6 November 1980, his final night alive. His patient was, he says, executed as he lay drugged and immobilised in a hospital bed. But no one should feel pity for Steve McQueen. He was neither broken nor bitter. Sick as he was, the happiest chapter of his life may have been the last one, in the care of Barbara, his third wife, flying his antique planes and slipping anonymously into church. He’d been living first in an aircraft hangar and then in a ranch with a big pot-bellied stove that filled half the room. Behind the house were fields and behind the fields were mountains. Here, in Santa Paula, California reminded Steve of the Missouri heartland he’d fled as a boy but never left. Here, the circle was complete.
A few other circles had been closed, too. McQueen’s first ever appearance on the big screen was as a prowling, knife-wielding punk. For his minuscule role as Fidel in 1956’s Somebody Up There Likes Me he earned $19 a day. Twenty-four years later, The Hunter ended on a poignantly downbeat note with McQueen spark out on a hospital floor. For that picture he made $3 million, plus 15 per cent of the gross. Running as a throughline in between, film audiences met one of the most arresting personalities in American art. Not too many others could hold a candle to McQueen’s striking affirmation of individuality. Far, far from the usual Hollywood pieties, Steve spent his off-duty hours dirt-biking or squatting in the desert with Navajo Indians. As a man, few ever came close to him. As an actor, nobody did. At his worst, McQueen gave off a quietly passionate sense of love and loss, eyes reeling with meaning, which perhaps promised more than it delivered. On peak form, he gave substance to even the thinnest plot. Not since the salad days of Brando had the words ‘movie’ and ‘star’ been in such proximity. Above all, McQueen knew that performance wasn’t a matter of right and wrong but of life and death – of the material. Jim Clavell, who worked up The Great Escape, would say that ‘Steve played suffering perfectly,’ since it chimed so well with his experience.
‘Lo hice – I did it’ were McQueen’s last known words. Towards the end, according to an orderly who was there, he ‘talked a lot about the early days, the farm, growing up and most of all reform school’. His nostalgia for the lost world of 1945 hid a grim truth: Steve had been committed by his own mother and her new husband. The squat bunker of Junior Boys Republic, the burr-cuts and bib overalls, the carbolic smell ground deep into the floor, the reek of the laundry – those were the stinking madeleines of his youth. And as McQueen lay dying, pressing ice cubes to his cheeks, doctors would hear him sob, ‘Three-one-eight-eight,’ over and over, his old school number of thirty-five years earlier echoing his fluttering heartbeat. Steve went out, if not with a whimper, then whey-faced for all the bewildered souls, not for his legendary groupies and least of all for Candyland, but for the ‘real folks’. For those who like their types cast, it was a quite heroic death.
They took him to the mortuary in Juarez, bumping along dusty roads where paparazzi from across the border already cowered behind trees. The Globe and Enquirer stringers squealed like game-show contestants when the car pulled in to the Prado Funerales. On that frenetic morning reporters were attempting to bribe medical staff with $80,000 for a shot of the corpse. In the end it was Paris Match who located McQueen’s body, calmly lifted the undertaker’s sheet and got off a picture for their front page. An orderly took exception and wound up rolling around with the photographer on the morgue floor. Later that afternoon the cortege made its way to the frontier town of El Paso, Texas, where a private jet stood fuelled and ready for the flight to Santa Paula. The sight of more press on the runway even as the plane revved up set off a round of groans and denunciations among McQueen’s friends. It was like the climactic scene from Bullitt. Two hours later they landed in California in thick fog. The plain Mexican coffin, flimsy for even his gaunt body, was loaded on a station wagon and taken to the Chapel of Rest in Ventura for cremation.
It was what McQueen had wanted, another perverse triumph. He’d always hated fires. He was nearly killed by one as a boy and in later years often had occasion to head-butt his demons. ‘You lookin’ at me?’ or a tart ‘Fuck you, candyass’ defiantly masked his inner terrors. Steve once ran through hot smoke to rescue his wife and young baby from a brush fire in Laurel Canyon. Drink and dope were balanced, for him, not only by fast cars but by constantly testing how he felt about himself and nature; and McQueen experienced that sense of challenge again in 1966, when he helped fight a three-alarm blaze at the studio. Ironically, the two worlds of fact and fiction finally merged eight years later when, at a routine briefing with the technical adviser on The Towering Inferno, McQueen responded to a real-life emergency by suiting up to save yet another torched stage. On that occasion a fireman looked over his shoulder, started and blurted out, ‘Holy crap! Steve! My wife won’t believe this.’ ‘Neither will mine,’ said McQueen calmly.
The body was burnt, and the ashes placed in a cheap urn. Steve had wanted ‘nothing fancy’ for himself, and he was famous for his spartan tastes – a can of Old Milwaukee was fine by him. Especially towards the end: by then, instead of goons and gofers, McQueen was keeping company with a distinctly rough-hewn crew of local barnstormers and pilots. Together they shared hobbies and traditions that were already old when Steve was born. They had an overriding love of keeping it simple, and many was the night they sat around the hangar, drinking and hugging themselves against the cold, whooping it up at Hollywood. This new McQueen was, above all, ‘real folks’, which is to say much the sort of person done on screen by the old McQueen. He favoured flying the flag in every school, early nights, and affirming the sanctity of marriage. That never ruled out a beer or a smoke. As for protocol, he didn’t overdo it. McQueen’s language was famously earthy. As far as acting went, he felt as if he’d pissed away about twenty years, wondering aloud what the fuck he’d been doing in half his films, although he always cashed the cheques. ‘You know, guys,’ Steve would say, squinting up at the snowy Rafaels, ‘I only really feel horny when I’m flying.’
They took the urn up in McQueen’s favourite antique Stearman, headed for the coast and scattered his ashes over the Pacific. That big bug. He’d loved it almost as much as he loved wheels. Fumes and altitude, the part of the American dream that went high and fast. Up there in the yellow biplane all the lines and wrinkles and what Steve called ‘broken glass’ were dissolved, blown away in the alpine air. They’d watched him, Sammy and Doug and Clete and the other flyboys, as he’d climbed sheer gradients, swooping with wild speed, and, just as fast, pulling back, rushing headlong towards the mountains, then levelling out at last towards the trails that went up into the hills and the clear sharpness of the peaks beyond. He would waggle his wings and it was exciting to him as though he were living, or at least exhaling, for the first time. That and the ranch and the silvered grey of the sagebrush, the quick, clear water of the Santa Clara and the missionary church were the sights and sounds he’d chosen for himself at the end. He’d always had a great imitative style, attitudes and poses associated with other people. But for the last year at least, Steve McQueen was playing himself.
That flight in the Stearman was a defining symbol of McQueen’s real breakthrough: that worldly success, for which he’d fought the System like two ferrets in a sack, was yet more ‘shit’. He was back to basics. Fire, air and sea were the true representation of Steve’s own words echoing down his last year – ‘Keep it elemental.’ His friends said a prayer for him over the water and came back low across the channel to Ventura. On McQueen’s orders, there was no grave or marker of any sort. His widow moved out of the ranch to a remote cabin in Idaho, and the plane and McQueen’s other goods were mainly given away. That, too, chimed with the ‘poor, sick, ragged kid’ who was father to the man.
Even Steve’s latter-day humility wasn’t enough to protect his cherished privacy. They came from all parts looking for clues, fans and paparazzi alike, doorstepping the ranch and swarming round his figure – soon removed by curators – at Hollywood’s wax museum. More than a few straggled back to the clinic, but none pierced the narcotic smog of medical debate, especially on the knotty subject of ‘alternative’ cancer treatment. Certainly nobody seriously floated the idea that McQueen had been murdered.
William Kelley, a one-time Texas dentist who apparently cured himself of cancer and went on to
