McQueen Steve - The life: Steve McQueen

DWIGHT JON ZIMMERMAN

2017 Quarto Publishing Group USA Inc.

First published in 2017 by Motorbooks, an imprint of
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Digital edition: 978-0-76036-198-6
Hardcover edition: 978-0-76035-811-5

Names: Zimmerman, Dwight Jon author.

Title: The life McQueen / Dwight Jon Zimmerman.

Description: Minneapolls : Motorbooks, 2017.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017038746 | ISBN 9780760358115 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: McQueen, Steve, 1930-1980. | Actors--United

States--Biography. | BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Entertainment &

Performing Arts. | BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Rich & Famous.

Classification: LCC PN2287.M547 Z56 2017 | DDC 791.4302/8092 [B] --dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017038746

Acquiring Editor: Zack Miller
Project Manager: Alyssa Bluhm
Cover and page design: Laura Drew
Page layout: Laura Drew and Beth Middleworth

Front cover photo: William Claxton

A person is very much shaped by his environment and upbringing, and in Steve McQueens case, the combination of parental abandonment and economic hardship created a man tough on the outside and vulnerable insidedriven to succeed, and on his terms. And he did.

McQueen was a complex individual full of contradictions: a man reaching out for intimacy but suspicious whenever he found it, demanding trust but rarely reciprocating it. Devoted father, serial cheater. A hedonist who became devout, not because he was dying, but because he truly found God. His success on the silver screen and on the racetrack and off-road propelled him above A-list stardom to hold the unique position of the King of Cool, an icon who was as comfortable in tailored suits and expensive casual dress and manicured fingernails as he was in jeans, a T-shirt, and work boots with grease under his fingernails. Yet even at the peak of his fame and fortune, he was constantly nagged by feelings of inferiority and a fear of poverty.

Success in acting gave him the freedom to lead the life he wanted, and what he wanted with equal passion was to race and be respected by his fellow racers. He said, An actor is a puppet, manipulated by a dozen other people. Auto racing has dignity.

A man constantly in the public eye, he was a loner, happiest by himself on a motorcycle in the desert. In On Any Sunday, the motorcycle racing documentary he financed and starred in, he said, Every time I start thinking of the world as all bad, then I start seeing some people out here having a good time on motorcyclesit makes me take another look. It was a good time that motorcycling repaid him. In 1976, he was inducted into the Off-Road Motorsports Hall of Fame, and in 1999, the American Motorcycle Association inducted him into the Motorcycle Hall of Fame.

As this is written, thirty-seven years have passed since his tragic death of cancer at age fifty. Yet his influence continues to be felt on the screen and in fashion.

Biographer William F. Nolan wrote, Steve McQueen ended as he began, a rebel outside the establishment, a man who had preserved his fierce sense of unwavering integrity against all odds, who had gone through the fire, and who had found, at the end, a deep personal peace within himself.

Everyone starts somewhere. For Terrence Steven McQueen, that somewhere was Slater, Missouri, in 1930, just as the Great Depression was entering its worst years. Abandoned by his father, Terrence McQueen, when he was six months old, and then by his mother, Jullian Crawford McQueen, to relatives, when she took him back at age nine and left with him to live in California with the latest of her husbands, the seeds of angry rebellion had been deeply sown.

Not long after settling down in Los Angeles, Jullian found herself caught between an abusive husband and an out-of-control son who had become a member of a street gang. In desperation, she signed a court order that sent the delinquent McQueen to the California Junior Boys Republic, which he entered on February 6, 1945. It was there that he finally got the guidance he needed and developed a positive sense of self-worth.

As for why he kept returning to the Boys Republic after he had become a star, McQueen said, Because I owe the place. And you pay your debts. They tell me I do a lot of good here. And maybe I do. But lemme tell ya. If I thought Id help just one kid who was headed the way I was headedhelped him get straight with the worldthat would make all the trips okay. Just one kid. Youve got to give back, you cant take. And at Chino, Im givin back a little is all.

On April 21, 1983, in a ceremony attended by McQueens son, Chad, and some close friends and civic officials and guests, the Steve McQueen Activity Center was dedicated. Its plaque reads,

Steve McQueen came here as a troubled boy but left here as a man. He went on to achieve stardom in motion pictures but returned to this campus often to share of himself and his fortune. His legacy is hope and inspiration to those students here now, and those yet to come.

The first woman in McQueens life was his mother, Jullian Crawford McQueen. A spoiled, rebellious only child, she was anything but a good mother. Blonde, blue-eyed, and beautiful, she wanted nothing less than a handsome man to show her a good time. Bored by her strict church upbringing in smalltown Slater, Missouri, she ran away at sixteen to find good times and good men in the metropolis of Indianapolis.