McQueen: The Biography. Christopher Sandford
him into a king,’ he said. In January 1960 Alfred Hitchcock cast Steve, with Neile as his co-star, in two of his TV melodramas, including the famous Man from the South episode. (One man bets his new Cadillac against another man’s little finger that he can’t flick a cheap Bic lighter ten times in succession.) ‘For kicks’ they did a number of shows together after Terry’s birth, including slots in the Bob Hope and, of all people, Perry Como revues. They made a good-looking couple, the bullet-headed tough, who could also be soft, and the small, stunningly svelte dancer. As Steve ascended, they might yet have become a hip version of Burton and Taylor, but it wasn’t to be. Shortly after testing for the film of West Side Story that spring, Neile learned that she was pregnant again. The role she settled on was at once stranger and more ordinary than anything Hollywood could have scripted, that of ‘plain Mrs Superstar’.
Meanwhile, the so-called ‘tail’ kept coming. McQueen pulled women, as one of them puts it, ‘like a magnet does iron filings’. Those with long memories made the connection to certain well-slept stars of the recent past: the Clark Gable, Errol Flynn type. He doted on Neile and the children, but he liked to mingle too. At parties Steve’s beautifully groomed hair positively glowed. His lithe, pumped-up body fitted perfectly into Fashion District denim and patent leather boots. The girls crowded round him panting. They obviously wanted to touch the hem of his garment, and frequently more, and it was all McQueen could do to fight them off. He didn’t always bother. A woman called Natalie Hawn remembers a scene where ‘some bit sidled up to him. “I wore these for you, Stevie,” she said, hand[ing] him a pair of panties. After she moved out of earshot…[McQueen] turned to me: “That’s the kind of shit I have to put up with.”’ When Steve, in turn, wound up alone with Hawn, she found him ‘a sweetheart’ and says that, just as McQueen was the quickest draw in Hollywood, so something similar went on in bed. He told Hawn he’d hustled both men and women while down on his luck in New York, but was ‘cured’ by the time he met Jack Kennedy a few years later in Santa Monica. The then President apparent had taken Steve aside and asked him, ‘Don’t you find you get a headache if you don’t have at least a poke a day?’
Around 1960 McQueen was nearing Kennedy’s ideal. The tally was ‘two or three hundred’ a year.
There were rumours that he was manic depressive, and unburdened himself to his woman friends. Hawn also remembers him ‘raving’ about Julian and then, in answer to her questions, discussing his childhood – if a mumbled ‘yep’ or ‘nope’ could be elevated to the level of discussion. These were the times when he should have been with his family, when it might have been possible to scale down if not vanquish his furies and acquire much-needed perspective on the misery of his youth. But not for the son of Julian Crawford.
Hawn adds, ‘Sometimes Steve would turn up, and sometimes he wouldn’t. My instructions were that, if he was in town, I’d wait by the phone for him to contact me. We’d meet and then, as he put it, shtup. Towards the end I had to sit in all day, because I never knew when he’d call me. As it turned out, he never did. And I never found out where he went.’
His close male friends rhapsodised over McQueen, and with good cause. Don Gordon calls him a ‘straight arrow – almost uniquely for [Hollywood], totally bullshit free’. His biking partner Bud Ekins talks of Steve’s personality with perhaps more understanding than anyone. Ekins claims that this ‘complicated guy’ who ‘basically trusted nobody’ and ‘did best one-on-one, and then only from amongst four or five people’ was ‘unknowable…It was almost impossible to pin him down. He was first and last an actor. But to a few people he was the best company, the most loyal guy on earth.’ Steve always made it abundantly clear that, whereas he admired anyone who could ‘hold his mud’, he only really had time for a few dirty-faced peers prepared to pit themselves against one another. Most or all of the inner circle, like Ekins, Gordon and McQueen himself could handle themselves on wheels. In 1960, while on location in Cuernavaca, Steve was named Rookie of the Year by the American Sports Car Association. He let it be known that the award meant more to him than ‘any fucking Oscar’.
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