Boulevard. There was, first of all, his natural flair. The two started going desert-riding together, and Ekins found that ‘Steve was good – great reflexes and fast, even if reckless. He’d hit everything en route.’ Two additional traits grew out of and complemented that talent: an intense curiosity and a slow but profound ability to bond. McQueen wanted to know all that he could about motorcycle history, and he’d ‘try to get a rise’ from people until he narrowed the field down to a few trusted cronies. Ekins evidently passed the test, because he and Steve were close for the next twenty-one years.
Then there was Don Gordon, a thirty-year-old actor living near McQueen in the Hollywood hills. ‘Steve would literally go by the front door on his way to work and sort of announce himself. It happened over two weeks, in four phases. First, he’d just drive by and stare; not a word. Then he’d drive by and wave. Next he’d drive by more slowly and smile. Finally, he actually stopped and said, “Hey, I’ve seen you on TV.” I said the same, and that’s how we got tight.’ Soon enough, bolstered by the power of his ratings, McQueen offered Gordon a guest spot on Wanted. ‘In those days Steve was still groping his way through the maze, discovering what did and didn’t work for him. For instance, that smile and a particular kind of walk were in. Surplus dialogue was out.’ Yet when he talked to Gordon about bikes, the mouth that chewed fastidiously on lines like bits of gristle suddenly relaxed and grinned, ‘Beat you to the top, man.’
Once you got used to him, you found he was a very nice person.
McQueen’s perfectionism and his undying paranoia did for him with at least some of his peers. But, for others, the over-intense actor was but a ‘Cut’ away from the passionate friend. ‘I loved the man,’ says Gordon. ‘Many was the night he’d come by late, I’d grab my leathers and we’d literally ride off into the hills. Great times.’ As for how Steve in turn treated his friends, nine years later Gordon was invited out of the blue to read for a film being shot at Warners. The title was Bullitt. When Gordon tried to thank McQueen for getting him the job, ‘Steve looked me in the eye and said, “I had nothing to do with it.” That was typical of the guy. It was endearing, and it was also total crap. Steve didn’t want me to feel beholden to him.’
That same summer of 1959 MGM put together a budget for Never So Few, the screen version of Tom Chamales’s World War II novel set in Burma. It was a solid melodrama starring Frank Sinatra and, as was his wont, a few of his clan, including Sammy Davis Jr. After Davis talked himself out of the job, Stan Kamen at William Morris rang his own friend the director John Sturges. Kamen not only had a replacement for Davis in mind. He told Sturges that he could get him Hollywood’s ‘next Bogie’ for ten weeks at just $2500 per week.
McQueen then had to report to Sinatra, who laid it on the line. ‘Steve, baby,’ he said, ‘here’s how it’s gonna be. I turn up, I say the lines, I fuck off back to the hotel. They got any light left, I’ll tell ’em to focus on you. Dig it?’
McQueen dug it.
Perhaps the most winning quality of Never So Few lay not in its deadpan, pre-ironic swashbuckling, nor in the jungle locations (largely faked in Hollywood and Hawaii), nor even in Sinatra himself, but in the gum-chewing Ringa, the renegade army driver played by McQueen. He was brilliant. More than a year in front of the camera had taught Steve how to react. But his first appearance, leaping down from the jeep with a feline grace and giving his signature crinkly grin, was so naturally deft, and the impact so sudden, that if Gene Kelly had done it audiences couldn’t have been more impressed. At the New York premiere Sturges heard people actually gasp at the scene. McQueen photographed like a god, yet basically carried and conducted himself like a regular guy. Somewhat taut, watchful, but with a touch of shyness, he was never more human. Steve was so cool and lithe, with his muscle shirt specially cut for him by Neile, that gnarled, goateed Sinatra never really got to grips with being the picture’s star. I’ll tell ’em to focus on you. Sturges and MGM also picked up on McQueen instantly, the studio signing him to a non-exclusive contract. Finally, Steve made a friend of the assistant director Bob Relyea, who worked closely with him throughout the sixties. After twelve years of puzzled study and a further thirty since they split, Relyea gives his wry assessment of McQueen’s career. ‘Steve in some respects – the way he was always on his toes – was the same offstage and on. But he did more than just hold his character. For all the defensiveness and deadly mood swings, McQueen had the best instincts I’ve ever known for what he could and couldn’t get away with. His choice of scripts was masterly. The man was a genius at planning his next move.’
Mood swings a problem? Some would say they were Steve’s meal ticket. Critics loved the gregarious loner, the anti-heroic McQueen; his family and few friends were proud of the ‘regular guy’ who liked nothing more than to swig beer and talk mechanics. No one, however, ever responded more enthusiastically to Steve’s taste for low comedy than Sinatra did. It matched his own – no small accolade.
If a staccato, comradely bond characterised the two men’s relationship in Never, then the same quality regularly surfaced off screen. McQueen and Sinatra were ‘both children emotionally’, as Steve put it. One afternoon on location McQueen was diligently reading his script when Sinatra crept up behind him and slipped a lit firecracker into his belt. After the explosion had died down, Steve levelled his prop tommy gun and let off a full clip at Sinatra’s chest. At that range the paper wadding from the blanks actually bruised him; the director ‘heard Frank gasp out’. After that there was a long silence, finally broken by Sinatra’s admiring laughter. ‘You got stones, kid,’ he said. From then on the two of them could be seen zipping off to one bar or another, a surfeit of Y chromosomes rasping along in a liberated jeep.
Every account of the Never shoot depicts it as a summer of frat-house antics, dissipation and frequent practical japes, usually involving fireworks. It was the summer in which Steve, in a fit of beery hi-jinks, detonated an ‘entire fourth of July show’ inside Sinatra’s dressing room. In some versions, Sinatra was tickled by this display; in others, he emerged singed and ranting, like Hitler after the generals’ plot of 1944, and began demanding blood. It was the summer in which the stars nearly killed Loren Janes by blowing up his trailer, dragged another crew member to the edge of a cliff, promising to push him off, and threatened to dunk Charles Bronson, claiming there was no danger since, like his acting, he was ‘all wood’. It was the summer in which McQueen, banned by MGM from riding his motorbike on set, asked if he could borrow Dean Jones’s Triumph – and Jones said yes, only to have Sturges appear later and tell him, ‘McQueen’s just driven through a fence; now you’re both banned.’ Above all it was the summer in which Sinatra’s first words on screen to Steve – ‘You interest me, Ringa’ – echoed real life. He’d found a protégé who was tough, playful and bad-assed; and that was certainly part of the truth.
In the end, salty performances kept Never So Few from sinking in its own melodramatic plot. One reviewer called it a ‘schizoid war romancer that, when it comes to split personalities, is up there with Sinatra himself’. Sadly, he was wrong: Never So Few had precious little personality to split. McQueen’s own sense of humour and spirit, at least, was well done. There was a steadiness there which carried him through. All his war films would manage the rare feat of combining rebellion and charm in equal parts. Cocky, unfeasibly bronzed and swaggering, McQueen’s Ringa announced the arrival of a major talent.
The comer.
Sinatra, says Bob Relyea, ‘encouraged Steve to be the next officially tolerated bad boy in town’. The two men and their families were inseparable that year. Sinatra and the McQueens spent a week together in New York, where they ate at Louie’s and took innocent pleasure in demonstrating how far each had come. One evening McQueen stood at the window of his hotel suite, pointed a finger down Fifth Avenue and said, ‘It’s a lot longer from Barrow Street to here than you think.’ That Saturday night the McQueens went backstage at Sinatra’s homecoming concert in Atlantic City. Steve was mistaken for one of the band and mobbed.
