Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [115]
The press played up the divorce as the final, sad act of what had once been one of Hollywood’s brightest fairy-tale couples. A sympathetic Joyce Haber wrote in her syndicated column, “If you ask me, the other party wasn’t a woman, but rather one of Steve’s bikes or racing cars!”
At a party at Richard Chamberlain’s house shortly after the divorce, Neile told April Ferry, the wife of Steve Ferry and one of her oldest friends, reaching all the way back to when they were both on Broadway in Kismet, “I got a million dollars from that son of a bitch.” To which Ferry replied, “You deserve more.”
Neile’s brave face and catty words could not hide the pain of the truth that she and Steve were finished, their fifteen-plus-year marriage over for good.
THE SHOOTING schedule for The Getaway was set at sixty-two days, with a budget of $2,826,954, which fit just under the First Artists budget allowance. (When the film ran $300,000 over budget—the negative cost came to $3,352,254—with Evans’s permission Ali graciously forfeited her salary, but Paramount still kept Germany).6 Production began February 28, 1972, on location, first at Huntsville for a few days, then in San Antonio for the last five weeks.
Steve wasted no time making his move on Ali, who was more than receptive to him. Almost immediately, they began a blazing, we-don’t-care-who-knows-it love affair while still in Huntsville. (Foster, one of Steve’s best friends, and who was with them for virtually the entire on-location shoot, claims he was oblivious to any of it until he read about it in the tabloids.) According to Ali, “I was obsessed with Steve from the moment he stepped into my world, and there was never enough air for me to breathe to change that feeling. He was very taken with me, too, although I wasn’t necessarily his dream lady, physically.… [F]or the next three months of filming I walked the nasty razor’s edge between occasional moments of sanity and remorse on the one side and, on the other, feverish excitement.”
Even from the earliest days, when the two lovers were in their deepest mutual heat, Steve—as always, fueled by coke, pot, and beer—could not resist his desire, or need, to have sex with as many groupies lingering on-set as he could manage, and he made no attempt to conceal any of these liaisons from Ali.
“One night [in San Antonio] we went together to a small local party,” Ali later recalled. “Halfway through the evening, sufficiently loaded, he began carrying on with two local beauties right in front of me. I was livid, and left the party. Later that night Steve returned, and I could hear him in his apartment next door with the two girls. It was excruciating. The next morning he sauntered out onto his front step and casually asked if I wanted to come and make him breakfast. And the amazing thing is, I went in and cooked it. He had a kind of spell over me, with all of his macho swaggering … for a while I found it sexy. Here I was, out in the wilds of Texas with the man’s man of all time.”
The film proved a difficult shoot for all the principals, both on and off the screen. MacGraw, for instance, could not drive a car, which made the scenes in which she had to be the getaway car driver extremely challenging. In another scene, Steve, as Doc, insanely jealous despite Carol’s having followed his instructions to get him sprung by sleeping with Benyon, improvised his fury by slapping Ali around, on her face and across her body. The scene was eerily reminiscent of Steve’s violent attacks on Neile. The set went silent when Peckinpah finally called cut and then everyone broke out in applause. The take made it into the final cut.
Peckinpah and Steve, meanwhile, despite their loyalty and camaraderie, were increasingly at odds over the amount of violence in the film (Steve was upset at how much violent screen time Lettieri was getting)7 and how