Читать книгу McQueen: The Biography - Christopher Sandford - Страница 9

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?’

She shook her head, and he smiled. ‘You picked it up, didn’t you? Well, you can pick this up too.’ Then he leant over, kissed her, and said simply, ‘I’m with you.’

She enrolled at the Playhouse, ‘and because Steve was there I had the time of my life. My God! What an operator, and what a beautiful man.’

Largely thanks to the missionary work of Brando and Montgomery Clift, by 1951 a mainstream acting generation was still – just – running the show. A Method-acting generation was coming up behind, fast. Those who belonged to the new, so-called ‘torn shirt’ school, or were linked with some other group opposed to established convention in the arts, were already the critics’ darlings. Meisner’s class drew in a small but distinguished house. Talent scouts and even a few directors would come to the Playhouse’s annual revue, a combined graduation and gala night. This new cult of anti-hero duly attracted an agent named Peter Witt to the Christmas production of Truckline Cafe. Witt ‘loved the kid in the sailor suit’, whose near-actionable Brando parody both cribbed and surpassed the original. Peers like Rydell also began to talk up the novice who upstaged nearly every other actor in the intensity department. To them McQueen had an ‘air of wild rage’, even if, to others, it was really more Method with an animal glaze. Voice, movement, technique. Steve quickly made a whole system out of his childhood. He did anger so convincingly that, for the first but not last time in his career, he made people’s flesh creep. McQueen had few duties in handling such a slight role on such a small stage, chief of which was to look animated, and to make the other actors shine. He proved incapable of doing either, but otherwise used the play well. ‘Steve was spellbinding,’ says Yanni.

Meisner saw quite another thing in McQueen:

‘Professionalism, always the professionalism. Dog tired, he’d put his feet in a bucket of ice water to jerk himself awake while he learnt lines.’ There were plays and scripts to be read. Steve threw himself into it all with an energy born of ambition. He’d set out to become, he announced, a great American actor.

His commercial debut followed that spring of 1952, in a Jewish repertory production on Second Avenue. The very first words McQueen uttered on stage, in Yiddish, were direly prophetic: ‘Nothing will help.’ After the fourth night he was fired.

That same season on 25 May 1952, Steve transferred to the Hagen-Berghof drama school. He celebrated by buying his first racing bike, a used K-model Harley. On that note, and clutching a few wadded dollars, he again took off for Miami while classes were out for the spring. One moment that should have lived but hasn’t, not least because in an increasingly photogenic career no one yet had a camera on him, was Steve tearing up Highway 1, bare-chested and laughing, under the swaying royal palms. Once on the beach, he soon found the saloon that would become his home from home during the New York ‘shit season’, a dark cave with a bar where the owner remembers McQueen for his ‘bleached hair, bronzed body and faintly bad smell’. He ate with a burger in one hand and a slab of pie in the other, gulping down his beer at breakneck speed. Much the same intensity characterised his policy on women. Steve was rarely without an aspiring model or college co-ed in tow, and within a week he enjoyed the local handle, before it was ever a retail cliché, of ‘Big Mac’.

McQueen often went diving in Florida with an old marine buddy named Red. Early in June, about three miles out in Biscayne Bay, Steve spotted a small shark which, characteristically, he chased to the ocean floor. After failing to bring it up on a gaff so that Red could net it, McQueen surfaced dangerously fast and punctured his already bad left eardrum. That evening the two men returned to Miami to get a doctor to test Steve’s hearing. It was further seriously damaged, and even though he laughed it off himself, his voice coach in New York was furious with McQueen for his carelessness.

Soon after getting home he was cast in no fewer than three provincial shows. Though none rang bells in the far universe, McQueen made both a small name and a thin living for himself on the road. During the last, Time Out for Ginger, he was able to put down $450 for a red MG roadster.^* Steve needed a replacement because he had just wrecked his previous car, a hearse, racing it zigzag across Columbus Circle, actually flipping it upside down, the long black roof shedding sparks at the point of impact, McQueen himself walking away. That incident cost him financially, but it did wonders for his reputation. Thanks in part to his poker money, Steve was flush enough to give up non-theatrical work and now focus full-time on acting. He did a verbal deal for Witt to represent him. As McQueen said, it was ‘grooving together’. He’d made ‘people talk’ about him. It was all, at least locally, paying off. Bloody-mindedly, he’d pay Julian back in a way that would brook no more ‘shit’ or sarcasm.

He would become a legend.

With at least a first whiff of success Steve worked, if possible, even harder. ‘Busting my ass to read,’ he said, let alone memorise the texts. Line by dismal line—a triumph of will over semi-literacy. But he allowed himself to unwind, too. Behind his volcanic rage he was capable of something approaching real charm. The perfectly timed smile, the easy, apt jokes and above all the brilliant send-ups, not least of himself, all testify to the fact that Big Mac was tempered by his sweeter kid brother, Little Steve.

The two rubbed along together during those next five years of graft. Fame, for McQueen, wouldn’t suddenly come calling after one audition; he had to ring the bell, pound on the door and finally smash on through. Witt, though aquiver for new talent, never quite turned creative vision into commercial triumph. Until 1958 nothing could avail against that hard truth. That Steve did, in the end, make it was due, in roughly equal part, to talent, luck and others’ unshakeable faith in him; that and an underlying self-confidence that he wasn’t only in the right place, but there at the right time. ‘I found a little kindness,’ as he later said. ‘A joint where people talked out their problems instead of punching you.’

There wasn’t a city in the world where an alert twenty-two-year-old could have had a better day-to-day sense of possibility than New York in the early 1950s. The place was awash with actors, especially those who trod in Brando’s huge, ‘slabby’ (as McQueen put it) shadow. The rehearsal group known as the Actors Studio had opened in 1947 in a semi-converted church, apt digs for what now became, under Lee Strasberg, a bully-pulpit for teaching Stanislavski’s Method. It was a wide-open enterprise still, more than living up to its fame. After A Streetcar Named Desire threw off the yoke of what a star was meant to look and sound like, diners like Louie’s and the dives around Sheridan Square pulsed with men in biker gear who drank and fought and then slouched their way to the school on 44th Street where, during the summer rush, a Ben Gazzara or a Marilyn Monroe took turns at the switchboard. When McQueen was eventually accepted in 1955, he was as busy and happy – if broke – as he’d ever been. Irrespective of the value of what it actually produced, the benevolent originality of the Studio would reverberate for the rest of his life. Steve bought a leather jacket. He had his glossies taken. At an informal reading he stood toe to toe with James Dean and took turns to recite ‘Sailing to Byzantium’.

Eli Wallach, who, ‘like the great McQueen’, trained at both the Playhouse and the Studio, believes ‘Steve already had the raw skill. But what he learnt to do [in New York] was what separates the true artist from the ham – to watch and, above all, to listen.’ In an impressively short time ‘McQueen was the best reactor of his generation.’ Peerlessly, he arrived.

A few brief years later various agents and loon-panted studio heads would fall over themselves to claim him as theirs, an accolade that, for Steve, had a lack of fascination all its own. He flattered but never fawned over his real mentor; he seems to have recognised that success was a more lasting and effective plug than obsequiousness. McQueen did what he could to notice those who had noticed him. ‘I had that gift in me,’ he said, ‘but [Strasberg] had the key to unlock it…Nobody gives you talent. You either have it or you don’t. What Lee gave me was definition.’

He did. But someone less attuned than he was to ‘being’ and more to theatrical elegance could never have kept in character, as Steve did, for a quarter of a century. And the character he kept in was both riveting and surprisingly versatile. Unlike some of the lesser lights at the Studio he was never just brazenly ‘acting’, an exclamation without a point. At worst, McQueen beamed what Meisner called his ‘exquisite innocence’. In top gear, he had the rare gift of understatement, and even wizened hacks would come to admire how his each look adapted to the scene, how subtly and lightly he angled for the shot, every line dropping like a fly on the course. The brute realism was there, too: McQueen followed Bogart and Garfield and narrowly preceded the likes of De Niro in showing what it was like to actually live a life, how to elicit respect, how to bear up under misfortune. In what seemed like a flash and was only a few months, those qualities would mark him for a star.

Plausibility was Strasberg’s business. And in Steve he had an actor who was all too blazingly real, human – and male. His love scenes, like his love life, soon became gladiatorial. According to the school’s Patricia Bosworth, McQueen and his actress girlfriend once improvised a scene in bed at the Studio. ‘They were really rolling around – we actually thought they were screwing and everybody wanted to take this girl’s place…I just kept staring at him. Finally Steve came over and said, “Do you want me to take you out?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “OK. I’ll take you out.” I hopped on his motorbike and off we went.’

His key moral notion remained that actresses ‘did it’.

McQueen, of all those who rose from the assembly line, was the most famously well slept. Here, too, versatility was the keynote of all his couplings, whether taking his women singly or in pairs, together with a lifelong fondness for the phrase ‘I’ll call you’. Some around New York thought Steve’s eclecticism even swung to his own sex. There was, for one thing, the way he looked. For an alpha male, McQueen was disturbingly epicene: like something made by a jeweller’s art, body perfectly honed, facial planes expertly turned, his china-blue eyes ornamented by long lashes. From his beauty spot up to the sandy hair he had artfully pouffed each week at a Chelsea salon, Steve was exquisite designer crumpet. His narrow head accentuated the sallowness of his skin. Like his acting, he had a wide expressive range – ‘a Botticelli angel crossed with a chimp’, in one critic’s arch review. For several years McQueen alternated his Wild One leathers with a pair of Bermuda shorts, almost a specific, around the Village, against being ‘straight’. Then there was the whole begged question of his name. More than one of his stage-school friends would blithely drop the prefix ‘Mc’, while McQueen, when once using the Studio bathroom (the one Strasberg labelled ‘Romeo’), was shocked to see his surname daubed on the wall, with the last letter twisted into an ‘r’.

Steve at times liked to play the caricature of a luvvie in class, insisting that he had the right, as well as the duty, to stretch. But outside 44th Street this tendency to see himself as both Steve the tease and McQueen the stud wasn’t necessarily a good move. As one ex-friend puts it, ‘He forgot that some folks didn’t make the distinction.’ It was no doubt this role-playing that led to the buzz that Steve was bisexual; bent. The photographer Bill Claxton, for one, speaks of being taken by McQueen on a voyage around his old New York haunts. ‘He would show me where he’d lived…places he worked as a hustler. He had some pretty wild stories.’ A persistent Studio rumour that McQueen dabbled in cross-dressing (frocks particularly) was a vile slur, but expressed a view some people had of him.

Both the book Laid Bare and a California radio DJ similarly offer, even today, any number of plausible ‘McQueer’ scenarios, if few real details. There may not be any. It is certain, though, that he idolised James Dean – whose act he shamelessly filched in The Blob – and that a friend of Dean’s, Paul Darlow, was firmly under the impression that ‘Jimmy and Steve were swishes’.

Those scenes in Dean’s room at the Iroquois Hotel didn’t create the gossip, but they did nonetheless colour it. Darlow and several other men were present one night in 1954 after a drinking binge uptown at Jerry’s Bar. ‘Like to do my hair?’ Dean asked McQueen, helpfully drawing it back from his forehead as if clearing his mind, and producing a brush. Steve sat down behind him and patiently back-combed the famous quiff, thick and shiny as a mink’s, breathing or perhaps lightly chuckling down the back of Dean’s neck. Darlow then witnessed the following:

‘Would you do mine?’ Steve asked.

‘Drop dead.’

‘Come on, JD. Don’t you dig my fur?’

‘No,’ Jimmy replied, ‘it always looks so dago to me.’

Dean treated McQueen gingerly, once inviting him backstage at a performance of The Immoralist but then dropping him. Less than eighteen months later he was dead.

For the rest of his own life an undercurrent of all McQueen’s relationships, marriages and affairs alike, was the nagging threat of homosexuality. He was legendarily touchy on the subject. According to the Londoner who first offered Steve ‘a fag’, he promptly ‘threw a fit, prodding his fingers at me and yelling, “Fuck you! I’m Steve McQueen! Kiss my ass.’” (It was his girlfriend who explained that in England they came twenty to a packet.) Six years later, in January 1968, Steve took a phone call at home in California. The anonymous party told him, ‘There’s a new book coming out that lists all the celebrities who are queer. I thought you’d like to know your name is in it.’ He hung up. According to his ex-wife, Steve became phobic – ‘possessed’ is the word she uses – from that day on, greatly accelerating his paranoia and, not incidentally, her own exit. On the set of The Getaway in 1972 McQueen was ‘seriously freaked’ at shooting a nude scene with ‘real cons who happened to be gay’, says Katy Haber, who worked on the film. And two years later, when Paul Newman broached the idea of his taking a homosexual role, McQueen told him, ‘I could never play a fag.’ It was an expression of disgust and also, so it seemed, of fear.

Mostly, though, Steve shrugged all that off. Publicly he bore most of his hangups in silence.

Back in the fifties there was something almost defiant about the flaming heterosexual whose line of active bachelorhood would fix two words on the New York stage scene, just as it had on the Florida beach. Big Mac: the serial seducer who dazzled his women with a neat mix of the goofy and the gothic. It was the end of December 1954 when several Playhouse students met in an automat off Times Square. Steve was there when they arrived. He startled one actress, Emily Hurt, by ‘jumping to his feet and rolling his eyes while sticking his tongue out, like a mad kid’. McQueen’s meal, she says, was ‘hoovered down – he ate as though he was on fire, then calmly reached over and speared the meat from my plate’. There was also beer. ‘Steve was sort of writhing around in his seat. He’d go into a slump and then suddenly toss off one-liners in a screwy way that reminded me of his acting.’ One of them was in the form of a question: ‘Why not come back for some New Year grog at my dump?’ Steve appears, from the accounts of this dinner, to have behaved like a badly neglected child, because he now asked, according to Hurt, ‘Want to see how a farm boy eats chicken?’ Whether or not anyone took up the offer, he ‘grabbed a drumstick and began ramming it in and out of his mouth, sucking it ostentatiously’.

The party broke up. ‘Steve was kind of slouched there alone. His face was grim and set, and by now his shoulders were hunched. I held back, too, and I remember that he looked up and said something that shook me.

‘“How would you treat a suicidal nut? Just the same as any other guy, or make an exception?”’

On that note the two of them walked arm-in-arm down Seventh Avenue to Sheridan Square. Once inside Steve’s bleak apartment, ‘he again became the hyperactive kid, bouncing off walls and pleading with me to feed, by which he meant breastfeed, him’.^* Broadly, according to Hurt, ‘Steve loved anything with wheels or tits, probably in that order…All in all, a very torn-up guy. We became lovers. God knows, he shouldn’t have added up to much, but that came from his sweet, klutzy side and the charm he could turn on like a switch. Nobody played the hurt puppy like Steve did.’

It was doubtless these same mood swings that led to the New York rumours he was bisexual, as well as bi-polar. McQueen’s Bermuda shorts made for a particular talking point around the Studio. To others, the mumbling actor was but a lisp away from the drama queen. The truth is, at bottom Steve was an old-fashioned (and deeply unfashionable) man who wanted his partners, as most confirm, barefoot if not pregnant. While they ‘took the precautions’, says Hurt, McQueen wore a condom over his heart. Feeling himself let down by the first woman he knew, he never again let go with a woman.

Somehow, alone or with a mate, Steve managed an ever more wild pace. Whether tearing up Broadway on the Harley or wolfing his food and drink, he seemed to be an actor in a race with life. A twitchy figure in black, McQueen hustled along at a bouncy clip, with his toes cocked out at an angle, his very shoes – scuffed trainers – of a piece with a man on the move. Even his music was right: Steve listened nonstop to ‘Fidgety Feet’ and the jump-jive of a Louis Jordan. Aside from an ancient gramophone, the bike and the car, his few possessions were athletic: sweat pants, a punching bag, the barbells. When not actually working out, McQueen did most of his weightlifting with a fork and mug. The otherwise spartan flat was always well stocked with junk food. His only kitchen appliance was a blender, in which he mixed up an unholy brew of eggs, mouldy yogurt and coffee every morning. According to one visitor, ‘Steve got up dead, but after the second hit of that crap he was like a dog off the leash. People had to run just to keep up with him.’

As an actor, McQueen was emerging almost fully formed. He was poised; he was go-getting. He was also – and always – spoiling for a fight. In his wordless way, a clear plan of attack grew out of his five-year apprenticeship.

By his twenty-fifth birthday Steve had been in three plays far off Broadway, and had a reputation for being both talented and difficult. The money from these productions was long since gone. Early that winter he was forced to trade down to a fifth-floor slum on East 10th Street with a tin bathtub in the kitchen. His previous place, he now decided, was ‘fucking near the Plaza’ by comparison. McQueen sold the MG and took part-time work as a mechanic in an Upper West Side garage, where he once suffered the indignity of having to service James Dean’s Harley. Something about the flush to his face when he handed back the keys suggested, to a mutual friend, that ‘Steve was jealous of Jimmy, and was busy figuring out how to deal with it’. Aside from a brief encounter at Jerry’s, that was the last time the two actors ever met.

Steve did, however, reluctantly put in several man-hours of hard work with Julian. They eventually got back in touch. Whatever his normal code on women, these tedious and often trying interventions were much to McQueen’s credit. Two or three times that winter his mother called him to discharge her from hospital, where she was being treated for acute alcoholism. He always went, walking her home from Bellevue through Gramercy Park and down Irving to East 18th, where Julian liked to stop in for a beer at Pete’s Tavern. By any account there was something heroic about Steve’s self-control: he was able to rally round Julian while never again daring to trust, let alone to love her. As Dora Yanni quite rightly says, ‘That woman put the iron into Steve’s soul.’ Iron, she adds, that ran deeper than blood. Without Julian he would never have been a great tragedian, as opposed to another pantomime punk figure. Yanni happened to see McQueen hurrying into the hospital one evening, his white gym shoes snapping against the polished floor. ‘She’s frothing,’ he told her.

Implacably, Julian’s influence was everywhere.

Meanwhile Steve continued, as Yanni herself knew, to ‘root himself stupid’ around New York. For other actors the most seductive aspect of Big Mac may not have been his innocence, but the startling, pre-emptive willingness to do literally anything to make it. When McQueen auditioned for Strasberg, he was one of only five actors out of 2000 applicants to be accepted that season. He also lobbied Witt nonstop for work. Later that spring of 1955 he landed a spot in an hour-long dramatic NBC anthology series, the Goodyear Playhouse. Both ten ratings points lower and twenty IQ points higher than current TV fare like I Love Lucy, The Chivington Raid, broadcast on 27 March, was McQueen’s screen debut.

He followed it by launching himself, as Yanni says anachronistically, ‘like a Scud missile’ at a play called Two Fingers of Pride. This pro-labour harangue, set in the New York docks and broadly in the mould of On the Waterfront, was being cast by its writer Jim Longhi and the director Jack Garfein. Steve read for the second lead, having assured them that he, like his character, was Italian-American and twenty-two years old. Neither was true, but otherwise McQueen fitted the part well. He then borrowed $35 (never repaid) to buy his first Actors Equity card. Even though the show never transferred from summer stock in Ogunquit, Maine, Steve’s ‘original, primitive’ portrayal of Nino the longshoreman was noted warmly by the New York Post and without insult in the News. Garfein managed to get McQueen an appointment with the talent agency MCA. Steve arrived for his interview at the glass-and-marble office on Madison Avenue by riding his Harley through the lobby, into the lift, and up to the eleventh floor. MCA accepted him.

Later that winter the director Robert Wise was in New York casting his biopic Somebody Up There Likes Me, set in the roasted light of Hell’s Kitchen and the prize ring. Wise remembers an audition when ‘this kid came in, cocky, wearing a sport jacket and a beanie cap, and told me: “I’m your man.’” There were dozens of other actors in immaculate black denim up for the bit part of Fidel (often wrongly given as Fido), the blade-wielding punk. Wise had never heard of McQueen. He did, however, recognise the potential of the ‘lean, tense boy you felt could slug you as fast as smile’ whom MCA brought him. Steve got the job. For $19 per diem (rising to $50 on the few days he had any lines) he got to play out scenes from his own adolescence.

Somebody was a remarkable case study of the transaction between life and art, at its core dramatising the career of the boxer Rocky Graziano. McQueen came on as a greaser, whose sudden eruptions of energy – ‘You lookin’ at me?’ – lent, with their De Niro-like emphasis, a touch of added menace to the proceedings. His safari down the back alleys of New York was freighted with three obsessions—hubcaps, pool and mob violence – as well as a touch of mimicry, specifically a disgruntled Brando mushmouth. It was the first, though not the last instance of Steve’s knack for projecting his own life’s path on screen. Somebody was good, hard-bitten stuff.

As a member of Graziano’s street gang Steve offered his usual concentration, quickness and stern, appraising gaze. Appearing in only the first fifteen minutes of the film, he cut a slick dash as well as a tone that was satirical and vicious to the outside world, yet warm and accepting of friends – the distinctive McQueen tone, in his first fully confident role. Following the style of the movie as a whole, Steve’s movements were crisp and taut, his voice gruff, his type now cast as a threatening hardnut, yet whose performance was never sacrificed to the action. Mostly, of course, the critics still ignored him. McQueen’s role was uncredited, and thus somewhat below a Variety’s radar. His few notices in the trades were good enough, but what struck Steve more, if possible, was the wallop he had on Hollywood. Men like Wise and MCA’s John Foreman now sat up for the ‘kid’ whose talent for engaging menace was complemented nicely by a slit mouth and the shaggy-pup eyes.

The man who played top dog to Steve’s Fido was a thirty-year-old actor in only his own second role. From then on, Paul Newman’s career became a kind of pace car for McQueen’s. Steve’s first director is only the most compelling witness to the fact that it was ‘undeclared war’ between them, two physical types whose commonplace, yet heroic qualities inspired, on one level, several PhD theses and, striking a lower note on the academic scale, Erica Jong’s orgasm in Esquire. ‘Who has the bluest eyes? Newman or McQueen? It’s difficult to say, but McQueen’s twinkle more. He makes me think of all those leathery-necked cowboys at remote truck stops in Nevada. Does he wear pointy boots? And does he take them off when he screws?’ The most charitable reading of this rivalry is that it neatly relit the torch once carried by Steve for James Dean (originally slated for the Graziano role) before the latter died in September 1955. It reached its shining apogee, or leaden nadir, when the two stars came to debate their billing, eighteen years later, in The Towering Inferno. A compromise was eventually reached whereby McQueen’s name would be on the left, and Newman’s a shade higher, exactly a foot to the right, on the marquee. Steve knew very well the direction in which people read. That twelve-inch gap was supremacy superbly controlled.

Mutual ambivalence, meanwhile, bordered on open war. Only this can explain the bile which seeped out of McQueen’s private assessment of Newman like an oil leak. ‘Fuckwit’, he dubbed him at moments of stress.

Frank Knox, an extra on Somebody, remembers Steve as the ‘sweetest guy’ off the set and a ‘bear in rutting season’ on it. One night after work the two of them went out for a beer at Pete’s. When the time came for McQueen to talk about acting, according to Knox, he ‘outlined his positive accomplishments to date, noted that more needed to be done, and promised that it would be’. Steve ended the evening by pledging to ‘pull [his] shit together’, to ‘grab the brass ring’ and, all in all, to ‘get some sugar out of this business – to be a big star’ by his thirtieth birthday.

Fighting words, but for Steve McQueen, who believed in doing rather than talking, they raised a flag. There was no way, says Knox, McQueen would ever settle for the sad fate of most struggling actors’ careers. ‘You got the impression, with him, it really was Hollywood or bust. He’d either go under or hammer a few million bucks out of the system. Even then, Steve was always ten per cent more rabid than the rest.’

Work, in Tinseltown, bringing more work, McQueen appeared on TV again early in 1956. He walked through the ‘US Steel Hour’ drama unobtrusively, wearing a shapeless grey suit that somehow on him looked suave, draping him like folded wings. Steve was quiet, small and slightly stooped, but the wooden appearance was deceptive: there was a nervy concentration about him, his half-hooded glance murderous and sharp. Aptly enough for McQueen, that particular episode was entitled ‘Bring Me a Dream’. Soon after it aired, he was badgering Strasberg, MCA and both the director and writer for a part in the watermark play A Hatful of Rain, a stark depiction of the misery, though occasionally blissful mundanity of drug addiction. After weeks of brutal jockeying the role of Johnny Pope, the doomed greaser lead, went to type in the form of the Studio graduate, McQueen’s rival Ben Gazzara. By then, Gazzara also had a contract for the film The Strange One. He soon left New York for an oddly unfulfilled career in Hollywood. Without him, the play’s future was uncertain.

McQueen wanted Hatful, but he was trouble. What with the pay demands and the firings he had, over the last four years, cost producers plenty – ‘a lot of freight’, as they say in the business, to carry for an actor many thought unemployable at worst and a long shot at best. But he was persistent. McQueen always had a hawk eye for where real power lay, how to scam a casting. He kept up a nonstop flow of notes and cards, not only to the suits but to their wives: ‘Roses, always roses,’ says one of the latter. That spring McQueen spent time amongst real junkies in Hell’s Kitchen. He read, rehearsed and understudied. He offered to defer his modest salary in exchange for a percentage of profits. ‘Short of some shtick involving a horse’s head,’ says Frank Knox, ‘it’s hard to think what more Steve could have done.’ In a bravura ploy beyond his own means he even had his few trade notices photocopied, professionally bound and sent round.

It was a full-time siege, and it worked. Stockholm syndrome, the obscure love that flowers between ransomer and captive, paralysed the producers’ will. By midsummer Steve had the job.

The critics weren’t happy. McQueen threw himself into the role, never missing a cue, much less a trick, and even dying his hair black. And yet, with all his intensity and his million-toothed smile, his performance was oddly earthbound: it came down to inexperience, earning Steve the backstage name Cornflake. He never settled into a rhythm or pitch that brought out the best in his speeches.

With Gazzara, at least, the character had existed in the round. Steve never combined the same sense of insight into personality and condition with that seemingly easier thing, a good voice. Whereas the loudest noises in the house had once been the shocked gasps of the crowd, for McQueen audience vocalisation tended to be in the form of sniggering as lines like ‘Watch my back!’ broke into falsetto. Physically, his Pope thrummed with a wildness that was all the more dramatic for being contained and controlled; but when Steve let go vocally, he squeaked. Only six weeks into his run he was fired from Hatful, though he briefly returned to it on tour. By then, of course, accepting rejection had long since become a part of McQueen’s resume, under the bold heading of ‘Skills’. But 1956, the year he flopped on Broadway and first discovered film, was a true turning-point. Steve never worked in the theatre again.

What made McQueen still run? His pride, obviously, but also the fact that he was slowly carving out a name on two coasts. Even fucking up in lights, as he put it, was something. He knew the significant prestige of failure. Among a loyal if obscurely positioned cult, meanwhile, Steve was a man to watch. Their patronage may not have pulled much with the critics, but it meant a lot to McQueen. MCA’s support was also critical in allowing his idiosyncratic and highly individual talent to flourish. All he had to be now was strong enough to survive the wait. The truly charismatic, he knew, are never long delayed by the paroxysms of the second-rate.

His first night in Hatful, a middle-aged fan had rushed the stage, flinging at McQueen a pair of red silk panties.

From the beginning, Steve wasn’t only worshipped by a group of T-shirted male admirers, barrio types, he was a virtual religion among women. Tooling around on his bike, the blender and a bottle permanently clamped under his arm, McQueen skilfully exploited the first free-love generation, the main source of his ‘juice’, says Emily Hurt, being his shrewd understanding that ‘the smiley-tough look would get those undies down’. Aspiring actresses loved him. Back in East 10th Street he always seemed to understand what they were driving at, believed that it was the right thing, and enthusiastically did what he could to help. He invariably told them he thought they were talented and wanted to hear them read. Many of these ad hoc auditions lasted to all hours. According to Hurt, ‘Back in those days, Steve was virtually a sex machine. You were either sleeping with him, or you knew someone who was.’ His partners knew he could be foul-mouthed – snapping at a lame suggestion, cursing his luck with producers – and deeply bored by subjects that didn’t personally move him. But that wasn’t the Steve McQueen of their common experience. On countless nights a woman like Dora Yanni had seen him charm a guest by ‘a quiet tear or that billion dollar grin’. It was the same for Hurt. ‘Steve already knew how to moisturise his audience. He may not have made it on Broadway, but he was a true superstar in the Village.’

More and more, words like ‘fucker’ echoed around when either sex spoke of him.

The horizontal skirmishes were legendary, and followed broadly down the maternal line. ‘Steve was addicted to being thrown off-balance,’ says Hurt. ‘Because Julian had been crazy, he expected that from his mate.’ That autumn of 1956 McQueen took a pale, flapper-thin girl named Mimi Benning to a movie or two and then made her cry in a taxi. Numerous others went out on variants of the same ‘yo-yo date’, as she puts it. Consummation would come almost immediately after these trips to Loew’s or the Quad, and was guaranteed by the sort of groping that was mandatory in the back row. One casual partner remembers being fed blueberry pie and beer by Steve in 10th Street after a showing of Giant, and being told, ‘I’ll never make it – as a man or an actor.’ Yet within a few weeks McQueen was in and out of lights on Broadway; and he fell in love.

Her name was Neile Adams, and when he met her she was already starring in her second musical, The Pajama Game. This lucky and talented showgirl, then just twenty-three and with a pixieish vigour, had, like him, never known her father. Neile was brought up by her mother in the Philippines, and eventually spent three years there in a Japanese concentration camp. After that, the teenager was sent to a convent in Hong Kong and boarding school in Connecticut. As if not already exotic enough, after seeing The King and I Neile then announced her intention of becoming a dancer. Against all odds, she made it. With her dark hair cut short, gamine-style, dressed in a silk shirt, scarf and toreador trousers, Neile was a frail, classic beauty with a surprisingly loud, throaty laugh. They met at Downey’s restaurant – where McQueen made his move over a bowl of spaghetti – and the fascination was mutual. As an admiring friend says, they might have won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. There was also the old saw of opposites attracting. Whereas Steve lacked the ability to make light of misfortune, Neile presented a more straightforward type: the outgoing young ingenue who ‘dug people’. Her inner life, while rebellious, found its outlet on stage.

Later that same night there was a knock at Neile’s apartment door. It was Steve. She said, ‘I’m going to crash.’ Then he said, ‘Yeah, I am too.’ He couldn’t learn to clean and would sooner starve than cook but he did, nonetheless, light up that small, cluttered bedroom.

‘Boy,’ says Neile, ‘was I happy.’

He was disguised, veiled, going through social motions; she was enjoying herself, displaying what she was, opening herself up to immediate experience. One was playing for time, the other was full of life for the moment. A koala and a leopard, they somehow found themselves on the same limb of the tree. Sure enough, Neile joined the long list of lovers, though for once Steve, radically for him, was on turf well beyond what Benning calls ‘Olympic screwing’. After exactly a week he moved into Neile’s digs at 69 West 55th Street. McQueen arrived carrying a battered suitcase full of old clothes, his crash helmet and the barbells. As Neile says, ‘The man was obviously used to travelling light.’

That September, once fired from Hatful, Steve took off on his new BSA through Florida and, from there, to Cuba. The ominous signs of revolution were already brewing when McQueen got himself arrested for selling yanqui cigarettes in a bar. On 3 October 1956 Neile was handed a telegram at her hotel in Hollywood, where she was then testing for Bob Wise’s film This Could Be the Night:

I LOVE YOU HONEY SEND ME MONEY LET ME KNOW WHATS HAPPENING IN CARE OF WESTERN UNION CON AMOR

ESTEBAN

The central theme of all McQueen’s adult relationships – that contempt for those who caved to him had its parallel respect for those who didn’t – was quickly brought home when Neile turned him down. Steve limped back to West 55th, having sold most of his clothes and cannibalised the BSA for bail, with the words: ‘It’s all right, baby. I admire your spunk.’ Then he sought out a jeweller friend in the Village and talked him into designing a twisted molten gold ring for $25 down and eight further quarterly instalments. Two years later Neile herself finally paid off the balance.

Steve, who had an instinct for reality, would remember the shabbier details of the next month all his life: the ‘dark pit’ when Neile returned to California to film This Could Be the Night, the two or three now suddenly tacky ‘honkings’ behind her back, the constant trickling rain of New York, the flow of reverse-charge calls to the coast; and finally, the guilty sale of Uncle Claude’s watch to raise funds. McQueen himself arrived in California on the morning of 2 November 1956. Bob Wise recalls ‘the kid from Somebody suddenly holed up with Neile in the hotel. Fair enough, but when he also hung around the lot, I had him barred.’ As Wise saw it, despite her own rough knocks, ‘the girl in my movie was young and impressionable’, and McQueen, a hard man to resist, had definitely hustled her. Her manager Hillard Elkins remembers ‘Neile asking my advice, and me telling her she was being a shmuck. In those days, I didn’t know McQueen as an actor. What I did know was that he screwed anything with a pulse, and I thought he was wrong for her.’ On the other hand, Neile and Steve had a peculiarly dire family past in common. They’d already bonded with each other’s mothers in New York. Carmen Adams took to him as one orphaned, deprived, too thin (if sadly lacking in manners) and fed him on nourishing Spanish dishes. McQueen had also introduced his fiancée to Julian, whom she liked. ‘Whatever she’d done or hadn’t done for Steve, as a woman I empathised,’ Neile says today. ‘When she had him, she’d only been a kid herself, trying to find her way in the world.’ The Adamses, too, had had troubles at home. ‘It was two damaged birds flocking together,’ says Neile. ‘Plus, I really loved the man.’

That same Friday night Steve and Neile climbed into a rented Ford Thunderbird, waved to the film crew and headed for the border. The two lapsed Catholics decided on a whim to marry in the mission at San Juan Capistrano, twenty miles south of LA. When that was vetoed by the nuns on the unanswerable grounds that no banns had been published, McQueen exploded. For a while back there, courting Neile, he’d been fine. His truncated vocabulary and make-do syntax had both risen to the occasion. But now he had a schedule to keep. Fuck the banns. Nor were anxieties about the ‘young people’s’ piety misplaced. ‘Open a vein,’ McQueen snarled, and took off again in a crunch of gravel. A few miles further down the coast the now fugitive couple were stopped by the police for speeding. What followed was a scene at the very edge of a Chaplin skit as the law, once briefed by Steve, hurriedly escorted them to a local Lutheran minister. The McQueens were duly married, just before midnight, in a small chapel in San Clemente. The legal witnesses were the highway patrolmen who had pulled them over an hour earlier. ‘It was far out,’ Steve recalled. ‘Here we were getting hitched, and these two big cops with their belted pistols an’ all. Felt like a shotgun wedding.’ By now he’d known his wife for just over three months.

The man Neile Adams married was as gritty as a half-completed road. McQueen wasn’t yet the popular notion of the alpha male – the ape who gets to have sex with all the females and swagger past the competition – but he was getting there, fast. Neile remembers that he rarely or never had any money, gobbled down his food and had a fondness for both Old Milwaukee beer and pot. Steve was ill-read, indeed semi-literate (his next wife famously complained that he couldn’t spell the word ‘blue’). As for social graces, he didn’t overdo them. When Elkins invited him to lunch in the Polo Lounge, McQueen gazed dolefully at the French menu before finally asking if he might be allowed a burger and a shake. He did, however, Neile saw, have that much rarer thing – instinct. ‘Steve could always tell the very few good guys from the phony.’ As the nuns had rightly feared, he wasn’t religious. Besides Neile, McQueen’s sustaining love was of machines, and for him happiness – its possibility and reality, its attainment and capture – came out of a finely tuned call-and-response with the internal combustion engine, the channelling of some great unknown, copulating force that called for the perfect alignment of man and motor. ‘A good set of wheels gets me hard,’ he’d say. In a race, Steve always felt that his own car, like a woman, was personally challenging him.

His competitiveness! No one who knew McQueen ever forgot it. The actor Dean Jones saw the classic, turbo version of it around the late 1960s. ‘Steve and I used to go biking, and he couldn’t stand – I mean he pathologically hated – being second. The reason McQueen got in so many wrecks is that, good as he was, he overcooked it.’ A charger, in race lingo. No piss-ant limits, he always said, for him. Stirling Moss, one of the few men Steve deferred to on four wheels, encountered the same thing whether on the track at Sebring or driving the canyon roads of Bel Air. ‘McQueen was fast, but he was also undisciplined. My God, the fearlessness of the man. But that was his whole life.’ Sure enough, Steve offered continual homages to ‘mud’ both on and off the screen. He’d already lived too long with the rules and restrictions which pettily obstructed his happiness. Far too fucking long. McQueen ‘constantly had to be proving himself,’ notes Neile. It was the same whether at poker, pinball, sex, fighting or acting. ‘You didn’t win, he did.’ No doubt it was this ‘madness and fire’ that led men like the director Buzz Kulik to portray the Steve of 1956 as a ‘little shit’. A perceptive friend noticed that he ‘was never difficult with people he didn’t like, the people he didn’t take seriously. He was the world’s most charming guy to waiters. On the other hand, he fell out at one time or another with almost all his cronies.’ To Dean Jones, ‘Steve’s film career made a virtue out of his flaws as a man. For me, he had the edge and frenzy of genius.’

The newlyweds’ honeymoon in San Diego and Ensenada was a balmy bit of upward assimilation, but soon enough they came down to earth again with a bump. Only two days later the McQueens drove back to Neile’s Culver City hotel. After twenty-four hours of continuous drinking and drag-racing the Ford, Steve promptly fell asleep over the soup course of their welcome-home supper. Various members of the film crew picked him up and put him on a couch. McQueen apparently slumbered for a few minutes, suddenly waking up again to telephone an order for two cases of Old Milwaukee, together with a fleet of taxis to take the entire Night cast out to a club. Bob Wise, who still had his doubts about Steve’s acting, was impressed with the pair’s mutual spark and kept an image of them as romantic lovers. He felt protective of the woman. There was something ‘young-boyish’, too, about the nearly middle-aged man. At weekends Steve and Neile started on a search that continued for some years for his lost father Bill, then thought to be living in California. Most other days, while Neile worked on This Could Be the Night, her spouse mooched around the Ballona Creek bars, tearing off into the Baldwin Hills on the 650 BSA or in the couple’s new VW (traded in, with Neile’s next pay cheque, for a Corvette, then a second red MG). Passers-by couldn’t help but notice that McQueen liked to ride the bike bare-chested and that he carried a bullwhip over the back wheel.

California had opened Steve’s eyes, but it hadn’t made him much money. He wound his way back to New York at Christmas. Between filming, guesting on The Walter Winchell Show and starring in a Vegas revue, Neile was now among the most prolific and commercially hot women on the stage. Creativity like that is usually part discipline and part indiscipline. Hers was all discipline. Steve constantly demanded Neile’s attention, particularly now that he – the ‘guy who [couldn’t] get arrested’, as he put it on honeymoon – paled, professionally, next to her. The cycle that emerged was explosive. One night, rushing to the theatre, she served him up a quickie TV dinner. McQueen said nothing, merely acted. In a single swoop, turkey bits, reconstituted peas, diced carrots, instant mash and the plastic sauce cup splattered the far wall. Frozen shit. According to their next-door neighbour, it was a 1950s role-reversal, the man ‘always flopping around the apartment’ while the woman, saintly in just about every account, ‘did everything, everywhere, all the time’. More to the point, Neile, though ‘ambitious and hyperactive – a mini Audrey Hepburn’, was also fanatically loyal to her husband’s cause. She introduced him, for instance, to Hilly Elkins and her agents at William Morris. Between them, they got him a role in a TV drama called The Defenders, opposite Bill Shatner of later Star Trek fame. Steve used to read for the part, alone or with his wife, in that cramped flat with the strong reek of damp and Lucky Strike cigarettes, honing his gift to affect any identity at the drop of a hat – to become, in a split second, according to the demands of his public, a hick, a thug, a greaser, a romantic hero, while remaining at bottom a world-weary child. As they walked around a New York which has since disappeared – open drains that stank, and horsemeat burgers he devoured as if they were famine relief – she encouraged him to see everyday life as a form of rehearsal. Steve’s mind would latch mathematically onto the number of steps he took between lights, or the exact beat of each foot, and then how he could fit his stage lines to the rhythm. It was Neile who gave him the great advice to show more of his ‘wonderful smile’ and childlike wit on screen. She told him frankly that he’d ‘stunk – done a bad Brando’ in Somebody Up There Likes Me. Neile’s support helped him sidestep many of the struggling actor’s other occupational hazards. Steve had always hated having to wash dishes or do anything too low to make ends meet. Nowadays he no longer had to. In the first year of their marriage McQueen and his wife earned $4000 and $50,000 respectively, which they pooled evenly.

Then he began to catch up.

If Somebody’s, Fidel had to a large extent been an imaginative manipulation of Steve’s own life, the killer role in The Defenders was almost pure invention. ‘McQueen was brilliant,’ says Hilly Elkins. ‘Everyone knew the material was lame – there was a certain amount of shtick involved – but looking at Steve’s face, seething with passion, even the most gnarled cynic melted. What struck me most were those eyes. God, but he had presence.’ The other thing McQueen had was a voice. Perfect pitch. Diction: dramatically improved. Gone for ever was Johnny Pope’s castrato croak, replaced by a rich, full-toned instrument which Steve lowered pointedly when he was most threatening, and raised when irony called. After that broadcast of 4 March 1957 the CBS switchboard took dozens of calls from fans praising his performance.

It was the last year of Steve’s long education. While Neile signed on for a revue in Vegas he took another job for CBS and severed his final ties with the Actors Studio. From now on, the ‘mad Hungarian’ Pete Witt, still clinging doggedly to his protégé, Elkins and the William Morris agency, suddenly all dancing crisply executed gavottes around their ‘kid’, would work together day and night to ‘break’ him. Three more television spots quickly followed. McQueen would later blame ‘a lot of [his] early marital shit’ on the fact that he awoke each day ‘knowing that either the wife or I would be out grooving away’ on location. On many of those days Steve would have to go for an audition, shoot a test or do a reading. In retrospect it was astonishing that he could combine such stress with a relentlessly full social life. Somehow, he always found time for play. When not shuttling between coasts, he was still busy around the bars and fleshpots of Greenwich Village. Once Neile was gone Esteban quickly became Desperado again, haunting the back room at Louie’s, where women in tight skirts loitered round the pool table. Commitment was fine, he said. He’d never abuse it. It was just hussies he wanted, the little sluts.

One night Steve showed up at Louie’s on his BSA, brandishing the bullwhip. By his own account, he drank ‘about a vat’ of Old Milwaukee. Much later on, some sort of ruckus broke out with another actor, a young Disney star who, in his own wry homage, carried a white rodent named Mickey in his breast pocket. There was a brief fraternal punch-up over the green baize, the pet mouse carefully avoided. Then Steve announced he was buying everyone a drink, to keep him company while ‘the old lady’ was out of town. Two women, encouraged, followed him up to the bar. Discouraged, one of them called him a shit. Towards dawn the other one accompanied Steve to 55th Street.

Many of those TV spots, not least the one called Four Hours in White, were tours de force, as McQueen first found and then glossed what Emily Hurt calls his ‘smiley-tough combination’. In that particular soap he appeared as cool and detached as a Strand cigarette advertisement. Even in the grainy, low-budget production values of early television, men like Elkins recognised a remarkable face and presence that could, with a year or two’s more work, trump even a Bogie or Walter Brennan. Thanks to Elkins, McQueen’s seismic break would follow in the summer of 1958. Seven years to the month after he first applied to stage school, he finally had a hit. From then on McQueen was a seller’s market for twenty-two years, the terms increasingly in his favour, right through to the end.

Professionally as well as sexually speaking, Steve was often told he was a shit in those years, and he didn’t disagree. Even Bogart, as McQueen was always reminding people, had had to claw his way to the top. As he also never tired of saying around Louie’s, ‘When I believe in something I fight like hell for it…All the nice guys are in the unemployment line.’ Even – or perhaps especially – at this first rip of his career, Steve was continually pushing for more ‘face time’ and wasn’t above throwing a fit, or walking off, if denied. He was a virtuoso self-promoter. Sometimes it worked, as when he told a TV director, ‘You’re photographing me, not some fucking rocks,’ and then had him swap a lavish, colour supplement shot of Monument Valley for extra close-ups of himself. Sometimes it didn’t. A friend remembers a scene in 1959 when the producer of McQueen’s series tore a strip off him for ‘bullying’ some of the crew.

Puzzled, Steve asked what he meant.

The suit replied that he meant McQueen was being a shit, that’s what.

Unbelieving, Steve replied that he only wanted what was best for the show, and besides, ‘I don’t need your stinking $750 a week – I’ve got bread in the bank.’

The mogul calmly pressed the button on his office speaker and said, ‘Find out how much money McQueen has in the bank.’ Five minutes later the machine spoke back: ‘Two hundred dollars.’

McQueen never fully understood acting, or he chose not to, which made him carve away at it all the more. For all the voice lessons and facial drills in front of the West 55th mirror, there was something more innate than Methodic in the way he rubbed grit into even the blandest lines. By the end of 1958 Steve was being touted as a TV star, but always wanted to work on the big screen; the transformation was so successful that he virtually invented the crossover, fully five years and ten pictures before Clint Eastwood. His new style, which he discovered almost immediately, was bluff and laconic – he hid behind silence as behind a bomb-proof door—and yet, like Steve himself, it had an unmistakable elegance and wit. It was perfect cool with a flash of menace.

McQueen’s second film was five star gobbledegook. The role itself was less scanty, if not much better than the first. Largely through Peter Witt, he landed the part of a young Jewish lawyer in Never Love a Stranger, Harold Robbins’s latest effort to fillet the sex from a thin, not to say gaunt plot. This queasily melodramatic tale of the Naked City wasn’t released for nearly two years, and then tanked. As a story, it was reminiscent of a bad episode of The Untouchables.

There was no pretence at range. The whole thing seemed to shrink down to a stage play and then simply to have forgotten to tell the cameraman to stay home. Stranger was located along a narrow strip of the Hudson river, which served as a central metaphor for the soggy, meandering plot. Most of the acting conveyed the shrill, one-note dramatics of Ed Wood on a much lower budget. For once McQueen’s damnation of an out-and-out bomb, and his own part in it, was underdone. Dick Bright, best known as the omnipresent Mob crony in The Godfather trilogy, thought Steve ‘shit’ in Stranger, yet sagely guessed he was still ‘working on a formula’. In that eventual blueprint, the voice, the sense of mood and action would be so well crafted that it would – and did – take pages to even review the underlying sense of danger, the hidden motivations McQueen could pack into a few tart lines of dialogue. Before long, he would play it tight and hard in even the most asinine soap opera. At this stage, Steve was still more concerned with merely acting than he was with pace or narrative drive, but his Cabell was a heroic failure. A star wasn’t born.

The reviews shook him – McQueen a ham? Back to grunt work, weekly handouts from his wife? – as if he’d been slapped from a trance. After that, Steve rehearsed twice as hard as before. Not the least of the lessons from Stranger was that if he dominated the rest of the cast backstage, he could handle them on screen, too. Especially the women.

That cramped little crew hotel.^* Steve made a start towards super-stardom by following the lead of young actors who became notorious for their behaviour. The leading man John Drew Barrymore, for one, had already run afoul of the law and his own temper, landing himself first an arrest sheet and then a year-long suspension by Actors Equity. Barrymore spent most of his evenings in the unbuttoned privacy of the ‘sin bin’ or crew lounge, convivially doling out what were probably cigarettes. Some of these, along with Barrymore himself, would in turn make their way to the junior actresses’ room known as ‘the dorm’. McQueen, failing to heed the film’s title, soon began an affair with his co-star Lita Milan. This, too, had some of the properties of a St Trinian’s romp. The couple signalled each other excitedly at night with torches from their adjacent suites, and at one point Steve climbed into an empty maid’s room to eavesdrop on a call between Milan and a girlfriend immediately below, repeating the intimate conversation to her in bed. There was an abandon and fun, even frivolity, about the place, though Robbins and the movie itself were a lurking presence. Most nights, Steve would stop off for an Old Milwaukee in the lounge, dine on a burger, and then join Milan in the room with the red neon light from the Chinese restaurant flickering outside. At weekends he drove back to Neile in Las Vegas.

Emily Hurt saw McQueen becoming a star before her eyes. They still ran into each other around the Village, and he told her about Lita Milan. On the other hand, he had a marriage, and ‘Steve was intent on having most of its vows kept’, specifically the one about the woman obeying the man. He told Hurt that Neile gave him the royal treatment, and asked only that he ‘be careful’ – discreet, in other words – with the overcaffeinated young starlets who filled his time between one take and the next. Neile was well aware of the casual screwing that went on throughout their marriage. She tolerated it. When McQueen coined the admiring phrase, ‘Slopes are different’ he was talking about several characteristics peculiar to Eastern women – but mainly the way they give men a long leash, even if all the leashes ultimately are held in female hands. He usually confessed to his wife straight away. ‘Oh, Steve,’ she would murmur as he started in, silently pour them both a drink, and say no more until a quiet ‘Why?’ or ‘It’s all right, baby,’ as he finished.

As Neile writes, ‘My combination Oriental and Latin upbringing had taught me that men separated love and marriage from their feckless romps in the hay…So, OK, I thought. I can handle it – I have to – as long as he doesn’t flaunt it.’ And McQueen didn’t, says Hurt. ‘He wasn’t stupid. Steve nearly always told Neile before someone else did.’ Sex, fear, guilt. ‘Scared shitless. What am I gonna do about the fuck-flings?’ he’d ask Hurt, one of the flung. Worse, ‘What will the wife do? I can’t live without her.’ Luckily for him, McQueen had chosen an exceptionally stoical mate. It was only when Neile cast back over their lives fifteen years later that the carefully preserved biodome cracked, under the twin stresses of drugs and madness, with shattering results.

Somebody and Stranger may not have been much, but between them they formed a hyphen linking the Cornflake to the king of cool. In the late fifties Steve was still inclined to bad Brando and Dean parodies, but as he got older he began to prefer acting that was formed out of the actor’s own ‘mud’, simple and to the bone. He was fond of a remark by Hitchcock, who held that true drama involved ‘doing nothing well’. Steve rightly liked to say that he’d lived, and it showed in his work. The strong jaw and X-ray stare gave him a knocked-about look. McQueen seemed much more grown up than most of Hollywood’s new crop of pretty boys. His range as an actor may not have been wide, but it was profoundly deep. He was the self-sufficient male animal, the kind of Hemingway hero who combines complexity with reserve to portray a tortuous emotional life. In film after film he carried himself like a regular guy, fissile but superbly taut, and Steve could no more slither into histrionics than he could enjoy a night out in women’s clothing. The sheer intensity of his second twenty-five years was certainly deepened by the horrors of the first. As Hurt rightly says, ‘Steve McQueen could have been a character in a Steve McQueen movie.’

He served up some other fare in 1958–9 and did well, using the same skills he’d honed in The Defenders and adding touches brought by Neile. She urged him, for example, to finally drop ‘Steven’ for the more freewheeling Steve. ‘When I met [McQueen] he’d no name or stage presence – that came later – but he did have a great head on his shoulders and he learnt fast.’ She wasn’t the first woman to groom a star, some would sniff jealously; but Neile was, nonetheless, stunningly successful at converting the B-film hack into a potent Hollywood player. Now more than ever, she hammered his case with Elkins and Stan Kamen of William Morris. Thanks in turn to their all-hours agentry, Steve won the lead in The Great St Louis Bank Robbery, his first ever above-the-title billing – a modest caper directed by Charles Guggenheim and funded by family money. The idea behind this vanity picture was to show, in excruciating detail, how an actual heist might be planned, intercut with doomed efforts to convey ‘character’. McQueen played the getaway driver. His wholeheartedness offset what, on the most charitable view, were the gang’s familiar cardboard types: the muttering hophead, the rough diamond, the gentle weakling and the voice of reason – the hero’s girlfriend, played by one Molly McCarthy. Against this cut-out backdrop, Steve did his best, at once glamorous and tragic, but St Louis soon tipped into farce. Real indignity befell the climax, with McQueen sobbing, ‘I’m not with them!’ as the cuffs went on. By then the script seemed to have lost all interest in suspense, either in this particular rip or within the larger saga; although the Guggenheims talked about a sequel, their services as film moguls weren’t to be required again.

Steve auditioned every chance he could, on his way to being one of the envied stars in a town full of them; Neile and Elkins and Kamen pounded on every door they could, bulk-mailing his glossy to scouts and producers. With talent and support like that he was picking up speed like a competition-tuned Ferrari, bigger and more menacing every time anyone glanced in their mirror.

Along the way McQueen also took some desperately lame roles, simply in order to have somewhere to go in the mornings. At least one of his self-coined ‘fuck films’ would make St Louis look like Sophocles. This was The Blob, his last ever ‘something or anything’ picture, done, according to Elkins, ‘pure and simple to get Steve seen’. The three-week shoot with a threadbare air to it in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, cost a total of $220,000. For his part as Steve Andrews, the local high schooler, twenty-eight-year-old McQueen was offered $3000 or 10 per cent of the film’s gross. He opted for the cash. To date, close to $20 million has rained down for The Blob, a figure as over the top as most of the acting. Steve fumed about this miscalculation for the rest of his life.

Mixed-up kids, authority figures and the definitive, gelatinous red menace. With all the stock types and plot cued by contemporary culture, The Blob actually had its moments. The story, daringly for its day, unfolded in very nearly real time. Between them, director and producer pulled two masterstrokes. First, The Blob conformed to – in some ways defined – the late fifties morality tale about the small town that refuses to listen to its teenagers. Then, instead of the usually confident, not to say cocky lead, they cast McQueen as a bolshie but well-meaning mug without the faintest idea how to cope. The loner and anti-hero legend effectively started here. As Bob Relyea, Steve’s later business partner, says, ‘Oddly enough, most of the famous looks and grunts were present and correct in The Blob. The way McQueen plays off the other kids, I always think, gives a hint of the Don Gordon relationship in Bullitt.’ Finally, the whole film was a minor miracle of stretching a little a long way. In particular, the miniatures and special effects, shot in the basement of a Lutheran church, gave at least some gloss to the deathless ‘Omigod, it’s alive!’ rhetoric of the budget sci-fi romp. But that was about all you could say for The Blob. Every day McQueen would drive in from Philadelphia to be directed by that same church’s vicar in scenes opposite a man-eating Jello. Then every night he would drive back to the hotel and ‘vent’, as she put it, to Neile.

The real star, as Steve used to complain, may have been the amorphous slime oozing down those Pennsylvania streets. But he did for it in the end. The simplicity of the part’s trajectory – rebellious dope to town hero – mirrored at least some of his own story. In the movie’s satirically duff climax, the Blob, seen a minute earlier steamrollering entire houses, beats a quivering retreat from McQueen and a lone fire-extinguisher. Wooden acting and a smoochy theme by Burt Bacharach added up to a film equally wobbly, with even basic drama unaccountably glossed over. From there the credits worked their way to ‘The End’, only to have the letters swirl into an ominous, sequel-begging question mark. Long before then, The Blob had lapsed into truly ham-fisted efforts to convey danger, as in the epic scene between McQueen and his date Aneta Corseaut:

SM: You sure you wanna go with me?

AC: Yes.

SM: I wouldn’t give much for our chances…you know, wandering around in the middle of the night trying to find something that if we found it, it might kill us.

AC: If we could only find a couple of people to help us.

SM: Who?

AC: Why, your friends – Tony, Mooch and Al.

SM: [Excitedly] Hey! You know, that’s worth a try.

In time, The Blob became that then rarity – a cult that gave tangible as well as critical meaning to the word ‘gross’. After Paramount bought the rights and pumped in $300,000-worth of PR, it earned an initial $2 million, the first wedge of what, for them, became a stipend. McQueen would soon and long regret having taken his flat fee. In chronological order, the film became first a fad, then a full-blown hit, latterly a video staple, made the producer Jack Harris a rich man, spawned both a sequel and a remake, warped into one of those camp classics loved precisely for being bad and finally found its true home on TV – The Blob is on somewhere most Friday nights, and features in virtually every trivia quiz show. Its entry in the reference books invariably includes the footnote, off by two years, of being ‘Steve McQueen’s first film’.^*

Around William Morris they were soon celebrating, and the PR office began concocting what was the prototype of so many puff pieces: ‘Young people today want a new hero to relate to, someone whose success isn’t for himself but for his fans everywhere. Their enjoyment [of the film] is his best reward of all.’ But Steve’s true feelings hardly amounted to pride. He reacted to The Blob with a mixture of hilarity and embarrassment. After fame finally struck, he tended to shrug it off – suggesting they hang a poster of it in his executive john – when not quite seriously denying any knowledge of it. Near the end of his life McQueen told his minister Leonard De Witt that he’d always rued not having taken the points on The Blob, ‘but at the time he did it he was flat broke – being evicted’. The man with the by then legendary clout around town ‘just laughed at the whole mess’. But that was later. In 1958, according to Neile, ‘Steve was shocked – it was like, “Jesus Christ! I’m in one of those things.” Total horror. On the other hand, that’s when he knew he was on the way.’

Ambition, money, sex: whatever else you said of him, McQueen didn’t skirt the big issues in life. Many Hollywood producers, with their penchant for docile idiots, hated him on sight. But he was hard-working and talented, and with others that nearly cancelled out his quirks about ‘face time’ and close-ups.

A man like Jack Harris saw McQueen as taut and tightly strung, physically as well as in type. ‘Steve had a reputation for being trouble,’ he’d say. ‘He was always hard to handle.’ Another actor remembers that McQueen ‘walked tense, and when he walked he’d really strut out. Bang, bang, bang. Onto the set. I mean, he didn’t have a leisurely, graceful walk.’ On stage or in the hotel, Harris and the rest watched him act or sulk or argue aggressively in an obvious and deliberate effort to overcome his basic shyness, to win the very approval his intensity often prevented. ‘I don’t think he ever had an ounce of self-confidence.’ To others, though, the effort was all too convincing. ‘Steve had an almost animal streak about him,’ says Hurt, ‘which was why some people gave him a pass. He could be wild.’ And violent: one morning in New York McQueen and his wife were out walking in the park when a man wolf-whistled at Neile from a passing convertible. Steve immediately ran after the car, caught up with it at a light, dragged the man from his seat and forcibly extracted an apology. The alternative to this solution had been ‘a pop in the chops’.

McQueen’s flip side, in contrast, was a childlike insistence that life was supposed to be fun. He had the great capacity to take things solemnly but not seriously, and a part of him remained firmly rooted in 1938, the shy but self-contained boy on the hog farm. (Soon after Steve married Neile, he took her to meet Uncle Claude – carefully bypassing Slater itself.) Although he was a realist at heart, he never quite lost Claude’s own conviction that life not only should but could be enjoyed, and in the right mood, says Hurt, ‘McQueen had a great sense of humour – always provided the joke was in the proper context.’ Friends remember his helpless laughing jags when Steve simply abandoned himself. A roar with a giggle in it, and quite often hysterics. ‘Knock knock’ gags sent him into fits. Not quite Oscar Wilde then, this man-child, but warm and witty enough to offset at least some of the darker side.

That first year or so after Neile met him, McQueen ‘virtually invented a new way to live’: gunning the bike down New York alleys, adopting the ugliest pets – mutts in the street always seemed to follow him home – jogging into the apartment, hot and fetid (if not an accomplished athlete, a spirited one), then running downtown, unchanged, for beer and burgers and yet more belly-laughs in Downey’s. In other words, Steve was the consummate mood swinger – Hollywood’s swinger. ‘When something bugged him, he let you know it,’ says Hurt. ‘But, otherwise – God, what a smoothie.’

Above all, Steve doted on Neile and, eventually, even came to trust her. He may have avoided being ‘head-over-heels in love’, but, he asked, who wouldn’t? The accident of being worked over by a woman was one thing. Courting such grief was another, and if a charge of aggressive intent were lodged against McQueen he answered it with a plea of self-defence. ‘I try to get along, and I’ll continue to get along. In fact, I plan on doing as much getting along, with as many folks, as possible. I will get along until I drop. How ’bout that?’ He seldom bad-mouthed a woman or a colleague in public, rarely displayed his obvious first-strike potential and never jilted a friend. Or not yet. Everything else, as he often said, was ‘just business’.

Within only a year or two McQueen was one of the few stars who could ‘open’ a picture, a man apparently with his finger on the pulse of the mass audience. Strangely enough, he was never ‘one of the people’ himself. Steve essentially went from zero to eighty without feeling the need to level off at forty or so en route. Late in 1957, cheered on by wife, manager and agent, he duly made the full-time move west. He had never spent more than a few weeks, at least at large, in California, and his prospects there were as unpredictable as the country. But Elkins, particularly, was all for it. He and Stan Kamen went to work on Steve, still the sweatshirted hipster, getting him first into chinos and suede jackets and then on to a plane. Kamen took him aside and talked out his reasoning: ‘Kid, you can be one of the chorus line in New York or you can make for Tinseltown…I know it’s a risk to take. Do you want to fold your cards, maybe, or raise the ante?’

Go for it.

He and Neile arrived deep that midwinter and rented their first house, admittedly not much more than a shack, beside an auto shop and a Mexican cantina on Klump Avenue in Studio City. At the time he moved in, McQueen owned his clothes, a bike and a car, and one Indian quilt. He loved the place. Klump may have been no Beverly Hills, but it was, nonetheless, Hollywood, and Steve would never forget riding his BSA up into the canyon trails, cruising under winter skies streaked with red and purple. His whole life now went from noir to Technicolor. By the end of a new year that had begun in 55th Street, he was a sunny fixture in a town gaudily decorated in 1920s Moorish, fêted if not always loved, rich, famous, and a serial collector of unpaid tickets in his fancy Porsche Super Speedster. He would never again go back to live in New York.

Steve settled in California at Christmas, and got his break by Easter. He still had no real reputation except the one Neile gave him by her support and flattery, but because she yielded so freely, he began to grow in confidence. McQueen now regularly met their mutual manager for planning sessions: and like others Elkins came to love his private lack of pretension, his habit of breaking into fits, telling little stories, making irreverent jokes about The Blob, his uncanny impressions of famous actors. Klump soon became the unlikely command post for Steve’s next offensive. It started with the familiar combination of talent and good luck.

Elkins happened to also represent one Bob Culp, then starring in the weekly CBS series Trackdown. ‘The producers, Four Star, hit on the then novel idea of a companion piece. The spinoff was about a bounty hunter in the old West. I immediately knew that McQueen, playing this quasi-heavy lead, wouldn’t only be perfect for the part – he’d use it as a launch pad for stardom…I made my pitch to Steve and to Four Star. He did the pilot, then made The Blob while the jury was still out. The Western was a smash and the rest is history.’ Instead of doing more B-films, McQueen suddenly found himself being rung up and chauffeured to the Four Star offices. The first of the four he met there was David Niven, who, like Elkins, soon also grasped the fact that ‘Steve had “it”, and that “it” – whatever it was – was the future’. One of the great Hollywood icons of the then recent past, merely by launching McQueen, thus illustrated that legends of their day would inevitably become prey for those who followed them.

The only way Steve himself could avoid this fate was to establish a character for the long haul.

An actress friend was invited to dinner at Klump one night that summer. She remembers that McQueen ‘actually put down his knife and fork to take an enormous script from his coat pocket to bounce ideas off everyone’. For the remainder of the meal Steve chewed over the text as much as his food. Later that same evening, he was still up ‘trying out voices, practising quick draws, doing funny little moves, going over scenes where he needed a reaction’. It’s doubtful that McQueen’s guests did any serious advising. By then Steve was an uncontrollable ball of energy, his voice sometimes soaring back to Hatful register and the peak of blond hair rising on his head, his hands flapping and his feet in biker boots stamping up and down. His rehearsal was a gala performance in which he sang and played all the parts.

McQueen’s Trackdown slot aired on 7 March 1958. CBS and Four Star both liked what they saw and bought the series. Wanted Dead or Alive, as it now was, made its prime-time debut that September. Virtually overnight Steve became the first though not the last TV cowboy to shoot his way towards the big screen. But where Richard Boone, Chuck Connors and the other fauna of the half-hour ‘oater’ barely made it onto film, McQueen would leapfrog the entire Hollywood pack. The breakthrough was stunningly achieved. In 117 straight episodes, whether riding into the sunset or daringly allowing his character to be human, Steve staked out a claim bordered by Bogie’s eruptive cool and Gary Cooper’s suave languor. Though McQueen soon had company on that turf, he drew more from it than most. He became a star. Men like Niven and his partner Dick Powell now related to him as a virtuoso peer, as well as a self-dramatist. Trade reporters who had barely heard of McQueen in 1957 now began to speak in his voice and wrinkle up their noses at things that had a bad smell for him. A few fans doorstepped him at Klump. Steve’s relationship with Neile also changed. She remained his friend and gatekeeper as well as his wife, but he was no longer her project. Steve himself affirmed this when, the same week Wanted went on the air, he asked her whether it wasn’t time to settle down and have a baby. By mid September of that year Neile was pregnant.

Then, for fifteen years, she stopped working.

McQueen, meanwhile, never resolved his feelings towards the paired universe of his own childhood, the lonely son of the absent father and the mother who was a nervous wreck. This legacy gave rise to the ruthless demands he made on himself and others. When Wanted first went in front of the cameras, Steve was twenty-eight and pretty much fully formed. He was intense, grim (except when he collapsed in giggles), insecure, prickly and exceptionally focused – a flinty product of fly-by-night adventurism and naivete, hardened by reform school and the Marines. It took all his combined experience, ambition and sheer nous to lift Wanted out of the mire of competing horse operas. Cheyenne, Wyatt Earp, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Maverick and Zane Grey were only the upmarket end of a genre tethered by the likes of Rifleman and Wells Fargo. McQueen’s series went out in the cut-throat 8.30 p.m. slot on Saturday nights, after an hour of Perry Mason and directly opposite Perry Como. Steve declared a private ratings war on the famously smooth, cardigan-wearing crooner. Como’s weekly guests – an assortment of ‘real folks’ such as construction workers, on hand to make requests – never looked half as real as McQueen himself, sporting dirty boots and a sawn-off Winchester shotgun dubbed the ‘Mare’s Laig’. More than forty years later, rerun episodes of Wanted are still saddled with a Violence rating.

Steve very soon changed and then embodied most people’s stereotype of a cowboy. Rugged, wan and bow-legged like a prairie John Wayne, self-contained, cool, he also liberated the postmodern, ironic school which sprang up in the years ahead. In an equivalent move, thousands of female fans – many of them defecting from Como’s jacuzzi – duly responded to the all-action hero who had the nerve to, as he put it, both ‘fight and think’. Men simply wanted to be like him.

Elsewhere, however, it was another story. Behind the scenes, among at least some of Wanted’s crew and cast, it’s fair to say that McQueen wasn’t just not liked, he was disliked. For one, there was his relationship with the show’s primary advertiser, Viceroy cigarettes. Steve’s contract called for him to be wheeled out, in character as the star Josh Randall, to make his periodic pitch (‘It’s good entertainment for the whole family…yessir…and that’s what’ll sell any product’) for both sponsor and series. Somehow, the way he did it was always thought to be lacking in warmth. One ex-Viceroy mogul, Nick Payne, recalls McQueen working the company’s convention, ‘cruising the room like a zombie…He’d stare at you with that squinty, butch look, offer a “Howdy, mac” and move on, his arm outstretched to his next mark. What I remember him telling us was that he’d sold millions of cigarettes for us, for a few bucks’ return,’ says Payne. ‘Been there, done that. It was extremely flip.’ McQueen’s tone was cool, his grip cold and clammy. Nor did he exactly endear himself to the Viceroy suits by ostentatiously smoking one of their rivals’ brands. ‘It was obvious to most of us that Steve was a so-so salesman, and that the product he was really plugging was himself.’

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

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

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

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

He had no close friends.

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

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

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

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