always had a hawk eye for where real power lay, how to scam a casting. He kept up a nonstop flow of notes and cards, not only to the suits but to their wives: ‘Roses, always roses,’ says one of the latter. That spring McQueen spent time amongst real junkies in Hell’s Kitchen. He read, rehearsed and understudied. He offered to defer his modest salary in exchange for a percentage of profits. ‘Short of some shtick involving a horse’s head,’ says Frank Knox, ‘it’s hard to think what more Steve could have done.’ In a bravura ploy beyond his own means he even had his few trade notices photocopied, professionally bound and sent round.
It was a full-time siege, and it worked. Stockholm syndrome, the obscure love that flowers between ransomer and captive, paralysed the producers’ will. By midsummer Steve had the job.
The critics weren’t happy. McQueen threw himself into the role, never missing a cue, much less a trick, and even dying his hair black. And yet, with all his intensity and his million-toothed smile, his performance was oddly earthbound: it came down to inexperience, earning Steve the backstage name Cornflake. He never settled into a rhythm or pitch that brought out the best in his speeches.
With Gazzara, at least, the character had existed in the round. Steve never combined the same sense of insight into personality and condition with that seemingly easier thing, a good voice. Whereas the loudest noises in the house had once been the shocked gasps of the crowd, for McQueen audience vocalisation tended to be in the form of sniggering as lines like ‘Watch my back!’ broke into falsetto. Physically, his Pope thrummed with a wildness that was all the more dramatic for being contained and controlled; but when Steve let go vocally, he squeaked. Only six weeks into his run he was fired from Hatful, though he briefly returned to it on tour. By then, of course, accepting rejection had long since become a part of McQueen’s resume, under the bold heading of ‘Skills’. But 1956, the year he flopped on Broadway and first discovered film, was a true turning-point. Steve never worked in the theatre again.
What made McQueen still run? His pride, obviously, but also the fact that he was slowly carving out a name on two coasts. Even fucking up in lights, as he put it, was something. He knew the significant prestige of failure. Among a loyal if obscurely positioned cult, meanwhile, Steve was a man to watch. Their patronage may not have pulled much with the critics, but it meant a lot to McQueen. MCA’s support was also critical in allowing his idiosyncratic and highly individual talent to flourish. All he had to be now was strong enough to survive the wait. The truly charismatic, he knew, are never long delayed by the paroxysms of the second-rate.
His first night in Hatful, a middle-aged fan had rushed the stage, flinging at McQueen a pair of red silk panties.
From the beginning, Steve wasn’t only worshipped by a group of T-shirted male admirers, barrio types, he was a virtual religion among women. Tooling around on his bike, the blender and a bottle permanently clamped under his arm, McQueen skilfully exploited the first free-love generation, the main source of his ‘juice’, says Emily Hurt, being his shrewd understanding that ‘the smiley-tough look would get those undies down’. Aspiring actresses loved him. Back in East 10th Street he always seemed to understand what they were driving at, believed that it was the right thing, and enthusiastically did what he could to help. He invariably told them he thought they were talented and wanted to hear them read. Many of these ad hoc auditions lasted to all hours. According to Hurt, ‘Back in those days, Steve was virtually a sex machine. You were either sleeping with him, or you knew someone who was.’ His partners knew he could be foul-mouthed – snapping at a lame suggestion, cursing his luck with producers – and deeply bored by subjects that didn’t personally move him. But that wasn’t the Steve McQueen of their common experience. On countless nights a woman like Dora Yanni had seen him charm a guest by ‘a quiet tear or that billion dollar grin’. It was the same for Hurt. ‘Steve already knew how to moisturise his audience. He may not have made it on Broadway, but he was a true superstar in the Village.’
More and more, words like ‘fucker’ echoed around when either sex spoke of him.
The horizontal skirmishes were legendary, and followed broadly down the maternal line. ‘Steve was addicted to being thrown off-balance,’ says Hurt. ‘Because Julian had been crazy, he expected that from his mate.’ That autumn of 1956 McQueen took a pale, flapper-thin girl named Mimi Benning to a movie or two and then made her cry in a taxi. Numerous others went out on variants of the same ‘yo-yo date’, as she puts it. Consummation would come almost immediately after these trips to Loew’s or the Quad, and was guaranteed by the sort of groping that was mandatory in the back row. One casual partner remembers being fed blueberry pie and beer by Steve in 10th Street after a showing of Giant, and being told, ‘I’ll never make it – as a man or an actor.’ Yet within a few weeks McQueen was in and out of lights on Broadway; and he fell in love.
Her name was Neile Adams, and when he met her she was already starring in her second musical, The Pajama Game. This lucky and talented showgirl, then just twenty-three and with a pixieish vigour, had, like him, never known her father. Neile was brought up by her mother in the Philippines, and eventually spent three years there in a Japanese concentration camp. After that, the teenager was sent to a convent in Hong Kong and boarding school in Connecticut. As if not already exotic enough, after seeing The King and I Neile then announced her intention of becoming a dancer. Against all odds, she made it. With her dark hair cut short, gamine-style, dressed in a silk shirt, scarf and toreador trousers, Neile was a frail, classic beauty with a surprisingly loud, throaty laugh. They met at Downey’s restaurant – where McQueen made his move over a bowl of spaghetti – and the fascination was mutual. As an admiring friend says, they might have won the Nobel Prize for chemistry. There was also the old saw of opposites attracting. Whereas Steve lacked the ability to make light of misfortune, Neile presented a more straightforward type: the outgoing young ingenue who ‘dug people’. Her inner life, while rebellious, found its outlet on stage.
Later that same night there was a knock at Neile’s apartment door. It was Steve. She said, ‘I’m going to crash.’ Then he said, ‘Yeah, I am too.’ He couldn’t learn to clean and would sooner starve than cook but he did, nonetheless, light up that small, cluttered bedroom.
‘Boy,’ says Neile, ‘was I happy.’
He was disguised, veiled, going through social motions; she was enjoying herself, displaying what she was, opening herself up to immediate experience. One was playing for time, the other was full of life for the moment. A koala and a leopard, they somehow found themselves on the same limb of the tree. Sure enough, Neile joined the long list of lovers, though for once Steve, radically for him, was on turf well beyond what Benning calls ‘Olympic screwing’. After exactly a week he moved into Neile’s digs at 69 West 55th Street. McQueen arrived carrying a battered suitcase full of old clothes, his crash helmet and the barbells. As Neile says, ‘The man was obviously used to travelling light.’
That September, once fired from Hatful, Steve took off on his new BSA through Florida and, from there, to Cuba. The ominous signs of revolution were already brewing when McQueen got himself arrested for selling yanqui cigarettes in a bar. On 3 October 1956 Neile was handed a telegram at her hotel in Hollywood, where she was then testing for Bob Wise’s film This Could Be the Night:
I LOVE YOU HONEY SEND ME MONEY LET ME KNOW WHATS HAPPENING IN CARE OF WESTERN UNION CON AMOR
ESTEBAN
The central theme of all McQueen’s adult relationships – that contempt for those who caved to him had its parallel respect for those who didn’t – was quickly brought home when Neile turned him down. Steve limped back to West 55th, having sold most of his clothes and cannibalised the BSA for bail, with the words: ‘It’s all right, baby. I admire your spunk.’ Then he sought out a jeweller friend in the Village and talked him into designing a twisted molten gold ring for $25 down and eight further quarterly instalments. Two years later
