Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [106]
This time she told him.9
Steve then sat her in a hard wood chair and gave her his version of the third degree—where it had happened, who had spoken first, who had picked whom up, who had wanted it. And then, while admonishing her, he began to hit her, punching and jabbing and smacking her in the face, until she confessed that she had liked sleeping with the other man.
When he was finally finished, he left her in that chair, beaten up, bloody, and sobbing. He ran out of the house, got into his Porsche, and shot out of the driveway. He returned at six that morning, contrite and apologetic, with tears running down his face. The drugs had apparently worn off and he’d realized what he had done.
According to Neile, in her memoir, this scene was repeated several nights in a row: Steve would get high, grill her, hit her, leave, and come back with his tail between his legs. Not long after, Steve went to Bob Relyea and calmly asked him if he could hire the actor Neile had named. As it happened, he was unavailable, which probably saved his life.
BACK ON the set, Sturges was becoming increasingly fed up with Steve’s behavior. He was not a documentary-style filmmaker, and hadn’t bargained for having to make something that was uncomfortably close to that style of moviemaking. He kept asking an increasingly surly and sullen Steve where the human element was in the film.
Soon enough, Relyea, Bob Rosen, who was Cinema Center’s man on-set, and Sturges got together and decided to shut the film down again until they could all settle on a plot. Steve abruptly took off with Neile and the kids to Morocco. Sturges then quit the film. The next day Cinema Center hired TV director Lee H. Katzin to finish it, without consulting either Relyea, Fields, or Steve.
When Steve finally returned to the set to resume production it was already August, and the cost overruns had reached the $6 million limit; any additional costs would, by agreement, have to come out of Solar, which meant Steve’s personal money. Bill Maher, who had already once saved the company from bankruptcy with his idea to take it public, was waiting for Steve. This time the news was worse than before. Solar could not be saved. To prevent total financial disaster for both the company and for Steve personally, it had to be dismantled. Steve agreed, said nothing to anybody, and quietly finished the movie.
After, that, he blamed almost everything that had gone wrong on Bob Relyea, accused Relyea of betraying him, and told him they were finished. They would never work together or speak again.
IN AUGUST 1970, Neile found out that she was pregnant.
Steve didn’t believe it was his.
The next week she flew to London and had an abortion.
Upon her return to Los Angeles she decided to get some help. She went to a marriage counselor, who immediately suggested they get separate psychiatrists, which they did, but Steve’s physical violence toward her and the emotional battering continued. Finally, she decided they had to separate, but when she tried to discuss it with Steve, he just moved out, finding a small guesthouse in the Pacific Palisades. It had none of the accoutrements of the Castle, but it did serve to at least get him out of there and away from his wife and kids.
No sooner had he unpacked his things than he called Neile. Not long after, they were dating again, three times a week.
LE MANS had taken a year and a half to make and cost $10 million (more than $50 million in today’s dollars). Steve did not participate in the postproduction, and when he saw a screening of the film in its finished form, he knew that Sturges had been right all along: it had desperately needed a real story to tie all the racing sequences together. In a moment of rare humility, Steve personally apologized to Bob Rosen, Cinema Center’s man, for all that had gone wrong with the film—but to no one else.
The premiere was held June 23, 1971, in Indianapolis, home of the Indy 500. Not surprisingly, the movie was not well received by the critics. In the New York Times, Howard Thompson wrote, “Racing-car