “Walk into the scene, hit your marks, look the other guy in the eye and tell the truth.” Steve did that in spades.’

McQueen made it big that year, his thirtieth, presiding over the birth of modern cool. Before there was Clint Eastwood or Jack Nicholson or Robert De Niro or Bruce Willis, before Sean Connery first suited up as Bond or Gene Hackman perfected his common touch in The French Connection, Steve cast his eye over the house and determined that both men and women would go for a ‘type’: someone who, if he got any more virile, could have joined the World Sumo Federation, yet who also had a heart. One half of the audience saw the icy surface and thought they could melt it. The other half merely applauded. As the critic Barry Norman says, ‘It was a clever unisex appeal. Males wanted to be him – the females wanted to bed him, which a fair number duly did.’ The character ‘Steve McQueen’ was a definite artefact of the mass market.

McQueen was up for three films that year, Ocean’s Eleven, Pocketful of Miracles and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, all of which he walked on or vetoed. His Wanted contract allowed him only the vague option to take outside work at ‘mutually convenient times’ for Four Star and CBS. Then Steve heard that John Sturges was applying the model of a Josh Randall type to the big screen in a version of Akira Kurosawa’s film The Seven Samurai. Sturges’s model was Westernised, starring seven gunslingers hired by a Mexican border town to halt periodic forays on the pueblo by bandits. By the time McQueen first got wind of it, the project already had a long and chequered history. The producer Walter Mirisch had been developing the story with his old friend Yul Brynner for six years when, between takes on The Guns of Navarone, Anthony Quinn filed suit alleging that he, not they, owned the rights to the 1954 screenplay. Mirisch and Brynner then had their own falling out about money. On several occasions the Mexican government came close to torpedoing the whole project on the grounds that ‘bad things’, such as torture and buggery, were done in Sturges’s original adaptation. Clearly, The Magnificent Seven wasn’t destined to be a standard oater. McQueen saw his character Vin as more sombre and internal than Josh Randall, at least as envisaged by Four Star. He quickly signed up.

Four Star acknowledged the news, then hit Steve with a hammer-blow. They refused to release him from his Wanted shooting schedule. Dick Powell waved away the very idea that a successful movie star could impress himself on the series and the ratings. It seemed as though McQueen’s first real shot at the ‘brass ring’ would be lost. Before he had time to get the snarl off his face, he was already doing the mental arithmetic. He was a few weeks shy of thirty, the age by which he’d promised to ‘get some sugar out of the business’, and he was stuck there, in The Factory, atop Ringo and greased up like Tom Mix; playing cowboy ‘for fucking seven-fifty a week’ when Candyland lay just over the horizon; wondering whether he should, after all, book three tickets for Australia. ‘For me and my ol’ lady and my kid,’ he told David Niven. ‘I’m tired of the whole scam.’

‘He really meant it,’ says Hilly Elkins. Elkins appealed to Niven and Powell, who referred him back to Four Star’s manager Tom McDermott. The two men had known each other for years in New York. ‘I met with McDermott and told him, “Steve has a real opportunity and it’ll bring only good PR to the series. Give him a couple of weeks’ leeway.”’ That was cut off with an angry chop of McDermott’s hand. He reddened, glared at Elkins and delivered the blow.

‘Fuck you. McQueen’s paid for.’

As Elkins caught his breath, McDermott rushed on, trying to convince himself as much as Elkins that ‘We own McQueen. We made him and we can break him.’ A long pause greeted this remark, broken by Elkins saying, ‘Tom, you may want to think it over. I hate to hear you say that, because Steve’s so emotionally set on the film. You don’t want an unhappy actor.’

‘What in the name of fucking shit does that mean?’

Elkins groaned.

‘Be reasonable, Tom. All I said was, You don’t want McQueen unhappy.’

‘Well, fuck you.’

Then, according to Elkins, ‘McDermott went completely out of control, prodding his fingers towards my face, yelling, “Don’t try those fucking Mafia tactics with me,” and “I’ll take you and your client out and kick both your asses.” He told me to put my coat on and leave. As an afterthought, I asked him if he really proposed to kick Steve McQueen’s ass. And that was the end of the interview.’

Elkins drove back to his office, picked up the phone to McQueen, who happened to be visiting Boston with Neile, and told him, ‘Have an accident.’

‘Steve, being Steve, promptly rammed his rental car into the side of a bank, narrowly missing a cop on the way. It made the press. McQueen – who was completely unhurt – came back to LA in a neck brace, and I dutifully told Four Star that their golden boy was laid up and unable to work. Next thing, McDermott was back on the line screaming, “I know this is a fake, motherfucker, but you’ve got your film.”’ Whatever McDermott thought, Elkins was playing tough, so tough that he renegotiated Steve’s contract. He had Four Star double his salary as well as his stock in the company. After the yelling had died down, he then rang the Mirisch brothers and upped McQueen’s fee for The Magnificent Seven. ‘I told ’em, “This is a guy who’s going to be huge and I’ll let you have an eighteen-month option on him.” They went for it. Steve did the film and the rest is history.’