main script read like Tom Sawyer,’ one McQueen biographer has written. But there was also a dark sub-plot from Tennessee Williams around the place.
A heavy drinker, Claude had a volcanic temper. His fiancée, an ex-burlesque dancer from St Louis, where she left an illegitimate daughter, wore fake diamond rings on every finger and drove a gold Cadillac. The money soon ran out and the farm resorted to raising fryer chickens to sell at Christmas. Steve’s grandfather Vic was still living across the field in the disused sleeper, suffering from terminal cancer. His wife Lil went from being merely pious to fanatical, sometimes hobbling up Thomson Lane nude except for her crucifix and rosary in order to ‘see God’. Most days she didn’t recognise, or even acknowledge, her grandson. There were constant rows between husband and wife, brother and sister, plates flung, cops called. Julian, meanwhile, never once visited. All in all, it was no place for a chronically depressed twelve-year-old with an already fractured home life. If Indianapolis seemed like Fellini, then Slater was a living embodiment of American Gothic, the starkly realistic painting of Midwestern farm life unveiled, like Steve himself, in 1930. He ran away more than once, loping down to the railroad tracks with his few belongings in a knapsack, accompanied by a black-and-tan dog of uncertain ancestry and his black cat Bogie. The brick depot at the far end of Main Street made a viable overnight shelter from the madness of the farm.
The central fact of Steve’s childhood is that he was destroyed by men and blamed a woman. He carped at his vanished father for the rest of his life, but always with the key qualification, ‘Julian!’ He caught the right note of bewilderment. Claude himself wasn’t merely cranky, he was a tough disciplinarian who used strap and rod on his great-nephew; McQueen once called him ‘a shouter, very vociferous…He’d blow me out of the place, but I deserved it.’ His first stepfather, according to Gahl, ‘sexually molested Steve. He told me the two of them had been together one cold night while Julian was downtown, and how [McQueen] could always remember the beads of ice dripping from the ceiling like the sweat on the old geek’s lips…and that he, Steve, had tried to focus on the sound of the water and the wind flapping the hotel sign around outside the door to avoid thinking about what was going on.’ This was the same man who casually – and quite frequently – beat up his wife. That long winter of ritual abuse, physical and emotional, can only have been a trial to Steve’s mother as well, tied as she was to a perverted bully she couldn’t acknowledge as such. Steve, for his part, would always hold Julian responsible for the misery of his early years. ‘Don’t talk to me about love,’ she used to say. ‘I feel the same way before, when and after I fuck somebody – like shit.’
In mid 1942 Julian, now divorced and remarried to a man called Berri (Steve could never remember his first name), sent for her son to join them in California. Various circumstances had led to the move west, earlier that spring, among them another landlord-related crisis in Indiana. The specific reason that brought her to Los Angeles was that Berri was offered steady manual work on the fringes of the film trade. They took an apartment together on a drab, half-paved road of cheap motels between Elysian Park and the Silver Lake district, a mile or two north of downtown. Though there were sweeping views and a few modernist piles nearby, it was practically a genetic rule of thumb that Julian would end up in a slum. If the change was as good as a rest, its effect was to shatter her already primitive concept of family.
Day one she broke out the peroxide, nestled into a deck chair and whooped, ‘California!’
In fact neither the address nor the building itself could have been much worse. The Berris counted rats, raccoons, snakes, wild dogs and prairie-wolves in three or four varieties amongst their neighbours. Coyotes, the most feared, regularly came prowling down from the Verdugo hills. It was all a long way, figuratively, from Hollywood, let alone either Indianapolis or the farm. Steve arrived in LA, he told Gahl, feeling like he’d ‘crash-landed on Mars’, a pale, sulky refugee who now barely recognised his mother. Her first words when she met him at the depot were to tell him to behave around his stepfather, whose name they now took.
One night in his tiny back bedroom, with the vermin grazing outside, Steve lay down to write a letter to Slater. It wasn’t the usual perfunctory note home of a young teenager and it turned into a long one, as there was real hell as well as news involved. His new stepfather, he told Uncle Claude, was a thug who regularly beat him up. Steve was torn between his desire to run and a strong, but not yet overpowering, urge to fight back. Surely his family would rescue him. Is that what they were? Yes, he decided, those were his loved ones back in Slater. ‘Tonite after supper’, the letter continued, ‘[Berri] came to my room when he was ripped and lit off on stuff that he yells at Ma and me about and which he’s crazy over. That is, me and Ma finding jobs. Says he will likely toss us out if we dont start work.’ Steve went on like this for three pages, all of them covered in his spidery, retarded scrawl, sloppy, verbose and misspelt, though with sudden and surprising jolts of insight. The very last word over the signature, and the keynote of his whole year in LA, read ‘Help’.
The letter never made it to Slater. Berri, now lacerated by ulcers as well as by failure, got up in the night and noticed the light from under Steve’s door. Grabbing the letter, he read the first line or two before tearing it in half. When Steve bent over to pick it up, he was kicked or at least swatted hard on the rear. Berri followed this up by threatening to brain him. Unscrewing the dim bulb overhead, he then left Steve alone in the dark, whimpering in long, shuddering sobs and vowing revenge.
‘Berri used his fists on me,’ McQueen said later. ‘He worked me over pretty good – and my mother didn’t lift a hand. She was weak…I had a lot of contempt for her. Lot of contempt.’ Unsurprisingly, he was soon back running with a gang of toughs and shoplifters who worked the area around the bottom end of Sunset Boulevard. On Christmas Eve Steve was booked for stealing hubcaps from cars parked in Lincoln Heights. Truancy officers from the Los Angeles school board also called. At this dire pass, Julian wrote Uncle Claude a letter of her own, telling him how bad the boy was, and that they were considering sending him to the reformatory. A month later Claude wired money for the bus fare back to Missouri.
It had changed in Steve’s absence. Now the trains hauled troops as well as cattle, and a local factory converted from shoe manufacturing blasted out parts for the B-29 bomber. On the farm, too, began a painful induction into the world of peers and rivals. Claude’s wife Eva had sent for her own child, Jackie, from St Louis. The teenage girl was a year older than Steve and, it seemed to him, was spared chores around the house as compensation for having been dumped. Though he began innocently dating another relative of Eva’s, Ginny Bowden, Jackie’s would duly be the ‘first cooze I ever saw’, ogled through the crack in her bedroom door. There was also a suspicion that the seventy-year-old Claude was more interested than was proper in his stepdaughter. It was now, too, that Steve’s widowed grandmother was hauled off to State Hospital One, as the local asylum was called. The last sight he ever had of her was of her being dragged, kicking and screaming, out of her room. They used a straitjacket on her; an experimental model, it dislocated one of Lil’s painfully thin shoulders. Steve stood in open-mouthed horror as the old woman whirled free, yelling in agony and biblical righteousness, before being muzzled and hauled off like a mad dog. Once in the ambulance, she became a muffled shade and disappeared.
Steve, for his part, enjoyed his freedom to go drinking, hunting, or cruising off on his red bike with the black-and-tan or his pet mouse. For an inquisitive boy, he did remarkably little reading; the business of showing up for eighth grade was so tedious and time-consuming that he never made more than a few stabs at it. He was a dab hand at story-telling, but that was his one and only accomplishment back at Orearville. Formal learning never mattered much to Steve, aka Buddy Berri. At the end of the summer term, after calmly informing his schoolmistress of his dream of becoming a movie idol, he ran down the seven steps onto Front Street, laid out his cap on the ground in front of him and began doing Bogart and Cagney impersonations. When the afternoon was over he’d collected a total of two dollars. Thrilled at his success, Steve rode his bike home to Thomson Lane, where he repeated his career plans to Claude and Eva. His great-uncle’s response was to let rip with a contemptuous
