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During one of our Western discussions, it was Southern Lion, I think, who mentioned that the Steve McQueen movie, “Tom Horn” was one of his favorites.  Coincidentally, it appeared on cable right after that and I watched it.  It was a very good movie and made me realize that I didn’t know much about McQueen.  Fortunately, my local library had a biography in the stacks, so I checked it out.

Steve McQueen was an artist with the kind of hard knocks street cred that Jack Kerouac would have killed for.  Born to a teenage alcoholic prostitute, McQueen never met his father.  His mother abandoned him, leaving him with her parents, who themselves went bankrupt and were forced to move in with Steve’s great uncle.  At age nine, his mother reappeared and dragged him to Los Angeles, where he was beaten mercilessly by more than one stepfather.  He spent most of his time prowling the streets of L.A. with teenage gangs.

He eventually ended up in reform school, the California Junior Boys Republic in Chino.  When he was released, he traveled to New York to find his mother.  She had moved in with a new boyfriend in a small flat and Steve ended up living on the streets.  He joined the merchant marine, went AWOL in Port Arthur, Texas, worked on an oil rig and finally, joined the Marines.  He served three years and at age 21, went back to New York to look for his mother, but found out she had moved to San Francisco.  He stayed in Greenwich Village and that’s how he fell into acting.

I highly recommend this book, which tells the story of McQueen’s rise to fame and fortune.  I’m just going to list of few of the things I found surprising and interesting:

-  McQueen was a committed pothead, who may have smoked marijuana just about every day of his life from age 21 onward.  He didn’t shy away from alcohol, cocaine and LSD either.

-  He married a successful stage actress of Filipino descent, Neile Adams, when he was a complete unknown.  They had two children together and their marriage lasted for fifteen years, surviving McQueen’s rise to superstardom.  But that was only because Neile put up with his blatant philandering.     

-   He was the first choice for the role of the Sundance Kid in the movie “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid”.  He wanted the part, but didn’t get it because he demanded first billing over Paul Newman, even though Newman was willing to accept co-billing.  Overall, Newman was a much bigger star, but McQueen was hot as a pistol at the time due to the success of “Bullitt”.  McQueen had always had a huge inferiority complex about the more successful Newman and tried to humiliate him during the billing negotiations.

-  McQueen’s best friend was his barber, Jay Sebring.  Sebring and McQueen spent most of their time trying to screw every last woman in Los Angeles – and very nearly succeeded, it seems.  One day in 1968, Sebring invited McQueen to a party at Sharon Tate’s house.  McQueen was all set to go, he even invited his old buddy Robert Vaughn to the party, but he ran into an old flame and decided to spend the night with her instead.  That was the night of the Manson killings.  Sebring was stabbed seven times and shot in the head.  This would mess up anybody, but a coke addict like McQueen?  Talk about paranoid.     

Overall, this book is pretty depressing for a lot of reasons.  First, the guy’s childhood was just traumatic.  Second, as an adult he was very self destructive, although he wasn’t overly abusive to his loved ones (he took out most of his pain on movie directors, who universally hated him).  And finally, he died of lung cancer at the age of 50 (most definitely mesothelioma from removing asbestos in the Marines).

I can deal with all that stuff.  That’s just life happening.  What really bothers me about McQueen is how little he got out of his talent, how little he gave us.  He’s the opposite of Eastwood in that regard.  For example, he turned down the opportunity to franchise the Bullitt character (as opposed to how Eastwood handled Dirty Harry) and instead made silly movies like “The Reivers”.  He turned down the Sundance Kid job and the Gene Hackman role in “The French Connection”.  The list just goes on and on.   

I don’t think it’s just old fogie talk to say that when you look around the Hollywood landscape today, you don’t see any actor who can hold a candle to McQueen in terms of screen presence and charisma.  The real tragedy of his life is the fact that the left so many great movies on the table.