McQueen: The Biography. Christopher Sandford
had lived through the most pivotal years of his life. Although still technically a minor, he had the raw material to harness his own adult personality. Already a pattern had emerged: thoughts of disgust upon waking in the morning. Feelings of depression for most of the day. Dreams of manic elation and triumph on a great tide of sexual encounters after dark. During the night itself, he often lay awake reviewing things, and they often made him sick.
In the five years since he left Boys Republic, McQueen had variously worked as a deck ape, card-sharp, gigolo, huckster and runner in a brothel. His mind went in dolorous circles around the dim past – furnished slums, he always remembered, with gaslight laid on and find your own heating. Steve’s self-dramatising impulse, so crucial to his acting genius, grew out of a need to escape. He was a serial runaway, a Leatherneck and a boxer, an expert at pool and motorbikes. Not surprisingly he had a temper. Yanni’s recollection of him gripping the stationary Indian Chief, swaying back and forth on the seat as if it were a rocking horse, is chilling enough; but the self-destructive fits, not often encountered in the life of the publicised McQueen, were ‘worse – the pits’. Drinking for fun was out, but drinking to induce coma was a way of coping with life, specifically with ‘chicks’. The thought of sex while sober was like a doom before him.
Nor were career prospects that rosy. For most of the winter of 1950–51 Steve’s odds-on fate was a swift exit into jail, if not an undignified grave. Hundreds or thousands of men like him fell every year in New York, first in the gutter and then down the drain. What separated him from them was, oddly enough, both a strength and a weakness – his insecurity. Steve was, as he saw it, in a death struggle with the world, and he successfully passed off his dark streak as a sign of necessary moral fibre. Tenacity was what life was about. He was going to ‘grab the brass ring’, he told Yanni, who remembers visiting Steve one wet evening that March, carrying beer and cake ‘to celebrate, for once’. But by the time she got inside McQueen was already on the Indian Chief, rocking to and fro and repeating, like a machine, ‘Bad…Very bad,’ while gazing straight ahead of him with a glazed expression ‘like a man scoping hell’. Some of the ‘madness and fire’ that drove McQueen was there that night in the apartment, as Yanni watched him slowly nodding, then lurching with furious speed, kicking at the wheels of the bike, falling at last into an exhausted slump and sobbing with dreadful, ever-increasing momentum, panting and miserably trying to blink out the dampness in his eyes.
He was twenty-one.
3 ‘Should I lay bathrooms, or should I perform?’
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