McQueen: The Biography. Christopher Sandford
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;