him to dream of other, headier realities.
The past slowly faded: Civil War veterans, though a few still held court in Military Park; Indians, first as names and then as faces; even the great Jazz Age of the twenties. Culture in the Midwest was a marginal enterprise. The news that March Monday in the Hoosier Star was of Hitler, Gandhi and Stalin, and closer to home of Indianapolis itself, where the talk was of unemployment, foreclosures and the Ku Klux Klan. On the 24th fiery crosses burned on Mars Hill and the downs around Beech Grove, and the Catholic cathedral was pipe-bombed. Thugs terrorised Jewish shopkeepers. That long winter’s gloom wasn’t just climatic; it acted on the streets and the houses, but also on character, mood and outlook. It was a powerful depressant.
Nineteen-thirty was also, on another level, a time of mass escapism. The old music halls had gone, but the dramatic heart of the nation started up again in the movies. Sixty million men, women and children paid at the box office weekly. Mummified ‘flickers’ were fast giving way to modern production values: widescreen action in general and the Grandeur process in particular were blazed in 1930’s The Big Trail, starring John Wayne. The Depression would prove to be Hollywood’s finest hour. Disraeli, The Blue Angel and All Quiet on the Western Front were all soon playing amid a relentless diet of Dracula and primitive adult and slasher films. That same March Al Jolson opened in Mammy, while Garbo’s first talkie, Anna Christie, started out as an epic and soon mutated into something more, a picture Julian herself saw every night for a week. Between times, she would trudge with Steve to the downtown Roxy or sneak into the Crescent ‘colored house’, full of smoke, chrome and low-budget flickers which faded away to reveal the main visual drama – punch-ups and, in not a few cases, lynchings in the surrounding ghetto dealt out by the Klan. It was here that McQueen first made the acquaintance of sex and violence.
Meanwhile, more and more concerned women’s groups said that children could not be trusted around a cinema.
And yet the Daughters of the American Revolution probably weren’t unhappy. They had one cause of never-failing interest, and that was censorship. That same year Hoover established the Motion Picture Production Code, the so-called Hays Office, to police a growing trend towards blasphemy or crude Scandinavian naturism. Later in 1930 Loew’s on Meridian Street was actually raided during a live illustration of ‘civic hygiene’ involving two women, a tub and their silk smalls in a striking combination. According to the deadpan police report, ‘The sexual parts, around which the pubic hairs seem[ed] to have been shaved off, [were] clearly visible and so imperfectly covered by the wash cloth, that the lips bulge[d] out to the left and right of the towel…The glands were uncovered.’ Mae West’s celebrated trial on a similar morals rap opened in New York. This early, seminal association of the lively arts with sex and rowdyism was one Steve soon learnt and never forgot. Play-acting would give him the licence to be dirty, sweaty and lewd, the licence to get even, to make the real world vanish – and, eventually, to blow town. Once he started emulating the hoary two-reelers from Hollywood, it was only a matter of time for him and the rust-belt.
The pre-war decade was also a great flying era. Stunt pilots, barnstormers and wing-walkers attracted crowds undreamed of in the 1920s. Air displays sold out. In the same three-month period Charles Lindbergh and his wife set a transcontinental speed record, Amy Johnson made the haul from London to Sydney and Francis Chichester brought off the first solo crossing by seaplane from New Zealand to Australia. Bill’s intense devotion to this world reflected the same recklessness his son later experienced in drinking, drug-taking and dirt-biking. Like his father, Steve put himself on the line, on-screen and off; he dared all and he ‘went for it’ until self-destruction, or a sense of parody, kicked in. His whole career was the celluloid equivalent of the Barrell Roll. Long before he went aloft in his own vintage Stearman, McQueen had already flaunted his patronymic DNA – what Julian called the ‘butch, brawling, ballsy’ school of life. The winging it.
Born to poverty and bred to insecurity, Steve soon thrived on loneliness. He could never pinpoint how old he was when he first began to feel wretched in his own skin, but the critical scene haunted him the rest of his life. Running upstairs to the dive he shared with Julian, he suddenly heard her screaming, ‘hollering and howling [like] she was bein’ done in’ but accompanied, curiously, by gales of mirth from the neighbours’ stoop. His mother was in bed there with a sailor. ‘We ragged him,’ says a childhood friend, Toni Gahl. ‘Steve was very sort of geeky in those days. He was dirt poor, wore britches and Julian was no more than a prize slut. The other kids were down on him.’
So, suddenly, life became bewildering, and before he could even read or write McQueen was a reformatory case. His fate to always be the outsider was blazed early on. He was old enough to know he was ‘trash’, and young enough to dream about being part of a fantasy world in the movies. An imaginative, hyperactive child who would always rather be elsewhere, doing something else, Steve came to hate his mother even more than his runaway father. Every night he wandered among the drunks and rat-infested garbage while Julian turned tricks in their bedroom.
McQueen’s later binges were also a legacy of Bill’s – and Julian’s – world. What went into his movies was part of what went into his monumental craving for sex and drugs. The plethoric screwing, in particular, wasn’t normally for fun or pleasure; nor, says a well-placed source, was it ‘likely to thrill the girl. Steve was very much a wham, bam guy, not the kind to pour sap about love in your ear.’ That, too, echoed his father (motto: ‘They’re all grey in the night’), whose mark was in the boy’s marrow. His very names, Terrence Steven, were in honour of a figuratively legless, literally one-armed punter at Wild Will’s. The ‘McQueen’, from the Gaelic suibhne, meant ‘son of the good or quiet man’. As a derivative it was strictly out of the ironic-name school, and in fact, two choicer words could hardly be used to describe Bill. His own father had been a soldier, from a family of soldiers or sailors, who had moved from Scotland around 1750. By the early nineteenth century the McQueens were living in North and South Carolina before fanning out west at the time of the Civil War. An Arian (the ‘me’ sign), Steve was by a neat twist, within a few weeks’ age of both Sean Connery and Clint Eastwood, the three great ball-clanking icons of their era. The 24th of March was also celebrated in ancient Rome as the Day of Blood. Any child born that day was likely to be punished by an early death.
Julian’s people were devout Catholics and tradesmen in Slater, Missouri, gently rolling farm country midway between Columbia and Kansas City. For most of the 1930s she and Steve would shuttle from Indianapolis to the heartland and back, boarding with her parents and fostering an arbitrary highway persona, equal parts brief, ad hoc arrangements and cyclical transience, which he never broke. Much of McQueen’s on-screen insight came from the highly imaginative and disturbed five-year-old who once clutched his mother’s hand in genuine perplexity:
‘What’s wrong with us?’
Julian remained mute.
‘I’m starving, Ma.’
Julian was unaware of it at the time, but he was consumed with envy when he compared life even to that of the other slum kids in the city. Most of his peers were living in semi-comfort, while he had to content himself with cast-off clothes and meagre, wolfed-down meals. Toni Gahl remembers that Steve ‘didn’t say a lot. Basically he was pretty much of a clenched fist.’
Around mid-decade things, already apparently at their darkest, would turn black. Julian’s father went broke in the slump and he and his wife moved in with the latter’s brother Claude Thomson, a hog baron with a prodigious appetite for moonshine and also, with that spread, catnip to the ladies. The next time the bus pulled in from Indianapolis, Julian and Steve also joined the displaced family. Claude lived on a 320-acre farm on, aptly, Thomson Lane, three miles out of Slater by Buck creek. It was as near to a fixed childhood home as Steve ever had. He spent eleven years there on and off, sometimes with his mother, more often not. A woman named Darla More once saw him, head down, tramping alongside the Chicago & Alton
