McQueen: The Biography. Christopher Sandford
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,