McQueen: The Biography. Christopher Sandford
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