by Actors Equity. Barrymore spent most of his evenings in the unbuttoned privacy of the ‘sin bin’ or crew lounge, convivially doling out what were probably cigarettes. Some of these, along with Barrymore himself, would in turn make their way to the junior actresses’ room known as ‘the dorm’. McQueen, failing to heed the film’s title, soon began an affair with his co-star Lita Milan. This, too, had some of the properties of a St Trinian’s romp. The couple signalled each other excitedly at night with torches from their adjacent suites, and at one point Steve climbed into an empty maid’s room to eavesdrop on a call between Milan and a girlfriend immediately below, repeating the intimate conversation to her in bed. There was an abandon and fun, even frivolity, about the place, though Robbins and the movie itself were a lurking presence. Most nights, Steve would stop off for an Old Milwaukee in the lounge, dine on a burger, and then join Milan in the room with the red neon light from the Chinese restaurant flickering outside. At weekends he drove back to Neile in Las Vegas.
Emily Hurt saw McQueen becoming a star before her eyes. They still ran into each other around the Village, and he told her about Lita Milan. On the other hand, he had a marriage, and ‘Steve was intent on having most of its vows kept’, specifically the one about the woman obeying the man. He told Hurt that Neile gave him the royal treatment, and asked only that he ‘be careful’ – discreet, in other words – with the overcaffeinated young starlets who filled his time between one take and the next. Neile was well aware of the casual screwing that went on throughout their marriage. She tolerated it. When McQueen coined the admiring phrase, ‘Slopes are different’ he was talking about several characteristics peculiar to Eastern women – but mainly the way they give men a long leash, even if all the leashes ultimately are held in female hands. He usually confessed to his wife straight away. ‘Oh, Steve,’ she would murmur as he started in, silently pour them both a drink, and say no more until a quiet ‘Why?’ or ‘It’s all right, baby,’ as he finished.
As Neile writes, ‘My combination Oriental and Latin upbringing had taught me that men separated love and marriage from their feckless romps in the hay…So, OK, I thought. I can handle it – I have to – as long as he doesn’t flaunt it.’ And McQueen didn’t, says Hurt. ‘He wasn’t stupid. Steve nearly always told Neile before someone else did.’ Sex, fear, guilt. ‘Scared shitless. What am I gonna do about the fuck-flings?’ he’d ask Hurt, one of the flung. Worse, ‘What will the wife do? I can’t live without her.’ Luckily for him, McQueen had chosen an exceptionally stoical mate. It was only when Neile cast back over their lives fifteen years later that the carefully preserved biodome cracked, under the twin stresses of drugs and madness, with shattering results.
Somebody and Stranger may not have been much, but between them they formed a hyphen linking the Cornflake to the king of cool. In the late fifties Steve was still inclined to bad Brando and Dean parodies, but as he got older he began to prefer acting that was formed out of the actor’s own ‘mud’, simple and to the bone. He was fond of a remark by Hitchcock, who held that true drama involved ‘doing nothing well’. Steve rightly liked to say that he’d lived, and it showed in his work. The strong jaw and X-ray stare gave him a knocked-about look. McQueen seemed much more grown up than most of Hollywood’s new crop of pretty boys. His range as an actor may not have been wide, but it was profoundly deep. He was the self-sufficient male animal, the kind of Hemingway hero who combines complexity with reserve to portray a tortuous emotional life. In film after film he carried himself like a regular guy, fissile but superbly taut, and Steve could no more slither into histrionics than he could enjoy a night out in women’s clothing. The sheer intensity of his second twenty-five years was certainly deepened by the horrors of the first. As Hurt rightly says, ‘Steve McQueen could have been a character in a Steve McQueen movie.’
He served up some other fare in 1958–9 and did well, using the same skills he’d honed in The Defenders and adding touches brought by Neile. She urged him, for example, to finally drop ‘Steven’ for the more freewheeling Steve. ‘When I met [McQueen] he’d no name or stage presence – that came later – but he did have a great head on his shoulders and he learnt fast.’ She wasn’t the first woman to groom a star, some would sniff jealously; but Neile was, nonetheless, stunningly successful at converting the B-film hack into a potent Hollywood player. Now more than ever, she hammered his case with Elkins and Stan Kamen of William Morris. Thanks in turn to their all-hours agentry, Steve won the lead in The Great St Louis Bank Robbery, his first ever above-the-title billing – a modest caper directed by Charles Guggenheim and funded by family money. The idea behind this vanity picture was to show, in excruciating detail, how an actual heist might be planned, intercut with doomed efforts to convey ‘character’. McQueen played the getaway driver. His wholeheartedness offset what, on the most charitable view, were the gang’s familiar cardboard types: the muttering hophead, the rough diamond, the gentle weakling and the voice of reason – the hero’s girlfriend, played by one Molly McCarthy. Against this cut-out backdrop, Steve did his best, at once glamorous and tragic, but St Louis soon tipped into farce. Real indignity befell the climax, with McQueen sobbing, ‘I’m not with them!’ as the cuffs went on. By then the script seemed to have lost all interest in suspense, either in this particular rip or within the larger saga; although the Guggenheims talked about a sequel, their services as film moguls weren’t to be required again.
Steve auditioned every chance he could, on his way to being one of the envied stars in a town full of them; Neile and Elkins and Kamen pounded on every door they could, bulk-mailing his glossy to scouts and producers. With talent and support like that he was picking up speed like a competition-tuned Ferrari, bigger and more menacing every time anyone glanced in their mirror.
Along the way McQueen also took some desperately lame roles, simply in order to have somewhere to go in the mornings. At least one of his self-coined ‘fuck films’ would make St Louis look like Sophocles. This was The Blob, his last ever ‘something or anything’ picture, done, according to Elkins, ‘pure and simple to get Steve seen’. The three-week shoot with a threadbare air to it in Downingtown, Pennsylvania, cost a total of $220,000. For his part as Steve Andrews, the local high schooler, twenty-eight-year-old McQueen was offered $3000 or 10 per cent of the film’s gross. He opted for the cash. To date, close to $20 million has rained down for The Blob, a figure as over the top as most of the acting. Steve fumed about this miscalculation for the rest of his life.
Mixed-up kids, authority figures and the definitive, gelatinous red menace. With all the stock types and plot cued by contemporary culture, The Blob actually had its moments. The story, daringly for its day, unfolded in very nearly real time. Between them, director and producer pulled two masterstrokes. First, The Blob conformed to – in some ways defined – the late fifties morality tale about the small town that refuses to listen to its teenagers. Then, instead of the usually confident, not to say cocky lead, they cast McQueen as a bolshie but well-meaning mug without the faintest idea how to cope. The loner and anti-hero legend effectively started here. As Bob Relyea, Steve’s later business partner, says, ‘Oddly enough, most of the famous looks and grunts were present and correct in The Blob. The way McQueen plays off the other kids, I always think, gives a hint of the Don Gordon relationship in Bullitt.’ Finally, the whole film was a minor miracle of stretching a little a long way. In particular, the miniatures and special effects, shot in the basement of a Lutheran church, gave at least some gloss to the deathless ‘Omigod, it’s alive!’ rhetoric of the budget sci-fi romp. But that was about all you could say for The Blob. Every day McQueen would drive in from Philadelphia to be directed by that same church’s vicar in scenes opposite a man-eating Jello. Then every night he would drive back to the hotel and ‘vent’, as she put it, to Neile.
The real star, as Steve used to complain, may have been the amorphous slime oozing down those Pennsylvania streets. But he did for it in the end. The simplicity of the part’s trajectory – rebellious dope to town hero – mirrored at least some of his own story. In the movie’s satirically duff climax, the Blob, seen a minute earlier steamrollering entire houses, beats a quivering retreat from McQueen and a lone fire-extinguisher. Wooden acting and a smoochy theme by Burt Bacharach
