California had opened Steve’s eyes, but it hadn’t made him much money. He wound his way back to New York at Christmas. Between filming, guesting on The Walter Winchell Show and starring in a Vegas revue, Neile was now among the most prolific and commercially hot women on the stage. Creativity like that is usually part discipline and part indiscipline. Hers was all discipline. Steve constantly demanded Neile’s attention, particularly now that he – the ‘guy who [couldn’t] get arrested’, as he put it on honeymoon – paled, professionally, next to her. The cycle that emerged was explosive. One night, rushing to the theatre, she served him up a quickie TV dinner. McQueen said nothing, merely acted. In a single swoop, turkey bits, reconstituted peas, diced carrots, instant mash and the plastic sauce cup splattered the far wall. Frozen shit. According to their next-door neighbour, it was a 1950s role-reversal, the man ‘always flopping around the apartment’ while the woman, saintly in just about every account, ‘did everything, everywhere, all the time’. More to the point, Neile, though ‘ambitious and hyperactive – a mini Audrey Hepburn’, was also fanatically loyal to her husband’s cause. She introduced him, for instance, to Hilly Elkins and her agents at William Morris. Between them, they got him a role in a TV drama called The Defenders, opposite Bill Shatner of later Star Trek fame. Steve used to read for the part, alone or with his wife, in that cramped flat with the strong reek of damp and Lucky Strike cigarettes, honing his gift to affect any identity at the drop of a hat – to become, in a split second, according to the demands of his public, a hick, a thug, a greaser, a romantic hero, while remaining at bottom a world-weary child. As they walked around a New York which has since disappeared – open drains that stank, and horsemeat burgers he devoured as if they were famine relief – she encouraged him to see everyday life as a form of rehearsal. Steve’s mind would latch mathematically onto the number of steps he took between lights, or the exact beat of each foot, and then how he could fit his stage lines to the rhythm. It was Neile who gave him the great advice to show more of his ‘wonderful smile’ and childlike wit on screen. She told him frankly that he’d ‘stunk – done a bad Brando’ in Somebody Up There Likes Me. Neile’s support helped him sidestep many of the struggling actor’s other occupational hazards. Steve had always hated having to wash dishes or do anything too low to make ends meet. Nowadays he no longer had to. In the first year of their marriage McQueen and his wife earned $4000 and $50,000 respectively, which they pooled evenly.
Then he began to catch up.
If Somebody’s, Fidel had to a large extent been an imaginative manipulation of Steve’s own life, the killer role in The Defenders was almost pure invention. ‘McQueen was brilliant,’ says Hilly Elkins. ‘Everyone knew the material was lame – there was a certain amount of shtick involved – but looking at Steve’s face, seething with passion, even the most gnarled cynic melted. What struck me most were those eyes. God, but he had presence.’ The other thing McQueen had was a voice. Perfect pitch. Diction: dramatically improved. Gone for ever was Johnny Pope’s castrato croak, replaced by a rich, full-toned instrument which Steve lowered pointedly when he was most threatening, and raised when irony called. After that broadcast of 4 March 1957 the CBS switchboard took dozens of calls from fans praising his performance.
It was the last year of Steve’s long education. While Neile signed on for a revue in Vegas he took another job for CBS and severed his final ties with the Actors Studio. From now on, the ‘mad Hungarian’ Pete Witt, still clinging doggedly to his protégé, Elkins and the William Morris agency, suddenly all dancing crisply executed gavottes around their ‘kid’, would work together day and night to ‘break’ him. Three more television spots quickly followed. McQueen would later blame ‘a lot of [his] early marital shit’ on the fact that he awoke each day ‘knowing that either the wife or I would be out grooving away’ on location. On many of those days Steve would have to go for an audition, shoot a test or do a reading. In retrospect it was astonishing that he could combine such stress with a relentlessly full social life. Somehow, he always found time for play. When not shuttling between coasts, he was still busy around the bars and fleshpots of Greenwich Village. Once Neile was gone Esteban quickly became Desperado again, haunting the back room at Louie’s, where women in tight skirts loitered round the pool table. Commitment was fine, he said. He’d never abuse it. It was just hussies he wanted, the little sluts.
One night Steve showed up at Louie’s on his BSA, brandishing the bullwhip. By his own account, he drank ‘about a vat’ of Old Milwaukee. Much later on, some sort of ruckus broke out with another actor, a young Disney star who, in his own wry homage, carried a white rodent named Mickey in his breast pocket. There was a brief fraternal punch-up over the green baize, the pet mouse carefully avoided. Then Steve announced he was buying everyone a drink, to keep him company while ‘the old lady’ was out of town. Two women, encouraged, followed him up to the bar. Discouraged, one of them called him a shit. Towards dawn the other one accompanied Steve to 55th Street.
Many of those TV spots, not least the one called Four Hours in White, were tours de force, as McQueen first found and then glossed what Emily Hurt calls his ‘smiley-tough combination’. In that particular soap he appeared as cool and detached as a Strand cigarette advertisement. Even in the grainy, low-budget production values of early television, men like Elkins recognised a remarkable face and presence that could, with a year or two’s more work, trump even a Bogie or Walter Brennan. Thanks to Elkins, McQueen’s seismic break would follow in the summer of 1958. Seven years to the month after he first applied to stage school, he finally had a hit. From then on McQueen was a seller’s market for twenty-two years, the terms increasingly in his favour, right through to the end.
Professionally as well as sexually speaking, Steve was often told he was a shit in those years, and he didn’t disagree. Even Bogart, as McQueen was always reminding people, had had to claw his way to the top. As he also never tired of saying around Louie’s, ‘When I believe in something I fight like hell for it…All the nice guys are in the unemployment line.’ Even – or perhaps especially – at this first rip of his career, Steve was continually pushing for more ‘face time’ and wasn’t above throwing a fit, or walking off, if denied. He was a virtuoso self-promoter. Sometimes it worked, as when he told a TV director, ‘You’re photographing me, not some fucking rocks,’ and then had him swap a lavish, colour supplement shot of Monument Valley for extra close-ups of himself. Sometimes it didn’t. A friend remembers a scene in 1959 when the producer of McQueen’s series tore a strip off him for ‘bullying’ some of the crew.
Puzzled, Steve asked what he meant.
The suit replied that he meant McQueen was being a shit, that’s what.
Unbelieving, Steve replied that he only wanted what was best for the show, and besides, ‘I don’t need your stinking $750 a week – I’ve got bread in the bank.’
The mogul calmly pressed the button on his office speaker and said, ‘Find out how much money McQueen has in the bank.’ Five minutes later the machine spoke back: ‘Two hundred dollars.’