Eli Wallach, who, ‘like the great McQueen’, trained at both the Playhouse and the Studio, believes ‘Steve already had the raw skill. But what he learnt to do [in New York] was what separates the true artist from the ham – to watch and, above all, to listen.’ In an impressively short time ‘McQueen was the best reactor of his generation.’ Peerlessly, he arrived.
A few brief years later various agents and loon-panted studio heads would fall over themselves to claim him as theirs, an accolade that, for Steve, had a lack of fascination all its own. He flattered but never fawned over his real mentor; he seems to have recognised that success was a more lasting and effective plug than obsequiousness. McQueen did what he could to notice those who had noticed him. ‘I had that gift in me,’ he said, ‘but [Strasberg] had the key to unlock it…Nobody gives you talent. You either have it or you don’t. What Lee gave me was definition.’
He did. But someone less attuned than he was to ‘being’ and more to theatrical elegance could never have kept in character, as Steve did, for a quarter of a century. And the character he kept in was both riveting and surprisingly versatile. Unlike some of the lesser lights at the Studio he was never just brazenly ‘acting’, an exclamation without a point. At worst, McQueen beamed what Meisner called his ‘exquisite innocence’. In top gear, he had the rare gift of understatement, and even wizened hacks would come to admire how his each look adapted to the scene, how subtly and lightly he angled for the shot, every line dropping like a fly on the course. The brute realism was there, too: McQueen followed Bogart and Garfield and narrowly preceded the likes of De Niro in showing what it was like to actually live a life, how to elicit respect, how to bear up under misfortune. In what seemed like a flash and was only a few months, those qualities would mark him for a star.
Plausibility was Strasberg’s business. And in Steve he had an actor who was all too blazingly real, human – and male. His love scenes, like his love life, soon became gladiatorial. According to the school’s Patricia Bosworth, McQueen and his actress girlfriend once improvised a scene in bed at the Studio. ‘They were really rolling around – we actually thought they were screwing and everybody wanted to take this girl’s place…I just kept staring at him. Finally Steve came over and said, “Do you want me to take you out?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “OK. I’ll take you out.” I hopped on his motorbike and off we went.’
His key moral notion remained that actresses ‘did it’.
McQueen, of all those who rose from the assembly line, was the most famously well slept. Here, too, versatility was the keynote of all his couplings, whether taking his women singly or in pairs, together with a lifelong fondness for the phrase ‘I’ll call you’. Some around New York thought Steve’s eclecticism even swung to his own sex. There was, for one thing, the way he looked. For an alpha male, McQueen was disturbingly epicene: like something made by a jeweller’s art, body perfectly honed, facial planes expertly turned, his china-blue eyes ornamented by long lashes. From his beauty spot up to the sandy hair he had artfully pouffed each week at a Chelsea salon, Steve was exquisite designer crumpet. His narrow head accentuated the sallowness of his skin. Like his acting, he had a wide expressive range – ‘a Botticelli angel crossed with a chimp’, in one critic’s arch review. For several years McQueen alternated his Wild One leathers with a pair of Bermuda shorts, almost a specific, around the Village, against being ‘straight’. Then there was the whole begged question of his name. More than one of his stage-school friends would blithely drop the prefix ‘Mc’, while McQueen, when once using the Studio bathroom (the one Strasberg labelled ‘Romeo’), was shocked to see his surname daubed on the wall, with the last letter twisted into an ‘r’.
Steve at times liked to play the caricature of a luvvie in class, insisting that he had the right, as well as the duty, to stretch. But outside 44th Street this tendency to see himself as both Steve the tease and McQueen the stud wasn’t necessarily a good move. As one ex-friend puts it, ‘He forgot that some folks didn’t make the distinction.’ It was no doubt this role-playing that led to the buzz that Steve was bisexual; bent. The photographer Bill Claxton, for one, speaks of being taken by McQueen on a voyage around his old New York haunts. ‘He would show me where he’d lived…places he worked as a hustler. He had some pretty wild stories.’ A persistent Studio rumour that McQueen dabbled in cross-dressing (frocks particularly) was a vile slur, but expressed a view some people had of him.
Both the book Laid Bare and a California radio DJ similarly offer, even today, any number of plausible ‘McQueer’ scenarios, if few real details. There may not be any. It is certain, though, that he idolised James Dean – whose act he shamelessly filched in The Blob – and that a friend of Dean’s, Paul Darlow, was firmly under the impression that ‘Jimmy and Steve were swishes’.
Those scenes in Dean’s room at the Iroquois Hotel didn’t create the gossip, but they did nonetheless colour it. Darlow and several other men were present one night in 1954 after a drinking binge uptown at Jerry’s Bar. ‘Like to do my hair?’ Dean asked McQueen, helpfully drawing it back from his forehead as if clearing his mind, and producing a brush. Steve sat down behind him and patiently back-combed the famous quiff, thick and shiny as a mink’s, breathing or perhaps lightly chuckling down the back of Dean’s neck. Darlow then witnessed the following:
‘Would you do mine?’ Steve asked.
‘Drop dead.’
‘Come on, JD. Don’t you dig my fur?’
‘No,’ Jimmy replied, ‘it always looks so dago to me.’
Dean treated McQueen gingerly, once inviting him backstage at a performance of The Immoralist but then dropping him. Less than eighteen months later he was dead.
For the rest of his own life an undercurrent of all McQueen’s relationships, marriages and affairs alike, was the nagging threat of homosexuality. He was legendarily touchy on the subject. According to the Londoner who first offered Steve ‘a fag’, he promptly ‘threw a fit, prodding his fingers at me and yelling, “Fuck you! I’m Steve McQueen! Kiss my ass.’” (It was his girlfriend who explained that in England they came twenty to a packet.) Six years later, in January 1968, Steve took a phone call at home in California. The anonymous party told him, ‘There’s a new book coming out that lists all the celebrities who are queer. I thought you’d like to know your name is in it.’ He hung up. According to his ex-wife, Steve became phobic – ‘possessed’ is the word she uses – from that day on, greatly accelerating his paranoia and, not incidentally, her own exit. On the set of The Getaway in 1972 McQueen was ‘seriously freaked’ at shooting a nude scene with ‘real cons who happened to be gay’, says Katy Haber, who worked on the film. And two years later, when Paul Newman broached the idea of his taking a homosexual role, McQueen told him, ‘I could never play a fag.’ It was an expression of disgust and also, so it seemed, of fear.
Mostly, though, Steve shrugged all that off. Publicly he bore most of his hangups in silence.
Back in the fifties there was something almost defiant about the flaming heterosexual whose line of active bachelorhood would fix two words on the New York stage scene, just as it had on the Florida beach. Big Mac: the serial seducer who dazzled his women with a neat mix of the goofy and the gothic. It was the end of December 1954 when several Playhouse students met in an automat off Times Square. Steve was there when they arrived. He startled one actress, Emily Hurt, by ‘jumping to his feet and rolling his eyes while sticking his tongue out, like a mad kid’. McQueen’s meal, she says, was ‘hoovered down – he ate as though he was on fire, then calmly reached over and speared the meat from my plate’. There was also beer. ‘Steve was sort of writhing around in his seat. He’d go into a slump and then suddenly toss off one-liners in a screwy way that reminded me of his acting.’ One of them was in the form of a question: ‘Why not come back for some New Year grog at my dump?’ Steve appears, from the accounts of this dinner, to have behaved like a badly neglected child, because