heights in offbeat roles in breakout films. In the process, the improbable wisdom of his moodiness would be fully vindicated.
His life was transformed – at least intensified – by the accumulated blows of 1930–44, to the point where the whole ordeal seemed to be a jail sentence. Not only was McQueen an orphan and condemned case, the Midwest itself was a haven of kidnapping and racketeering, stony-jawed icons like Bonnie and Clyde, Machine-Gun Kelly and the Barkers all plying their trade along the Route 44 corridor. The young Steve once saw John Dillinger being led into jail in Crown Point, Indiana. In later years he remembered how the killer had turned to him with his grinning, lopsided face, curling away from his two guards, and winked. Quite often, McQueen said, he couldn’t go to sleep for replaying the scene in his mind.
Against this felonious backdrop, marches and violent pickets in Saline county reflected the feelings of most Americans in the face of the appalling and mysterious Depression. Fist fights, or worse, regularly broke out between labour organisers and the law. ‘Most of my early memories’, McQueen once told a reporter, ‘are bloody.’
One morning in 1937 Steve was walking with Claude up Central Avenue in Slater when he saw several protesters holding banners turning the corner ahead of them. Soon there was shouting from around the bend. Armed police began to run towards the intersection. Steve looked up at Claude, who said quietly, ‘Something’s up.’ They walked on to the general store on Lincoln Street and heard shots fired. When they got nearer the crowd, they saw one of Claude’s own farmhands being dragged along the ground by three policemen. He was kicking. There was blood, Steve noticed, all over his face and shirt. ‘We better not have anything to do with it,’ Claude calmly told his great-nephew. ‘Better stay way out of it.’ The seven-year-old shook his head.
Steve’s clash with formal education, later that same year, came as a mutual shock. Every morning he walked or biked the three miles down to Orearville, a small, segregated elementary school on Front Street. Stone steps led up under a canopy to the modest one-room box he later called the ‘salt mine’. It was certainly Siberian. A coal stove in the vestibule there gave off as much heat as a 60-watt bulb and when it rained, which it did constantly most winters, water seeped through the roof. Like many shy boys, Steve relied on memorising to get by. (The rote student of Mark Twain would become an actor who hated to learn lines.) Parroting Huck Finn, for his peers, was enlivened by the ‘deez, demz and doz’ tones, plus stammer, in which he flayed the text. It was later discovered that he was suffering from a form of dyslexia. The muffled sniggers were yet another small snub, avenged by Steve with a quick, impersonal beating in the dirt bluff behind the schoolyard or, more often, playing truant. A Slater man named Sam Jones knew McQueen in 1937-8. ‘We all heard stories about him, but the truth is he didn’t show up much.’
By his ninth birthday he was firmly in the problem-child tradition, a pale, sandy-haired boy whose steely-blue eyes gave Jones the uncomfortable feeling of ‘being x-rayed’. People called it a striking face, broad-nosed but narrow-chinned, so that the head as a whole was bullet-shaped rather than oval. Another Slaterite recalls ‘that tense, hunted look he always had in a crowd’. Aside from the claustrophobia, McQueen owed his trademark quizzical squint to hearing loss. An undiagnosed mastoid infection in 1937 damaged his left ear for life, bringing him further untold grief in class and completing a caricature performance as small-town misfit. His remaining time there would be brief, violent and instructive.
As soon as he could drive Claude’s truck or fire a rifle, Steve immediately entered into such active conflict with Slater that the local sheriff called at Thomson Lane to issue a caution, and he aroused the school’s indignation by appearing, when he did so at all, reeking of pig dung. But he also deftly took to his relatives’ world. He liked to hunt, for instance, and once, to Claude’s eternal admiration, he took out two birds with a single shot. Steve often stalked deer or quail in the woods north of town, on the banks of the Missouri, at least once with a pureblood setter named Jim, the officially designated ‘coon dog of the century’. (The animal could apparently understand elaborate human commands, and also predicted the winners of horse races and prize fights.) In short, he said, it was a ‘schizo existence’, in which the wilderness, bloodletting and the magic of the primal, male life jarred against the drudgery of school and church. Steve’s great-uncle and grandparents didn’t bring him up to be violent – something beyond even their nightmares – but they showed him the world, and that was enough.
All this changed for the worse in 1939.
A flash of inspiration as can only be produced by a newlywed parent now caused Julian to send for her son from Indiana. Early that autumn, the same month that Britain went to war with Germany, Steve was taken out of school, packed a kit bag and sat, shrouded in his moth-eaten city clothes, cap pancaked down on his head, in the very back seat of the bus east. It was crowded with immigrant farmworkers going home to enlist. Many of them knew as much about the rest of America as they did about the Antarctic and sat staring or muttering over the noise of Steve’s neighbour, a Negro with a mouth-harp, as they crossed the Mississippi at St Louis. The Greyhound wound through Illinois until, late at night, it came around a curve into town. On both sides a sudden, windswept ruin opened out, the bus ploughing down dark alleys and backstreets, hardly better than furrows between the slums with, Steve noticed, ‘only a couple of pissing rats’ as proof of life. Indianapolis.
McQueen himself looked unhappily through the back window taking in the acrid smell of the city. Those 400 miles were worlds exquisitely separated. Where once there’d been Claude’s pigs, now there were pool halls, the Crescent and the Roxy. Racially, too, Indianapolis was segregated, black and white symbolically split by the railway – somewhere, downtown, men wore cheap Irontex suits and drove boatlike cars past hand-painted signs saying EATS. Local unemployment and, not incidentally, racketeering and Klan activity were all at their height and there was a curfew. It was raining. With two mismatched homes and no fewer than four warring role models (five, including his new stepfather), it’s hardly surprising McQueen would return to the theme of self-reliance throughout his career, channelling it into his best work and telling one startled reporter, ‘I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.’
The bus pulled in to the Meridian Street depot at midnight. Julian was more than an hour late meeting it, and Steve could smell the gin on her breath when she kissed him. He was introduced to her dour, clinically psychotic, it emerged, husband, and the three of them walked down dark streets, frequently challenged by police, to the boarding house. It was on the site of a former stockyard, and the old stink still haunted the place. Even through the shut window, the familiar depressing reek of meat, tallow, pulverised bones, hair and hides wafted up to Steve’s cold room. Towards dawn, he could hear Julian’s voice pleading and begging through the wall, and then the sound of her husband punching her. Finally, with daylight, the boy fell asleep. After all, he later told a close friend, it wasn’t as if it were permanent. They already owed their landlord ten dollars.
Before long Steve’s fourth-grade teacher in Indianapolis wanted nothing to do with him, and the contempt was mutual. Most mornings he went back to his earliest haunts, nowadays alone, slipping into the darkness of the Roxy, then begging some bones at the kitchen door of a diner. It wasn’t unknown for him to scavenge from the dustbins outside the canal bars, and he became an underage, lifelong beer toper. One day Steve fell in with some older boys who showed him how to steal hubcaps and then redeem them for cash at a store downtown. It was his first glimpse beyond his own rebellion into a world of organised crime that he would find more intriguing than the weekly mass to which his grandmother had dragged him in Slater. Julian and her husband tried, too, packing him off to a delinquents’ summer camp and Sunday school. But Steve acquired neither religion nor social graces. Soon, he was spending his nights running with a gang. He rarely, if ever, slept at home.
There was some building done during the late 1930s and early 1940s: hospitals, museums and parks all overlaying the great Lockefield Garden prank, a slum clearance scheme that provided housing for 7000 families. Several of these projects went broke and the Reconstruction
