44th Street this tendency to see himself as both Steve the tease and McQueen the stud wasn’t necessarily a good move. As one ex-friend puts it, ‘He forgot that some folks didn’t make the distinction.’ It was no doubt this role-playing that led to the buzz that Steve was bisexual; bent. The photographer Bill Claxton, for one, speaks of being taken by McQueen on a voyage around his old New York haunts. ‘He would show me where he’d lived…places he worked as a hustler. He had some pretty wild stories.’ A persistent Studio rumour that McQueen dabbled in cross-dressing (frocks particularly) was a vile slur, but expressed a view some people had of him.
Both the book Laid Bare and a California radio DJ similarly offer, even today, any number of plausible ‘McQueer’ scenarios, if few real details. There may not be any. It is certain, though, that he idolised James Dean – whose act he shamelessly filched in The Blob – and that a friend of Dean’s, Paul Darlow, was firmly under the impression that ‘Jimmy and Steve were swishes’.
Those scenes in Dean’s room at the Iroquois Hotel didn’t create the gossip, but they did nonetheless colour it. Darlow and several other men were present one night in 1954 after a drinking binge uptown at Jerry’s Bar. ‘Like to do my hair?’ Dean asked McQueen, helpfully drawing it back from his forehead as if clearing his mind, and producing a brush. Steve sat down behind him and patiently back-combed the famous quiff, thick and shiny as a mink’s, breathing or perhaps lightly chuckling down the back of Dean’s neck. Darlow then witnessed the following:
‘Would you do mine?’ Steve asked.
‘Drop dead.’
‘Come on, JD. Don’t you dig my fur?’
‘No,’ Jimmy replied, ‘it always looks so dago to me.’
Dean treated McQueen gingerly, once inviting him backstage at a performance of The Immoralist but then dropping him. Less than eighteen months later he was dead.
For the rest of his own life an undercurrent of all McQueen’s relationships, marriages and affairs alike, was the nagging threat of homosexuality. He was legendarily touchy on the subject. According to the Londoner who first offered Steve ‘a fag’, he promptly ‘threw a fit, prodding his fingers at me and yelling, “Fuck you! I’m Steve McQueen! Kiss my ass.’” (It was his girlfriend who explained that in England they came twenty to a packet.) Six years later, in January 1968, Steve took a phone call at home in California. The anonymous party told him, ‘There’s a new book coming out that lists all the celebrities who are queer. I thought you’d like to know your name is in it.’ He hung up. According to his ex-wife, Steve became phobic – ‘possessed’ is the word she uses – from that day on, greatly accelerating his paranoia and, not incidentally, her own exit. On the set of The Getaway in 1972 McQueen was ‘seriously freaked’ at shooting a nude scene with ‘real cons who happened to be gay’, says Katy Haber, who worked on the film. And two years later, when Paul Newman broached the idea of his taking a homosexual role, McQueen told him, ‘I could never play a fag.’ It was an expression of disgust and also, so it seemed, of fear.
Mostly, though, Steve shrugged all that off. Publicly he bore most of his hangups in silence.
Back in the fifties there was something almost defiant about the flaming heterosexual whose line of active bachelorhood would fix two words on the New York stage scene, just as it had on the Florida beach. Big Mac: the serial seducer who dazzled his women with a neat mix of the goofy and the gothic. It was the end of December 1954 when several Playhouse students met in an automat off Times Square. Steve was there when they arrived. He startled one actress, Emily Hurt, by ‘jumping to his feet and rolling his eyes while sticking his tongue out, like a mad kid’. McQueen’s meal, she says, was ‘hoovered down – he ate as though he was on fire, then calmly reached over and speared the meat from my plate’. There was also beer. ‘Steve was sort of writhing around in his seat. He’d go into a slump and then suddenly toss off one-liners in a screwy way that reminded me of his acting.’ One of them was in the form of a question: ‘Why not come back for some New Year grog at my dump?’ Steve appears, from the accounts of this dinner, to have behaved like a badly neglected child, because he now asked, according to Hurt, ‘Want to see how a farm boy eats chicken?’ Whether or not anyone took up the offer, he ‘grabbed a drumstick and began ramming it in and out of his mouth, sucking it ostentatiously’.
The party broke up. ‘Steve was kind of slouched there alone. His face was grim and set, and by now his shoulders were hunched. I held back, too, and I remember that he looked up and said something that shook me.
‘“How would you treat a suicidal nut? Just the same as any other guy, or make an exception?”’
On that note the two of them walked arm-in-arm down Seventh Avenue to Sheridan Square. Once inside Steve’s bleak apartment, ‘he again became the hyperactive kid, bouncing off walls and pleading with me to feed, by which he meant breastfeed, him’.* Broadly, according to Hurt, ‘Steve loved anything with wheels or tits, probably in that order…All in all, a very torn-up guy. We became lovers. God knows, he shouldn’t have added up to much, but that came from his sweet, klutzy side and the charm he could turn on like a switch. Nobody played the hurt puppy like Steve did.’
It was doubtless these same mood swings that led to the New York rumours he was bisexual, as well as bi-polar. McQueen’s Bermuda shorts made for a particular talking point around the Studio. To others, the mumbling actor was but a lisp away from the drama queen. The truth is, at bottom Steve was an old-fashioned (and deeply unfashionable) man who wanted his partners, as most confirm, barefoot if not pregnant. While they ‘took the precautions’, says Hurt, McQueen wore a condom over his heart. Feeling himself let down by the first woman he knew, he never again let go with a woman.
Somehow, alone or with a mate, Steve managed an ever more wild pace. Whether tearing up Broadway on the Harley or wolfing his food and drink, he seemed to be an actor in a race with life. A twitchy figure in black, McQueen hustled along at a bouncy clip, with his toes cocked out at an angle, his very shoes – scuffed trainers – of a piece with a man on the move. Even his music was right: Steve listened nonstop to ‘Fidgety Feet’ and the jump-jive of a Louis Jordan. Aside from an ancient gramophone, the bike and the car, his few possessions were athletic: sweat pants, a punching bag, the barbells. When not actually working out, McQueen did most of his weightlifting with a fork and mug. The otherwise spartan flat was always well stocked with junk food. His only kitchen appliance was a blender, in which he mixed up an unholy brew of eggs, mouldy yogurt and coffee every morning. According to one visitor, ‘Steve got up dead, but after the second hit of that crap he was like a dog off the leash. People had to run just to keep up with him.’
As an actor, McQueen was emerging almost fully formed. He was poised; he was go-getting. He was also – and always – spoiling for a fight. In his wordless way, a clear plan of attack grew out of his five-year apprenticeship.
By his twenty-fifth birthday Steve had been in three plays far off Broadway, and had a reputation for being both talented and difficult. The money from these productions was long since gone. Early that winter he was forced to trade down to a fifth-floor slum on East 10th Street with a tin bathtub in the kitchen. His previous place, he now decided, was ‘fucking near the Plaza’ by comparison. McQueen sold the MG and took part-time work as a mechanic in an Upper West Side garage, where he once suffered the indignity of having to service James Dean’s Harley. Something about the flush to his face when he handed back the keys suggested, to a mutual friend, that ‘Steve was jealous of Jimmy, and was busy figuring out how to deal with it’. Aside from a brief encounter at Jerry’s, that was the last time the two actors ever met.
Steve did, however, reluctantly put in several man-hours of hard work with Julian. They eventually got back in touch. Whatever
