They did talk. Men like Janes saw how ‘Steve was fixated on the part. He wanted to make it unusual, and also to [break into] films…So he’d get furious…he was so focused on what he was doing,’ crashing back and forth between set and trailer, a brute even by Hollywood TV standards. To many who watched him work, McQueen – with his tendency to kill a weak scene with a curt Shit – still did a fair impression of a ‘royal pain in the ass’, however apposite and penetrating his remarks. According to Nick Payne, ‘he was combative rather than conciliatory,’ but then contradictorily would take the entire Wanted crew and their wives out to dinner. Another colleague remembers that ‘McQueen usually arrived on set looking like thunder.’ But this soon broke and followed a familiar pattern. ‘He’d be a turd and the director would snap,’ he says. ‘Then they’d make up.’
Steve’s arrival on his motorbike for the day’s shoot, at least early on, was the signal for muted groans, the respect accorded an admittedly gifted but temperamental child. The first cameraman on Wanted claimed he could tell his boss’s mood by the clothes he showed up in. All-black leathers evidenced a storm – trouble ahead. A denim rig with a loud shirt was the sign of good humour – a day when he was approachable and nearly an entire episode could be shot. A neutral outfit with dark glasses signalled the unpredictable. This last look was the most common.
Despite or because of the tension, Wanted soon began to improve. As a rule, the scripts had no pretensions to subtlety. In a typical plot Randall would chase and get his man (first act), be foiled (second act), then resolve the crisis in a mild twist (third act). Justice was done, loose ends tied up, and there was never a dull moment, a scene that unfolded merely for its own sake. But within a dozen episodes, and thanks largely to McQueen, Wanted was breaking new ground. Then, it had been a formulaic channelling of John Wayne. Now, it toyed with the familiar genre of half-hour Westerns while skilfully distancing itself from almost all cliché. Daringly, Steve played the role with an ethical centre closer to Bogie’s in High Sierra. But he went vastly further than that onto what had hitherto been the stage’s traditional turf: his hero wasn’t a shoot-’em-up hard man with no time for metaphysical asides, but instead the critical study of a morally aware adult willing to do anything reasonable, but no more, to get his bounty back to town. Once or twice Randall even let his man go.
Sympathetic, low-key, physically active; there was both charity and cruelty in this radical hybrid of McQueen’s.
Wanted barely troubled the Nielsen ratings for its first six months. But by late March 1959 it had moved into the charmed circle of the Top Ten, with a 30.6 share – 15 million viewers. Everything now went overboard. Week after week, Steve’s picture appeared in the trade press and the Hollywood fanzines, some thirty hits in all. As well as Foster’s ‘awareness campaign’, there were hand-outs, potted biographies, glossies and souvenirs, all coupled with a strategic year-long blitz by CBS that would lead to stories in Variety and Photoplay. People who would never go near Broadway now knew the name and, above all, the face of Steve McQueen.
The camera loved him. To Four Star and the network he was blue chip – even in black and white, a glossy shot of him, tanned, trim and hardy, with a thatch of fair hair, big eyes and a quizzical grin was enough to bring the sponsors running. Not that Steve just stood in front of the lens and allowed himself to be photographed. He had certain tricks and impenetrable mannerisms like the ‘squinty, butch look’ (at least partly a response to deafness) and the lopsided, crinkly smile; but the forging of a direct personal link to the audience, a vector of just-you-and-me was something they didn’t, and couldn’t, teach him at stage school. One obvious form of it was that McQueen always looked another actor dead in the eye when he spoke or, more typically, listened. It was the instant way of establishing that he was missing nothing, and that he knew what to do about it. Steve was never an all-out action hero in the sense of a Stallone or Schwarzenegger. At the same time he was a man who gave the impression, rightly or wrongly, that he would stop at nothing. If he decided to kill you, he’d kill you; if he thought it sufficient to walk away, he would. What’s more, he patently had a wry, deep awareness of the inherent failings of human nature; the ultimate slipperiness of all relationships. Steve’s internal gyroscope – his ‘bullshit detector’ – never stopped turning. On screen, as in life, precious little got by him. Wayne Rogers, who guested with McQueen on Wanted, particularly remembers his ‘taciturn, Gary Cooper quality that made one feel he was always thinking a lot more than he was saying’. Nick Payne also cites the ‘less-is-more vibe’ that made McQueen the sharply prejudiced, brilliant observer he was. ‘It’s the obvious analogy of the killer iceberg – most of him was submerged.’ Even in those prehistoric days Steve was proving his key theory that what the actor omitted was as vital as what he did. Neile, for her part, remembers his heroes as four men – Cooper, Bogart, Cagney and Walter Brennan – not exactly known for their hamming.
To some people in 1959, McQueen wasn’t so much an actor who knew how to cope as a man consumed with violence. The controversy simmered throughout the series’ first season, at which point it boiled into a crisis. According to a Variety report published in mid-run, Wanted was a ‘brutal, hard-boiled actioner [some] feel single-handedly responsible for the big business pickup in the sale of pistols and shotguns’. The complaint duly made its way to the FBI, who opened a file on both show and star that 12 November. Meanwhile, The Great St Louis Bank Robbery was finally released to an indifferent audience and critics who also used it as a weapon to beat the man who seemed to be ‘blasting at the rest of the world…a loner…obviously the hard type’. While partisan, the description reflected much of what Steve’s closest colleagues felt as well.
At the same time, money was nudging McQueen out of his dark haze. The couple moved upmarket in 1959, buying their first home together in Laurel Canyon’s Skyline Drive, a semi-private street hidden by thick ivy and bougainvillaea. A sign read ‘Patrolled by Armed Security’. Number 8842 with its high window and skylight was, however, fully visible from the road. Standing on a neatly manicured plot landscaped with a trellis and bushes, the back of the house enjoyed a view over Hollywood. Pharaohs like Marlon Brando lived nearby on Mulholland Drive. Steve liked to gun his cars up and down the steep access road, duly collecting more tickets; after he appeared in Long Beach District traffic court that spring, Neile became his designated driver for several months. When not actually working or on the trail, McQueen spent whole days at the Union 76 station on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Ventura, where he oscillated between being a regular guy – talking shop with the mechanics – and that old ‘royal pain in the ass’. He wanted his Porsche hand-waxed for free whenever he bought gas, he announced once. The help scoffed at this. No, it would be good PR for them, Steve insisted, thereby demonstrating the yawning gulf between Hollywood and real life. He also loved to browse at the nearby flea market, where he’s fondly remembered for once having ‘chiselled the price of a Johnny Mathis LP from fifty cents down to something like a dime’.
It