McQueen: The Biography. Christopher Sandford

      Within only a year or two McQueen was one of the few stars who could ‘open’ a picture, a man apparently with his finger on the pulse of the mass audience. Strangely enough, he was never ‘one of the people’ himself. Steve essentially went from zero to eighty without feeling the need to level off at forty or so en route. Late in 1957, cheered on by wife, manager and agent, he duly made the full-time move west. He had never spent more than a few weeks, at least at large, in California, and his prospects there were as unpredictable as the country. But Elkins, particularly, was all for it. He and Stan Kamen went to work on Steve, still the sweatshirted hipster, getting him first into chinos and suede jackets and then on to a plane. Kamen took him aside and talked out his reasoning: ‘Kid, you can be one of the chorus line in New York or you can make for Tinseltown…I know it’s a risk to take. Do you want to fold your cards, maybe, or raise the ante?’

      Go for it.

      He and Neile arrived deep that midwinter and rented their first house, admittedly not much more than a shack, beside an auto shop and a Mexican cantina on Klump Avenue in Studio City. At the time he moved in, McQueen owned his clothes, a bike and a car, and one Indian quilt. He loved the place. Klump may have been no Beverly Hills, but it was, nonetheless, Hollywood, and Steve would never forget riding his BSA up into the canyon trails, cruising under winter skies streaked with red and purple. His whole life now went from noir to Technicolor. By the end of a new year that had begun in 55th Street, he was a sunny fixture in a town gaudily decorated in 1920s Moorish, fêted if not always loved, rich, famous, and a serial collector of unpaid tickets in his fancy Porsche Super Speedster. He would never again go back to live in New York.

      Steve settled in California at Christmas, and got his break by Easter. He still had no real reputation except the one Neile gave him by her support and flattery, but because she yielded so freely, he began to grow in confidence. McQueen now regularly met their mutual manager for planning sessions: and like others Elkins came to love his private lack of pretension, his habit of breaking into fits, telling little stories, making irreverent jokes about The Blob, his uncanny impressions of famous actors. Klump soon became the unlikely command post for Steve’s next offensive. It started with the familiar combination of talent and good luck.

      Elkins happened to also represent one Bob Culp, then starring in the weekly CBS series Trackdown. ‘The producers, Four Star, hit on the then novel idea of a companion piece. The spinoff was about a bounty hunter in the old West. I immediately knew that McQueen, playing this quasi-heavy lead, wouldn’t only be perfect for the part – he’d use it as a launch pad for stardom…I made my pitch to Steve and to Four Star. He did the pilot, then made The Blob while the jury was still out. The Western was a smash and the rest is history.’ Instead of doing more B-films, McQueen suddenly found himself being rung up and chauffeured to the Four Star offices. The first of the four he met there was David Niven, who, like Elkins, soon also grasped the fact that ‘Steve had “it”, and that “it” – whatever it was – was the future’. One of the great Hollywood icons of the then recent past, merely by launching McQueen, thus illustrated that legends of their day would inevitably become prey for those who followed them.

      The only way Steve himself could avoid this fate was to establish a character for the long haul.

      An actress friend was invited to dinner at Klump one night that summer. She remembers that McQueen ‘actually put down his knife and fork to take an enormous script from his coat pocket to bounce ideas off everyone’. For the remainder of the meal Steve chewed over the text as much as his food. Later that same evening, he was still up ‘trying out voices, practising quick draws, doing funny little moves, going over scenes where he needed a reaction’. It’s doubtful that McQueen’s guests did any serious advising. By then Steve was an uncontrollable ball of energy, his voice sometimes soaring back to Hatful register and the peak of blond hair rising on his head, his hands flapping and his feet in biker boots stamping up and down. His rehearsal was a gala performance in which he sang and played all the parts.

      McQueen’s Trackdown slot aired on 7 March 1958. CBS and Four Star both liked what they saw and bought the series. Wanted Dead or Alive, as it now was, made its prime-time debut that September. Virtually overnight Steve became the first though not the last TV cowboy to shoot his way towards the big screen. But where Richard Boone, Chuck Connors and the other fauna of the half-hour ‘oater’ barely made it onto film, McQueen would leapfrog the entire Hollywood pack. The breakthrough was stunningly achieved. In 117 straight episodes, whether riding into the sunset or daringly allowing his character to be human, Steve staked out a claim bordered by Bogie’s eruptive cool and Gary Cooper’s suave languor. Though McQueen soon had company on that turf, he drew more from it than most. He became a star. Men like Niven and his partner Dick Powell now related to him as a virtuoso peer, as well as a self-dramatist. Trade reporters who had barely heard of McQueen in 1957 now began to speak in his voice and wrinkle up their noses at things that had a bad smell for him. A few fans doorstepped him at Klump. Steve’s relationship with Neile also changed. She remained his friend and gatekeeper as well as his wife, but he was no longer her project. Steve himself affirmed this when, the same week Wanted went on the air, he asked her whether it wasn’t time to settle down and have a baby. By mid September of that year Neile was pregnant.

      Then, for fifteen years, she stopped working.

      McQueen, meanwhile, never resolved his feelings towards the paired universe of his own childhood, the lonely son of the absent father and the mother who was a nervous wreck. This legacy gave rise to the ruthless demands he made on himself and others. When Wanted first went in front of the cameras, Steve was twenty-eight and pretty much fully formed. He was intense, grim (except when he collapsed in giggles), insecure, prickly and exceptionally focused – a flinty product of fly-by-night adventurism and naivete, hardened by reform school and the Marines. It took all his combined experience, ambition and sheer nous to lift Wanted out of the mire of competing horse operas. Cheyenne, Wyatt Earp, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Maverick and Zane Grey were only the upmarket end of a genre tethered by the likes of Rifleman and Wells Fargo. McQueen’s series went out in the cut-throat 8.30 p.m. slot on Saturday nights, after an hour of Perry Mason and directly opposite Perry Como. Steve declared a private ratings war on the famously smooth, cardigan-wearing crooner. Como’s weekly guests – an assortment of ‘real folks’ such as construction workers, on hand to make requests – never looked half as real as McQueen himself, sporting dirty boots and a sawn-off Winchester shotgun dubbed the ‘Mare’s Laig’. More than forty years later, rerun episodes of Wanted are still saddled with a Violence rating.

      Steve very soon changed and then embodied most people’s stereotype of a cowboy. Rugged, wan and bow-legged like a prairie John Wayne, self-contained, cool, he also liberated the postmodern, ironic school which sprang up in the years ahead. In an equivalent move, thousands of female fans – many of them defecting from Como’s jacuzzi – duly responded to the all-action hero who had the nerve to, as he put it, both ‘fight and think’. Men simply wanted to be like him.

      Elsewhere, however, it was another story. Behind the scenes, among at least some of Wanted’s crew and cast, it’s fair to say that McQueen wasn’t just not liked, he was disliked. For one, there was his relationship with the show’s primary advertiser, Viceroy cigarettes. Steve’s contract called for him to be wheeled out, in character as the star Josh Randall, to make his periodic pitch (‘It’s good entertainment for the whole family…yessir…and that’s what’ll sell any product’) for both sponsor and series. Somehow, the way he did it was always thought to be lacking in warmth. One ex-Viceroy mogul, Nick Payne, recalls McQueen working the company’s convention, ‘cruising the room like a zombie…He’d stare at you with that squinty, butch look, offer a “Howdy, mac” and move on, his arm outstretched to his next mark. What I remember him telling us was that he’d sold millions of cigarettes for us, for a few bucks’ return,’ says Payne. ‘Been there, done that. It was extremely flip.’ McQueen’s tone was cool, his grip cold and clammy. Nor did he exactly endear himself