McQueen: The Biography. Christopher Sandford
to reveal the main visual drama – punch-ups and, in not a few cases, lynchings in the surrounding ghetto dealt out by the Klan. It was here that McQueen first made the acquaintance of sex and violence.
Meanwhile, more and more concerned women’s groups said that children could not be trusted around a cinema.
And yet the Daughters of the American Revolution probably weren’t unhappy. They had one cause of never-failing interest, and that was censorship. That same year Hoover established the Motion Picture Production Code, the so-called Hays Office, to police a growing trend towards blasphemy or crude Scandinavian naturism. Later in 1930 Loew’s on Meridian Street was actually raided during a live illustration of ‘civic hygiene’ involving two women, a tub and their silk smalls in a striking combination. According to the deadpan police report, ‘The sexual parts, around which the pubic hairs seem[ed] to have been shaved off, [were] clearly visible and so imperfectly covered by the wash cloth, that the lips bulge[d] out to the left and right of the towel…The glands were uncovered.’ Mae West’s celebrated trial on a similar morals rap opened in New York. This early, seminal association of the lively arts with sex and rowdyism was one Steve soon learnt and never forgot. Play-acting would give him the licence to be dirty, sweaty and lewd, the licence to get even, to make the real world vanish – and, eventually, to blow town. Once he started emulating the hoary two-reelers from Hollywood, it was only a matter of time for him and the rust-belt.
The pre-war decade was also a great flying era. Stunt pilots, barnstormers and wing-walkers attracted crowds undreamed of in the 1920s. Air displays sold out. In the same three-month period Charles Lindbergh and his wife set a transcontinental speed record, Amy Johnson made the haul from London to Sydney and Francis Chichester brought off the first solo crossing by seaplane from New Zealand to Australia. Bill’s intense devotion to this world reflected the same recklessness his son later experienced in drinking, drug-taking and dirt-biking. Like his father, Steve put himself on the line, on-screen and off; he dared all and he ‘went for it’ until self-destruction, or a sense of parody, kicked in. His whole career was the celluloid equivalent of the Barrell Roll. Long before he went aloft in his own vintage Stearman, McQueen had already flaunted his patronymic DNA – what Julian called the ‘butch, brawling, ballsy’ school of life. The winging it.
Born to poverty and bred to insecurity, Steve soon thrived on loneliness. He could never pinpoint how old he was when he first began to feel wretched in his own skin, but the critical scene haunted him the rest of his life. Running upstairs to the dive he shared with Julian, he suddenly heard her screaming, ‘hollering and howling [like] she was bein’ done in’ but accompanied, curiously, by gales of mirth from the neighbours’ stoop. His mother was in bed there with a sailor. ‘We ragged him,’ says a childhood friend, Toni Gahl. ‘Steve was very sort of geeky in those days. He was dirt poor, wore britches and Julian was no more than a prize slut. The other kids were down on him.’
So, suddenly, life became bewildering, and before he could even read or write McQueen was a reformatory case. His fate to always be the outsider was blazed early on. He was old enough to know he was ‘trash’, and young enough to dream about being part of a fantasy world in the movies. An imaginative, hyperactive child who would always rather be elsewhere, doing something else, Steve came to hate his mother even more than his runaway father. Every night he wandered among the drunks and rat-infested garbage while Julian turned tricks in their bedroom.
McQueen’s later binges were also a legacy of Bill’s – and Julian’s – world. What went into his movies was part of what went into his monumental craving for sex and drugs. The plethoric screwing, in particular, wasn’t normally for fun or pleasure; nor, says a well-placed source, was it ‘likely to thrill the girl. Steve was very much a wham, bam guy, not the kind to pour sap about love in your ear.’ That, too, echoed his father (motto: ‘They’re all grey in the night’), whose mark was in the boy’s marrow. His very names, Terrence Steven, were in honour of a figuratively legless, literally one-armed punter at Wild Will’s. The ‘McQueen’, from the Gaelic suibhne, meant ‘son of the good or quiet man’. As a derivative it was strictly out of the ironic-name school, and in fact, two choicer words could hardly be used to describe Bill. His own father had been a soldier, from a family of soldiers or sailors, who had moved from Scotland around 1750. By the early nineteenth century the McQueens were living in North and South Carolina before fanning out west at the time of the Civil War. An Arian (the ‘me’ sign), Steve was by a neat twist, within a few weeks’ age of both Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood, the three great ball-clanking icons of their era. The 24th of March was also celebrated in ancient Rome as the Day of Blood. Any child born that day was likely to be punished by an early death.
Julian’s people were devout Catholics and tradesmen in Slater, Missouri, gently rolling farm country midway between Columbia and Kansas City. For most of the 1930s she and Steve would shuttle from Indianapolis to the heartland and back, boarding with her parents and fostering an arbitrary highway persona, equal parts brief, ad hoc arrangements and cyclical transience, which he never broke. Much of McQueen’s on-screen insight came from the highly imaginative and disturbed five-year-old who once clutched his mother’s hand in genuine perplexity:
‘What’s wrong with us?’
Julian remained mute.
‘I’m starving, Ma.’
Julian was unaware of it at the time, but he was consumed with envy when he compared life even to that of the other slum kids in the city. Most of his peers were living in semi-comfort, while he had to content himself with cast-off clothes and meagre, wolfed-down meals. Toni Gahl remembers that Steve ‘didn’t say a lot. Basically he was pretty much of a clenched fist.’
Around mid-decade things, already apparently at their darkest, would turn black. Julian’s father went broke in the slump and he and his wife moved in with the latter’s brother Claude Thomson, a hog baron with a prodigious appetite for moonshine and also, with that spread, catnip to the ladies. The next time the bus pulled in from Indianapolis, Julian and Steve also joined the displaced family. Claude lived on a 320-acre farm on, aptly, Thomson Lane, three miles out of Slater by Buck creek. It was as near to a fixed childhood home as Steve ever had. He spent eleven years there on and off, sometimes with his mother, more often not. A woman named Darla More once saw him, head down, tramping alongside the Chicago & Alton railway between Slater and Gilliam. ‘Steve was just a poor, sad, fatherless, mixed-up kid. I don’t think it’s possible for a human being to look as absolutely beat as he did at that moment.’ More sat down with him and learnt that Julian had left for Indianapolis, without bothering to tell her son, the night before. ‘Steve slumped there on the tracks and wept his eyes out. It sounds corny, but I promptly went and picked a flower to cheer him up and gave it to him. I still remember the smile Steve flashed me back.’ When alluding to the scene in later years, McQueen himself would sometimes choke and have to compose himself.
In all, Steve grew up in ‘about twenty different shacks and dumps’, he said, and his imagination seems to have provided more richly furnished accommodations. There were any number of lifelong connections from that era, but a handful beat a straight path to sadomasochism: watching Julian casually come and go, for example, her soft, fat lips, her assertion that fun was more important than family.
Neglected by both parents, he was raised in large part by a man who ran the farm with a mixture of shrewdness, opportunism and brute force. Husbandry in those days was an often violent business, and they did have gangsters in Missouri. In fact, the only mention of crime in the Slater paper for Christmas 1933 records a sorry fall from grace: on 24 December two men shot at a third after catching him interfering with a sow. Although Uncle Claude owned several guns, there was no suggestion that he was tied up in this scandal. He did, however, protect his own, worked all hours and drove a hard bargain. All through the Depression he made a good living, becoming one of Slater’s richest men. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic whose great-nephew, for all the Catholic ritual and dogma his family tried to beat into him, grew up virtually wild.
Accordingly, Steve stood far closer to the moonshine than to any holy sacraments. By contrast, Julian’s mother Lil was a religious nut and disciplinarian said by McQueen to habitually ‘spit icicles in July’. She fussed around the white stucco