McQueen: The Biography. Christopher Sandford

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      It was a boom time for the movies. In the early war years Hollywood went from a half-shod outpost dealing in flickers to a culture factory employing the likes of Mann, Brecht and Faulkner. A large number of Broadway’s classical stars were coming west as fast as they could make it. The very best pictures of the day – Gone with the Wind, The Grapes of Wrath, Mrs Miniver – created characters that weren’t just some new aspect of stage acting, but new from the ground up. Bogart’s High Sierra, above all, won Steve over. This far-fetched gangster yarn had its faults, even he would admit, but in the lonely, sardonic yet soulful leading man it boasted a recognisable role model – ‘someone [whose] mud I dug’. More than thirty years later he was still mining the lode of that film, along with trace elements of The Maltese Falcon and Casablanca. ‘I first saw Bogie on screen when I was a kid,’ Steve said in 1972. ‘He nailed me pronto, and I’ve admired him ever since. He was the master and always will be.’

      There were better technical actors than McQueen, more classical or orthodox, but none who did a more brilliant take-off of his hero. He was more volatile than the actual Bogart, colder, more threatening, more thoroughly lost in the parts. He reprised and improved the famous sneer; he paid homage to Bogie and outdid him in the same breath. But Steve’s emotional authenticity went far beyond getting off a decent impersonation. His smallest movements had the kinetic flow of an animal, something feral. Whether playing the loner, the loser or the lover, he drew on his own signature mix of ego and insecurity. There was, first up, the man himself. Steve McQueen looked like a movie star. A front page of him, whether tight-lipped and scowling or smirking archly, was usually worth thousands of extra copies. But there was more to his success than bright blue eyes and a fetching grin. McQueen was one of that rare breed of actors who didn’t need to ‘do’ anything in order to shine. It was enough that he had, as Brando puts it, ‘the mo’, the properties of a bullet in flight.

      Laser-like focus was key to the young Steve, always adapting to some new competition, some fresh conflict. When not brooding at home or prising off hubcaps, he would make for the downtown pool hall. He played the game like a war, often wagering his entire day’s cash and immersing himself in the ritual, polishing shots and practising slang – picking up the protocol of the sport. Steve’s technique was sound, his gamesmanship honed, the depth of concentration frightening. But what most struck people, says Gahl, was the way ‘he got in part…Even broke, he’d show up with his own monogrammed stick and a bridge that was pure Minnesota Fats.’ McQueen played with self-assured pride, gliding this kit around the baize and carefully stowing it at night in a leather travelling case. He took it with him everywhere and, in 1956, its third or fourth successor became the very first item of the ‘stuff’ (as he called his stage artefacts) he worked so brilliantly on screen. Persistence, panache, props: the three ingredients were already filling out Steve’s street education, and he soon added a fourth. The fear he aroused in people was palpable, and he reinforced it more than once around town with that same pool-cue.

      How much of the juvenile delinquent McQueen would be in his films? The answer is that the more you watch him, the more of him you recognise. It was precisely because he was real – working off his own reactions, not the director’s – that he managed to create roles with mass appeal to high- and lowbrow alike. When he played a loner or a hustler, an emotional basket case, you could be sure it was coming from deep source material and not just a script. Those early years fell, Steve said, as ‘ashes and muck’ on adult life but as gold and fame on his career. In a rare cultural allusion, he sometimes compared his Indianapolis gang days to Fellini’s I Vitelloni. ‘That one…seemed to sum up the kind of kids we were at the time – whistling at chicks, breaking into bars, knocking off lock-up shops…a little arson.’ That kind of thing. His early childhood was the ‘baddest shit imaginable’, McQueen later told his wife.

      Then things took another turn for the worse.

      Late in 1940 Julian, apparently unable to cope, sent him back to the farm in Slater. Steve spent the next two years there. Home again became the tall prairie-grass pastures around Thomson Lane, the hulking grain storage silos and the love-seat under the old elm close to the house where Claude would sit swinging on summer nights with his new maid and future wife (less than half his age), Eva. McQueen’s room was a tiny attic under the eaves. Because of his obvious affection for his great-nephew, his tendency to josh him, and the enjoyment he took from his company as time went СКАЧАТЬ