him on the back and said, ‘It’s all yours, kid.’ Neile recalls running across the parking lot, two figures whose doll-like smallness gave them the air of kids breaking curfew ‘beside ourselves with glee. “The pope’s just blessed you,” I told Steve, and then we hit Cyrano’s to celebrate.’ Thanks to luck, talent and timing, McQueen’s dues-paying years were over. Hollywood’s idea of a hero was ruthlessly tumbling forward, and Steve triumphantly captured the moment. After Never So Few he became the consensus superstar-in-waiting. ‘I remember going to a party where all the A-list flocked around Steve,’ says Neile. ‘Jennifer Jones and Rita Hayworth were both jostling to get a look at the “next big thing”.’
They weren’t alone. Over the coming few months an unlikely friendship developed between the sixty-nine-year-old Hedda Hopper and the ‘young gun’, as she dotingly called him. At eleven in the morning, as soon as Hopper awoke, she began her day by phoning Steve on the Wanted set. The venerable columnist and one-time vamp followed down a line from Powell and Niven as stars of an earlier era for whom McQueen now became a kind of mascot. ‘He excites,’ she said. ‘I knew he had a past after one look at that hardened face.’ Evidently, he also had an effortless kind of glamour from the rear – ‘such an arrogant back’, Hopper added. As well as promoting McQueen nonstop in print, she cannily advised him to turn down Sinatra’s Execution of Private Slovik and Ocean’s Eleven by posing the stark question, ‘Do you want to be a Rat Pack flunky, or say no to Frank?’
Say no to Frank.
Steve returned the favour by, allegedly, taking Hopper to bed. He always referred to her around town as a ‘great lady’, often dropping a syllable amongst friends. After her death in 1966 lavish, black-bordered tributes to Hopper appeared in all the trade press. The mourner was anonymous. But Hopper’s staff, by dint of detective work, tracked him down. It was McQueen.
In the autumn of 1959 Steve reluctantly went back to Wanted and the small tube. It’s difficult today to imagine the power and the precise chemistry he and Josh Randall had together – and how receptive pre-Vietnam America was to the adage ‘A man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do’. The initially sparse audience for McQueen’s frontier show had first made it a cult and then a phenomenon. By the end of its second season Wanted was firmly atop the ratings and sponsors were beating a trail to CBS’s door.
Steve responded with a new frenzy of bickering with the series’ producers. For him, there was no inherent contradiction between titanic personal ambition and a genuine commitment to getting it right. Although he asked for, and won, a pay rise – now $100,000 a year from all sources – his real leverage went towards upping the quality of the show. The quickest annoyance duly came with the arrival, on set, of a suit. McQueen often seemed to conflate all his authority figures into one vast anti-Steve conspiracy. ‘This is jive,’ he’d tell Dick Powell. Or: ‘You’re twisting my melon, man – screwing me.’ Once, on being told an episode was behind schedule, McQueen carefully counted off ten pages of script, ripped them out and snarled, ‘Now we’re on track.’ The pages never went back in. He ranted when CBS talked about changing Wanted’s transmission time, then ranted when they didn’t and a rival network scheduled Leave It to Beaver in the same slot, inviting viewers to choose between Steve and one of America’s pet sitcoms. Most of all, he ranted about Josh Randall not being ‘real’. Often he would break off and snarl at the malevolent figures behind the lights:
‘Bullshit!’
As McQueen told one of the show’s writers, Bill Nolan, ‘I wanted to play [Randall]…as a guy trying to do a dangerous, unglamorous job with a minimum of fuss. But the Four Star dudes kept trying to turn him into a jaw-busting, sure-shot hero. I had some bad times with them over this.’ Steve’s manager Hilly Elkins confirms that ‘McQueen’s wars weren’t about bigger trailers or more lines – usually they were about less, but better lines.’ The view that Steve simply tried too hard was a common one amongst detractors. ‘McQueen always wanted it to be Hamlet,’ a well-known Wanted guest star says. ‘That was his strength, but at a certain point it became a weakness. It was only a cowboy show, for God’s sake.’
‘The Factory’, with its 5 a.m. calls and work-sheets, was McQueen’s great theme, but there were rewards too. With his combined big- and small-screen earnings, Steve had bought land and blue-chip stock in Dow Chemical, as well as a new Lotus Mark XI. Early in 1960 he formed his own production company and began to talk of developing a racing film with the title Le Mans. This particular obsession would tick steadily away for the next ten years, at which point it promptly exploded. ‘Steve was so up around then,’ says an ex-family friend; ‘he was twenty-nine, tanned, rich and had that manic zip. The guy was fresh goods.’
There were also some darkly revelatory moments around the house on Skyline Drive, frequently after McQueen had overdone his beloved Old Milwaukee or Peruvian flake. He never forgot a slight, real or imagined, wrote off anyone who crossed him and, as Neile says, ‘trusted exactly one soul in the world – me’. Steve’s paranoia could be as heated as his affection. ‘If anybody hurts my family, I’m gonna put them down in a little black book.’
One balmy evening in late 1960 Steve, his young daughter and their dog went for a walk up the canyon road. Far below them in the valley the jumble of downtown LA and Century City were strung with Christmas lights. In the spirit of the season, McQueen knocked on the door of a neighbour, one Edmund George, to make peace. Recently, there had been complaints about Steve ‘partying’ and ‘scaring the shit out of the street’ by gunning the Lotus on his midnight rounds to and from Hollywood. When the neighbour came out and his attitude wasn’t satisfactory, McQueen socked him in the mouth to make it so. Out of sheer shock and frustration, George allegedly retaliated by punching not Steve but his own wife. Meanwhile, the dog went berserk. McQueen then strolled the few yards back to his house where, sure enough, he was promptly hit with a lawsuit. (It was thrown out of court several months later.) A tangled contradiction for a man who continually wanted his TV series to be ‘less violent’.
Why did Wanted succeed?
‘Impact,’ says Don Gordon. ‘A fresh approach. Steve wasn’t a worn-out ham. The very few great screen actors know to break through that veil between them and the camera. They just do. It was McQueen’s greatest strength and his greatest hassle – he busted his ass. He worked. That’s what people forget when they talk about a big star.’ Among the ‘business’ Steve would perfect was his trademark, swivel-fire technique with the Mare’s Laig and various other quickdraw stunts he practised hours on end. He researched countless books on the correct 1890s-era wardrobe. There were his other finely-tuned mannerisms, like the way he walked or mounted a horse. McQueen would give certain scenes an hour or two while he pondered a move. Cast and crew got used to hanging restlessly on until the spirit moved him, at which point he would emerge at a run, once skidding at top speed into a prop cactus as he bawled excitedly:
‘Roll ’em.’
Once an idea was lodged in McQueen’s mind, he was raring to go and, as soon as the sets were ready, plunged in with his ‘manic zip’. Beneath it all was a hard unsaid truth. He was manic, he was depressive. The imitative, or impressionable, in Steve was there too. He was still given to his cherished Brando and Dean impersonations. Often it came through off set, as in his hi-jinks with Sinatra. And yet, by 1960, one look at the hardened glint in those shaggy-dog eyes told you there was something there rather deeper than mere mimicry. McQueen had unbeatable film sense. As Eli Wallach, who worked with him that year, says, ‘Steve’s great skill – the word genius comes to mind – lay in being observant. He could always find what it had been in an earlier scene that led, logically, to what he was doing just then. Nobody quite grasped the poetry in the flow of film like him.’ McQueen’s latter-day refusal to truck with decorative flourishes, but simply to wire back the facts, was also what struck Gordon. ‘Jimmy Cagney said it best:
