Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [11]
Steven remembered the incident this way: “They put me on the stage with a girl—a dilettante from Long Island—and we were supposed to improvise an argument. Well, she hit me. I didn’t expect it. She hit me hard and I couldn’t stand it. I hit back as hard as I could and knocked her cold. Man, it was Panicksville!” Afterward, an enthused Meisner urged Steven to stay with it, and told him that he would even help him try to get some acting work to help pay his rent.
By the summer of 1952 Steven, with Meisner’s assistance, had landed a small role in a Jewish repertory company on the Lower East Side that featured the legendary Yiddish actress Molly Picon. He had four lines of dialogue—in Yiddish, which took him forever to learn. He never could master the accent and was fired after four performances, but it was a start, and not long after, with Steven’s stint at the Neighborhood Playhouse coming to an end, Meisner urged him to try out for the prestigious and even-harder-to-get-into Herbert Berghof Studio.
Berghof, born in Vienna and educated at the University of Vienna and then the Vienna State Academy of Dramatic Art, where he had studied with the great Max Reinhardt, had been forced to flee from the Nazis in 1939. He relocated in New York City, where he became a Broadway star. In 1945 he created his acting school (joined later by his wife, the equally talented and successful Uta Hagen), intended as a lab for highly trained working professionals to practice their craft between gigs. Steven, the sum of whose professional acting consisted of a couple of nights badly impersonating a Jew in the Yiddish theater, not only was accepted by Berghof but, on the basis of his audition and Meisner’s enthusiastic recommendation, was offered a full scholarship, all living expenses paid, which, of course, he eagerly accepted.
SUMMERTIME FOR New York actors in the 1950s meant summer stock. They spread out to rural towns and burgs where residents otherwise rarely got a chance to see live theater. In June 1953, Steven was cast opposite former child star Margaret O’Brien, a onetime Oscar winner, who found little demand for her services as an adult, in the J. Hartley Manners turn-of-the-century chestnut Peg o’ My Heart.5 Steven was her leading man. He listed himself as Steve in the program, the name he now preferred. On opening night stage fright got the better of him and he forgot most of his lines, leading him to think seriously about giving up acting and going back to being Steven.
He didn’t, though, and continued to land summer acting jobs that often turned into national tours stretching into the fall and through the holiday season. After a handful of auditions in the spring of 1954, Steve landed a part in a show called The Geep, produced by Jack Garfein, a new play that never made it to Broadway.6 A brief stint in a tour of Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding, starring Ethel Waters, quickly followed, and that same year he was cast in the national tour of Time Out for Ginger, a comedy about a middle-class suburban family turned upside down when its teenage daughter wants to try out for the high school football team. The play starred Melvyn Douglas as the father. For $175 a week, Steve agreed to replace Conrad Janis as one of the football players. Janis had originated the small but effective part on Broadway but did not want to tour. The rest of the New York cast remained intact, including Douglas. In the first real review of Steve’s acting, one local critic named Samuel Wilson wrote that “Mr. McQueen lampoons the star athlete of the school in a couple of turns.”
However, things quickly turned sour for Steve because something about him—his cockiness, or perhaps his charisma—irritated Douglas, and the aging star insisted McQueen be fired.