Steve McQueen

by Greg Laurie

  As Actor’s Studio director Lee Strasberg told the class, “A rattlesnake cannot be aligned with the heart of the family.” Though Strasberg didn’t identify McQueen by name, “everybody knew who he was talking about,” John says.

  As Actor’s Studio director Lee Strasberg told the class, “A rattlesnake cannot be aligned with the heart of the family.” Though Strasberg didn’t identify McQueen by name, “everybody knew who he was talking about,” John says.

  None of this surprises me.

  _____

  McQueen was effectively parentless, and in learning to fend for himself, he’d also started to think primarily of himself. These are survivor skills that one develops when proper parameters aren’t established in a child’s life. We’re all selfish and self-centered by nature. Steve was no exception. And he didn’t have much help counteracting it.

  Next up is a meeting with one of Steve’s former girlfriends, dancer Janet Conway, at the Carnegie Deli on Seventh Avenue. I’ve heard about this old-school deli for years, where patrons have filled up on pastrami, corned beef, and matzo balls since 1937. Janet suggested this sixty-four-seat venue because it’s right across the street from where she met Steve in 1956. Sadly, it’s about to close its doors for good. Its aging owner told the New York Times, “At this stage in my life, the early morning to late nights have taken a toll, along with my sleepless nights and grueling hours.”

  “He was intense, attractive, and kind of mumbled when speaking,” she says. “His affectations were charming, and he had the most gorgeous blue eyes I had ever seen. I don’t know how or when, but we became an item.”

  I quickly peruse the menu, but there’s really no choice other than to get the iconic four-inch thick pastrami sandwich on rye. Janet, who is still in fighting trim at age seventy-eight, orders the same.

  After a few bites into our sandwiches, Janet reflects wistfully, “I met Steve at Viola Essen’s dance studio, which was located on the eighth floor of Carnegie Hall,” says Janet. “I was a seventeen-year-old student at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts, and Steve was a struggling actor who’d been hired by Viola to teach drama classes.

  “He was intense, attractive, and kind of mumbled when speaking,” she says. “His affectations were charming, and he had the most gorgeous blue eyes I had ever seen. I don’t know how or when, but we became an item.”

  On their dates Janet often picked up the tab. “Part of my attraction for Steve was that he was dead broke,” she says with a laugh. “Acting jobs were few and far between.” McQueen lived in a rundown cold-water flat at the time, and Janet recalls a bus stop sign he’d stolen off the street and used as a barbell.

  About his acting, she says, “He was absolutely driven,” and when McQueen landed a brief, uncredited role in the 1956 movie Somebody Up There Likes Me, he rehearsed relentlessly.

  “He had a prop on the dresser—a switchblade—and I remember he was working hard to become comfortable with it to make the scene look real. He had talent,” Janet says, “and nothing was going to stop him.”

  They broke up when they were leaving Carnegie Hall one night and she spotted another actor she thought was cute. Steve must have picked up on the vibe, and when she hesitated to hop on the back of his bike, he said, “Either come now or forget it.”

  “Then forget it,” Janet told him.

  And that was it.

  She bumped into him a few months later when he was starring in a Broadway play. He was standing outside the stage door, invited her into his dressing room, and started to act out the entire play for her. “Steve, I didn’t come here to see the play,” she told him. “I just wanted to say hello and congratulations”—congratulations not so much for his work but for his upcoming marriage to dancer Neile Adams.

  “I was happy for Steve,” Janet says, “because it seemed as if he’d finally found the woman he’d been looking for his whole life.”

  It helped. For a while.

  THE BLOB AND THE BIBLE

  _____

  What in the world was I thinking?

  Driving from California to the East Coast and back, stopping in five cities in between—and thinking I could do it all in just seven days?

  Maybe if I was forty years younger.

  Now it’s Friday night, and I have one more stop to make before heading home. If I’m going to make it back to the West Coast for Sunday services, either the Bullitt or I had better sprout wings. I’m exhausted, and not even an espresso IV drip would put me in shape to drive all that way by Sunday.

  I suppose I could stash the Bullitt in the hotel garage, hop a flight to the coast, deliver my three sermons, and fly back to New York City the next day. Or hold a Skype session with all twelve thousand members of the church. But then—voilà!—the perfect solution pops into my head, and I whip out my smartphone.

  “Son,” I say when Jonathan answers, back in California, “I have a big favor to ask . . . .”

  The story of my son Jonathan is nothing short of a miracle. Today he’s an associate pastor at the church I’ve pastored for more than forty years, Harvest Christian Fellowship. Jonathan literally grew up there. His “uncles” were fellow pastor friends of mine.

  While driving to work at the Riverside church, Christopher’s car collided with a truck and he was killed. We actually didn’t know of it until early that afternoon when three of our pastors told Cathe and me the news no parent ever wants to hear.

  Both of our boys—Christopher and Jonathan—believed in Jesus at an early age yet still went prodigal later on, drinking and even using drugs. Christopher actually spent more than nine years wandering in a spiritual wilderness; then, after a lot of prayer by his mother and me, he made a recommitment to Christ at age thirty. He fell in love with a wonderful girl named Brittany, and they gave us our first granddaughter, Stella (named after my grandmother, who in many ways was more of a mother to me than my birth mom).

  Christopher was quite a talented artist and worked for a leading design firm in Newport Beach. Then he came to work at our church, heading up our design department. Jonathan took an internship in our outreach event department. I could not have been happier.

  Our lives changed forever, though, on July 24, 2008, at 9:01 in the morning—the tragic story I shared with Barbi McQueen in Sun Valley. While driving to work at the Riverside church, Christopher’s car collided with a truck and he was killed. We actually didn’t know of it until early that afternoon when three of our pastors told Cathe and me the news no parent ever wants to hear.

  It was like all the air was sucked out of the room. Time stood still. I collapsed in a heap, and for months went around in a tearful haze. Though I’d been a pastor for many years and counseled countless families who had lost loved ones, I wasn’t sure how or if I would survive Christopher’s death. Having grown up essentially fatherless, I’d overcompensated with my boys in an effort to give them the stable childhood I never had. And now . . . .

  It was unimaginably difficult. It still is.

  Jonathan and his brother were very close. He was working the day Christopher died and, like us, was unaware of it until someone who’d gotten the news told him to go home immediately. When he arrived on our street, he saw cars in front of our house and people standing around . . . then saw his dad on the ground, weeping.

  At the time Jonathan was engaged in his own struggle with drugs. Just the night before, he and his brother had discussed the problem, and Christopher said, “Jonathan, what’s it going to take?”

  Now he knew.

  Jonathan made his own recommitment to Christ, turned his back on drugs, and never looked back.

  Till then he’d never been much for public speaking, but at Christopher’s memorial service he spoke so profoundly and eloquently, it was obvious he was evolving in front of our eyes. Jonathan’s spiritual growth in the aftermath of his brother’s death was a revelation. He served as my personal assistant, we read the Bible together, and I gave him books that had positively impacted me as a young man. T
oday Jonathan is a full-fledged pastor at our church and still growing in every way.

  So I have no qualms about asking him to fill in for me in the pulpit this Sunday, and his unhesitating response is pure balm for my soul: “Dad, I would be honored. Thanks for asking. Please pray for me too.”

  My extra day in New York allows me to meet with actor Michael Dante then drive to the Philadelphia suburbs without being rushed.

  Michael is eighty-five years old and in tremendous shape. A professional baseball player turned actor, he enjoyed television and movie success for several decades. He’s also a very nice man. I immediately recognized him from his many appearances in films and TV shows, including Bonanza, one of my favorites growing up. I used to watch it with my grandparents when I lived with them.

  We’re getting together at the Warwick Hotel in midtown New York because that’s where Michael first encountered Steve McQueen when both were working on Somebody Up There Likes Me. Michael, then a contract player for MGM Studios, played “Shorty the Greek” in the film starring Paul Newman. McQueen was an extra getting a whopping nineteen dollars a day, and he looked on the star with envy, vowing one day to catch up to him.

  Michael says he was under the canopy of the Warwick Hotel waiting for the limousine that would take him to the set for his 8:00 a.m. call. It was pouring rain, he tells me, when all of a sudden a guy on a motorcycle roared to a stop in front of him and, in a “very hip, beatnik way,” asked where the MGM company was filming that day. Michael told him to wait there then follow the limousine.

  The film set was a half hour away, and the biker—McQueen, of course—arrived there in the limo’s wake, soaking wet. He and Dante were assigned to the same dressing room, where McQueen changed out of his sopping clothes into his wardrobe for the day.

  In one of the scenes filmed that day, Paul Newman, playing boxer Rocky Graziano, was to stop a truck carrying fur coats and keep the driver occupied while the characters played by Dante, McQueen, and Sal Mineo looted the furs from the back of the vehicle. But the truck’s brakes malfunctioned, and it plowed into some equipment, narrowly missing Newman. McQueen was busy checking out hundreds of pigeons flying around the set, and if Dante hadn’t pushed him out of the truck’s errant path, MGM might have needed a new extra.

  It was well known in the industry that he didn’t work with actors who were taller than he was.

  According to Dante, years later McQueen muffed a chance to return the favor when the cast was being assembled for Bullitt. Producer Phillip D’Antoni had already told Michael that he would get the role as McQueen’s cop partner in the movie, and a lunch was scheduled at the Warner Brothers commissary to firm things up. Everything went fine until Michael stood up after the meal to say his good-byes and neglected to slouch. “I had forgotten about McQueen’s complex regarding height,” he says. “It was well known in the industry that he didn’t work with actors who were taller than he was. He looked up at me and said, ‘Hey, whoa, man, what did you do? Get taller?’

  “I knew then that I was out of the picture.”

  Sure enough, the coveted role of Sergeant Delgetti went to Don Gordon.

  “I liked Steve, thought he was a good guy and a terrific actor, but that one really hurt,” acknowledges Michael.

  Long before Bullitt, however, came The Blob.

  When McQueen married Neile Adams, she was the better known and more successful of the two, earning fifty thousand dollars a year to his six thousand. When acquaintances started calling him “Mr. Adams,” McQueen decided it was time to kick his career into high gear and started looking around for big projects. Nothing materialized until he was offered the lead in a science fiction movie called The Blob.

  “My first impression was that McQueen was a real jerk,” said Howie Fishlove. “He was annoying. He drove around on his motorcycle and kept throwing firecrackers at all of us. I thought, What in the heck is the matter with this guy?”

  Made by Paramount Pictures, The Blob was the studio’s highest grossing film of 1958, and today is a cult classic. Filmed in six weeks in a suburb of Philadelphia, the movie was actually the brainchild of an outfit called Good News Productions, which specialized in religious films. It’s owner, Irvin S. “Shorty” Yeaworth, conceived of The Blob as a means of connecting with secular film audiences.

  The movie’s climatic scene was filmed at the Colonial Theatre in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania, and that’s where I’m meeting with Jack H. Harris, The Blob’s producer, as well as Russell Doughten, associate producer, and Howie Fishlove, head grip.

  Two hours after leaving New York City, I’m there. The Colonial was completely restored in 1997, and Phoenixville has totally embraced its cinematic claim to fame by hosting an annual, kitschy “BlobFest.”

  After reviewing artifacts from the movie in several display cases, we sit down for what I’m sure is going to be a fascinating chat. Russell recalls that he and Shorty Yeaworth met McQueen six months before he was cast in The Blob. Neile was working in a project for Good News Productions at the time, and McQueen was constantly underfoot, making such a pest of himself that when he expressed interest in The Blob, they weren’t much interested in him. But he read for the lead role in the low budget ($130,000) production and got it.

  “Every day the filmmakers would go into prayer meetings. They would always finish by saying, ‘And save us from Steve McQueen!’”

  They almost instantly regretted it.

  “My first impression was that McQueen was a real jerk,” said Howie Fishlove. “He was annoying. He drove around on his motorcycle and kept throwing firecrackers at all of us. I thought, What in the heck is the matter with this guy? ”

  McQueen was demanding and temperamental throughout the shoot, and when he was arrested one day for recklessly driving his MG Sports Roadster, Jack Harris decided it was time to have a talk with him. After bailing him out, he sat down his leading man and told him to shape up. But as they talked, Harris realized something: what McQueen craved and needed, more than anything, was constant approbation—praise, acceptance, encouragement.

  “He wanted approval,” says Jack, who is a spry ninety-eight years old. “What he was looking for was somebody to be Daddy and say, ‘You’re a nice guy and I like you.’”

  Harris’s stroking worked up to a point, but the production staff knew they needed more than just cheerleading to keep McQueen in line. As his female costar Aneta Corsaut recalled, “Every day the filmmakers would go into prayer meetings. They would always finish by saying, ‘And save us from Steve McQueen!’”

  Later, when standing at the pinnacle of success in his chosen field, Steve McQueen would find out that all the stuff this world offers isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. It doesn’t satisfy in the end.

  But they also prayed for him.

  “It was easy to tell Steve wasn’t saved,” says Russell. “He was materialistic, hedonistic, and profane, like most people. He would talk to me about the Bible; sometimes he’d argue, but he wasn’t vehement. He knew he was a sinner. He wasn’t trying not to be a sinner.

  “I talked to him about materialistic things and how he was making those possessions more important to him than a relationship with Christ. I think that his time with us on The Blob showed him how true Christians lived, acted, and worked.”

  At the time, however, McQueen was only interested in movie stardom, and his singular, self-absorbed focus bothered Doughten, who says, “Frankly, I saw him entering the wilderness of the world.”

  When the movie was done, Doughten presented his troubled and troublesome star with a Bible, in which he’d bookmarked and underlined the verse for John 3:16 KJV: “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.”

  I think we can safely assume this message was lost on McQueen back then. But not forever. That’s how spiritual seeds work. They’re sown into people’s lives at various times and places, like into a cocky twenty-something a
ctor on the set of The Blob, and they begin to germinate. The gospel takes root.

  This word itself, gospel, means “good news”—namely, that there is a God in heaven who loves every one of us. From birth we are separated from Him by sin, but God’s Son Jesus died on the cross to pay for our sins so we can be free to discover what life is truly all about. Knowing this, believing this, makes everything else pale in comparison.

  Later, when standing at the pinnacle of success in his chosen field, Steve McQueen would find out that all the stuff this world offers isn’t everything it’s cracked up to be. It doesn’t satisfy in the end. But sometimes, in searching for personal peace—as he did his whole life—a guy must first discover where it’s not before he discovers where it is.

  CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’

  _____

  The East Coast was nice, but California is home. And, boy, am I glad to be home. And warm. Winter sure comes early back east.

  I met a lot of nice folks there and got a whole new perspective on Steve McQueen.

  But the journey is only halfway finished. Now comes the real meat of the story: McQueen’s move to California. The years of stardom. The freewheelin’ 1960s and ’70s. Sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll—and redemption.

  Hollywood was McQueen’s last hope. Steve was finished in New York after he got sacked from A Hatful of Rain. But he had Neile, whose unstinting belief in him was one of the chief reasons he was finally able to open up and trust someone. And when they arrived in California, she made a call to her agent, the late Hilly Elkins, begging him to help her husband.

  Elkins lobbied hard to get McQueen a screen test at CBS, which resulted in a role on the series Tales of Wells Fargo that paid four hundred dollars for three days’ work.

  Then came the stardom McQueen was so desperate for, as bounty hunter Josh Randall. McQueen first appeared as Randall on a series called Trackdown and was so spellbinding that a spin-off series was created specifically for him called Wanted: Dead or Alive, which debuted on September 6, 1958.