Steve McQueen

by Greg Laurie

  William was a private in the US Marines from 1927 to 1929. Following his discharge from active service, he returned to Indianapolis, where he met the comely Julian Crawford. Nine months later, Steve McQueen was born.

  William’s military record indicates he was booted out of the Marine Reserves in July 1930 for misconduct, and after that he lammed out for the West Coast, leaving Julian and Steve behind.

  In trying to describe it, she volunteers the observation that she and Steve share the same wanderlust in their dNA.

  Terri shows me copies of pages from the 1930–32 Los Angeles city directory showing that William lived on the famous Sunset Boulevard and managed a gas station. A year later, though, he was back with Julian and Steve in Slater in an outbuilding on Claude Thomson’s farm, where a silo stands today, then again at her parents’ house in Beech Grove, Indiana. But the reconciliation was short-lived, and in 1934, William was in San Francisco working for the Dollar Steamship Line. He joined the Merchant Marine three years later.

  Terri then pulls out a handful of pictures, a birth certificate, a telegram, and a fingerprint file, proof of William Terrence McQueen’s real existence. The photos, which have been tucked away for several decades, show physical similarities between father and son. They have the same head, ears, lips, nose. The same intense gaze. The two also shared almost identical builds as adults: William was listed as 5’ 10¼”, 160 pounds, medium build, white complexion, light brown hair, blue eyes. And indeed, they were piercing blue eyes.

  I ask Terri how she fits into all of this. She tells me William met her mother, a twenty-five-year-old waitress named Alma Doris Moody at Joe Kelly’s Restaurant in the City by the Bay. They started dating, and William ardently wooed her with poetry and moonlight canoe rides in Golden Gate Park.

  As with Julian, it’s uncertain whether William and Alma— who was called Doris—ever officially tied the knot, but they did live together. And on May 5, 1940, Terri Carol McQueen was born in Seattle, Washington. She shows me her King County birth certificate as proof, which lists William and Doris as her parents.

  Terri’s mom, she tells me, was as footloose and restless as William, and a year after she was born, Doris left her with her grandmother and moved back to San Francisco. When Terri was seven, Doris married someone else. It didn’t make for a happy childhood.

  In trying to describe it, she volunteers the observation that she and Steve share the same wanderlust in their DNA. “I was never a bad child—I had a lot of freedom growing up,” Terri says. “I’d be out on my bicycle with my dog roaming everywhere. If I wasn’t home when my mother got home from work, or if I didn’t make my bed, she would always threaten with sending me to reform school. I never understood where that came from until a few years ago,” referring to Steve being sent to Boys Republic in the 1940s, a reform school in Chino, California. “My mom thought, Okay, that’s what you do with kids that won’t behave—you send them to reform school. She knew Steve had been sent there, so . . . .

  “She was not the nurturing mother kind at all. Both she and Steve’s mother never should have had children.”

  Doris didn’t want Terri to have any contact with her meandering father, so when William sent gifts, letters, and telegrams from whatever port of call he was in, Doris threw them away unopened.

  So, like her half brother, Terri never knew her dad. It’s apparent this still grieves her. “Every little girl wants to know her daddy, and I’ve always carried that with me,” she says.

  I am glad that, thin though it is, a thread of spirituality does indeed run in McQueen’s family, in the voice of his half sister.

  William eventually ended up back in Southern California. The 1951 Long Beach directory lists him as an “aircraft salesman.” His last years were wracked by illness exacerbated by alcoholism, and William McQueen died on November 11, 1958. Official cause of death: cirrhosis of the liver.

  An inventory and estimated value of assets prepared by the Los Angeles Superior Court listed William’s total assets as three hundred dollars—six fifty-dollar traveler’s checks stashed away in a drawer next to his bed when he passed. With no legal family members to claim him, William was declared indigent, and his body was shipped from the county morgue to All Souls Cemetery in Long Beach. The cemetery, which is sponsored by the Catholic Church, gave him a proper burial but placed his casket in an unmarked grave. It remains unmarked, though Terri is working with the Veterans Administration to try rectifying the slight.

  Terri said her mother Doris died in 2002, and sadly, was an avowed atheist. “No matter what I would tell her, she really believed there would be nothing left when she died. I’m pretty spiritual myself, and I know for a fact there is life after death,” Terri says. “We are spirits living in a body, not flesh and blood. But I could never get that across to her. That’s my one big thing that really bothered me—she was scared when she died.”

  I am glad that, thin though it is, a thread of spirituality does indeed run in McQueen’s family, in the voice of his half sister.

  I ask Terri whether she knows if Steve ever met her father face-to-face. She says, unbeknownst to each other, while William lived in Long Beach those last years, the son he’d abandoned lived in nearby Hollywood.

  Yet the story gets sadder. When Steve’s wife, Neile, was pregnant with their first child—a daughter, which they ironically named Terry—he took another stab at finding his dad, hiring detectives who scoured the seedy part of Los Angeles for a William McQueen, putting out feelers into local pool halls, bars, gin joints, and veterans’ organizations.

  Then, Terri says, Steve got a call one day from a woman who said she was William’s girlfriend. “Come on over if you want to know about your dad,” she told him. Steve and Neile went to her apartment in Echo Park, only to find out that William had died three months earlier. The woman did, however, share this one slice of haunting memory. She said William faithfully watched Wanted: Dead or Alive every Saturday night and would sometimes say aloud, “I wonder if that’s my boy . . . .”

  I ask Terri when she first discovered she had a famous half brother. She said she started stitching the pieces of the puzzle together one afternoon when she arrived home unannounced as her mother was watching that same program, Wanted: Dead or Alive. Prone to imbibing, Terri’s mother inexplicably let her guard down, remarking how strongly Steve resembled his father.

  “The thing is, my mother hated westerns and cowboy movies, yet she was paying a lot of attention to this particular show—more like mesmerized,” Terri says. “After that, it wasn’t too hard putting two and two together. I watched the show constantly after that day and always caught his movies at the theater.”

  Terri tells me she never met Steve but came shockingly close.

  Terri says she also caught the acting bug herself, actually moving to Hollywood in the early ’60s, but was careful not to exploit the McQueen name or the relationship. “I didn’t want to be seen as trying to ride his coattails,” Terri says as she shows me a headshot of herself. She was a stunner. “I never wanted him to ever have that impression of me—that I came to Hollywood to use him.”

  Terri tells me she never met Steve but came shockingly close. After several years in Hollywood, she auditioned in front of famed Bonnie and Clyde director Arthur Penn for the Jane Fonda role in The Chase, the 1965 movie starring Marlon Brando and Robert Redford. Had she nabbed the role, Steve wouldn’t have been able to avoid paying attention and taking notice of her.

  Oh, and there was one other time. When Bullitt was being filmed in San Francisco in early 1968, she and her husband drove to the set. In the car she wrote a note to Steve and asked her then-husband to deliver it to him through an assistant. Terri recalls it wasn’t a terribly long note, just telling Steve who she was, how they were related, and the name of a family friend who knew their father and could vouch for her. But Terri’s husband was very insecure and jealous, and she suspects he probably just tossed the note away.

  “I’d have given an
ything to meet him,” Terri says of Steve. “He was the big brother of my dreams—dreams that I was never able to share. I’d like to believe, if that note had reached him, we would have met.

  “Now we’ll just have to wait to meet in another life,” she says. “And when we do, that reunion is going to be very, very special.”

  HOUSE OF HORRORS

  _____

  In my sixty-four years on this earth, I’ve never met anyone who’s led a truly charmed life (though some flatter themselves, bragging that they have). We all experience difficult times and go through personal crises that test and shape us. My own early life is a testament to this. I was able to survive and persevere not because I’m special or made of sterner stuff than most but only through the saving grace of God’s kindness and unconditional love.

  I wonder how many times in his life Steve McQueen felt there was no such thing. Even after he surmounted his dismal childhood and adolescence to become famous and fabulously wealthy, he still felt bereft enough to mount an expensive, expansive search for the father who abandoned him in his infancy—only to discover that for several years they’d been separated by only a few miles, and now it was too late. He would never know his dad, never find out why William McQueen deserted him. The soul-rending wound it left would never heal.

  It would haunt him until the end of his life.

  When you understand the devastation of effectively being rejected and unwanted by your father—in Steve’s case, for the most part, by his mother too—you realize a clearer understanding of the trajectory someone’s life can take. You start to better understand Steve McQueen.

  In what would be his last interview, he said to former Mayo Clinic professor Bru Joy, “When a kid doesn’t have any love when he’s small, he begins to wonder if he’s good enough. My mother didn’t love me, and I didn’t have a father. I thought, ‘Well, I must not be very good.’”

  He would never know his dad, never find out why William McQueen deserted him. The soul-rending wound it left would never heal. It would haunt him until the end of his life.

  A heartbreaking statement to hear but quite telling in what must have motivated Steve throughout his life.

  It’s 10:00 a.m. when my breakfast meeting with Terri is over, and I’m heading home—and can’t get there fast enough. The drive from Pueblo to Orange County is approximately twelve hundred miles, a sixteen-hour shot. If I don’t take too many breaks, I should pull into my driveway around two o’clock tomorrow morning. I’ll be able to grab a few hours of sleep and then deliver three sermons on Sunday. Only half as coherent as usual, I’m wondering if anyone will notice.

  The drive from Pueblo to California offers some of the most beautiful landscape in the country, including the Rocky Mountains, several indigenous reservations in northern New Mexico, the South Rim of the Grand Canyon, and the Mojave Desert in California.

  I turn on the satellite radio to a different station than I’d been listening to, and it’s Sheryl Crow singing a song called “Steve McQueen.” It’s a great rocker to keep me awake as she sings of how she wants to be like Steve McQueen and his fast machine.

  My Bullitt begins to accelerate a bit more.

  Many hours and hours later, as I enter the city limits of my hometown, I don’t need the radio to cue up “Ode to Joy.” Being home is joy enough. I don’t even bother unpacking the Bullitt—just go in, kiss Cathe hello (and good night), and instantly tumble into a bottomless sleep in our bed. The only thing missing is staying awake a minute or two longer, just to savor the blissful comfort of the sweet place called home.

  Yet it seems like I’ve slept only a minute or two when Cathe wakes me at 5:20 a.m. with a cheerful, “Time to inspire the masses.” I forgive her when she hands me my 2-percent latte.

  I turn on the satellite radio to a different station than I’d been listening to, and it’s Sheryl Crow singing a song called “Steve McQueen.” It’s a great rocker to keep me awake as she sings of how she wants to be like Steve McQueen and his fast machine. My Bullitt begins to accelerate a bit more.

  My normal routine when it comes to preparing Sunday sermons is to start the Wednesday before with lots of reading in the theological library I’ve built up over the years. Plenty of good stuff there. On Thursday, I do a basic “brain dump” into a Word document on the computer, then on Friday start crafting the message. When things are really clicking, I’m pretty much good to go by Sunday morning, though I’m usually still tinkering right up to the time I open my mouth, and sometimes I make adjustments even while I’m talking.

  I’m not an entertainer, and I don’t try to be one in the pulpit, but I’m amazed how some of the purveyors of God’s Word are able to make it sound as dull, lifeless, and impenetrable as a recitation of the federal tax code. Those who come to our church do so to hear a message from God, and that’s what I always want to give them. I always want them to know how it applies in their lives. I don’t consider it my job to make the Bible “relevant.” Fact is, the Bible is relevant. It doesn’t require my spin for that. My job is simply to let “the Lion out of the cage” and let Him have His way.

  Small as he was, McQueen fought back, trying to match his tormentor blow for blow. “I would have borne any punishment—anything— just for the sheer pleasure of knowing that I had given back even a little of the pain he inflicted on me,” Steve recalled, adding, “God, how I wanted that.”

  Yet under the circumstances, I can’t say the three sermons I deliver today are the most inspiring I’ve ever given. But at least I didn’t fall asleep in the pulpit.

  Back home after church, Cathe pours me a tall glass of iced tea (loaded with extra ice) and sets down a steaming pan of chicken enchiladas with green sauce and refried beans. I’m already on record as saying nobody lives a charmed life, but being married to her is the closest thing to it I can think of.

  When the pan is empty, I totter to a well-worn oversized leather chair in our family room, turn on the tube, and fall fast asleep. But only for twenty minutes because there’s a house in Echo Park, about an hour and a half from here, that I just have to see today. It’s where Steve McQueen lived during one of his childhood excursions to California with his mother.

  House of horrors, is more like it.

  How Julian McQueen met her second husband, Hal Berri, is unclear, but most likely they knew each other through their work. Julian had landed a job as an estimator for a company called Smith Warren in Los Angeles. Hal held the same position with a different company called Smith Martin. He was eight years Julian’s senior and married her right after divorcing his first wife in March 1937 in Monterey, California.

  It was yet another in a long series of poor choices by Julian, and one with dire consequences for Steve. In interviews years later, McQueen recalled Berri as a violent alcoholic who beat both his mother and him.

  You’d think Steve’s mother would’ve snatched him up, grabbing the first train or bus out of there. But Julian was too far gone in the bottle and self-degradation herself. She’d already lost one man and didn’t want to lose another.

  “He apparently beat me for the sheer sadistic pleasure it gave him—which included the joy he obviously derived from my pain,” McQueen recounted to one reporter. “I was young. I even thought of bearing the beatings, vowing simply to hold on until I was old enough to run away. But I just couldn’t restrain myself. It wasn’t in me.”

  Instead, small as he was, McQueen fought back, trying to match his tormentor blow for blow. “I would have borne any punishment—anything—just for the sheer pleasure of knowing that I had given back even a little of the pain he inflicted on me,” Steve recalled, adding, “God, how I wanted that.”

  Of course it was hopeless, boy against man, and after the inevitable beat-down, Berri would lock him in a dark room for hours without food or water.

  I’m now in front of the house on Preston Avenue in Echo Park where McQueen endured that torment. It’s an adobe-style, split-level residence shaded by very large trees. You
’d never guess it was once a torture chamber of sorts.

  But it’s true. And what happened inside there changed Steve. It made him unusually wary of physical contact with adults. He was often afraid to go home. He grew withdrawn, uncommunicative, aggressive, and disruptive. He did poorly in his schoolwork and found an outlet for his uncontrollable mounting frustrations and hostility by stealing cars and thumbing his nose at law enforcement.

  My mom, unconscious, lying in a pool of blood. Eddie, in one of his rages, had beaten her mercilessly, within an inch of her life.

  You’d think Steve’s mother would’ve snatched him up, grabbing the first train or bus out of there. But Julian was too far gone in the bottle and self-degradation herself. She’d already lost one man and didn’t want to lose another.

  Her solution was to write to Claude Thomson in Slater and ask if she could send her son back there to live. The only alternative, she said, was reform school. Claude agreed to take Steve in, and the boy returned to the farm. But as we’ve seen, it didn’t last. Steve got into trouble and ran away with a carnival.

  But that didn’t last long either, and the teen runaway ended up back in Los Angeles with his mother and the stepfather from hell. Steve was later arrested for stealing hubcaps, and in court the judge warned him that one more offense would land him in jail. When he got home, Berri beat him severely, even pushing him down a flight of stairs.

  This guy reminds me of one of my prize stepdads. I’ll call him “Eddie.” He was six-foot-plus, had sort of a raffish appearance, owned a seedy bar in Waikiki and, as the saying goes, was his own best customer.

  You never knew what would trigger one of Eddie’s explosive, alcohol-fueled temper tantrums. I was a bucktoothed kid, and when I ate with a fork or spoon, the silverware would audibly scrape against my protruding upper teeth. This sound annoyed Eddie to no end, and one night when it happened, he went nuts, screaming, swearing, and banging his hammy fists on the table. I started looking at him a little differently that night, my gut telling me this guy was dangerous.