McQueen’s greatest skill was his ability to radiate. Picking up women, many of them as broke as he was, he switched on what Yanni calls ‘several million volts of synthetic charm’, and Steve himself termed his ‘shaggy-dog look’ when sponging money. It was rarely refused. But McQueen always went further than the mere touch. He believed that he had to shore up people’s confidence as well as trawl their purses. Years later one of his overnight guests recalled how she had hesitated when Steve asked her to take classes at the Playhouse in addition to her work as a secretary. Seeing her pause, he ‘half closed those eyes of his’ and asked: ‘Did you know any more about typing or filing when you started that?’
She shook her head, and he smiled. ‘You picked it up, didn’t you? Well, you can pick this up too.’ Then he leant over, kissed her, and said simply, ‘I’m with you.’
She enrolled at the Playhouse, ‘and because Steve was there I had the time of my life. My God! What an operator, and what a beautiful man.’
Largely thanks to the missionary work of Brando and Montgomery Clift, by 1951 a mainstream acting generation was still – just – running the show. A Method-acting generation was coming up behind, fast. Those who belonged to the new, so-called ‘torn shirt’ school, or were linked with some other group opposed to established convention in the arts, were already the critics’ darlings. Meisner’s class drew in a small but distinguished house. Talent scouts and even a few directors would come to the Playhouse’s annual revue, a combined graduation and gala night. This new cult of anti-hero duly attracted an agent named Peter Witt to the Christmas production of Truckline Cafe. Witt ‘loved the kid in the sailor suit’, whose near-actionable Brando parody both cribbed and surpassed the original. Peers like Rydell also began to talk up the novice who upstaged nearly every other actor in the intensity department. To them McQueen had an ‘air of wild rage’, even if, to others, it was really more Method with an animal glaze. Voice, movement, technique. Steve quickly made a whole system out of his childhood. He did anger so convincingly that, for the first but not last time in his career, he made people’s flesh creep. McQueen had few duties in handling such a slight role on such a small stage, chief of which was to look animated, and to make the other actors shine. He proved incapable of doing either, but otherwise used the play well. ‘Steve was spellbinding,’ says Yanni.
Meisner saw quite another thing in McQueen:
‘Professionalism, always the professionalism. Dog tired, he’d put his feet in a bucket of ice water to jerk himself awake while he learnt lines.’ There were plays and scripts to be read. Steve threw himself into it all with an energy born of ambition. He’d set out to become, he announced, a great American actor.
His commercial debut followed that spring of 1952, in a Jewish repertory production on Second Avenue. The very first words McQueen uttered on stage, in Yiddish, were direly prophetic: ‘Nothing will help.’ After the fourth night he was fired.
That same season on 25 May 1952, Steve transferred to the Hagen-Berghof drama school. He celebrated by buying his first racing bike, a used K-model Harley. On that note, and clutching a few wadded dollars, he again took off for Miami while classes were out for the spring. One moment that should have lived but hasn’t, not least because in an increasingly photogenic career no one yet had a camera on him, was Steve tearing up Highway 1, bare-chested and laughing, under the swaying royal palms. Once on the beach, he soon found the saloon that would become his home from home during the New York ‘shit season’, a dark cave with a bar where the owner remembers McQueen for his ‘bleached hair, bronzed body and faintly bad smell’. He ate with a burger in one hand and a slab of pie in the other, gulping down his beer at breakneck speed. Much the same intensity characterised his policy on women. Steve was rarely without an aspiring model or college co-ed in tow, and within a week he enjoyed the local handle, before it was ever a retail cliché, of ‘Big Mac’.
McQueen often went diving in Florida with an old marine buddy named Red. Early in June, about three miles out in Biscayne Bay, Steve spotted a small shark which, characteristically, he chased to the ocean floor. After failing to bring it up on a gaff so that Red could net it, McQueen surfaced dangerously fast and punctured his already bad left eardrum. That evening the two men returned to Miami to get a doctor to test Steve’s hearing. It was further seriously damaged, and even though he laughed it off himself, his voice coach in New York was furious with McQueen for his carelessness.
Soon after getting home he was cast in no fewer than three provincial shows. Though none rang bells in the far universe, McQueen made both a small name and a thin living for himself on the road. During the last, Time Out for Ginger, he was able to put down $450 for a red MG roadster.* Steve needed a replacement because he had just wrecked his previous car, a hearse, racing it zigzag across Columbus Circle, actually flipping it upside down, the long black roof shedding sparks at the point of impact, McQueen himself walking away. That incident cost him financially, but it did wonders for his reputation. Thanks in part to his poker money, Steve was flush enough to give up non-theatrical work and now focus full-time on acting. He did a verbal deal for Witt to represent him. As McQueen said, it was ‘grooving together’. He’d made ‘people talk’ about him. It was all, at least locally, paying off. Bloody-mindedly, he’d pay Julian back in a way that would brook no more ‘shit’ or sarcasm.
He would become a legend.
With at least a first whiff of success Steve worked, if possible, even harder. ‘Busting my ass to read,’ he said, let alone memorise the texts. Line by dismal line—a triumph of will over semi-literacy. But he allowed himself to unwind, too. Behind his volcanic rage he was capable of something approaching real charm. The perfectly timed smile, the easy, apt jokes and above all the brilliant send-ups, not least of himself, all testify to the fact that Big Mac was tempered by his sweeter kid brother, Little Steve.
The two rubbed along together during those next five years of graft. Fame, for McQueen, wouldn’t suddenly come calling after one audition; he had to ring the bell, pound on the door and finally smash on through. Witt, though aquiver for new talent, never quite turned creative vision into commercial triumph. Until 1958 nothing could avail against that hard truth. That Steve did, in the end, make it was due, in roughly equal part, to talent, luck and others’ unshakeable faith in him; that and an underlying self-confidence that he wasn’t only in the right place, but there at the right time. ‘I found a little kindness,’ as he later said. ‘A joint where people talked out their problems instead of punching you.’
There wasn’t a city in the world where an alert twenty-two-year-old could have had a better day-to-day sense of possibility than New York in the early 1950s. The place was awash with actors, especially those who trod in Brando’s huge, ‘slabby’ (as McQueen put it) shadow. The rehearsal group known as the Actors Studio had opened in 1947 in a semi-converted church, apt digs for what now became, under Lee Strasberg, a bully-pulpit for teaching Stanislavski’s Method. It was a wide-open enterprise still, more than living up to its fame. After A Streetcar Named Desire threw off the yoke of what a star was meant to look and sound like, diners like Louie’s and the dives around Sheridan Square pulsed with men in biker gear who drank and fought and then slouched their way to the