Marc Eliot - Steve McQueen: A Biography

Also by Marc Eliot

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Cary Grant: A Biography

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Rockonomics: The Money Behind the Music

Down Thunder Road: The Making of Bruce Springsteen

Walt Disney: Hollywoods Dark Prince

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Down 42nd Street: Sex, Money, Culture, and Politics at the Crossroads of the World

Copyright 2011 by Rebel Road, Inc.

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown Archetype, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eliot, Marc.
Steve McQueen : a biography / by Marc Eliot.1st ed.
Includes filmography.
1. McQueen, Steve, 19301980. 2. Motion picture actors and actressesUnited StatesBiography. I. Title.
PN22287.M547E45 2011
791.43028092dc22
[B] 2011002262

eISBN: 978-0-307-45323-5

Jacket design by Laura Duffy
Jacket photographs: Front and spine: 1978 William Claxton/mptvimages.com;
back, fourth down: Courtesy of David Foster; all others from the Rebel Road Archive
Author photograph: Courtesy of Marc Eliot

All photos are from the Rebel Road Archive unless otherwise credited.
Frontispiece: Bettmann/CORBIS

v3.1

For bee bee and little Sweetie Pie

All life is just a progression toward, and then a recession from, one phraseI love you.

F. S COTT F ITZGERALD , The Offshore Pirate

T ERRENCE S TEVEN M C Q UEEN WAS THE PRODUCT OF A one-night stand that stretched into a year and six months of misery between Terrence William McQueen, a handsome, philandering stunt pilot for a traveling circus, and Jullian Crawford, a teenage alcoholic prostitute. Terrence William left Jullian and Steven for good six months after the boy was born. Unable to cope with single motherhood, Jullian soon abandoned Steven. As casually as she changed clothes (or took them off), Jullian passed him off to her uncle, the wealthy but emotionally distant Claude Thomson.

These early traumatic events helped shape the fragile, needy psyche that for the rest of Steve McQueens life would bubble just beneath the deceptively smooth surface of his very good-looking exterior. Physically beautiful but emotionally insecure, this shy and withdrawn little boy would grow up to become an international movie superstar. He would be loved by millions from afar, but unable to handle intimate commitment and often lash out at those women who tried to love him in real life.

His emotional insecurity left him extremely sensitive and wary, a combination that would aid him enormously in his early days as an actor, and lead to his powerful attraction to and essential distrust of femalesa pattern that began in childhood with his mother and continued into adult life with the three women he made his wives. Marriage to Steve meant swimming in a pool of emotional turmoil. The promise of commitment tempted him, but the fear of abandonment compelled him to run away. He was a lover and a fighter whose emotions were always stoked to the peak of their heat.

Film directors favor those actors who can take their considerable inner turmoil and use it to infuse the characters they play in the movies with a heightened and compelling sense of drama. It is what is called talent in Hollywood, and those who have it, despite the high personal price they pay, are highly coveted.

Steve McQueen had it. His special, unique talent was his ability to balance his inner heat (his emotional rage, his distrust of older authority figures, and his defiance of them) and his cautious, careful, catlike wariness that so beautifully translated to the screen as the ultimate in cool. Although much of what he managed to accomplish in film was the result of his ability to trust his instincts, his emotional balancing act gained him the reputation as one of the best practitioners of the then in-vogue acting style of moody, brooding strength that was the by-product of the so-called Stanislavsky Method. He had studied the Method while a struggling actor in his early New York days, and it gave him a disciplined approach to acting. McQueens raw intensityhis talentwas always there; he was, in life, an emotional time bomb who ticked with metronomic precisiontick, the need to hold in all the rage; tock, the need to let it all outon-screen or off. This was what gave his characters their power, and despite all the acting classes, keeping the beat was the only real method he ever used and the only one he ever needed.

In 1958, after struggling as a stage and live TV actor, McQueen hit it big in the filmed TV series Wanted: Dead or Alive, his gateway to Hollywood and the twenty-eight feature films he would make in his lifetime. His resume is admittedly brief, with barely enough credits to admit him into the pantheon. His output is not only qualitatively minimalist but quantitatively minimal when compared with the 217 one-hour episodes and more than seventy features made by his contemporary Clint Eastwood (who is still going strong). People tend to forget that Eastwood and McQueen were born the same year1930and that their TV and film careers began approximately the same time (Wanted: Dead or Alive in 1958, Eastwoods Rawhide in 1959).

Interestingly, neither McQueen nor Eastwood ever appeared especially comfortable in cinematic scenarios of romance (although both were very much players in real life). Eastwood, with his poncho, cigarillo, and regal loneness, was able to externally fetishize his ability not just to exist but to thrive on-screen without women, while McQueen seemed too emotionally inhibited, his eyes too haunted, too downcast, to be a truly romantic leading man. Auteurist critic and historian Andrew Sarris pointed out after McQueens death that he was that rarity of rarities, a Method Action Hero.

The Method played a key difference between McQueens approach to acting and to his career and Eastwoods (who is a purely instinctive actor). The Method did to McQueen what it did to a lot of aspiring actors in the mid-to-late 1950s: it held up Marlon Brando as an ultimately unattainable icon to try to emulate. It confused and intimidated novice actors such as McQueen, who didnt fully understand the essence of the Methodthat it was intended to personalize performances and liberate emotions within the context of a reality already existing in the actor. In McQueen it led to fake impressions rather than true expressions of pain and personalization, and all the posturing that went with that falsity. (To many of McQueens teachers, good imitation Brando was better than no Brando at all.) For the rest of his career, McQueen would be saddled with the burden of trying to prove he was an actor. It led to Method-gone-mad disasters such as