STEVE MCQUEEN
THE FILM ICON’S WIVES AND CO-STARS REVEAL HOW HIS PERSONAL STRUGGLES FUELED HIS CHARISMA
The King of Cool’s wives and co-stars reveal how his personal struggles helped shape his legendary persona — on and off the silver screen.
“I live for myself, and I answer to
nobody.”
— Steve McQueen
Barbara Minty was a top fashion model in the late ’70s when she got a message from her agent that Steve McQueen wanted to meet her. “I said, ‘Who is Steve McQueen?’ ” Barbara, 64, tells Closer. “My agent ran through his movies, and I’d seen The Towering Inferno. She said, ‘He’s the guy with the really blue eyes.’ I thought it was going to be Paul Newman, but when Steve came to meet us, he looked like a mass murderer — he had long hair and a beard. He sat down, ordered two beers and we talked for an hour and a half. I said to my agent on the way out, ‘I’m going to marry that man one day. I love him!’” She soon became his third wife.
Steve had that effect on people. Behind those baby blue eyes lay a profound intensity grounded in a painful childhood and a roughand-tumble life that lent authenticity to his roles as men of action in classic Westerns (The Magnificent Seven) and war movies (The Great Escape). “He only had a ninthgrade education, but he had a Ph.D. in street smarts,” says Marshall Terrill, co-author of Steve McQueen: Le Mans in the Rearview Mirror. As Great Escape co-star David McCallum tells Closer, “Steve liked fast cars and motorcycles — he risked death on wheels. He was cool.”
More than 35 years after his tragic death at 50 in 1980, Steve remains a screen presence like no other. “Whatever anger and frustration he had, he was able to bring it to every role he played,” Marc Eliot, author of Steve McQueen: A Biography, tells Closer. “That was his magic.”
As Steve put it, “My life was screwed up before I was born.” Conceived in Indiana, “he was the child of a prostitute and a one-night stand,” claims Eliot. “The guy hung around for a couple of months and then he left.” Steve’s mom, Julia, “couldn’t handle being a mother and sent him away to an uncle’s farm in the Midwest,” says Eliot. “Then she’d get lonely and call him back.”
With such instability at home, it’s no wonder Steve developed a profound mistrust of others — and landed in reform school. He ran away from home at 16 and worked as a roughneck, a lumberjack, a carnival barker and a towel boy at a brothel before joining the Marines as a teenager in 1947. Any hopes the military would straighten him out were dashed when he went AWOL with a girlfriend and spent 41 days in the brig. Understates Eliot, “He had trouble with authority.”
Thanks to his rugged good looks, Steve soon found an easier way to meet girls: acting. At the famed Neighborhood Playhouse in NYC, he earned a reputation for volatility that drew comparisons to Marlon Brando. Still, he struggled with the idea of making a career in show business, having said: “In my own mind, I’m not sure acting is something for a grown man to be doing.”
Hollywood had its own ideas for Steve. After landing a lead role in the 1958 monster movie The Blob, he found fame as bounty hunter Josh Randall in the TV Western Wanted: Dead or Alive. Always a restless spirit, “Steve left the show after three seasons,” says Eliot. “He didn’t think the scripts were that good.”
Craving a sense of security at
ALL ABOUT STEVE
home, Steve wed actress Neile Adams in 1956. Within four years, they had a daughter, Terry (who died after a liver transplant at 38 in 1998), and a son, Chad, now 56. But in the swinging ’60s, Steve couldn’t stay faithful, seducing co-stars like Lee Remick and Tuesday Weld, and Neile retaliated by having a fling with actor Maximilian Schell. “I told him about it, and that’s what did the whole thing in,” Neile tells Closer. “His sense of abandonment was so strong — he was abandoned by his father, his mother, then me. He was furious and really hurt.”
Whether over women or roles, Steve was fiercely competitive. “He saw life as a race — everyone was out to screw him, and if he didn’t put his foot on the gas, he’d get beaten,” says biographer Christopher Sandford. “He had a lifelong feeling that he had to push himself to get ahead.” He felt deeply jealous of Paul Newman after losing the lead to him in 1956’s boxing drama Somebody Up There Likes Me. Even after a string of smashes in the ’60s like The Great Escape and The Thomas Crown Affair, “Steve saw Paul as his only real rival as a male superstar,” says Sandford. Perhaps not coincidentally, both became obsessed with auto racing, with Steve getting behind the wheel for 1971’s Le Mans.
“You only go around once in life, and I’m going to grab a handful
of it.”
— Steve McQueen
Steve’s voracious appetite for women — and winning — was stoked when he met Ali MacGraw on the set of 1972’s The Getaway. Even though she was wed to studio exec Robert Evans, “Steve decided they were going to get married,” says Eliot, and they were the following year. But their marriage quickly hit the skids. “He wanted her to have dinner on the table at 6 p.m., and he made her go to bed at 7 p.m.,” says Eliot. With her own film career booming, Ali didn’t want to obey Steve’s rules. When she told him she’d accepted a part opposite Kris Kristofferson in 1978’s Convoy, Steve told her, “In that case we are filing for divorce.”
Though he’d scored one of his biggest hits ever by swallowing his pride and co-starring with Paul (and reteaming with Thomas Crown’s Faye Dunaway) for 1974’s The Towering Inferno, he was sick of playing the Hollywood game. “He hated talking with studio executive types,” says Sandford. So he put his career on hold. “He became paranoid, grew his hair and beard long, and made himself uncastable,” says Eliot. His cocaine habit didn’t help.
Steve dropped out of celebrity culture, traveling across the country in an RV and on motorcycles. In the second half of the ’70s, he starred in
only one film, an adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s 1882 play An Enemy of the People that cast him as a scientist. It was his bid to be taken seriously as an actor, but it proved a critical and commercial flop. By 1980, when he wed Barbara, he was ready for a comeback. But his time was running out.
IN THE HOMESTRETCH
With Barbara unimpressed by his fame, Steve was initially able to relax. “He liked disco music, he was a terrible dresser and he drank Old Milwaukee Beer with ice. And he made the best mashed potatoes ever,” she recalls fondly. “We loved to take road trips and go second-hand junking in his old pickup truck.” Not that life with Steve was always a smooth ride. “He was an odd cookie,” says Barbara. “He was a pain in the ass, don’t get me wrong! But his soul and heart were good, and a lot of the [negative] stuff came from his dreadful childhood.”
Steve tried to break the cycle of dysfunctional parenting that had crippled him emotionally. “He was a fabulous father,” gushes Neile. “He was terrific with the kids. He’d take them motorcycle riding and swimming and pal around with them.” Steve also found religion, embracing Christianity. “His whole life led to that,” says Sandford. “He was searching for some sort of peace.”
Getting back to work, he shot the 1980 Western Tom Horn (“Steve couldn’t have been more wonderful,” co-star Linda Evans raves to Closer) as well as the action drama The Hunter, unaware it would become his final film. Steve was diagnosed with the lung disease mesothelioma and received a grim prognosis: “They gave him three to six months to live,” says Sandford. “He lived for almost another year.”
As tabloids trailed him (“it was a celebrity deathwatch,” Sandford says), he sought alternative treatments in Mexico. But cancerous tumors had metastasized in his neck and abdomen, and 12 hours after he underwent surgery to remove them, he died in his sleep of cardiac arrest on Nov. 7, 1980.
Steve’s unhappy early years haunted him to the end. “I was adopted as an infant, and when he started getting sick, I said I wanted to find my birth parents to see if cancer ran in my family,” says Barbara. “He said, ‘Nope, don’t find your family — it will only hurt you.’ ”
For decades, Steve had believed his dad was a daredevil pilot, but Terrill found “his father was a Merchant Marine,” he says. “That’s how he was able to avoid his family: He was out to sea, not up in the air.” When Steve’s dad died in 1958, he was living only a half-hour away in California, but they never reunited.
Steve channeled his angst into a magnetic persona, and he was equally compelling offscreen. “He was a contradiction in terms, constantly,” Neile concludes. “Sometimes he’d be charming and adorable; other times he wouldn’t. He was just totally an original.” — Bruce Fretts, with reporting by Katie Bruno and Barbra Paskin
“If my mother didn’t
love me, I guess I’m not
very good.”
— Steve McQueen