Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [114]
After much persuasion, Peckinpah finally gave in and agreed to MacGraw starring in the picture. All they had to do now was get her to be in it.
Evans invited Foster and Steve over to his mansion to help them push for MacGraw, who was apprehensive about meeting Steve in person. They had never met, but MacGraw had seen him in Bullitt and hadn’t forgotten the effect he had had on her.
According to MacGraw, “It was one of the very rare times in my life, especially in my grown-up years, when I left the movie theater with my knees knocking for the star. Whatever it is that Star is about, Steve had it onscreen. And, I was later to find out, in [that] room, I knew [if I made The Getaway] I was going to get in some serious trouble with Steve. There would be no avoiding it. He was recently separated and free, and I was scared of my own overwhelming attraction to him.” By the end of the night, Foster officially offered Ali the role of Carol, and she accepted.
Ali was perhaps the best Method actress of all. She had had an affair with Ryan O’Neal during Love Story and had a reputation of having slept with every leading man she played opposite, maybe to help her find the romantic reality of her characters. She was a woman attracted to wealth and power, mostly men like Evans, while at the same time a woman in need of what they couldn’t give her. Working with Steve, Ali knew, was going to be a sexual time bomb waiting to explode.
During the last days of postproduction on The Godfather, Paramount’s big gamble on period gangsterism that Evans was sure was not going to do anything at the box office (a feeling not helped by early negative audience reaction), he was stuck in New York City with the film, while his wife was jumping into bed with Steve McQueen every chance she got.
HOWEVER, before filming even began, Evans put The Getaway into turnaround. He may have begun to suspect his wife’s heated attraction to Steve, or perhaps he was unhappy over the loss of Bogdanovich as director. Whatever the reason, it relieved Paramount of any further obligation to make the film.
To Foster and Steve, losing Paramount was a setback but not a disaster. Evans, who had signed MacGraw to an exclusive three-picture deal with Paramount, of which Love Story was the first, let her stay with the project no matter where it landed—if it landed—in return for her agreed-upon $300,000 salary (to be paid to Paramount as part of a loan-out deal) plus all of the film’s net earnings in Germany, where Steve was a huge star.
Steve, meanwhile, still owed First Artists three pictures. With Foster’s okay, he decided to take The Getaway there.
Their offer was not what Foster had hoped for but he accepted it. There was a ceiling on what any of its founding members could spend for a First Artists film, which was $3 million, and all the profits were shared among them. Because of these budget restrictions, the actors only brought films to First Artists that every other studio had already turned down. Obviously, if they could get a better deal elsewhere, they would (only one other First Artists film ever made any money—Sidney Poitier’s Uptown Saturday Night [1974], after which the company folded. Had The Getaway been made today, Steve would have walked away with at least $25 million, in star-salary and percentages alone, even without also producing the film).
Just before Steve arrived in Texas to begin shooting, he had to take care of some difficult and unfinished personal business, signing the papers that finalized his divorce. When it had become painfully clear to him that there was no way he could salvage his marriage, on March 14, 1972, he gave in and signed all the necessary papers, ending his fifteen-and-a-half-year marriage to Neile.
She signed off on it two weeks later, on April 26, 1972, for a $1 million settlement and $500,000 alimony and child support every year for the next ten years. She received custody of both children