Christopher Sandford - McQueen - The Biography

Harper Non-Fiction

A division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Entertainment 2001

Copyright © S. E. Sandford 2001

The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks

HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication

Source ISBN: 9780006532293

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2017 ISBN: 9780007381906

Version: 2017-01-13

For Robin Parish

‘The soul of the thing is the thought;

the charm of the act is the actor;

The soul of the fact is its truth, and the

NOW is its principal factor’

Eugene Fitch Ware

‘I’m a little screwed up, but I’m beautiful’

Steve McQueen

Cover Page

Title Page McQueen The Biography Christopher Sandford

Copyright Copyright Copyright Epigraph 1 The American Dream 2 War Lover 3 ‘Should I lay bathrooms, or should I perform?’ 4 Candyland 5 Solar Power 6 The King of Cool 7 Love Story 8 Abdication 9 Restoration 10 The Role of a Lifetime Keep Reading Appendix 1 Chronology Appendix 2 Filmography Appendix 3 Bibliography Author’s Note Sources and Chapter Notes Index Acknowledgements Also By Christopher Sandford About the Publisher Harper Non-Fiction A division of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.harpercollins.co.uk First published in Great Britain by HarperCollins Entertainment 2001 Copyright © S. E. Sandford 2001 The Author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks HarperCollins Publishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication Source ISBN: 9780006532293 Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2017 ISBN: 9780007381906 Version: 2017-01-13

Epigraph ‘The soul of the thing is the thought; the charm of the act is the actor; The soul of the fact is its truth, and the NOW is its principal factor’ Eugene Fitch Ware ‘I’m a little screwed up, but I’m beautiful’ Steve McQueen

1 The American Dream

2 War Lover

3 ‘Should I lay bathrooms, or should I perform?’

4 Candyland

5 Solar Power

6 The King of Cool

7 Love Story

8 Abdication

9 Restoration

10 The Role of a Lifetime

Keep Reading

Appendix 1 Chronology

Appendix 2 Filmography

Appendix 3 Bibliography

Author’s Note

Sources and Chapter Notes

Index

Acknowledgements

Also By Christopher Sandford

About the Publisher

Steve McQueen was dead. It was a strange enough ending for a life that had scaled the heights of fame and plumbed the depths of depravity, laid out in a cold bare-walled room in a Mexican clinic. On this November morning a pale, watery sun came through the barred windows, sending chopped-up light onto the narrow bed. All the grief which marked the last year of McQueen’s life seemed purged by death. His eyes which, oddly, had turned dark grey were blue once more. In his hands was a Bible, turned to McQueen’s favourite verse, ‘For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish but have everlasting life.’ A doctor and a nurse both noticed the look that came over him at the end. It was the quizzical half-grin he made his own, that frighteningly unamused smirk at once attractive and not quite welcoming. Steve McQueen was himself again.

The king of cool had died at fifty. If the cancer hadn’t done for him, then a human agent had: according to McQueen’s doctor, it is ‘certain’ that a person or persons injected him with a fatal coagulant late on 6 November 1980, his final night alive. His patient was, he says, executed as he lay drugged and immobilised in a hospital bed. But no one should feel pity for Steve McQueen. He was neither broken nor bitter. Sick as he was, the happiest chapter of his life may have been the last one, in the care of Barbara, his third wife, flying his antique planes and slipping anonymously into church. He’d been living first in an aircraft hangar and then in a ranch with a big pot-bellied stove that filled half the room. Behind the house were fields and behind the fields were mountains. Here, in Santa Paula, California reminded Steve of the Missouri heartland he’d fled as a boy but never left. Here, the circle was complete.

A few other circles had been closed, too. McQueen’s first ever appearance on the big screen was as a prowling, knife-wielding punk. For his minuscule role as Fidel in 1956’s Somebody Up There Likes Me he earned $19 a day. Twenty-four years later, The Hunter ended on a poignantly downbeat note with McQueen spark out on a hospital floor. For that picture he made $3 million, plus 15 per cent of the gross. Running as a throughline in between, film audiences met one of the most arresting personalities in American art. Not too many others could hold a candle to McQueen’s striking affirmation of individuality. Far, far from the usual Hollywood pieties, Steve spent his off-duty hours dirt-biking or squatting in the desert with Navajo Indians. As a man, few ever came close to him. As an actor, nobody did. At his worst, McQueen gave off a quietly passionate sense of love and loss, eyes reeling with meaning, which perhaps promised more than it delivered. On peak form, he gave substance to even the thinnest plot. Not since the salad days of Brando had the words ‘movie’ and ‘star’ been in such proximity. Above all, McQueen knew that performance wasn’t a matter of right and wrong but of life and death – of the material. Jim Clavell, who worked up The Great Escape , would say that ‘Steve played suffering perfectly,’ since it chimed so well with his experience.