called yet again at the Thomson farm, this time in response to complaints that Steve had shot out a cafe window with his BB gun. After the shouting had died down, the fourteen-year-old took off into the night. By way of a travelling circus he grubbed his way back west, eventually reaching California. Steve never set foot in Slater again. For the rest of his short but active life he carefully avoided it. McQueen had mixed views about the place. On one level he clearly loathed it, running it down as a ‘sewer’ where he’d felt his welcome to be, at best, sketchy. On the other hand it was precisely in his retreat into the world of guns, engines and play-acting that he found his way in life. Keenly aware of his role as Hollywood’s misfit, he played the part with a flair that gave his performance that touch of genius. He made a whole career out of his rich source memory.
Most of his best films were attractive reflections of his own personality. Long before his fifteenth birthday, Steve knew what it was like to be dyslexic, deaf, illegitimate, backward, beaten, abused, deserted and raised Catholic in a Protestant heartland. He was the fatherless boy who was a hick in the city and a greaser back on the farm. Not surprisingly, nobody would do outcast roles better than he did. And to the bitter end: it was one of the weird paradoxes of McQueen’s cv that while everything got better, he experienced it as having worsened. Only a true depressive could complain as he did, while earning $12 million a film, of being ‘screwed blind’. After the Dickensian time he’d had of it, no one would ever blame McQueen for bitterly anticipating more ‘shit’ even as life, materially, turned up roses. They merely got used to it. Most sympathised with what Cagney would tartly call McQueen’s ‘clutching at the bars of his sanity’ in an ‘Alcatraz of self-loathing’. As a superstar, he maintained his old ways. At heart, Steve always saw himself as last in life’s queue, with few real options – or, in psychiatrists’ jargon, a touch of moral masochism – given the odds stacked up against him. A measure of his despair in 1944 was that, after quitting the circus, he soon thumbed his way back to his mother and stepfather in Los Angeles.
McQueen the film star would be a man alone – just as he’d once been a boy alone, hoboing his way across America or stealing out the window of the Berris’ shack to duck another beating. If, in the end, he was a loner by choice, nature and circumstance did their worst to set him on the path. ‘He once told me he’d wanted to murder his folks,’ says Toni Gahl. ‘He’d actually stood in their doorway with a butcher knife, it was that close. And you know he could have done it. You know it.’
According to her, ‘Steve always said Berri ran that family like his own Stalag Luft III. Living with him was like being a POW, only most POWs don’t get the crap kicked out of them every day for no good reason, and they also ate better.’ As the quietest and one of the smallest, wearing rags and usually sporting a thick lip, Steve knew what it was like to be given hell at school, too. He solved the problem by rarely turning up there. Most days he was out on the verminous streets around Silver Lake, up by the reservoir, resuming his old trade in hubcaps and food stamps. In January 1945 he was brought in front of a judge after being involved in a violent street brawl. Steve’s age saved him from the lockup that time.
The next morning he awoke to a flash of white light, followed by shooting pain across his whole face. He crawled out of bed half blinded. Coming home late to a tearful wife, Berri had belted him unconscious while he slept. Largely out of laudable respect for Julian, Steve had never fought back before. Now he finally went berserk. That dark new year’s morning he flew at Berri, knocking him across the room and out the door. Before long the two of them fell down a flight of concrete steps onto the street. Steve’s parting comment, hissed through broken teeth, was, ‘You lay your stinkin’ hands on me again, I’ll kill you.’ Then he began shambling up Glendale towards Griffith Park, where a city gardener, Dale Crowe, found him coiled in the foetal position and sobbing under a tree. It wasn’t a pleasant sight. Nor, however, was it Crowe’s problem. ‘I asked Steve if he needed help, and he told me to go fuck myself,’ he says. ‘I took that as a no.’
As early as 1940 Steve had narrowly escaped a stretch in the Indiana Junior Reformatory, alma mater of his friend Dillinger. The one night he did spend in custody, in a prison ward after another fight, the clang of the door behind him – which a guard then locked, banging him up with the criminally mad confined there – was the ‘second worst shit’ of its kind he ever experienced. Rock bottom came on 6 February 1945, when his mother and stepfather signed a court order confirming the fourteen-year-old to be incorrigible. That same evening Steve arrived at Junior Boys Republic in Chino, one of LA’s far eastern suburbs in the foothills of the Santa Anas. But even this craggy fastness wasn’t secure enough for him to serve out the sentence worthy of his crimes. After an immediate bolt and recapture, Steve achieved his recurrent lifelong fate – he was put in solitary.
Steve was never to forget those next hours in the dark, breathing in the sharp tang of rag mats, cabbage and stewing tripe. Suffocating. Other boys’ voices could be heard mumbling or sobbing through a shut metal door. McQueen lay awake all night, alone in the cooler, his bedroom a moth-eaten mattress jammed in the corner. The word ‘murder’ soon came to mind too enthusiastically for anyone’s liking but his own.
In fairness, though no ‘candyass scam’, as he later put it, Chino certainly wasn’t the borstal sometimes portrayed. The 200-acre campus was encircled not by bars and fences, but by cottages and open fields, and the regime stressed hard work, not punishment. It was an enlightened and even quite radical experiment in building character and self-respect. None of the ‘trusted’, as opposed to solitary, inmates was ever physically locked up. But if the security was lax, the story was sturdy, and duly found its way into the early McQueen fiction. ‘Ex-con’ was the fell phrase used in one biography. The reality of Boys Republic was more like a boarding school, with an elaborate system of rewards and fines. Its house motto was ‘Nothing Without Labor’ (almost too perfectly, though quite unconsciously, Himmlerian), the prime trade the manufacture of fancy Christmas wreaths for sale around the world. There was an emphasis on practical discipline. For the first time in his life Steve made his own bed. He learned to lay and clear a table. Most afternoons he was at work in the laundry, whose close, chemically scented walls still haunted him years later; McQueen would vividly recall that reek on his deathbed. The next time he ran away, over Gary Avenue and through Chino’s southern outskirts towards the mountains, the Republic’s principal gave him twenty-four hours before he called the law. They found Steve hiding out in a nearby stable. It was the second of five escape attempts, which appear to have been concerned less with actually absconding – he never made off by more than a mile or two – than with proving he could. The bolstering idea was rebellion.
Boys Republic would only be one part of McQueen’s breakout theme, first switched on with such voltage when he ran downtown to the bright lights of the Roxy. After Chino, he would jump ship and go AWOL from the Marines. He bailed out of literally scores of affairs – ‘fuck-flings’, he called them – as well as two marriages. Right to the end Steve would quite seriously talk of ‘getting away from it all’ on a sheep farm in Australia. Commercially, The Great Escape was in a long line with The Great St Louis Bank Robbery, Nevada Smith, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Getaway, Papillon and Tom Horn as variants of this – to him – magnificent obsession. Short of beating off Harrison Ford to The Fugitive, it’s hard to see what more McQueen could have done to make the point. When they hauled Steve back to the Republic for the fifth and final time, he actually knuckled down for a few weeks and was elected to the Boys Council. That last stretch of his year-plus there was always the one he later referred to nostalgically. But this seems to have been a ceasefire, not a real truce in the war between Steve and the powers that be. ‘I didn’t hang around with no crowd that dug suits,’ he confirmed.
Steve would spend fourteen unremittingly long, character-shaping months at Boys Republic. His mother never once came to visit him. One Saturday morning, not long after Berri himself left her, Julian rang Chino to say she wanted to take her son out for the weekend. Steve spent the whole day, from breakfast until supper, sitting on a chair by the front door. Towards evening he began to whimper quietly, raking his hands up and down his dust-caked overalls. The visit
