telling little stories, making irreverent jokes about The Blob, his uncanny impressions of famous actors. Klump soon became the unlikely command post for Steve’s next offensive. It started with the familiar combination of talent and good luck.
Elkins happened to also represent one Bob Culp, then starring in the weekly CBS series Trackdown. ‘The producers, Four Star, hit on the then novel idea of a companion piece. The spinoff was about a bounty hunter in the old West. I immediately knew that McQueen, playing this quasi-heavy lead, wouldn’t only be perfect for the part – he’d use it as a launch pad for stardom…I made my pitch to Steve and to Four Star. He did the pilot, then made The Blob while the jury was still out. The Western was a smash and the rest is history.’ Instead of doing more B-films, McQueen suddenly found himself being rung up and chauffeured to the Four Star offices. The first of the four he met there was David Niven, who, like Elkins, soon also grasped the fact that ‘Steve had “it”, and that “it” – whatever it was – was the future’. One of the great Hollywood icons of the then recent past, merely by launching McQueen, thus illustrated that legends of their day would inevitably become prey for those who followed them.
The only way Steve himself could avoid this fate was to establish a character for the long haul.
An actress friend was invited to dinner at Klump one night that summer. She remembers that McQueen ‘actually put down his knife and fork to take an enormous script from his coat pocket to bounce ideas off everyone’. For the remainder of the meal Steve chewed over the text as much as his food. Later that same evening, he was still up ‘trying out voices, practising quick draws, doing funny little moves, going over scenes where he needed a reaction’. It’s doubtful that McQueen’s guests did any serious advising. By then Steve was an uncontrollable ball of energy, his voice sometimes soaring back to Hatful register and the peak of blond hair rising on his head, his hands flapping and his feet in biker boots stamping up and down. His rehearsal was a gala performance in which he sang and played all the parts.
McQueen’s Trackdown slot aired on 7 March 1958. CBS and Four Star both liked what they saw and bought the series. Wanted Dead or Alive, as it now was, made its prime-time debut that September. Virtually overnight Steve became the first though not the last TV cowboy to shoot his way towards the big screen. But where Richard Boone, Chuck Connors and the other fauna of the half-hour ‘oater’ barely made it onto film, McQueen would leapfrog the entire Hollywood pack. The breakthrough was stunningly achieved. In 117 straight episodes, whether riding into the sunset or daringly allowing his character to be human, Steve staked out a claim bordered by Bogie’s eruptive cool and Gary Cooper’s suave languor. Though McQueen soon had company on that turf, he drew more from it than most. He became a star. Men like Niven and his partner Dick Powell now related to him as a virtuoso peer, as well as a self-dramatist. Trade reporters who had barely heard of McQueen in 1957 now began to speak in his voice and wrinkle up their noses at things that had a bad smell for him. A few fans doorstepped him at Klump. Steve’s relationship with Neile also changed. She remained his friend and gatekeeper as well as his wife, but he was no longer her project. Steve himself affirmed this when, the same week Wanted went on the air, he asked her whether it wasn’t time to settle down and have a baby. By mid September of that year Neile was pregnant.
Then, for fifteen years, she stopped working.
McQueen, meanwhile, never resolved his feelings towards the paired universe of his own childhood, the lonely son of the absent father and the mother who was a nervous wreck. This legacy gave rise to the ruthless demands he made on himself and others. When Wanted first went in front of the cameras, Steve was twenty-eight and pretty much fully formed. He was intense, grim (except when he collapsed in giggles), insecure, prickly and exceptionally focused – a flinty product of fly-by-night adventurism and naivete, hardened by reform school and the Marines. It took all his combined experience, ambition and sheer nous to lift Wanted out of the mire of competing horse operas. Cheyenne, Wyatt Earp, Wagon Train, Gunsmoke, Maverick and Zane Grey were only the upmarket end of a genre tethered by the likes of Rifleman and Wells Fargo. McQueen’s series went out in the cut-throat 8.30 p.m. slot on Saturday nights, after an hour of Perry Mason and directly opposite Perry Como. Steve declared a private ratings war on the famously smooth, cardigan-wearing crooner. Como’s weekly guests – an assortment of ‘real folks’ such as construction workers, on hand to make requests – never looked half as real as McQueen himself, sporting dirty boots and a sawn-off Winchester shotgun dubbed the ‘Mare’s Laig’. More than forty years later, rerun episodes of Wanted are still saddled with a Violence rating.
Steve very soon changed and then embodied most people’s stereotype of a cowboy. Rugged, wan and bow-legged like a prairie John Wayne, self-contained, cool, he also liberated the postmodern, ironic school which sprang up in the years ahead. In an equivalent move, thousands of female fans – many of them defecting from Como’s jacuzzi – duly responded to the all-action hero who had the nerve to, as he put it, both ‘fight and think’. Men simply wanted to be like him.
Elsewhere, however, it was another story. Behind the scenes, among at least some of Wanted’s crew and cast, it’s fair to say that McQueen wasn’t just not liked, he was disliked. For one, there was his relationship with the show’s primary advertiser, Viceroy cigarettes. Steve’s contract called for him to be wheeled out, in character as the star Josh Randall, to make his periodic pitch (‘It’s good entertainment for the whole family…yessir…and that’s what’ll sell any product’) for both sponsor and series. Somehow, the way he did it was always thought to be lacking in warmth. One ex-Viceroy mogul, Nick Payne, recalls McQueen working the company’s convention, ‘cruising the room like a zombie…He’d stare at you with that squinty, butch look, offer a “Howdy, mac” and move on, his arm outstretched to his next mark. What I remember him telling us was that he’d sold millions of cigarettes for us, for a few bucks’ return,’ says Payne. ‘Been there, done that. It was extremely flip.’ McQueen’s tone was cool, his grip cold and clammy. Nor did he exactly endear himself to the Viceroy suits by ostentatiously smoking one of their rivals’ brands. ‘It was obvious to most of us that Steve was a so-so salesman, and that the product he was really plugging was himself.’
McQueen became a star, but he didn’t immediately decide who Josh Randall was. It was an important question, quite apart from its personal stake for him, because it involved the whole business of anti-heroic acting. Steve began his invention of the future by going back to the past, specifically to the hoary Western star Randolph Scott and his 1954 The Bounty Hunter. He worked out characteristic poses, moves, both by constant rehearsal and by studying the masters. But McQueen was always much more than a clever copyist. For one thing, he was small for a leading man, giving Randall the advantage of the underdog. Trackdown’s producer Vince Fennelly would remember that ‘I needed a kind of “little guy” who looks tough enough to get the job done, but with a kind of boyish appeal…He had to be vulnerable, so the audience would root for him against the bad guys. McQueen was just what I had in mind. I knew he was my man the minute he walked through the door.’ When the character got in a fight, he’d do exactly what his alter ego did to his old marine buddy Joey – wait until the odds were even, and then deliver a quick beating. There was nothing particularly macho about Josh Randall. When two or three men came at him at once, he either high-tailed it out of town or, at a pinch, pulled the Mare’s Laig – his whole weight leaning into the gun, levelling it as easily as if it were a pistol. It was an extension of McQueen’s nervous system. Steve’s control of both his props and his body was always masterful, with no energy wasted. Finally, for authenticity’s sake, he got rid of the designer jeans and starchy shirts and wandered around in what looked like Scott’s old duds and a scuffed hat. It was the reverse of the classic Hollywood makeover, and it worked.
Much as McQueen had superb control of his body, he was also (as Viceroy now dubbed him) the thinking man’s cowboy. In 1979 he startled an old guest star on Wanted by recalling how ‘something in my look had once moved him during a take, and instead of punching me
