Steve McQueen

by Greg Laurie

  In time that whole attitude and lifestyle began to disgust me. And in time it would have a similar effect on the man who was the King of Cool.

  Don’t forget, he had the words “Loved by her your son, Steve” inscribed on the brass plaque on her grave.

  Julian contributed to Steve’s complexity as a young man—not only by her neglect of him but also in her indiscriminate choice of men that further hardened him. He was forced to survive. And the way he chose to do it was by attempting to dominate men and by treating women as conquests, which, of course, was very wrong.

  But ultimately Steve McQueen was responsible for his own choices. He made a long string of poor ones yet in time would make the best choice of his life.

  I felt the same way about my mother, Charlene, that perhaps Steve felt about Julian.

  My wife once pointed out that Mom may have actually been a major contributor to my coming to faith. In effect, she showed me all that this world had to offer. At various times (and with various husbands), we lived both in borderline poverty and great luxury. She was of the swinging Rat Pack generation of Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr.—a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Men were kings; women were “broads.”

  In time that whole attitude and lifestyle began to disgust me. And in time it would have a similar effect on the man who was the King of Cool.

  THE CANYON

  _____

  The day after visiting the grave of Julian McQueen, I’m parked in front of a house in Benedict Canyon where her famous son almost met his death almost 47 years ago.

  The address is 10050 Cielo Drive. On August 9, 1969, five people were killed here—Sharon Tate, Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski and Steve Parent. They were bludgeoned, stabbed and throttled by members of Charles Manson’s whacked-out “Family” in a grisly massacre that chilled the world.

  Poor Sharon Tate was the last to die. According to the court testimony of her murderer, Susan Atkins, Sharon begged, “Please don’t kill me. I don’t want to die. I want to live. I want to have my baby!”

  But Atkins did kill her in an act of pure evil.

  One of the killers wrote “Helter Skelter” on the refrigerator in blood, along with references to Beatles songs. Their vileness slammed the door on the era of free love and flower power once and for all.

  Steve McQueen was close to two of the victims.

  “Jay Sebring was my best friend,” he said in a 1980 deathbed interview. “Sharon Tate was a girlfriend of mine.”

  “I was sure taken care of,” McQueen added. “My name never got drawn into that mess.”

  He was blessed, indeed, because McQueen himself was supposed to be at 10050 Cielo Drive the night of that horrible mass murder.

  If Steve McQueen was the “King of Cool,” Jay Sebring, whom Steve met in the early ‘60s, was the “Architect of Cool.” Before Sebring began styling men’s hair, they went to barbershops redolent of moldering copies of Field & Stream and chose what haircut they wanted from several diagrams posted on the wall. (“Flattop with Fenders” was as exotic as it got.)

  “Please don’t kill me. I don’t want to die.”

  After his discharge from the Navy, Thomas John Kummer headed to Los Angeles and changed his name to Jay Sebring, after the famous Florida town and car race. Then he changed barbering into men’s hair care and styling, creating fashionable new looks for the Age of Aquarius and launching a multi-million dollar industry in hair products and toiletries.

  With financial help from his father, 25-year-old Sebring opened his first salon in Los Angeles in 1959. The red ankh (ancient Egyptian symbol of life) on the front door proclaimed it was not your old man’s barbershop. If that didn’t convince you, Sebring’s prices did. You could get a barbershop haircut for $1.50. Sebring’s coiffures started at $25.

  Sebring gave public cutting and styling demonstrations that drew the attention and then the patronage of the biggest names in Hollywood, and before long numbered among his clientele were Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Henry Fonda, Robert Wagner, Glen Campbell, Bruce Lee, James Garner and Andy Williams.

  When they and other stars wouldn’t let anyone else near their heads, the movie and TV studios had no choice but to hire Sebring at a cool $2,500 per day, plus expenses.

  No one benefited more from Sebring’s innovative techniques than McQueen. He gave Steve his trademark hairstyle—short, sharp and molded beautifully to the shape of his Roman head. It was Sebring who lightened McQueen’s hair for Love With the Proper Stranger, transformed him into a sex symbol in The Thomas Crown Affair, and made Lieutenant Frank Bullitt, a cop in an era when police were called “pigs,” look totally cool.

  It was Sebring who made Lt. Frank Bullitt, a cop in an era when police were called “pigs,” look totally cool.

  Larry Geller was a hairstylist with Sebring from the beginning. We’re meeting at the site of Sebring’s salon on Melrose and Fairfax in West Hollywood, just a few miles where Jay and the others were tragically murdered by the Manson Family.

  Decades later it’s still a salon, now only catering to a strictly female clientele. Geller says he had just graduated from beauty school when he first saw the stained-glass window decorated with the ankh.

  “My first thought was that it was a beauty salon, but it was wood paneled inside,” says Larry. “Jay was on a ladder hanging a potted plant. He said his shop was something new, and called it ‘hair architecture for men.’ I started the next day.”

  Sebring’s methods and approach to everything were unheard of till then. Male patrons first had their hair shampooed (by aspiring starlets) before it was cut. Sebring was one of the first stylists to use a blow-dryer, which he imported from Europe and also sold to his clients for home use. Sebring’s styling technique, says Larry, was based on the size and angles of the customer’s head, not what style looked good at the moment.

  “Steve and Jay were very much alike and close, close friends. They were both military veterans and self-made men.”

  Within six months, Geller says, the salon employed 17 “stylists” and two manicurists. If customers wanted their shoes shined, there was someone for that, too.

  Once he started making money handover-fist, Sebring bought the swanky 1930s Bavarian-style mansion once owned by MGM producer Paul Bern and his wife, actress Jean Harlow, a fleet of sports cars, closets full of tailored suits, and took karate lessons from Bruce Lee. He had his pick of female companions, and was engaged to starlet Sharon Tate for a time. She wanted to marry right away; he wanted to wait. Director Roman Polanski swooped in and married her instead. Despite that, there were no hard feelings, and Sebring remained friends with both.

  As for McQueen and Sebring, says Geller, “Steve and Jay were very much alike and close, close friends. They were both military veterans and self-made men. Jay, like Steve, was very straightforward and honest, never shy about letting you know his true feelings.”

  Larry shudders recalling what Sebring said to him just a week after Geller started working at the salon.

  “We worked together, ate together, talked a good many hours alone together, and all of a sudden Jay says to me, ‘When I go, the whole world is going to know about it.’ I said, ‘What? What are you talking about? How do you know this?’ He said, ‘I don’t know, I just know it.’”

  Sadly, he would be proven right.

  The night before the murders, Sebring went to The Castle to give McQueen his weekly trim. McQueen was at the apex of his career. The year before he had received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor for The Sand Pebbles (he lost to Paul Scofield), then showed he could play against type and still rake in box-office dollars in The Thomas Crown Affair, and made the rare transition from movie star to pop-culture icon in 1968’s Bullitt.

  There is no question that God spared the life of Steve McQueen on that night.

  Roman Polanski was in London working on a script, and had asked Sebring to keep an eye on Sharon Tate while he was g
one. Tate was eight-and-a-half months pregnant. Would Steve like to go out to dinner with him the following night, asked Sebring as he cut McQueen’s hair, and afterwards accompany him to Tate’s estate on Cielo Drive? McQueen agreed.

  But it didn’t happen. The next evening McQueen’s plans changed at the last minute when he hooked up for an impromptu tryst with a woman. He never made it to Tate’s house, and it saved his life.

  There is no question that God spared the life of Steve McQueen on that night.

  But why him and not the others?

  Who can say? As it is with your and mine, life is filled with so many twists, turns and, yes, unexpected tragedies like what happened to the occupants of 10050 Cielo Drive on August 9, 1969.

  This is hardly a new question.

  More than 2,000 years ago the disciples of Jesus asked Him about an incident in which Roman Governor Pontius Pilate had a group of men from Galilee murdered. Jesus responded, “Do you think those murdered Galileans were worse sinners than all other Galileans? Not at all. Unless you turn to God, you, too, will die.”

  This event did not happen to the victims that night because they were worse than anyone else. We are all sinners.

  Such horrible things happen because of the disease of sin that has permeated our planet since Adam and Eve, and because of evil people like Charles Manson and members of the so-called Manson Family, who did his evil bidding.

  This event did not happen to the victims that night because they were worse than anyone else. We are all sinners.

  The fact is that inexplicably bad things happen to good people—although the Bible makes, it clear, there are no truly good people—as well as bad people.

  Jesus Himself would soon stand before the very Pontius Pilate referenced above and be whipped, beaten, nailed to a cross and murdered in cold blood.

  Jesus’s point was that tragedies happen and innocent people suffer. Christ Himself was innocent of any crime, yet was murdered.

  The main point Jesus was making was, “Unless you turn to God, you, too, will die.”

  In other words, everyone dies. Some die old, some young; some from illness and others from old age; some from accidents and others from tragedy.

  The statistics on death are impressively immutable—100 percent of us will die. None of us knows how long our life on earth will last. So Jesus tells us to “Turn to God” while we can.

  Heartbreakingly for Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, Wojciech Frykowski, Steve Parent, Sharon Tate and her unborn child, August 9, 1969 was their last night on earth.

  Steve gave the eulogy at Sebring’s funeral a few days later. In the waistband of his suit pants was a handgun.

  But for Steve McQueen there would be another chance to make right choices.

  Steve gave the eulogy at Sebring’s funeral a few days later. In the waistband of his suit pants was a handgun. Like just about everyone else in Hollywood, the ghastly murders convinced McQueen that deranged hippies were out to get him, and in addition to going around packing heat, he turned The Castle into an armed camp with weapons stashed all over the place and had a state-of-the-art security system installed.

  It turned out that McQueen had cause to be spooked. When Charles Manson and his crazy band of long-haired misfits were arrested months later and put on trial, it was revealed that McQueen was on their celebrity kill list. So were Frank Sinatra, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and Tom Jones.

  So much for peace and love. The flower children and their visions of utopia were never real to begin with, just a drug-induced fantasy. The Manson Family served as the wake-up call.

  McQueen’s paranoia was probably justifiable under the circumstances; but it surely didn’t help that at the same time his use of illicit drugs escalated, and once again he was spinning out of control.

  Once again, God intervened in Steve McQueen’s life.

  Steve’s life would come to an end sooner then he expected as well.

  But not yet.

  From his first childhood bike to his fastest car, Steve was always on the move, both from and to something. At this point in his life and career, he was at the absolute pinnacle of success and global fame. It may not have been apparent yet to even him, but Steve was systematically discovering where the answers weren’t.

  Once again, God intervened in Steve McQueen’s life.

  He was never given a stable family with a loving mother and strong father. He was left at a very early age to his own devices to navigate life.

  Unbeknownst to himself, Steve McQueen was going through a process of elimination.

  So did I, but at an earlier age than Steve.

  I knew the answers were not in the alcoholic haze of my mother and her myriad of husbands and boyfriends and the “swinging” life they lived.

  Nor were they found in the drugs and counter-culture I immersed myself in as a teenager.

  So where, then, were the answers to life’s greatest questions?

  Mine would come on the campus of my high school.

  Steve’s would come in the cockpit of an antique airplane.

  THE MONSTER WITHIN

  _____

  As someone who grew up in less than ideal circumstances myself, I have empathy for anyone who survives a brutal childhood and am more inclined than most to try understanding questionable behavior. Up to a point.

  There is a rational explanation for Steve’s behavior at this time and for all of it to greater or lesser degrees. It’s because of a disease that first came from our parents and has spread through every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve.

  That disease is called sin.

  Sin darkens our heart and eats us up from the inside. Some seem to control it better than others, but ultimately sin controls us. And the focus of sin in our lives is to make us completely selfish people. We don’t care how our actions affect others, so naturally, we just think of ourselves.

  Part of the problem, as I see it, was that Steve fought so hard and for so long to reach the summit of the mountain, his determination to stay there made him even more ruthless.

  The adoration of the public certainly inflated his ego way out of proportion, creating a false sense of worth and entitlement. Fans went crazy to get his autograph or just eyeball him on the street. Flashbulbs popped whenever he ventured out in public. Calling McQueen a big Hollywood star at this point fails to adequately gauge the extent of his fame. Fundamentally, he was one of the most popular, most recognizable faces on the planet.

  There is a rational explanation for Steve’s behavior at this time and for all of it to greater or lesser degrees. It’s because of a disease that first came from our parents and has spread through every son of Adam and every daughter of Eve. That disease is called sin.

  To put in today’s celebrity culture, Steve McQueen was basically Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Johnny Depp all rolled into one.

  That kind of fame would be difficult for anyone to deal with. For someone like McQueen, it meant he increasingly turned to the things that gave him pleasure—friends, cars, bikes, family, drugs, women, and power. By then he’d essentially created a monster that needed to be constantly fed and appeased.

  In the first book of the Bible, God gave a warning to the proud and selfish Cain about his monstrous human nature. When the Lord accepted the offering of his brother Abel, but not his, Cain threw a fit. And God said to him, “Why this tantrum? Why the sulking? If you do well, won’t you be accepted? And if you don’t do well, sin is lying in wait for you, ready to pounce; it’s out to get you, you’ve got to master it” (Gen. 4:6–7 MSG).

  God was telling Cain that sin and the selfishness it brings is like a crouching beast, waiting to strike. You either master it, or it will master you. And at this point in his life, it appears that the monster got the better of Steve McQueen.

  This process began in mid-1970 when he decided to produce and star in a movie called Le Mans. It seems as though he could not make any sound decision regarding this particular film, and his selfishness wa
s at full wattage.

  To put in today’s celebrity culture, Steve McQueen was basically Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Johnny depp all rolled into one.

  Le Mans had no coherent story, and McQueen himself floundered trying to explain what he was going for. “The emphasis here is on film as a visual—I guess opposed to verbal,” he said. “We are also interested in reality.” When pressed for something more tangible, he shrugged and said, “The script is in my head.”

  Don calls the making of Le Mans “a bumpy ride for all of us and the strangest picture I worked on in three decades of filmmaking. It was not a fun experience.” Thanks mostly to McQueen.

  Confusion followed.

  Don Nunley served as the property master on this racing picture. He and I are meeting at Cupid’s Hot Dogs on Lindley Avenue in Northridge. Serving the Los Angeles area since 1946, Cupid’s signature chili dogs are legendary and actually have a connection to Le Mans.

  “Le Mans was filmed entirely on location in France,” Don says, “and it was originally supposed to be a simple, straightforward movie shot in six to eight weeks. It turned into a five-month nightmare of epic proportions, and we were all stressed.”

  One day, in an effort to lighten the tension, Don says the studio had a crate of Cupid’s chili dogs shipped from Los Angeles to the film set. “After attending a bloodless bullfight in a nearby town on a Sunday afternoon, we returned to Solar Village [the film’s headquarters] and chowed down,” Don says. “It was an entertaining diversion while it lasted.”

  Don calls the making of Le Mans “a bumpy ride for all of us and the strangest picture I worked on in three decades of filmmaking. It was not a fun experience.”

  Thanks mostly to McQueen.

  Le Mans was supposed to be his cinematic dream come true, but from the start it was a disaster. There were conflicts with original director John Sturges, personal excesses, budget woes, a war with the studio, a shutdown on the set, weeks of delays, and an accident that left one driver without a leg.