McQueen made it big that year, his thirtieth, presiding over the birth of modern cool. Before there was Clint Eastwood or Jack Nicholson or Robert De Niro or Bruce Willis, before Sean Connery first suited up as Bond or Gene Hackman perfected his common touch in The French Connection, Steve cast his eye over the house and determined that both men and women would go for a ‘type’: someone who, if he got any more virile, could have joined the World Sumo Federation, yet who also had a heart. One half of the audience saw the icy surface and thought they could melt it. The other half merely applauded. As the critic Barry Norman says, ‘It was a clever unisex appeal. Males wanted to be him – the females wanted to bed him, which a fair number duly did.’ The character ‘Steve McQueen’ was a definite artefact of the mass market.
McQueen was up for three films that year, Ocean’s Eleven, Pocketful of Miracles and Breakfast at Tiffany’s, all of which he walked on or vetoed. His Wanted contract allowed him only the vague option to take outside work at ‘mutually convenient times’ for Four Star and CBS. Then Steve heard that John Sturges was applying the model of a Josh Randall type to the big screen in a version of Akira Kurosawa’s film The Seven Samurai. Sturges’s model was Westernised, starring seven gunslingers hired by a Mexican border town to halt periodic forays on the pueblo by bandits. By the time McQueen first got wind of it, the project already had a long and chequered history. The producer Walter Mirisch had been developing the story with his old friend Yul Brynner for six years when, between takes on The Guns of Navarone, Anthony Quinn filed suit alleging that he, not they, owned the rights to the 1954 screenplay. Mirisch and Brynner then had their own falling out about money. On several occasions the Mexican government came close to torpedoing the whole project on the grounds that ‘bad things’, such as torture and buggery, were done in Sturges’s original adaptation. Clearly, The Magnificent Seven wasn’t destined to be a standard oater. McQueen saw his character Vin as more sombre and internal than Josh Randall, at least as envisaged by Four Star. He quickly signed up.
Four Star acknowledged the news, then hit Steve with a hammer-blow. They refused to release him from his Wanted shooting schedule. Dick Powell waved away the very idea that a successful movie star could impress himself on the series and the ratings. It seemed as though McQueen’s first real shot at the ‘brass ring’ would be lost. Before he had time to get the snarl off his face, he was already doing the mental arithmetic. He was a few weeks shy of thirty, the age by which he’d promised to ‘get some sugar out of the business’, and he was stuck there, in The Factory, atop Ringo and greased up like Tom Mix; playing cowboy ‘for fucking seven-fifty a week’ when Candyland lay just over the horizon; wondering whether he should, after all, book three tickets for Australia. ‘For me and my ol’ lady and my kid,’ he told David Niven. ‘I’m tired of the whole scam.’
‘He really meant it,’ says Hilly Elkins. Elkins appealed to Niven and Powell, who referred him back to Four Star’s manager Tom McDermott. The two men had known each other for years in New York. ‘I met with McDermott and told him, “Steve has a real opportunity and it’ll bring only good PR to the series. Give him a couple of weeks’ leeway.”’ That was cut off with an angry chop of McDermott’s hand. He reddened, glared at Elkins and delivered the blow.
‘Fuck you. McQueen’s paid for.’
As Elkins caught his breath, McDermott rushed on, trying to convince himself as much as Elkins that ‘We own McQueen. We made him and we can break him.’ A long pause greeted this remark, broken by Elkins saying, ‘Tom, you may want to think it over. I hate to hear you say that, because Steve’s so emotionally set on the film. You don’t want an unhappy actor.’
‘What in the name of fucking shit does that mean?’
Elkins groaned.
‘Be reasonable, Tom. All I said was, You don’t want McQueen unhappy.’
‘Well, fuck you.’
Then, according to Elkins, ‘McDermott went completely out of control, prodding his fingers towards my face, yelling, “Don’t try those fucking Mafia tactics with me,” and “I’ll take you and your client out and kick both your asses.” He told me to put my coat on and leave. As an afterthought, I asked him if he really proposed to kick Steve McQueen’s ass. And that was the end of the interview.’
Elkins drove back to his office, picked up the phone to McQueen, who happened to be visiting Boston with Neile, and told him, ‘Have an accident.’
‘Steve, being Steve, promptly rammed his rental car into the side of a bank, narrowly missing a cop on the way. It made the press. McQueen – who was completely unhurt – came back to LA in a neck brace, and I dutifully told Four Star that their golden boy was laid up and unable to work. Next thing, McDermott was back on the line screaming, “I know this is a fake, motherfucker, but you’ve got your film.”’ Whatever McDermott thought, Elkins was playing tough, so tough that he renegotiated Steve’s contract. He had Four Star double his salary as well as his stock in the company. After the yelling had died down, he then rang the Mirisch brothers and upped McQueen’s fee for The Magnificent Seven. ‘I told ’em, “This is a guy who’s going to be huge and I’ll let you have an eighteen-month option on him.” They went for it. Steve did the film and the rest is history.’
Shooting began early that spring in and around Cuernavaca, fifty miles outside Mexico City. McQueen headed south, Harry Mirisch recalled, ‘like a bat out of hell bound for glory’. He arrived at the Hotel Jacaranda alone on a Monday evening, his wife remaining behind to nurse Terry and hear more of McDermott’s convulsions. By Tuesday morning he was in bed with one of the Indian extras. McQueen loved Mexico: after his honeymoon there, he’d often driven back and he once offhandedly spoke of settling down to ‘live, die and be buried’ there. In Cuernavaca the streets were lined with strolling mariachi players and locals eager to entertain the famous star.
At the same time, McQueen was preparing for what he rightly knew could be his breakthrough, constantly lobbying Sturges for more ‘juice’. He had exactly seven lines, but they, too, were magnificent, including ‘Never rode shotgun on a hearse before,’ and ‘We deal in lead, friend.’ Steve’s tantrums on location were both logical and unnervingly dislocated. A full litany followed on his character, Vin, written, he complained, as ‘a kind of ass-wipe to Yul’. But McQueen was shrewd enough to play on Sturges’s vanity, and the director soon became his knowing patsy. With Brynner partly footing the bill, The Magnificent Seven, Sturges promised, would ‘give Steve the camera’.
McQueen’s relentless preoccupation with McQueen took various forms on set. While others cheerfully improvised, Steve took the attitude that the stage was a laboratory for precisely calibrating each setup. He spent hours correcting and editing his own lines in a maze of inserts, arrows, zigzags and fussy, infinitesimal revisions. That was for starters. McQueen liked every shot to be a completely rehearsed and blocked routine where each step and nuance was perfected down to the last detail. Eli Wallach, playing the heavy, remembers pulling his pistol on McQueen during a run-through. ‘Hold it exactly at that angle, not an inch left or right in the take,’ Steve told him.
‘But it’s an action sequence.’
‘Try your best.’
Onstage, McQueen was the most fiercely competitive of an overadrenalised cast, constantly ‘catching flies’, as Sturges put it, waving his white hat or rattling his bullet-casings