McQueen: The Biography

Shooting began early that spring in and around Cuernavaca, fifty miles outside Mexico City. McQueen headed south, Harry Mirisch recalled, ‘like a bat out of hell bound for glory’. He arrived at the Hotel Jacaranda alone on a Monday evening, his wife remaining behind to nurse Terry and hear more of McDermott’s convulsions. By Tuesday morning he was in bed with one of the Indian extras. McQueen loved Mexico: after his honeymoon there, he’d often driven back and he once offhandedly spoke of settling down to ‘live, die and be buried’ there. In Cuernavaca the streets were lined with strolling mariachi players and locals eager to entertain the famous star.

At the same time, McQueen was preparing for what he rightly knew could be his breakthrough, constantly lobbying Sturges for more ‘juice’. He had exactly seven lines, but they, too, were magnificent, including ‘Never rode shotgun on a hearse before,’ and ‘We deal in lead, friend.’ Steve’s tantrums on location were both logical and unnervingly dislocated. A full litany followed on his character, Vin, written, he complained, as ‘a kind of ass-wipe to Yul’. But McQueen was shrewd enough to play on Sturges’s vanity, and the director soon became his knowing patsy. With Brynner partly footing the bill, The Magnificent Seven, Sturges promised, would ‘give Steve the camera’.

McQueen’s relentless preoccupation with McQueen took various forms on set. While others cheerfully improvised, Steve took the attitude that the stage was a laboratory for precisely calibrating each setup. He spent hours correcting and editing his own lines in a maze of inserts, arrows, zigzags and fussy, infinitesimal revisions. That was for starters. McQueen liked every shot to be a completely rehearsed and blocked routine where each step and nuance was perfected down to the last detail. Eli Wallach, playing the heavy, remembers pulling his pistol on McQueen during a run-through. ‘Hold it exactly at that angle, not an inch left or right in the take,’ Steve told him.

‘But it’s an action sequence.’

‘Try your best.’

Onstage, McQueen was the most fiercely competitive of an overadrenalised cast, constantly ‘catching flies’, as Sturges put it, waving his white hat or rattling his bullet-casings around behind Brynner’s head. Offstage, he earned the half-fond, half-cagey nicknames Supie (for superstar) and Tricky Dick. ‘Most of the Seven, including Yul, would at least play cards together,’ says Bob Relyea. ‘Steve, by contrast, seemed typically self-contained.’ Another of Sturges’s crew notes that ‘McQueen tended to be standoffish – when he wasn’t screwing for America – which is what a star needs to be.’ Actors have always indulged themselves in dewy-eyed rhapsodies about their fellow luvvies. But, as Olivier once asked, ‘Why should the film set be treated any differently from the office?’ And why should entertainers be expected to get along any better than, say, a firm of suits? Steve never found rivalry, or a degree of insulation, unseemly. ‘Not my favourite part of a movie,’ he once muttered, as the cast gathered for a team dinner in the Jacaranda.

Film-making, McQueen maintained, was a state of war. For him the hostilities were made bearable by the money, a pretty wife who visited at weekends, and plenty of Mexican pot. Even so, he saw himself as the underdog.

With McQueen getting tetchier by the day, ‘a bust-up was inevitable’, says Eli Wallach. ‘He probably respected Yul the actor. But Yul, don’t forget, was also very much the shah of Brynner. He had his whole court, with someone taking his coat and someone else lighting his cigarette for him. Big movie star treatment. Steve, I’m sure, thought, “I’m not gonna buy that crap”…And he didn’t.’ McQueen not only trawled for scenes – the taunting ironic practicality of scooping up water in his hat while fording a river – he actively played Ahab to Brynner’s great white whale. He taught him, for instance, to draw his pistol so slowly, ‘I got three shots off before he even had his gun out of his holster.’ Another time, Elkins remembers, ‘Yul built himself a mound of dirt to stand on in one of his scenes with Steve. McQueen, during the shot, began accidentally-on-purpose kicking away at the pile, so Yul began looking shorter and shorter. By the end of the take, Brynner was disappearing down a hole.’ Sturges, for his part, wasn’t afraid to go it alone against the Mirisch brothers or the cast. What he was loath to do was side openly with one highly touted star against another, especially McQueen and Brynner, reflex foes who ruffled easily at real or imagined snubs. ‘Total mutual paranoia,’ says Wallach. However loose the two hung on stage, their private feud was rock solid, especially after a scoop about ‘creative differences’ appeared in the trades. When Brynner confronted McQueen about the story by grabbing his shoulder, his reply, hissed an inch from his co-star’s face, spun heads the length of the hotel:

‘Get your stinking hands off me, or I’m taking you down to the pavement.’

For the next twenty years, if you brought up Brynner around McQueen’s house, you wouldn’t be invited back. ‘He was one uptight dude,’ Steve informed the press. ‘He didn’t ride very well, and he didn’t know anything about quick draws and all of that stuff. I knew horses. I knew guns. I was in my element and he wasn’t.’

The Magnificent Seven opened worldwide, amidst an $800,000 publicity blitz, on 23 October 1960. While the critics’ thumbs twisted up or down, the consensus was that Sturges had created a splashy yet lucid morality yarn, in which character mattered as much as action and both combined to make the most of an unwieldy script. Part of the fun of the film lay in seeing several actors, notably James Coburn, launch their careers. Moreover, as the story was played out, the audience watched the spectacle of a superstar being born. Long after the last Panavision shot of the range, and the climactic chord of Elmer Bernstein’s score, there was the physicality and intelligence that made you appreciate Vin’s strength and humour, not to mention his hunter’s eye. Steve’s character was as sly and quick on the uptake as he was on the draw. Even more than the epic low-lying photography, those scenes stolen from behind Brynner’s back were the greatest of Seven’s many pleasures. Vin outdid himself as a virtuoso among equals, stretched tauter than the rest, with a temper fused as short as he was. Witty, lewd, allusive and violent, Steve played fast and loose with stereotypes, earning himself some of the critical yappings and shin-bitings that invariably greet true originals, while the public promptly sat up and bayed for him. In terms of buzz and hard cash, he now duly got his first real juice out of the business. McQueen missed his self-imposed deadline for fame by exactly seven months.

To the surprise of the few people who got to know Steve at home, he didn’t look the slightest bit driven, twisted, crazed, gnarled or bitter. He looked tired, though. On 3 May 1960 Four Star told him they were exercising their option to do another season of Wanted. That same week McQueen signed a contract for a thirty-minute TV drama called Masquerade Party, to be filmed live in New York. Three days later he shot yet another promo for Viceroy’s parent firm, Brown & Williamson. Add his responsibilities to his wife and young family and a taste for beer and late-night dirt-riding, and it’s easy to see how the strain could begin to tell.

McQueen, whose favourite outpost remained the racing circuit, was a man who was driven incessantly, the manic type who can achieve wonders but occasionally has to be hospitalised for his own good. He could also put unbearable pressure on others. Coburn, who quite plausibly insists ‘I loved him dearly,’ also admits, ‘There was kind of an evil streak to him.’ Tales were told of his self-obsession, the hours he spent each day muttering about his childhood and plotting revenge. Nobody denied Steve his refuge in the world of make-believe, or his chance at personal success and redemption. The unrelenting gloom of his upbringing made even a Brando’s or a Dean’s seem like Happy Days. But it grated to hear McQueen speak of ‘us’ or the ‘gang’, when a study of his actions behind the scenes shows that his first and overpowering loyalty was to himself. The only time he liked making a film, he quipped, was on payday.

In what seemed like a moment, Steve had made a breakthrough, cordoned off from his old life; leapt from sci-fi flummery in The Blob into a stylistic and original world of his own. He quickly picked up the pace. Nowadays, most mornings McQueen could be seen stalking the studio halls, hunched and scowling with the burden of his latest character. He needed people to follow. Those who did found him outrageous at times but often stimulating, a tonic, and generous in his loyalty as well as his rewards. He could even countenance inefficiency if enough talent came with it, as with Sam Peckinpah. To others, though, Tricky Dick was perhaps all too cleverly named for his own good.

A year later McQueen locked horns with the director of his eighth film Hell is for Heroes, who, like Sturges before him, saw it as an ensemble piece rather than a star vehicle. The director was fired. Something similar happened on The Great Escape, whose writer would call Steve ‘an impossible bastard’. The stamp-feet-and-sulk factor bulked large in both The Sand Pebbles and Thomas Crown. Meanwhile, McQueen’s friend Mark Rydell, who worked with him in The Reivers, remembers that ‘He was hard and he could be mean…He wanted to feel that nothing could happen without him.’ Him first, everybody else nowhere, people remember. Sturges himself walked away from McQueen’s next film, terminating their friendship. When Steve came down with flu – or a very early intimation of cancer – on 1972’s The Getaway, the exasperated crew put it to a vote (70 for, 49 against) whether or not to buy him a get-well card. There were more run-ins with the screenwriter of The Towering Inferno and the original director of Tom Horn. The list isn’t exhaustive. For twenty years McQueen was in and out of production meetings in black leather, pondering budgets and scripts. His rudeness Sturges believed to be part of his idea of thrift, a need to eliminate all time-wasting. Steve expected immediate answers to hard questions. Don’t think. Do it. The legendary profanities tumbled out in a verbal pile-up. Christalmighty, whaddyamean,goddammit. McQueen’s intensity was compelling, he demanded complete attention. His chilly blue eyes under the thatchy hair bored in relentlessly as he enquired about a term or condition, and gave it the drama of an international crisis. One Hollywood producer would compare negotiating with him to ‘dealing with a six-year-old who was carrying a nuclear bomb in his lunch-pail. Any meeting’s greatest potential was for an explosion.’

The alternative idea of his trusting Hollywood was and always would be pathetic.

As soon as he banked his Magnificent Seven money, Steve moved both upmarket and uphill to 2419 Solar Drive in the city heights. The Continental-style house, costing $60,759.84, was one of the very best situated in town, craning over Hollywood like a hippie Berghof. From the terrace and back garden the view swept towards mountains in the west, the Mojave desert in the east and downtown below, the far side of Silver Lake. Here ‘Supie’ became plain Steve, or Esteban again, playfully wolf-whistling at the woman he now called Nellie. There were moments of genuine empathy between the couple – as when they hosted elaborate Thanksgiving dinners for local children or stray race drivers – and, in the proper mood, they could give stunning performances of husband and wife. ‘A good woman can take a bum from the streets and turn him into a king,’ he said. In January 1960 Alfred Hitchcock cast Steve, with Neile as his co-star, in two of his TV melodramas, including the famous Man from the South episode. (One man bets his new Cadillac against another man’s little finger that he can’t flick a cheap Bic lighter ten times in succession.) ‘For kicks’ they did a number of shows together after Terry’s birth, including slots in the Bob Hope and, of all people, Perry Como revues. They made a good-looking couple, the bullet-headed tough, who could also be soft, and the small, stunningly svelte dancer. As Steve ascended, they might yet have become a hip version of Burton and Taylor, but it wasn’t to be. Shortly after testing for the film of West Side Story that spring, Neile learned that she was pregnant again. The role she settled on was at once stranger and more ordinary than anything Hollywood could have scripted, that of ‘plain Mrs Superstar’.

Meanwhile, the so-called ‘tail’ kept coming. McQueen pulled women, as one of them puts it, ‘like a magnet does iron filings’. Those with long memories made the connection to certain well-slept stars of the recent past: the Clark Gable, Errol Flynn type. He doted on Neile and the children, but he liked to mingle too. At parties Steve’s beautifully groomed hair positively glowed. His lithe, pumped-up body fitted perfectly into Fashion District denim and patent leather boots. The girls crowded round him panting. They obviously wanted to touch the hem of his garment, and frequently more, and it was all McQueen could do to fight them off. He didn’t always bother. A woman called Natalie Hawn remembers a scene where ‘some bit sidled up to him. “I wore these for you, Stevie,” she said, hand[ing] him a pair of panties. After she moved out of earshot…[McQueen] turned to me: “That’s the kind of shit I have to put up with.”’ When Steve, in turn, wound up alone with Hawn, she found him ‘a sweetheart’ and says that, just as McQueen was the quickest draw in Hollywood, so something similar went on in bed. He told Hawn he’d hustled both men and women while down on his luck in New York, but was ‘cured’ by the time he met Jack Kennedy a few years later in Santa Monica. The then President apparent had taken Steve aside and asked him, ‘Don’t you find you get a headache if you don’t have at least a poke a day?’

Around 1960 McQueen was nearing Kennedy’s ideal. The tally was ‘two or three hundred’ a year.

There were rumours that he was manic depressive, and unburdened himself to his woman friends. Hawn also remembers him ‘raving’ about Julian and then, in answer to her questions, discussing his childhood – if a mumbled ‘yep’ or ‘nope’ could be elevated to the level of discussion. These were the times when he should have been with his family, when it might have been possible to scale down if not vanquish his furies and acquire much-needed perspective on the misery of his youth. But not for the son of Julian Crawford.

Hawn adds, ‘Sometimes Steve would turn up, and sometimes he wouldn’t. My instructions were that, if he was in town, I’d wait by the phone for him to contact me. We’d meet and then, as he put it, shtup. Towards the end I had to sit in all day, because I never knew when he’d call me. As it turned out, he never did. And I never found out where he went.’

His close male friends rhapsodised over McQueen, and with good cause. Don Gordon calls him a ‘straight arrow – almost uniquely for [Hollywood], totally bullshit free’. His biking partner Bud Ekins talks of Steve’s personality with perhaps more understanding than anyone. Ekins claims that this ‘complicated guy’ who ‘basically trusted nobody’ and ‘did best one-on-one, and then only from amongst four or five people’ was ‘unknowable…It was almost impossible to pin him down. He was first and last an actor. But to a few people he was the best company, the most loyal guy on earth.’ Steve always made it abundantly clear that, whereas he admired anyone who could ‘hold his mud’, he only really had time for a few dirty-faced peers prepared to pit themselves against one another. Most or all of the inner circle, like Ekins, Gordon and McQueen himself could handle themselves on wheels. In 1960, while on location in Cuernavaca, Steve was named Rookie of the Year by the American Sports Car Association. He let it be known that the award meant more to him than ‘any fucking Oscar’.