McQueen: The Biography. Christopher Sandford
he meant to set himself. Long experience had taught that with any brass restraint, even ‘shit’, was inevitable. As McQueen encountered more authority, the bones of a deeply individualistic, anarchic view of life emerged more clearly. He was no ideologue. Rather, Steve was romantically attached to certain personal principles which weren’t necessarily owned by the left or right. One army buddy recalls him ‘reading his rights’, as he put it: the right to drink, to get laid, to race bikes and to tool around in his souped-up jeep. With that agenda a clash with authority was ordained, and duly came. From then on, Steve’s insubordination became proverbial. The one moral or intellectual datum it brought with it was a programmed response – one of his crisp variants of ‘Fuck you’ – to being cooped up. McQueen hated fences.
Leave soon came around.
‘I’ll be hootin’ and hollerin’,’ Steve said with glee. ‘I’ll be boozing! Fucking and fighting! Do you hear me?’
‘Just watch it,’ they told him.
But after extending a two-day pass into a two-week holiday with a girlfriend, Steve spent forty-one days in the Camp Lejeune brig. (This stint in the stockade, suitably dramatised, would provide much of the source material for The Great Escape.) Following a second AWOL episode – this one involving a punch-up with the Shore Patrol – he was busted down to private, the first of seven straight demotions. Not long after that, Steve was posted to the military arsenal in Quantico, Virginia, before graduating to the Gun Factory in Washington, DC. His best marine friend – who asked to follow him there – recalls the scene in the barracks when McQueen burst in after yet another report: ‘I remember he flung his cap into a corner and shouted, “Well, pal! Busted!” And I said, “What are your plans now, Steve? Somehow I can’t see you as officer material.” And with that he gave me that cool, drop-dead squint of his. “As far as I can see,” Steve said, “I got two choices. I could go on stage, or I could go to jail.” Most people’s money would have been on the latter.’
McQueen may have been a full-time morale problem for the uniformed class. His beefs about military life in general, and the lack of women and good food in particular, became lore. When his unit pulled a midwinter tour of Lake Melville (then 30 degrees below zero), it seemed to his friend that ‘all the ingredients were there for Steve to go ape. A lot of guys, better adjusted than he was, snap in those conditions.’ The first few days in Canada, spent in various cold-water amphibious exercises, were bad enough. McQueen complained ever more bitterly about his rations. Frozen bully-beef – ‘Shit,’ he growled as he crunched his. One early morning, when a transport carrying tanks and jeeps set off for Goose Bay, the divisional brass sensed there might be further trouble with McQueen. He was standing on the bank, hunched double against the snow, while waiting for the boat to pick him up. The few other men around him could hear him curse, over and over, moving from his cold and hunger to his lieutenant, to whom he offered certain medical advice as blunt as it was impractical: ‘rich stuff’, according to one witness, even for the Marines. In short, everything looked set fair for a confrontation.
And then, before anyone quite realised what was happening – before the officers could shout warnings – the transport floundered on a spit. Several vehicles and their drivers slid off the deck into the arctic water. Because of its speed, the ship itself capsized and began going down within seconds.
People watched.
McQueen sprang from his crouch and began snapping out orders, grabbing two or three soldiers (striking one of them as being ‘almost inhumanly calm’) and launching a small flatboat towards the sandbar. Inside a minute he was at the scene of the wreck, ducking down into the ice to rescue survivors – he personally pulled five men to safety – while keeping up a flow of commands, echoing crisply over the water, so as to avoid a second sinking. (Another boat that set out to help did keel over, with the loss of three lives.) Back on shore, he then saw to it that warm clothes and blankets were broken out before accepting any help for himself. Even his commanding officer seemed disarmed. After the shock had worn off, and before his own court-martial, there was a seizure of gushing thanks – a notable reversal for a hip-hup type who had long promised to ‘break’ his company misfit. ‘Steve, you amazed me,’ he admitted. According to the handwritten citation, ‘Pfc McQueen’s initiative in immediately setting a rescue in motion was the key to what followed afterwards…Had Pfc McQueen not acted promptly in that direction, more loss of life would have ensued.’
Once again, the bloody-minded loner had been redeemed by his instinctively gutsy, dogged alter ego: this was McQueen’s track record in the forces. His mutinous streak, his overall volatility and neon changes of mood would provide most of the copy for biographers mining his early years. But the artful, organised side deserves attention, too; no one personified grace under pressure like he did. ‘Watching him take charge that morning,’ his friend now says, ‘was the most revealing experience I had in the military.’
From Newfoundland, McQueen worked his way into a plum job by displaying a new instinct for keeping his head down. According to friends, by 1949–50 he had almost obsessive hopes of an honourable discharge, ones that would have been far-fetched a year or two earlier. But as at Chino he wanted to go out on his terms, for once having ‘done something’ for his country. His own boats were only half burned. Enlistment was an ordeal before him as well as behind. In time McQueen’s patriotism duly found expression when he became a member of the guard manning Harry Truman’s yacht, the Sequoia; he may have spoken to the president for a moment or two, as he would to four of his successors. Around 1950 Steve also began, or formalised, his lifelong exercise regime, and never quite forgot the bends and squats he learned in the marine gym. Aside from that and the poker, he had few other interests. The internal combustion engine, and driving it too fast, wasn’t strictly speaking a hobby. It was more what McQueen did.
Having joined the corps as a private in April 1947, McQueen left it exactly three years later with the same rank. From Camp Lejeune he hitched his way down the Pee Dee river to South Carolina. There was some talk of him moving in with – even marrying – his girl there, neither of which ever happened. Steve always preferred tearless exits, women knew, and he didn’t disappoint his Myrtle Beach connection that summer. In the early hours of 22 August 1950, his mustering-out pay gone, McQueen jumped a train to Washington, DC, where he eventually became a taxi driver. His parting note to his fiancée said he was sorry, he’d tried, but, as far as loving someone went – ‘I cant remember the drill.’
But then, Steve had a lot to forget.
The next year was a relatively happy one for McQueen, even though his income wasn’t large or his jobs very promising. He moved back to New York, to a $19 a month cold-water flat in Greenwich Village. Having thrown over a good living as a cabbie, he worked as a builder’s mate, did a paper round, repaired TV sets, trained as a cobbler, boxed, played stud, recapped tyres in a garage and ran numbers for a local bookie. On his own cheerful admission, he ‘got wasted a lot’. By now, pot, wine and beer had become his constant companions, his most dependable friends. Sometimes, late at night, Steve would take his bottles and bags down from the shelf, count them and fondle them as, other nights, he was known to do to his guests: there were literally dozens of women. It’s significant that he recognised the ways in which his cynical but childish twenty-year-old self kindled emotions associated with a much younger boy. Even teenagers wanted to mother him.
Nor did McQueen get about much. If he ever needed male company, his card-playing or dirt-biking crew would come round. Two ex-marines once paid him a visit at the apartment. Steve generously urged them, along with his current girl, to go out on the afternoon of her day off while he made dinner. They returned and found no trace of food or of McQueen. He was discovered in the kitchen reading the paper and drinking beer. Supper was ready: it consisted of meat loaf, potato salad and pie, all scrounged from the local diner. Steve was inordinately proud of this achievement and boasted of it for years later. Aside from a few tins and paper plates, his only personal effects around the place were a stolen NO PARKING sign he used as barbells and the 1946 Indian Chief motorcycle he kept by his bed. Dora Yanni, who knew McQueen in late 1950, remembers the look of ‘almost sexual awe’ that came over him whenever he gazed at the bike – quite unlike the ‘perfunctory stuff’ he went through with the women whom,