the hills, just the world’s biggest movie star and me, Steve thrilled like a kid breaking curfew but his edge immediately taking over.’ Gordon would good-naturedly watch McQueen put the throttle on and roar off into the dark. He ‘took it hard and fast because he was damn good, but also because he was stoked by knowing someone else was right behind him. I mean, Steve had to win.’
When McQueen died, more than twenty years ago, there was still a mythical America; an individual could still wrap himself in that myth. A large part of the legend had already gone Hollywood – not least in the lens of a John Ford or Frank Capra – before McQueen, but he also created his own. Vulnerability, decency and a real sense of menace all combined to fix him as the ‘new Bogie’, although Steve’s on-screen chemistry with women was the more toxic of the two. Some are put in mind of the ‘torn shirt’ school epitomised by Montgomery Clift and Brando, though McQueen’s reputation was always based on rather more than a few grunts and stylised nasal tics. With rare exceptions, he kept upping the risk, enlarging the dimensions of his own performance both on screen and off. Each of Steve’s roles was a grander and more precariously improvised adventure of the mind. His tragedy was that he could neither change the world nor ignore its creation of him. But it made for a life.
McQueen was able, out of his arrogance, to do something which was selfless. Of course he cashed the cheques, but in the best roles he created the walk, the look and the presence of the truly universal. Steve McQueen’s is the story of our time.
Many of Steve’s first memories were of machines; they seemed to exert a pull on him from the start. They stood out, conspicuous against the human world, notable for their tireless, solid qualities, their efficiency, their resilience and power. They seemed responsive to his touch, and they were rational. He quickly found his place.
His time, early spring of 1930, was one of uneventful peace brooding over Europe. Britain grappled with its perennial labour and sterling crises and the worldwide trade slump, both cause and result of the Depression. The sovereign people of the US still lumped it under President Hoover, Advisory Boards on everything from Reconstruction Finance to Illiteracy marking the real beginning, three years pre-Roosevelt, of the New Deal. Yet, if lacking in surface drama, 1930 was still a turning-point, with two or three events of real long-term significance. In Germany the first Nazis took public office; on the sub-continent Gandhi began his civil disobedience campaign, with all the dislocation that entailed; and in the American rust-belt Steve McQueen was born.
It was a grim enough time, an icy 24 March, and a grim enough spot, the Indianapolis suburb of Beech Grove. He was delivered at ten that morning in the branch hospital, hard by the Conrail depot, where shabby passenger cars came to be fixed. Among the first sounds he would have heard were of engines. Everywhere more and more machinery was grinding: the city mills were still running at full bore and coal was being quarried in record weight. The factories blasted night and day; the clang of iron plates made a thought-annihilating thunder. The stockyards sent up a thick reek, wooden shacks standing beside animal swamps which bubbled and stank like stewing tripe. Dirty snow hillocks formed along the kerbs and sewage water ran raw and braided in the gutters. The inner slums, like Beech Grove, were already long since pauperised. Even the leprous hospital block was half-enveloped in weeds. This was the place, full of blood, stench and the sulphurous glare of the railyard, that fixed itself in the young boy’s imagination.
It’s often said that McQueen lived five lives, the juvenile and late years and one time around with each of his three wives. Like many people he used to wonder whether, in the last resort, those mewling early days weren’t the happiest and best. ‘I remember running in the hog yards…My people had this big field. And I’d come lighting out from school and play [there] and I remember how buzzed I felt.’ In later life Steve was skilled at softening hard memories with happy stories. His nostalgia for the 1930s and 1940s masked the grim truth that he was odds-on illegitimate, very probably abused and certainly unwanted. The experience left McQueen with the unshakable conviction that he was ‘a dork’, a friend explains. ‘He always described himself exactly that way. Steve was very sold on his being damaged goods.’
His mother, Julia Ann Crawford, known as Julian, was a nineteen-year-old runaway and drunk. In 1927 she’d taken off from the family farm for the city. Julian was blonde and pert, an apparently stylish and independent woman, if not the model of sanity. On closer inspection her very face was demented. Julian’s eyes, small and dark, suggested a substitute set of nostrils at the wrong end of her nose. At moments of excitement her head would loll wildly. She soon made a whole lifestyle out of being fractious. For a while it was only semi-prostitution, but before long Julian was dancing the hoochy-koochy and swigging ‘tea’, which she fortified from a silver flask in her handbag. Lipstick smudged across her pasty cheeks, face drawn, arms frail, black dress cinched round her thighs, stockings rolled down, she lurched from partner to partner, half gone but occasionally soaring into a shrill, manic high. The city authorities often called for her. Long before bi-polarity had a name, Julian was screwing herself in and out of madness.
In June 1929 she met and bedded an ex-flyboy named Bill McQueen. Steve’s mysterious father was one of those old-time rowdies who bent iron bars, pulled trains with their teeth or barnstormed at county fairs. All that’s known of his early days is that he flew in the navy and later toured North America with an aerobatic circus. Aside from drink, his two major loves in life were of planes and gambling. On his twenty-first birthday Bill came into a windfall of $2000. He took the cash and opened an illegal casino called Wild Will’s below a brothel on Indianapolis’s Illinois Street. After the club folded he became a drifter and an alcoholic. Around 1928 he began to suffer so badly from liver attacks and heart trouble that his doctor had to dull the pain with morphine. That set up yet another vicious circle of addiction. By the time Bill met Julian Crawford he was a sick man, in his late twenties but prematurely aged, with death all over him. They lived for a while in a rooming house, riding the trolley down to Schnull’s Block, the commercial zone, looking for work. None ever came. When Steve McQueen was born the following March, his parents had to apply for funds under the Poor Law. Julian took Bill’s surname, though there is no evidence they ever married. The father took off one night six months later, leaving the mother and son in a dismal hotel downtown. Bill came back once, a few weeks later, asking to be forgiven. Julian kicked him out.
Bill headed for the hills.
Steve’s claim that ‘my life was screwed up before I was born’ might be mawkish, but there’s no denying the shadow cast by this earliest ‘shit’, as he called it. Right to the end, he often quoted The Merchant of Venice, ‘The sins of the father are to be laid on the children’, sometimes substituting ‘of the mother’. The rich, famous and fulfilled man the world saw still considered himself a freak maimed for life by that early catastrophic shock.
In both manner and matter, McQueen was firmly tied to the fate of a bastard child of the 1930s. He rarely or never trusted anyone, and knew the value of a dollar as well as a crippling sense of doubt throughout years that were gritty and filled with struggle. It was a new world he grew up in, unique to the place, peculiar to the time; and, his friend confirms, ‘always, to Steve, something of a cross’. On the very morning he was born the weather broke in a filthy shawl of snow. Back in the rooming house the pipes had to be thawed with blow-torches while Bill brooded over his bottles. By day thick fog descended, leaving spectacular rime deposits on Market Street. At night the White river froze solid and the cold seemed to have the pygmy’s power of shrinking skin. Even in early spring, few of the locals ventured beyond the narrow confines of the city canal. Trains would haul freight and animals east, but rarely people. Some did claim they liked to travel, but they meant to Chicago perhaps, 130 miles north, or that they once visited St Louis. Indianapolis had few illusions about ever becoming world class. It was the typical submerged existence of the poor; people accepted it, hardly realising
