palms. Once on the beach, he soon found the saloon that would become his home from home during the New York ‘shit season’, a dark cave with a bar where the owner remembers McQueen for his ‘bleached hair, bronzed body and faintly bad smell’. He ate with a burger in one hand and a slab of pie in the other, gulping down his beer at breakneck speed. Much the same intensity characterised his policy on women. Steve was rarely without an aspiring model or college co-ed in tow, and within a week he enjoyed the local handle, before it was ever a retail cliché, of ‘Big Mac’.
McQueen often went diving in Florida with an old marine buddy named Red. Early in June, about three miles out in Biscayne Bay, Steve spotted a small shark which, characteristically, he chased to the ocean floor. After failing to bring it up on a gaff so that Red could net it, McQueen surfaced dangerously fast and punctured his already bad left eardrum. That evening the two men returned to Miami to get a doctor to test Steve’s hearing. It was further seriously damaged, and even though he laughed it off himself, his voice coach in New York was furious with McQueen for his carelessness.
Soon after getting home he was cast in no fewer than three provincial shows. Though none rang bells in the far universe, McQueen made both a small name and a thin living for himself on the road. During the last, Time Out for Ginger, he was able to put down $450 for a red MG roadster.* Steve needed a replacement because he had just wrecked his previous car, a hearse, racing it zigzag across Columbus Circle, actually flipping it upside down, the long black roof shedding sparks at the point of impact, McQueen himself walking away. That incident cost him financially, but it did wonders for his reputation. Thanks in part to his poker money, Steve was flush enough to give up non-theatrical work and now focus full-time on acting. He did a verbal deal for Witt to represent him. As McQueen said, it was ‘grooving together’. He’d made ‘people talk’ about him. It was all, at least locally, paying off. Bloody-mindedly, he’d pay Julian back in a way that would brook no more ‘shit’ or sarcasm.
He would become a legend.
With at least a first whiff of success Steve worked, if possible, even harder. ‘Busting my ass to read,’ he said, let alone memorise the texts. Line by dismal line—a triumph of will over semi-literacy. But he allowed himself to unwind, too. Behind his volcanic rage he was capable of something approaching real charm. The perfectly timed smile, the easy, apt jokes and above all the brilliant send-ups, not least of himself, all testify to the fact that Big Mac was tempered by his sweeter kid brother, Little Steve.
The two rubbed along together during those next five years of graft. Fame, for McQueen, wouldn’t suddenly come calling after one audition; he had to ring the bell, pound on the door and finally smash on through. Witt, though aquiver for new talent, never quite turned creative vision into commercial triumph. Until 1958 nothing could avail against that hard truth. That Steve did, in the end, make it was due, in roughly equal part, to talent, luck and others’ unshakeable faith in him; that and an underlying self-confidence that he wasn’t only in the right place, but there at the right time. ‘I found a little kindness,’ as he later said. ‘A joint where people talked out their problems instead of punching you.’
There wasn’t a city in the world where an alert twenty-two-year-old could have had a better day-to-day sense of possibility than New York in the early 1950s. The place was awash with actors, especially those who trod in Brando’s huge, ‘slabby’ (as McQueen put it) shadow. The rehearsal group known as the Actors Studio had opened in 1947 in a semi-converted church, apt digs for what now became, under Lee Strasberg, a bully-pulpit for teaching Stanislavski’s Method. It was a wide-open enterprise still, more than living up to its fame. After A Streetcar Named Desire threw off the yoke of what a star was meant to look and sound like, diners like Louie’s and the dives around Sheridan Square pulsed with men in biker gear who drank and fought and then slouched their way to the school on 44th Street where, during the summer rush, a Ben Gazzara or a Marilyn Monroe took turns at the switchboard. When McQueen was eventually accepted in 1955, he was as busy and happy – if broke – as he’d ever been. Irrespective of the value of what it actually produced, the benevolent originality of the Studio would reverberate for the rest of his life. Steve bought a leather jacket. He had his glossies taken. At an informal reading he stood toe to toe with James Dean and took turns to recite ‘Sailing to Byzantium’.
Eli Wallach, who, ‘like the great McQueen’, trained at both the Playhouse and the Studio, believes ‘Steve already had the raw skill. But what he learnt to do [in New York] was what separates the true artist from the ham – to watch and, above all, to listen.’ In an impressively short time ‘McQueen was the best reactor of his generation.’ Peerlessly, he arrived.
A few brief years later various agents and loon-panted studio heads would fall over themselves to claim him as theirs, an accolade that, for Steve, had a lack of fascination all its own. He flattered but never fawned over his real mentor; he seems to have recognised that success was a more lasting and effective plug than obsequiousness. McQueen did what he could to notice those who had noticed him. ‘I had that gift in me,’ he said, ‘but [Strasberg] had the key to unlock it…Nobody gives you talent. You either have it or you don’t. What Lee gave me was definition.’
He did. But someone less attuned than he was to ‘being’ and more to theatrical elegance could never have kept in character, as Steve did, for a quarter of a century. And the character he kept in was both riveting and surprisingly versatile. Unlike some of the lesser lights at the Studio he was never just brazenly ‘acting’, an exclamation without a point. At worst, McQueen beamed what Meisner called his ‘exquisite innocence’. In top gear, he had the rare gift of understatement, and even wizened hacks would come to admire how his each look adapted to the scene, how subtly and lightly he angled for the shot, every line dropping like a fly on the course. The brute realism was there, too: McQueen followed Bogart and Garfield and narrowly preceded the likes of De Niro in showing what it was like to actually live a life, how to elicit respect, how to bear up under misfortune. In what seemed like a flash and was only a few months, those qualities would mark him for a star.
Plausibility was Strasberg’s business. And in Steve he had an actor who was all too blazingly real, human – and male. His love scenes, like his love life, soon became gladiatorial. According to the school’s Patricia Bosworth, McQueen and his actress girlfriend once improvised a scene in bed at the Studio. ‘They were really rolling around – we actually thought they were screwing and everybody wanted to take this girl’s place…I just kept staring at him. Finally Steve came over and said, “Do you want me to take you out?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “OK. I’ll take you out.” I hopped on his motorbike and off we went.’
His key moral notion remained that actresses ‘did it’.
McQueen, of all those who rose from the assembly line, was the most famously well slept. Here, too, versatility was the keynote of all his couplings, whether taking his women singly or in pairs, together with a lifelong fondness for the phrase ‘I’ll call you’. Some around New York thought Steve’s eclecticism even swung to his own sex. There was, for one thing, the way he looked. For an alpha male, McQueen was disturbingly epicene: like something made by a jeweller’s art, body perfectly honed, facial planes expertly turned, his china-blue eyes ornamented by long lashes. From his beauty spot up to the sandy hair he had artfully pouffed each week at a Chelsea salon, Steve was exquisite designer crumpet. His narrow head accentuated the sallowness of his skin. Like his acting, he had a wide expressive range – ‘a Botticelli angel crossed with a chimp’, in one critic’s arch review. For several years McQueen alternated his Wild One leathers with a pair of Bermuda shorts, almost a specific, around the Village, against being ‘straight’. Then there was the whole begged question of his name. More than one of his stage-school friends would blithely drop the prefix ‘Mc’, while McQueen, when once using the Studio bathroom (the one Strasberg labelled ‘Romeo’), was shocked to see his surname daubed on the wall, with the last letter twisted into an ‘r’.
