Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [113]
The forty-year-old Evans had also gained a strong reputation as a ladies’ man and already had two failed marriages under his belt when he first noticed the coltish thirty-two-year-old Wellesley-educated Ford model Ali MacGraw in her strong debut as the rich and spoiled Jewish princess Brenda Patimkin in Larry Peerce’s 1969 surprise hit screen adaptation of Philip Roth’s novella Goodbye, Columbus. Evans immediately cast her in the much-sought-after role of the beautiful but doomed Jennifer Cavalleri in Arthur Hiller’s 1970 adaptation of the bestselling Love Story and at the same time asked her to marry him.3 The picture both catapulted MacGraw into superstardom and trapped her in an unhappy marriage with Evans, something both would live to regret.
According to MacGraw, writing in her memoir, “Just before the actual filming of Love Story began in the autumn of 1969, Bob asked me to marry him.… [T]he overriding feeling of the early days of my marriage to Bob was that we were in love, two highly successful people in a business that idolizes winners.… We apparently looked good enough together that people in Hollywood seemed to love the idea of us as a couple, part of the ultimate fantasy of the dream machine.”
Evans saw their marriage a little differently: “I had a great sex life with Ali until I married her, and I couldn’t fuck her once after our marriage. Couldn’t get it up.”
According to writer Peter Biskind, “Evans evinced a peculiar mixture of treacly Hallmark Card sentimentality that would flower in his romance with Ali MacGraw, and a self-destructive darkness that would lead him into murky waters way over his head.”
BY THE time Foster formally presented The Getaway to Paramount and Evans agreed to do it, several major and unexpected changes had already taken place with the project. First, Bogdanovich opted to exercise the escape clause in his contract in favor of writing and directing What’s Up, Doc? for Barbra Streisand at Warner Bros., a move that did not sit well with Foster. According to screenwriter Walter Hill: “Peter Bogdanovich and I were going to co-write a new draft, then Peter and Steve didn’t see eye-to-eye and suddenly Peter was no longer doing The Getaway.… I’d known Steve for a number of years. I’d worked with him on The Thomas Crown Affair and Bullitt and known him slightly socially. He seemed to lose his equilibrium after he and Neile split up.”
With Bogdanovich out, Steve and Foster turned to Peckinpah to direct. Peckinpah always needed money, especially now that he had just gotten married, for the third time, and wanted to move to Mexico as soon as possible (perhaps because of the tenuous legal status of his latest marriage). Steve and Foster offered him $225,000 and 10 percent of the film’s net profits to direct the film, with an extra 25 percent up front to do a rewrite. He agreed on the spot.4
Peckinpah was familiar with the Thompson novel and had wanted to get his hands on it for a long time. He hated Hill’s first-draft screenplay. The problem with Hill’s version, according to Peckinpah, was that Hill was too young to “get it,” and had “scrubbed away all the shadows and polished the story into a slick action vehicle.”
According to Hill, “Evans began pushing for his wife to play the lead opposite Steve, as a way of expanding her range.”5 Foster and Steve loved the idea of using MacGraw as well, not so much for her acting talent or to stretch her screen persona, but for her golden marquee value—“McQueen and MacGraw heat up the screen in The Getaway.”
However, Peckinpah, the film’s new director, preferred Stella Stevens, a barely known movie actress whose best previous role had been in Peckinpah’s 1970 flop western The Ballad of Cable Hogue. MacGraw, Foster argued, was the hottest