to look as absolutely beat as he did at that moment.’ More sat down with him and learnt that Julian had left for Indianapolis, without bothering to tell her son, the night before. ‘Steve slumped there on the tracks and wept his eyes out. It sounds corny, but I promptly went and picked a flower to cheer him up and gave it to him. I still remember the smile Steve flashed me back.’ When alluding to the scene in later years, McQueen himself would sometimes choke and have to compose himself.
In all, Steve grew up in ‘about twenty different shacks and dumps’, he said, and his imagination seems to have provided more richly furnished accommodations. There were any number of lifelong connections from that era, but a handful beat a straight path to sadomasochism: watching Julian casually come and go, for example, her soft, fat lips, her assertion that fun was more important than family.
Neglected by both parents, he was raised in large part by a man who ran the farm with a mixture of shrewdness, opportunism and brute force. Husbandry in those days was an often violent business, and they did have gangsters in Missouri. In fact, the only mention of crime in the Slater paper for Christmas 1933 records a sorry fall from grace: on 24 December two men shot at a third after catching him interfering with a sow. Although Uncle Claude owned several guns, there was no suggestion that he was tied up in this scandal. He did, however, protect his own, worked all hours and drove a hard bargain. All through the Depression he made a good living, becoming one of Slater’s richest men. Unfortunately, he was also an alcoholic whose great-nephew, for all the Catholic ritual and dogma his family tried to beat into him, grew up virtually wild.
Accordingly, Steve stood far closer to the moonshine than to any holy sacraments. By contrast, Julian’s mother Lil was a religious nut and disciplinarian said by McQueen to habitually ‘spit icicles in July’. She fussed around the white stucco home (first in the county to get electricity), a rambling pile with sixty-five scalloped windows and endless corridors, all lined with bad paintings and an occasional life-size nude. What Claude Thomson had in cash, he lacked in class, the threadbare rugs and wooden pews (to give things a churchy feeling) contributing to a kind of mingy staleness. Despite all the glass, the farm had a dark, gothic feel, grimy paint and heavy mahogany mingling with a reek of dishwater, slops and Lil’s speciality, garlic, oozing from the kitchen. Everybody muttered about private grievances and never shared. In an unresolved row over money, Claude soon evicted his sister and her husband, who moved into an unlit railway car put up on blocks in a neighbouring field. When Lil was later widowed, her brother promptly had her committed to the state hospital for the insane.
Slater itself, of 4000 souls and a single stop-light, was inhabited by cadaverously thin men in overalls working the land for soya beans, by the peculiar musty stench of the loam and salt deposits, by defecating hogs and ancient trucks beached in front yards, by fire-and-brimstone preachers and illicit stills and funereal hillbilly music drifting up out of tomb-dark shacks. Local politics were a depressing spectacle, most attitudes pre-Lincolnian, race relations fundamental. Tradition was all. The place boasted twenty-one Protestant and two Catholic churches. Behind these lay the wheatfields and the occasional plantation, like Claude’s, in a grove of trees; obviously places of pretension at one time. The whole area was a throwback to a vanishing America. As for the people, they may have been, as Claude said, ‘no Einsteins’, but for the most part they possessed a certain earthy frankness. They were also capable, gruff, and kissed up to no one, including a new, ‘dorky’ arrival. Steve now knew what it was like to be shunned in two communities.
The trouble grew worse each year, especially after McQueen worked out the full truth of his parentage. From the start, though fully alive to the gossip, he’d been determined to ignore it, to ‘shut [himself] down’. At first there were only whispered reports; the locals simply looked away when he walked by. Returning along the trail that led across the creek to town, deep in the green shade of the thickest part of the prairie-grass, Steve was regularly aware of the same group of boys sitting at a turn of the road, at a place just before it led up the hill to the railroad and the shops. They squatted between the cottonwoods, quietly talking. When he came up to them he’d keep his head down, and they always did the same, remained silent a moment until he’d gone by, then nudged each other and hooted out, ‘Bastard!’
By the time Steve was six or seven, this already tense scene gradually gave way to violence, and verbal abuse degenerated into punch-ups. One local teen known only as Bud once spat at him as he walked by on Main Street. The response was dramatic. Quite suddenly, McQueen’s indifference ended. Vaguely, Bud remembered one of the other boys screaming and then felt a cracking pain as he went down on the kerb. There was another blow, and blood began to spurt out all over his face. A wiry meatpacking arm began to flail downwards, and with one hook of his left fist, Steve split the much older boy’s nose. Two passers-by, fearing he’d brain him, started yelling, ‘You’ll kill him, Mac! You’ll kill him!’ and dragged McQueen off. The police were called.
Steve would later attend a small, all-white school, where his aggression was matched by sullenness. For the most part his hobbies were solitary, his companions subhuman. So far as he ever let himself go, it was with a series of animals and household pets – his best friend was one of Claude’s hogs – with whom he abandoned himself in a carefree display of emotion, an uninhibited effusion of irresponsibility, happiness and love. He also, says Gahl, ‘dug anything with wheels’. Within those massive confines, it wasn’t a bad childhood, merely a warped one. First Bill’s and then Julian’s defections were a blow that helped to shape, or did shape him, making him tense, hard-boiled and edgily single-minded. He had his code worked out. People were swine; performing for them was simply to rattle the swill bucket. The sense of parental love which nourished even a Bud was shut off totally. On the other hand, McQueen learnt the value of self-help early on, and in the one surviving contemporary photo of him, taken in the pig-pen, he’s tricked out for the occasion in boots, bib overalls and a wide grin. Striking a pose that’s at once studied and casual, he leans against a trough with his knees slightly bent, as if ready to spring into action the moment the shutter’s released: finishing his chores early would earn him a bonus from Uncle Claude, and a Saturday matinee ticket to Slater’s Kiva cinema. ‘I’m out of the midwest,’ McQueen would say, from the far side of fame. ‘It’s a good place to come from. It gives you a sense of right or wrong and fairness, and I’ve never forgotten [it].’
He made his life within the cycles of manic depression, and they shaped him as much as the cycles of seasons and weather and fat and famine shaped the lives of other Slaterites. For the most part, Steve was happy enough to lose himself in Claude’s farm and the hardware. But clearly there was a part of him, burning down inside, that wanted to get away as far and as fast as possible.
McQueen’s morbid ambition was in large part revenge. Right down the middle of his psyche ran a mercenary core: the will to get even. Someone, he thought, was always trying to screw him; somebody else was having him on. All the world – but never he – was a con. Not exactly a prize sucker for the sell, Steve started off life ‘thinking everyone, from [Julian] down, was after me’, and went on from there to get paranoid. The bitchy litany became the sustained bark punctuated by the snarl and – when backed into a corner – outbreaks of hysterical frothing at the mouth. Even when McQueen got what he wanted, he combined the swagger of the aggressor with the cringe of the abused.
As Steve’s suspiciousness increased, so did his solitude. At a 1900-era diner stranded on Slater’s Front Street, the ex-owner remembers McQueen ‘real well…he came in after school and spent an hour sitting alone there over a glass of water. He wasn’t like other kids.’ Robert Relyea, with whom Steve went into business in the 1960s, recalls him ‘practising the famous baseball drill in The Great Escape for two days…I don’t think he’d ever been much for team sports.’ This key truth, more broadly unsociable than narrowly un-American, was echoed a few years later, when Relyea and his family were playing football with McQueen in a California park. ‘It was touching that he was running around, laughing at a fumble, punching triumphantly with his fist in the air when he made a touchdown, smiling and nodding when one of the kids brought off a catch, having the time
