He was born in Beech Grove, a suburb of Indianapolis, but when his parents separated, he was seven months old; he was given into the custody of his great-Uncle C. W. Thompson and his wife, and raised in Slater, Missouri. He returned with his mother to California when he was eight and she remarried. That it was an unsettling childhood, and that McQueen found as much education in the streets as he did in the home is attested to by his winding up, at the age of thirteen, in the Boy’s Republic at Chino. During his formative years he got to know the business end of cops. And loneliness. And alienation. And alla that stuff. Which makes his current attitudes about cops and alla that very dichotomous. But more of that later.
Listing his peregrinations after the Boy’s Republic would be like reading the credits of a novelist on the dust wrapper of his Great American Something: deckhand on a Greek oil tanker South America-bound; oil rigger in Texas; topper in a Canadian lumber camp; carny shill; ballpoint-pen salesman; TV repairman; finally a stint with the U.S. Marines, as tanker and mechanic.
He got sprung from the Marines in 1950, kicked around the country (ours) and did odd jobs, mostly automotive. He wound up in Greenwich Village and eventually a girl he had been dating, an actress, introduced him to drama coach Sandy Meisner, who gave him a part in a Yiddish play on Second Avenue. McQueen got $40 a week for his one line of dialogue.
He graduated from the Neighborhood Playhouse in 1952, won a scholarship to the Uta Hagen-Herbert Berghof Drama School, did summer stock, and by 1954 he had logged many hours of flight-time on the legitimate stage. He was accepted by Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio and after a while stepped in as lead replacement for Ben Gazarra in A Hatful Of Rain. In 1958 he arrived in Hollywood, appeared in a segment of Robert Culp’s “Trackdown” and made enough of an impression that subsequently, when Four Star TV went casting for the upcoming “Wanted—Dead Or Alive” series, he popped into mind, and won the starring role of Josh Randall, bounty-hunter with a cut down 44-40 carbine known as a “hawg’s-leg.”
Among the few actors to make the transition from television to star status in films—James Garner, Mia Farrow and Clint Eastwood are the only others that come readily to mind—McQueen has gone on to appearances in The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, Love With the Proper Stranger, Soldier In The Rain, The Cincinnati Kid, Nevada Smith, Baby, the Rain Must Fall, The Sand Pebbles, The Thomas Crown Affair, Bullitt (which is a bitch of a picture) and the forthcoming adaptation of William Faulkner’s The Reivers.
Today he has a career, a home, a wife, and two kids—daughter Terri Leslie, and son Chad.
He has a Mini Cooper, a VW, a Porsche, a Land Rover and a Ferrari. He also has an International-Harvester pickup truck. The rear deck of the pickup holds a pair of bikes, tied down for travel. That night McQueen lumbered out of the Santa Monica Mountains overlooking Hollywood with a pair of Triumph 650 choppers in the truck. 650’s with Rickman-Mettisse frames, 18 inch full knob rear wheels, 21 inch front wheels. We all headed for the low desert, McQueen’s natural habitat.
McQueen’s Land Rover careened around white sand dunes and exploded through pucker-bushes, the rear wheels leaving the ground, Tim Kiley clutching the windscreen as the balled-fist heat of the slipstream smashed him; McQueen was driving us out past Palm Desert, to show us the locations he’d spotted several days before. He spun the wheel like a Formula I driver taking the esses. He’d been one. It wasn’t always necessary to come crashing through stunted Choya cactus and dry mesquite they call pucker-bush, or skid through slalom curves at fifty, but McQueen was giving the howlies a thrill, getting into it, letting each of us get into it. Behind us Siegel and two other men on the project clung for all their lives to the seats and each other. And no one whimpered in fear; McQueen has a strange effect on people. They instinctively up their cool to match his. They keep their inadequacies under cover, they don’t want to disappoint him. Or, more probably, they don’t want him to reject them on grounds of personal weakness. I saw it many times—people trying to be more than what they were—for McQueen’s sake. Kiley bounced high as we took one particularly high hillock, and came down on my hat. He tried to say sorry, but the next curve threw him sidewise and he was too busy holding on for amenities.
Finally, we dipped down into a wash, came up the other side, whipped around the rim of a larger bowl and, spraying sand from the four-wheel drive, McQueen skidded to a halt. He was out of the Rover before the rest of us could orient ourselves. He was around the Rover, had Kiley by the arm, and was indicating with sharp and definite hand-movements where he thought the filming could best be done.
“Now, if you like the idea, I can come out of the desert over there, see, and I’ll do some wheelies and some jumps, and come over from that direction there, and I’ll jump that line of hoopedoos, and then right over that little boonie, through those pucker-bushes, and around there, and end up right here, right in front of Mr. Sullivan, and I’ll bury the rear wheel and spray sand back. How about that?”
Tim Kiley was standing in the middle of mind-blasting white desert, the sun at eight in the morning was already hammering us senseless, the glare was deafening, the silence spilled over like the Great Victoria Falls. He was a New York director in the center of a land that had gone unchanged since great saurians had stalked the earth. He was awed, by the land, and by the electric intensity of this McQueen who moved and breathed as if he was born naked and ready in the desert. McQueen was helping him in a way no amateur could have helped him: laying out the shots with care and imagination, saving him the time-consuming trouble of bobbling about in the sand. Kiley was enthusiastic about McQueen’s suggestions.
And I saw, for the first time, the way McQueen hangs in there on the smallest details. He runs the ship. There is no doubt about that. It is his gig, every way. You move into his scene, never the other way around. By his simple presence he dominates every group I ever saw him in. Yet he was not pushing. He was sincerely interested in getting for Kiley and the Sullivan Show the very best footage possible.
It was not the last time that day I saw him take control.
When the studio truck from Warner Bros.-7 Arts arrived, in company with the bus bearing production personnel, McQueen found out the Studio had prepared for the gig ineptly; they had not sent out vehicles capable of running in dune country. (He had no idea how badly Warners had shafted him; he was to find out later; too much later, unfortunately.)
Though McQueen was cool about it, I gathered from remarks others passed that this was only the latest skirmish in a battle of personalities that scoped large as money differences between McQueen’s Solar Productions, and Warners-7 Arts…but when it got down to the fine tuning, the personalities were McQueen and Kenneth Hyman, executive vice-president in charge of worldwide production for Warners-7 Arts.
McQueen’s Solar had only done one film under Warners-7 Arts aegis: Bullitt. It had been a fight from the first moment to the last between McQueen—a strong-minded stickler for detail—and Hyman—a studio exec who was in trouble. Hyman needed a winner to make the quarterly-annual report read in the black. He wanted McQueen to make Bullitt on the stages in Burbank, with Warners-7 Arts personnel, with only exteriors shot in San Francisco. McQueen had a heavy personal stake in the film. He knew the script as he had received it needed work, needed some clout inserted, and doing it Hyman’s way would be inadequate. He fought Hyman and Warners-7 Arts all down the line, and Hyman fought back in the only way a studio executive can fight back. He bugged McQueen:
On a morning when McQueen arose with sweaty palms and a dry mouth, knowing he was going to do the intricate and dangerous driving that culminates in an incredible high speed chase on San Francisco’s streets, he received a studio communique saying he was not allowed to ride his Triumph to and from shooting locations. The insanity of telling a man who was about to risk his life burning rubber in the single most gut-numbing automobile sequence ever filmed, that he could not ride his bike to and from work, was not lost on McQueen.
Nor was th
is latest knife-in-the-back tactic lost on him.
McQueen was bugged, but he instantly set it up so all the equipment could be moved out to the filming site in his Land Rover. It entailed many trips, with the Rover acting as ferry, from the highway to the shooting location out in the dunes; and by the time the reflectors and camera and crew had been set up, it was almost mid-day, and the heat slammed men flat without remorse. It was wide-open on the dunes, and only McQueen seemed really at home, at one with the camouflaged white lizards that zipped past in the shifting sand.
He began rehearsing his ride, the approach to the spot where a subsequent shot would show Ed Sullivan meeting him.
He kicked off on the bike, and went out into the glaring desert, and then like thunder came highballing back in, again and again, spinning to a stop right where he’d said he would, digging that rear wheel into the sand, sending a spume of sandspray fanning out behind him.
(FROM THE TAPE:
ELLISON: You once said you rode bikes because a man has to take risks. What do you mean by that?
McQUEEN: I do it because I like it, and it’s a very private thing. I don’t figure I’m anything so special with motorcycles, but I do it because I need it, even though I get scared like everyone else. You ought to understand this about me and motorcycle riding: I’ve lived in a very closed world, and I’ve tried very hard while I was racing to keep cameras away and public relations people away, because it’s my private world, and I do feel strongly about it.
ELLISON: You done taking risks?
McQUEEN: Oh, I don’t know, there was some publicity thing about me, about a death wish, that I’m so brave and everything like that. It was silly. I ride bikes, and I still go out in the dirt, but I never looked at it as being risky, and when my heart jumps up into my mouth I know I’m going too fast, so I slow down. I’d rather say involvement than risks. They’re the same thing, I suppose, but one is positive and the other can be very negative.
(END TAPE INSERT)
McQueen was a demon for work. With the heat going up and up, and production personnel draining the water casks, he kept hitting it out into the desert, running over the route of the single shot, again and again.
Finally, it was time to shoot. McQueen called for a clean black t-shirt. The one he’d worn through the rehearsal was soaked with sweat. As the crew was moving the camera down as close as possible to the spot McQueen would end up, he climbed to the top of the dune we were using as a command post. “Want some water?” I asked. He shook his head. “A desert guy I know told me to try and go half a day without any, makes it easier for the rest of the day.” Around me, studio grips and gaffers listened, and their eyes bulged as their tongues swelled as their hands reached for the little conical cups of ice water.
Sullivan arrived in the Land Rover, ferried in from the highway and his air conditioned, chauffered Cadillac that had brought him out from the hotel in Palm Springs to this beautiful, desolate spot. He looked old, but game.
McQueen was very polite, genuinely solicitous. For McQueen it was a great kick. Ed Sullivan! A legend in his own time, asking Steve McQueen, the kid from Slater, Missouri, to ride bikes on his reeleee big shewww! Even the superstars can be impressed by other superstars.
Siegel joined the group. “Where’s this, uh, dune buggy?” Sullivan asked.
McQueen’s Solar Plastics & Engineering Company manufactures a radical new type of dune buggy. McQueen had accepted a contract with a large department store chain to sell them exclusively, but had just about decided to cancel the contract and market the vehicles personally. The dune buggy was to be used in the segment with Sullivan. He had a heavy stake in this publicity break, even as he had had in Bullitt—which had turned out to be a personal triumph for him, over Ken Hyman’s opposition.
“It’s on its way from L.A.,” McQueen answered. “My mechanics were on it all night, setting it up. It’ll be here.”
Sullivan seemed pleased, though a bit bewildered by the heat, the desert, the vastness of the scene.
He stood under a studio reflector, catching the shade, as Kiley urged Steve to get aboard the Triumph, to make the first shot. McQueen was gone in an instant, out on the desert, getting smaller and smaller and then lost amid the hoopedoos. Then abruptly he was roaring in toward us, vanishing down the backside of the boonie, and like one of Quantrill’s Raiders suddenly exploding into the air, smashing through pucker-bushes, and sliding to a stop right in front of the camera lens. Sullivan—wearing a short-sleeved blue shirt-jac bought that morning at the hotel’s men’s shop—sauntered up. Incongruously. As though there was some sanity to his being there, afoot, in the midst of 114° of California low desert, without a twinkle of sweat on him.
McQueen legged-over on the bike, unsnapped his helmet and greeted Sullivan.
“Well! Steve! Steve McQueen!”
Pause, for the studio applause that would come some Sunday later.
“Hello, Ed.”
“Well, what is all this, Steve? I knew you rode motorcycles, but is this something new, riding out here in the desert?”
McQueen actually answered the question. It seemed a singularly cornball kind of dialogue to hold with a man who has just come scampering out of nowhere at a killing speed, but Kiley assured me later that it was this simple, direct charm on Sullivan’s part that enchanted Sullivan’s audience.
The inane conversation went on for a few minutes, ending with Steve McQueen suggesting Sullivan take a ride with him in the dune buggy. Which hadn’t arrived yet. Sullivan accepted. They walked out of the camera frame. Cut.
Kiley and McQueen felt it needed another take.
McQueen was unhappy with the skid. It wasn’t as full as it should have been. So he did it again. And again. And again. The heat was debilitating. Sullivan took off the fresh blue shirt-jac, and waited. They ran through it again. The dune buggy didn’t arrive. Old grips and gaffers and photographers and toadies and hangers-on sweated. The sun climbed. McQueen kept going for perfection…punching…punching…punching…
(The night before, when I’d come to his home, prior to leaving for Palm Springs, McQueen’s kids and other neighborhood children were riding their bikes back and forth outside the window. McQueen saw them getting close to a pileup, and he stuck his head out the window, shouting to his son, “Chad! You better stop that crisscrossing before one of you centerpunches the other!” Centerpunching: a racetrack word, meaning to hit headfirst into another car’s middle. That was the way he went at work that day…centerpunching.)
We broke for lunch. Sullivan looked wasted. With his shirt off you could see all the scars of his operations. He looked like he was empty, held together by silver pins. But he was game. He hung in there, and McQueen could not conceal his respect and admiration.
It was a key to McQueen. Tenacity wins his respect.
After lunch, the dune buggy arrived. It was a lovely thing. Open frame, big balloon tires, canopy, a fierce little mother that McQueen climbed down into and screeched off into the desert. Then he went to scout locations for shooting with the buggy.
We waited. An hour. Two hours. The sun thundered and the desert rippled with the kind of heat that turns eyes to poached eggs. Everyone assumed McQueen was doing the location thing. Almost three hours later, he came walking back in from the mindboggling vastness.
The buggy had broken down.
Without hat, without shirt, without water, in 114 degrees of killing heat, Steve McQueen had walked out of three miles of desert.
He wasn’t even winded.
No one seemed to pay any attention.
The man had performed a feat that might have killed any average man, a feat that would certainly have sunstroked even a strong man. But McQueen had done it, had grown perhaps a bit more tanned, didn’t think anything about it, joked that it was a good thing the Highway Patrol didn’t have to pull him out again as they’d done several times before, and was impatient to start shooting again.
Amazed, I watched the shooting proceed.
The next shot was to be a closeup of McQueen and Sullivan in the dune buggy, sitting and talking as though they’d just finished the ride. Though the actual filming of the ride would come the next day, Kiley wanted to get the closeups out of the way. (The thought of Sullivan, fragile Sullivan, held together with moxie and baling wire, being jounced out of his gourd by McQueen at 40 mph on that desert, was a stopper.) They shot it and shot and shot it again.
Finally, as the day drew to a close, Kiley asked the sound truck man if the noise of the camera rolling was audible. The soundman raised his eyebrows. “Of course,” he said. McQueen froze. Kiley was astounded. “What do you mean: ‘of course’?”
The soundman seemed at a loss in the face of their concern. “The sound is loud through all the stuff we shot today…everything.”
McQueen’s face changed. For an instant I saw anger. Pure, naked, undiluted anger.
The idiot soundman! The moron! The jerk had lost an entire day’s shooting. Everything they had been through—the grueling racing shots McQueen had done, the slides, the retakes, the heat, Sullivan getting faint, the dune buggy breaking down, the walk out of the furnace—all of it had been for nothing.
Warners-7 Arts had screwed him proper. They’d sent a crew so amateurishly unqualified for the job that the footage was unuseable. It was a moment without time. A moment without movement, breathless, in which the enormity of the horror of what had happened settled like smog across everyone baking dead in the sun. McQueen was stripped back to basics in that moment. He could have blown. No one would have blamed him. He could have grabbed that soundman by the throat and run him under the balloon tires of the dune buggy, and everyone would have applauded. But he didn’t. He breathed deeply, backed off from the kill, and took control again.