Steve McQueen

by Greg Laurie

  I offered up a desperate, feeble prayer.

  “God, please get me out of this! If You do, I will serve You, or do whatever You want. Please!”

  In an instant the car righted itself. We all laughed in hysterical relief, and as we continued on our way, I said another prayer, not quite so desperate this time: “Thanks, God—see You at the next crisis!”

  Suddenly the car hit a section of wet pavement. It fishtailed, then spun. We were out of control, with lights flying by and the tires screaming. This is it, I thought. This is how it ends for me.

  But thankfully, it didn’t take another crisis for me to give my life to the Lord. All it took was thinking back through all the years of loneliness, broken homes, the alcohol and drugs, the abysmally fruitless search for something to give my life meaning and solace and contentment. I started talking to God more. It was a little weird at first, but it was also wonderful. I finally felt some inner peace and safety. I felt like I’d finally found the family I was searching for: the family of God.

  Steve McQueen’s route to that harbor was much more byzantine. After his release from Boys Republic on April 1, 1946, he took a bus from California all the way to Greenwich Village in New York City to see his mother, who was living there with Victor Lukens, an artist, filmmaker, and photographer who later became an important figure in McQueen’s life and career. But Julian was still drinking heavily, and the mother-son reunion didn’t go well.

  Who else would run off and join a circus, be a deckhand on a boat, go AWOL, work in a brothel, and end up on a chain gang? Only Steve McQueen.

  After meeting a couple of sailors in a local bar who regaled him with swashbuckling tales of their life in the Merchant Marine, the teenaged McQueen promptly signed up as a deckhand on the SS Alpha headed for the West Indies. But the romance of the sea quickly turned sour, as all he did was swab the deck and clean the toilet. When the Alpha docked at Santo Domingo in the Dominican Republic, McQueen jumped ship.

  He briefly worked as a towel boy in a brothel before making his way back stateside and working a succession of deadend jobs. He was arrested for vagrancy and did thirty days on a southern chain gang.

  Who else would run off and join a circus, be a deckhand on a boat, go AWOL, work in a brothel, and end up on a chain gang?

  Only Steve McQueen.

  One wonders why they haven’t made a film, better yet an entire series, about his life.

  Finally he returned to New York in April 1947 and asked Julian to sign a parental consent form so he could join the US Marines. Her permission was required because Steve was under the age of eighteen, and she gave it. So on April 28, 1947, he was sent to the Marine Corps Recruiting Depot at Parris Island, South Carolina.

  And that’s where I’m headed in the Bullitt tomorrow after my three sermons on Sunday. I’ll also visit Quantico, Virginia; Washington, DC; New York City, and a place twenty miles northwest of Philadelphia—but not before making a quick run this afternoon over to Don Oakes’s shop in Riverside to get the Bullitt an oil change and a once-over.

  I take off at 5:15 on Monday morning, and except for overnight stops at two hotels along the twenty-four-hundred-mile route, I drive straight through to South Carolina.

  “Still on that secret mission?” he asks.

  “Still can’t talk about it,” I reply.

  While he works on the car, I flip open my laptop and start emailing folks in the east to line up meetings when I’m there. The response is quick and gratifying. Everyone is so generous and open!

  I take off at 5:15 on Monday morning, and except for overnight stops at two hotels along the twenty-four-hundred-mile route, I drive straight through to South Carolina.

  Bobby Joe Harris is waiting for me early Wednesday morning in front of the Marine Corps Recruit Training Station at Parris Island. He lives in Chandler, Arizona, but happened to be on an RV trip in the east when we corresponded. Bobby Joe is a decorated Vietnam vet, a former drill instructor, retired police chief—and best of all, a Marine Corps historian. By the way, no one who’s served in the corps is ever a “former Marine.” Once a Marine, always a Marine.

  I’ve brought along a copy of McQueen’s Marine Corps file, which was made available to the public in 2005. Thumbing through it at a table outside the station, Bobby Joe muses, “The Marines weren’t as picky back then as they are today. Back then they took in a lot of troubled youth and turned them into real men, and McQueen is the perfect example of this.”

  McQueen survived boot camp and from there went to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and trained as a tank crewman. After five months he was promoted to private first class — an impressive feat.

  Steve and the other recruits would’ve arrived at Parris Island exhausted from their long eight-hundred-mile journey from New York City, Bobby Joe says. But there was no respite. “Once they stepped off that train, they were immediately screamed at and told how to stand with their heels together, feet at a forty-five-degree angle, thumbs along the seams of their trousers with palms in, eyes forward, shoulders squared, chest out, and chin in. They were informed that if they eyeballed one of their drill instructors, they’d never see again. And they probably said to themselves, ‘Lord, what have I gotten myself into?’”

  McQueen survived boot camp and from there went to Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, and trained as a tank crewman. After five months he was promoted to private first class—an impressive feat, according to Bobby Joe. But the record also shows several citations for being Absent Without Leave (AWOL), which Bobby Joe says actually wasn’t that big a deal.

  “Happens more than you think. I can pretty much guess how the conversation went down: ‘Hey, honey, can’t you stay a little longer?’ ‘Yeah, it’ll cost me some liberty, but you’re worth it!’”

  Okay, I think I get the picture. I’ve learned what I needed to know about McQueen and his first taste of Marine life. So after thanking Bobby Joe for interrupting his vacation on my account, I’m off to Quantico, Virginia, to meet Sergeant Cliff Anderson, who served with McQueen there. Seven hours later, I pull into a hotel on the outskirts of Quantico and catch up on some much needed sleep. The next morning—Thursday— I’m in front of the Brown Field barracks that had housed them.

  One of McQueen’s first assignments was to clean the barracks latrine—a task he actually requested so he could go in, lock the door, and take a long nap on the floor.

  Cliff says he doesn’t have much time, unfortunately, that he won’t be able to visit as long as he’d hoped. But it doesn’t take long to sum up his impressions of the man I came to talk about. He fondly recalls Steve as a “screw-up.” And to confirm his point, he gives the following example. One of McQueen’s first assignments was to clean the barracks latrine—a task he actually requested so he could go in, lock the door, and take a long nap on the floor.

  Cliff remembers that Steve had a girlfriend in Baltimore and often reported back to base tardy with lipstick on his face. He also remembers him getting in trouble for having a ducktail haircut he refused to change. “I wish I would have taken some pictures of him back then,” says Cliff, “because he was a real piece of work.”

  But there’s one additional memory he wants to share before I leave. As we say good-bye, Cliff tells me of being on a hunting trip in Cheyenne, Wyoming, in July 1973, when he saw a newspaper item reporting that McQueen and Ali MacGraw were to be married there in a city park. Cliff contacted him, and Steve the famous actor soon became Steve the old Marine Corps buddy while they had a drink together. “He was one of a kind,” Cliff says, “someone special in my life.”

  Between Quantico and Camp Lejeune, McQueen’s service record indicates several AWOL citations, most importantly a court-martial resulting from a dust-up with a policeman that landed Steve in jail. Add that to his other misadventures.

  Tragically, his forty-one-day sentence to the brig also appears to have been a death sentence.

  His punishment was assignment to the Naval Gun Factory in Washington, DC, my next s
top. It’s brief, too, but meaningful because Steve’s job there was helping renovate ships’ engine rooms—hard, dirty work that entailed removing ceilings and pipes. The latter were wrapped in asbestos. Years later, McQueen told director John Sturges, “The air was so thick with asbestos particles the men could hardly breathe.”

  Almost thirty years to the day, Steve McQueen was diagnosed with mesothelioma, a rare and terminal cancer caused by asbestos inhalation.

  Tragically, his forty-one-day sentence to the brig also appears to have been a death sentence.

  NEW YORK STATE OF MIND

  _____

  Private First Class Steve McQueen was honorably discharged on April 27, 1950. He received muster-out pay of forty dollars and a set of tools he kept for the rest of his life.

  He also got something much more valuable.

  “The Marines made a man out of me,” McQueen later admitted. “I learned how to get along with others, and I had a platform to jump off of.”

  Washington, DC, to New York City is about a 225-mile jaunt north on Interstate 95. According to the GPS, it should take me about four hours, but I wonder if that’s taking into account the snarling East Coast traffic and those pesky toll roads that require all my spare change. The greatest unknown is traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike leading into Manhattan.

  But my timing is good so far. It’s about 2:00 p.m., and if I hit the Beltway and hit the gas, I’ll miss the DC traffic (which gives its LA counterpart a run for its money). Then I’ll stop for a latte to fortify myself for whatever comes next—which I do at a cool little coffee place called Everyman Espresso.

  Things go smoothly enough till I enter the Big Apple and spend an hour crawling through traffic to the Washington Square Hotel on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village. I check in around eight o’clock and hit the sack.

  Waiting for me in the lobby early the next morning is Gene Lesser, age ninety-one. He was an aspiring playwright in the early ’50s when he met Steve McQueen. Over breakfast in the hotel restaurant, he tells me they met through Steve’s mother.

  “The Marines made a man out of me,” McQueen later admitted. “I learned how to get along with others, and I had a platform to jump off of.”

  “I knew Julian through her boyfriend, Victor Lukens,” says Gene. “She was a lovely looking woman who had a great sense of humor. One day we were out having a beer and she said, ‘My kid’s coming here and needs a place to stay. Can you put him up?’”

  At the time Lesser paid nineteen dollars a month for a cold-water flat in the Village (meaning, it didn’t have running hot water). He and his new roommate got along fine though Gene learned quickly that McQueen wasn’t much of a talker.

  “He was very careful about who he befriended and never discussed his personal life with me or anyone else,” says Gene. “He was a brooder. Sometimes he shut down completely.”

  He says McQueen worked a succession of menial jobs in the Village, selling encyclopedias door-to-door, repairing lawn mowers, and even posing for pulp magazines such as Crime Detective and Homicide Detective to pay the rent. He bought a motorcycle, frequented the music scene, and learned to smoke weed. When he grew tired of the drudgery of regular employment, he started stealing and scamming to get by.

  Then he met a part-time actress named Donna Barton. And the day after their first date, McQueen moved in with her. She was taking acting lessons at the Neighborhood Playhouse in Manhattan and suggested that Steve give acting a shot.

  Further encouraged by his mother’s ex-flame Victor Lukens, McQueen applied for admission to the acting program there. He was one of about three thousand hopefuls, of whom fewer than seventy-five would be accepted. But Steve’s audition for director Sanford Meisner was a home run.

  He bought a motorcycle, frequented the music scene, and learned to smoke weed. When he grew tired of the drudgery of regular employment, he started stealing and scamming to get by.

  “He was original,” Meisner recalled later, “both tough and childlike like Marilyn Monroe, as if he’d been through everything but had preserved a basic innocence. I accepted him at once.”

  Not everything about acting came easy. Lesser remembers when Steve came to him with the script of a Shakespeare play his class was working on and asked for help with his cues. “He didn’t know what half the words in the book meant,” says Gene with a laugh—quickly adding, “not that anybody else did either.”

  I’ve enjoyed hearing Gene’s stories, learning how Steve first dipped his toe into acting. As I’m thanking him for his time and preparing to leave, he remembers one more. Two decades later when he worked in California as a screenwriter and play director, McQueen—then the biggest superstar in filmdom—sometimes dropped into his office on the Sunset Strip wearing a construction helmet and tool belt, telling Lesser’s secretary he was a phone repairman.

  “He’d lie on the leather couch in my office, and we’d talk about the old days,” says Gene. “It was as if he just wanted to get away from everything and everybody.”

  Fame was already tightening its grip on McQueen, the same scrutiny that would plague him years later while seeking cancer treatment in Mexico, with the press hounding him every moment. He wasn’t the first, nor would he be the last person to see how completely unfulfilling and empty being famous can be. Actor Kevin Costner, whose career began to soar after his star turn in the 1992 film The Bodyguard, was once asked, “Is it all worth it? Is the price of fame too high? Is all the money and all the glamour and all the power worth having your personal life dragged across the front pages of the tabloids like some rotting animal carcass?”

  Fame was already tightening its grip on McQueen, the same scrutiny that would plague him years later while seeking cancer treatment in Mexico, with the press hounding him every moment.

  Costner’s answer was firm, “No. It’s not worth it to me, it’s not worth it, but I don’t know what to do about it.”

  Ironically, the script for The Bodyguard was floating around in the 1970s and was intended for Diana Ross in the Whitney Houston role, with McQueen in the part Costner eventually played. Costner even sported a McQueen-like haircut in the film in tribute to one of his favorite actors.

  After Gene departs I walk a few blocks to 196 West Fourth Street, once the location of Louis’s Tavern. Today it’s a local supermarket that features fresh produce, prepared meals, and a lunch counter offering hot dogs and sandwiches. It’s been a Village mainstay for a few decades, but Louis’s was a legendary Beat-era barroom frequented by the likes of Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, James Dean, Jason Robards, William Stryon, and a fellow named McQueen. Steve, in fact, practically lived on the house special—spaghetti and meatballs with a tomato and lettuce salad for only sixty-five cents.

  I’m meeting John Gilmore there. John is a former-actor-turned-writer. In fact, he’s one of America’s most revered noir writers, having written books on serial killers, famous outlaws, and various Hollywood types. In his prime he was a dead ringer for Tony Curtis but now has wispy, peroxide blond hair and blue eyes he hides behind Wayfarer sunglasses. He had gone the method-acting route and befriended many famous people over the years: Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Sal Mineo, Lenny Bruce, Jack Nicholson, Janis Joplin, Dennis Hopper.

  McQueen then made it worse by flippantly remarking, upon learning Gilmore had been friends with the late James dean, that he was glad dean was dead because “it makes more room for me.”

  Steve McQueen, not so much. It was a former girlfriend of Steve’s who introduced them, and the fact that she was dating Gilmore at the same time made it awkward right from the get-go. McQueen then made it worse by flippantly remarking, upon learning Gilmore had been friends with the late James Dean, that he was glad Dean was dead because “it makes more room for me.”

  “I sort of laughed to let him know I thought he was joking,” recalls John, “when I knew he wasn’t. His excitement over James’s death ‘making more room for him’ was a reflection of McQueen’s bedrock, almost absolute self-absorption
.”

  When they met again soon after that, McQueen picked up where he left off, denigrating Dean and sneering that he didn’t like actors. Gilmore pointedly suggested he was in the wrong profession then, causing McQueen to leave in a huff.

  Gilmore also tells me about the time he and Diana—who later became his wife—were having drinks at Louis’s when McQueen made, shall we say, a grand entrance. “We were at this small table when all of a sudden we heard the roar of a motorcycle engine then a collision,” John says. “We reflexively snatched the drinks from our table when McQueen and his bike plummeted down the steps into the barroom.”

  “We were at this small table when all of a sudden we heard the roar of a motorcycle engine then a collision,” John says. “We reflexively snatched the drinks from our table when McQueen and his bike plummeted down the steps into the barroom.”

  According to John, Steve plowed through a glass door and landed face down on the floor, at which point a couple of large gun-toting wise guys carried Steve out of the bar, depositing both him and his bike back on the sidewalk.

  John was one of the people who’d seen Steve at his worst—like the night a drunk Julian McQueen was passed out on the floor at Louis’s, and Steve—instead of coming to her aid, left her there.

  Seeing her in that condition wasn’t all that uncommon, John says. Julian often embarrassed Steve by coming on to his friends so they would buy her drinks and just as often wound up on the floor in a stupor.

  John had also witnessed the scene when director Frank Corsaro upbraided Steve, then starring in A Hatful of Rain at the Lyceum Theatre on Broadway, after McQueen complained about not wanting to go on stage that night because of a sore throat. When McQueen continued to balk, he was replaced by another actor for the run of the play. Not long after that, the prestigious Actor’s Studio also cut McQueen loose as a disruptive presence.