Steve McQueen

by Greg Laurie

  I looked over at my mother, passed out drunk on the sofa. I can still see it. That was the reality I knew. But even as young as I was, I remember consciously thinking, This is not how it’s supposed to be. I knew. It was tragic.

  My own childhood was full of empty promises and immense disappointments. Like many kids with a vivid imagination who spend too much time alone, I sought escape from the dreary realities by drawing and pulling pranks, trying to please others and make them laugh.

  I remember one Christmas night when I was just a tyke, sitting on the floor in my pajamas. The lights on the artificial tree blinked on and off, and the tinsel shimmered when a breeze blew through the open window. I looked over at my mother, passed out drunk on the sofa. I can still see it. That was the reality I knew. But even as young as I was, I remember consciously thinking, This is not how it’s supposed to be. I knew. It was tragic.

  My mom often left me alone when she went out. I’d fall asleep for a while but then wake up and lay there, waiting for her to come back—hoping when she did it would be different than the last time she went out. But it never was. Mom rarely came home alone or even with the same man. I’d hear them laughing in the living room and pouring drinks. Then after a while came the yelling and smashing of things. Sometimes a neighbor would call the police, but more often than not, my mom and whoever would wear themselves out drinking, fighting, and doing other things. I’d get up when it was quiet and find mom and her company passed out on the couch or the floor. Sometimes I’d pick up the clothes they’d discarded and try to cover over their nakedness.

  I’d bet Steve McQueen could match me, nightmare for nightmare.

  They’re indelible imprints, those memories, and when they happen, you subconsciously decide how you’ll feel about what you’re experiencing—and how you’ll interact with people for the rest of your life.

  Everything I’ve read about McQueen says he demonstrated resentful feelings toward his neglectful mother throughout her lifetime. And so he found it quite difficult to trust and open up to women, including the three he married.

  Everything I’ve read about McQueen says he demonstrated resentful feelings toward his neglectful mother throughout her lifetime. And so he found it quite difficult to trust and open up to women, including the three he married.

  All of that—the flashbacks, the philosophizing, the making of shared connections—is what’s playing through my mind as the clock rolls to 3:00 p.m. I’m on Interstate 40, approaching Flagstaff, Arizona. I’ve been on the road for almost eight hours, with only a brief pit stop in Needles, California. I’ll have about three and a half hours of daylight left and will need to drive a couple of more hours in the dark before I make it to Albuquerque, New Mexico, about 325 miles away. But I’ll need another tank of gas for the Bullitt and, for my own tank, another 2-percent latte with three shots of espresso.

  I get both at one of those megamarts that dot the interstate system, virtual communities unto themselves offering gas, food, and just about every trinket you can think of but don’t really want or need. While I’m there I pull out my laptop and catch up on emails and texts and post on social media a pic I took in Needles of my dust-covered Bullitt, with the caption “Searching for Steve McQueen.”

  Suddenly I’m feeling terribly lonely, a bit sorry for myself, and frankly also a bit jealous of those happy kids. Why couldn’t I have been like them? Why have I had such a strange life?

  Approximately four hours later, I check into a Marriott off I-40 in Albuquerque, where I head downstairs to the restaurant for a quick bite.

  While waiting for my food to arrive, I text my wife and read a little Scripture. But I can’t help it—I’m a big people watcher. I’ve read that Steve McQueen was one as well. All around me now are people enjoying a meal, like the mom, dad, and kids having so much fun together at a nearby table that I want to go sit with them. Suddenly I’m feeling terribly lonely, a bit sorry for myself, and frankly also a bit jealous of those happy kids.

  Why couldn’t I have been like them? Why have I had such a strange life?

  It’s a fruitless, frustrating, chicken-or-egg speculation. The best thing for me to do is stop and remind myself: everything that happened to me made me the person I am today. Actually, I am thankful. God does indeed work in mysterious ways. But when you don’t have committed, involved parents, the yearning never really goes away. And it doesn’t take much to set it off full blast.

  Here, for example, is one of the ways this old emptiness can still show itself. Not many things make me angry. I can shrug off personal criticism, even insults, because in the end, only what God, my family, and my congregation think of me matters. But I cannot stand it when I see someone else who’s weak or afraid or being bullied. And when it happens, I want to step up and defend them. Immediately. Forcibly. Angrily? That’s because for so many years, I was the one who was weak and afraid, desperately in need of someone to stand up for me—a guardian, what a parent is supposed to be.

  How many times in his life, I wonder, did the King of Cool feel that way? Plenty, I’ll bet. We were members of the same unhappy club, searching for the same redemption. Ultimately, we’d each find it—a bridge over that awful chasm in the miracle of God’s grace—but it was a hard way coming.

  Back in my room, I climb right into bed. Fifteen straight hours of driving tomorrow will get me close to Indianapolis. But I always have trouble falling asleep in hotels. The pillows are lousy and the walls too thin.

  I get up and open my computer. I have a program called “Ocean Sounds” that transmits the sounds of rhythmic, lapping waves and an occasional muted foghorn. It never fails to lull me to sleep.

  Tonight “Ocean Sounds.” Tomorrow, Beech Grove.

  JULIAN AND CHARLENE

  _____

  The landscape of America is diverse and beautiful, but after fifteen straight hours of staring at it through the Bullitt’s windshield, the Homewood Suites in downtown Indianapolis is a sight for sore eyes. I greet the guy at the check-in desk like a long-lost relative—my first real human interaction since Albuquerque—then find my room, where I spiral into a deep sleep without need of a maritime lullaby.

  I sleep until 7:00 a.m.—a luxury for me, as I’m usually up at five. It’s Wednesday morning. My meeting with Will Smither is in a couple of hours, and Beech Grove is just fifteen minutes from my hotel, in the heart of the capital’s Wholesale District.

  After a shower, I go downstairs and stop for a moment in the lobby. For the first time, I take in the place. The hotel started out in the late 1880s as a shoe factory. Now it features high vaulted ceilings, exposed brick, hardwood floors, and wooden beams. I’m just a five-minute walk from Monument Circle in the center of downtown, whose 284.6-foot-tall State Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument is the Hoosier State’s most recognizable landmark. The Circle has lots of restaurants, sidewalk cafes, retail shops, office buildings, and boutique hotels. It’s actually kind of cool, tailor-made for pedestrian traffic. After two days in the car, it’s a pleasure to stretch my legs in search of a proper coffeehouse for my morning pick-me-up. The aroma emanating from Hubbard & Cravens Coffee and Tea is even more alluring than a neon sign and wafts me inside.

  After two days in the car, it’s a pleasure to stretch my legs in search of a proper coffeehouse for my morning pick-me-up.

  Because I’m meeting Will Smither for an eleven o’clock lunch, a fresh blueberry muffin should tide me over. When I’m done with that, as well as my coffee and some work on the laptop, it’s back to the hotel to pack up and check out. Weather report: partly cloudy, forty-seven degrees—a nice fall day to a Hoosier but downright wintry to a Californian. I should’ve brought a warmer jacket.

  The Bullitt takes longer to warm up, too, and as I let it idle, I program the GPS for 106 Main Street in Beech Grove, site of the Ball Park Pizza and Eatery II. Will has picked this place for us to get together.

  On the basis of the name alone, I heartily approve. I’ve never been into fancy food, pr
eferring pizza, burritos, hamburgers, and all the other tasty, greasy, artery-clogging chow my doctor warns me to stay away from. I love the very Midwestern name for a restaurant that combines two great American ideals, baseball and pizza. Especially pizza.

  According to the GPS, the drive there ought to take me just eleven minutes. That’s nothing compared to what I’ve done in the past two days.

  Beech Grove’s municipal website proudly proclaims it’s considered an “excluded city” in Marion County. It was a rural part of Indianapolis at the turn of the twentieth century, ostensibly named for the abundance of beech trees in the area. But mostly it’s named for the Beech Grove Shops, a hundred-acre railroad repair facility constructed in the early 1900s by the Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis railroads, also known as the “Big Four.” For years the Shops were the biggest employer in town and the largest “locomotive hospital” in the world. That’s not the case anymore, as it employs only a fraction of the people it did at its peak in the mid-1940s.

  At the time of Steve McQueen’s birth there in 1930, the population of Beech Grove was 3,552.

  At the time of Steve McQueen’s birth there in 1930, the population of Beech Grove was 3,552. After World War II and the start of the baby boom era, the number of inhabitants greatly expanded.

  Today there are approximately fourteen thousand residents. Indianapolis completely surrounds Beech Grove, but it is separate and autonomous, with its own mayor, police and fire departments, and school system.

  _____

  My impression driving into town is that it’s a picturesque tableau of Middle America, with an abundance of lush lawns, trees, churches, schools, and homes, arranged in attractive culde-sacs. A good place, it seems to me, to raise a family. Will Smither seems to agree.

  “I have to laugh,” he says, “when I read in all the McQueen biographies and periodicals that Beech Grove is a grimy, blue-collar, industrial, hard-nosed, two-fisted drinking town. It’s more like Mayberry RFD.”

  Will is in his midforties, I’d guess, medium build, with a touch of gray in his brown hair and a ready smile. So much for the stereotype of the dour librarian. At the very least I was expecting a tweed jacket with suede elbow patches, a bow tie, and little round glasses. Instead he’s wearing a casual button-down shirt, gray jeans, and tennis shoes.

  Eat your heart out, Babe Ruth. I know I’ll pay for this later, when I am trying to get to sleep, having graduated from acid rock to acid reflux. But it will be worth it—I hope.

  I like him even more when he hands me a menu as soon as we sit down in the Ball Park Pizza and Eatery and urges me to “swing for the fences.” He doesn’t need to twist my arm. I dig this place because it is so “old school” but in a good way. I order cheese sticks for an appetizer, spaghetti and meatballs, garlic bread, and the house specialty, the “Home Run,” a sixteen-inch pizza loaded with cheese, sausage, pepperoni, mushrooms, green peppers, and black olives. Whew! I purposely overextend myself so I can “sample” several items. Eat your heart out, Babe Ruth. I know I’ll pay for this later, when I am trying to get to sleep, having graduated from acid rock to acid reflux. But it will be worth it—I hope.

  Settling into conversation, I ask Will what sparked his interest in Steve McQueen. He says he grew up in Beech Grove and was actually surprised to hear McQueen had been born there. The city had never proclaimed the actor a native son, as most cities eagerly do with a famous citizen, making Will wonder whether it were actually true. He went to the local library and found a single McQueen biography on the shelf, which in the very first paragraph confirmed Beech Grove as the actor’s birthplace.

  “Some biographies state that he was born in ‘Beech Grove Hospital,’ but a hospital by that name has never existed in the city,” Will tells me. “The hospital that did exist then was St. Francis Hospital, which is thirteen blocks from here.”

  McQueen’s official Marion County birth certificate was recently discovered, and it named St. Francis as the hospital that delivered him. The document also names Julia Ann Crawford and William McQueen as Steve’s parents. His mother, known to family and friends as “Julian,” was a menial laborer, says Will, and it’s likely she was a charity case when she gave birth to Steve at St. Francis.

  “Alcoholic teenage runaway” is the thumbnail description of Julian that comes standard in many McQueen biographies and documentaries. Will says the alcoholic part is true but not that she was a runaway.

  “Alcoholic teenage runaway” is the thumbnail description of Julian that comes standard in many McQueen biographies and documentaries. Will says the alcoholic part is true but not that she was a runaway.

  His research in Indianapolis directories have turned up that from 1927 to 1929, Julian—then in her late teens— lived with her parents, Lillian and Victor Crawford, at 336 S. Flemming Street. The 1930–34 telephone directories list the Crawfords (including Julian) at 1311 N. Drexel Avenue. The birth certificate also lists William McQueen at the same address.

  According to the 1930 US Federal Census, Terrence Steven McQueen, born on March 24, 1930, lived with his mother and his maternal grandparents at the Drexel Avenue address.

  Therefore, contrary to previously published surmises, Steve was not born in Beech Grove by mere happenstance. The Crawfords’ home in the Indianapolis suburb of Little Flower was only a fifteen-minute drive from Beech Grove and St. Francis Hospital.

  Will doesn’t know for sure how and when Julian met William McQueen, but he does know that at the time William was listed as a private in the US Marines and had been mustered in 1929. His best guess is that they crossed paths in one of the speakeasies that flourished in Indianapolis (and most everywhere else) as the raucous decade of the Roaring Twenties came to a close, in spite of the federal prohibition against selling booze. The “speaks” were magnets for young people who felt Prohibition was imposed on them and didn’t necessarily feel the rules applied.

  The more I hear, the more similarities I feel between Steve McQueen’s childhood and my own.

  Julian’s mother, Lillian Thomson, was born in January 1879 in Missouri, and had two brothers, Early and Claude, and a sister, Ruth. The Thomsons came to America from Scotland and had a 320-acre farm on the outskirts of Slater, Missouri, about a hundred miles east of Kansas City.

  Refined, artistic, and well-read, Lillian spoke with excellent diction and was very devout in her faith, writing religious-based poetry in her spare time. At the other end of the spectrum was her gruff, profane brother Claude, who kept a homemade distillery in the barn and was an avid skirt-chaser even after he married and fathered a child. Claude followed no particular ideology or faith, but when he was sober and straight, he worked hard on the farm.

  Lillian hoped to inherit a section of the land upon the death of her father, John William, in 1916, but Claude effectively blew his nose with the old man’s will and claimed everything for himself.

  Lillian married Victor Lee Crawford, a traveling salesman a dozen years her senior, and they moved to St. Louis, where she took a job as a secretary. She was thirty-one to his forty-three when Julia Ann was born on April 10, 1910, in Missouri.

  As an only child, blonde-haired, blue-eyed Julian led the life of a little princess. Lillian made her fine dresses, sent her to private schools, and so doted on her every whim that Julian became spoiled and headstrong. Her parents were rigid Catholics who raised Julian to be the same, but by her late teens the attractive young woman was a rebellious handful and a familiar face at watering holes in and around Naptown.

  The more I hear, the more similarities I feel between Steve McQueen’s childhood and my own.

  Steve was sent to a boys’ home; I was sent to military school.

  Steve was effectively raised by his grandparents; so was I.

  Steve’s mother Julian was a beautiful blonde woman, and so was mine.

  My mother, Charlene McDaniel, was a dead ringer for Marilyn Monroe. It’s one of the reasons why she was a flat-out “man magnet.” Even as a
little boy I remember men coming up to me, asking me to introduce them to my stunning mother.

  She was from a large family of nine, raised in rural Arkansas. They went to church every Sunday morning and evening, as well as midweek Bible study. The rule was that my mother and her siblings were all expected to attend. They also had missionaries and visitors over at the house nearly every night for one of my grandmother’s amazing home-cooked meals that you’d never wanted to miss: fried chicken, black-eyed peas, collard greens, and the best homemade biscuits you’ve ever tasted.

  Yet my mom couldn’t get out of that house fast enough. She bucked at the rules imposed on her by her parents (my grandparents), Charles and Stella McDaniel, rules that included never wearing pants, for example, which they thought to be not very “ladylike.”

  My Aunt Willie—my mother’s sister—once told me a story about her. She went out one Sunday in the snow with some kids our parents didn’t approve of. They didn’t return until well after dark that night. My grandfather waited up for her, and when she finally walked through the door, he had a pair of scissors in his hand. Willie thought he was going to cut off all of my mother’s beautiful blonde hair, but he told her to go into her bedroom, take off her slacks, and bring them to him. He stood by the fireplace, and when she returned downstairs, he took the slacks and cut them into small pieces then threw them into the fireplace. Willie said she was hiding in the dining room as this scene played out. I’m sure it was one of many tipping points that eventually pushed my mother out the door.

  I, too, understand what it was like to be the unwanted, unloved son. Like he was. And I can tell you, it stays with you for the rest of your life.

  She eloped with a young military man named Ken at the age of eighteen, with the help of Willie, who hid her suitcase under a crawl space at the church they attended. In running away from home, she was putting behind herself all the rules and things she’d learned in youth service and church. Too bad some of that discipline didn’t rub off on her.