Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [116]
As filming drew to a close, Steve remained unsatisfied with the way the dailies looked and decided he had to take over from Peckinpah and put together the final negative cut himself. As one of the producers, he had the contractual right to do so, but it did not endear him to Peckinpah. “McQueen’s playing it safe,” Peckinpah later said. “He chose all these playboy, pretty boy shots of himself.”
Steve also decided he didn’t like the music of Peckinpah’s favorite composer, Jerry Fielding. He fired Fielding and replaced him with Quincy Jones, further enraging Peckinpah.
Tension during the last days of shooting was high enough, but it was about to increase with the arrival of Bob Evans, who by now had read all the stories in the tabloids about his wife’s steamy romance with Steve, the biggest illicit Hollywood affair since Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. “He had to know,” Foster said later. “Every day there were helicopters filled with paparazzi flying above us, and I began to dread getting that call from a furious Bob Evans.” Sure enough, Evans, finally able to free himself from the long hours of postproduction on The Godfather, called to tell Foster he was coming down to get Ali and bring her back home, finished picture or no finished picture. Foster told Steve, who wanted no part of facing Evans, and he asked Foster to break the news to Evans about what was going on between him and Ali. Foster refused, and it was left to Ali to be the one to tell her husband that everything he’d read was true.
At the hotel near the Mexican border where Evans was staying, he and Ali had it out. She broke down in tears and confessed to Evans that she was in love with McQueen. Evans then went to Foster, who pleaded for just twenty-four more hours to wrap the film, which Evans agreed to let him have before he pulled his leading lady for good even if the production still needed her. Evans then assigned a chaperone to stick close to his wife every minute she was off-set those last hours. For the entire time of Evans’s visit, whenever Steve finished a take, he disappeared and was nowhere to be found.
Not everyone sympathized with Evans’s playing the cuckold. Frank Yablans, the head of Paramount distribution and someone who was very close personally to Evans, had this take on the McQueen-MacGraw affair: “Evans pushed them together. He created the breakup with Ali, the public cuckolding. ‘Bob, you’re gonna lose your wife. These two are going at it hot and heavy,’ to which he said, ‘It’s just a passing thing.’ He didn’t give a shit. It didn’t matter to him. He’s a very strange man. He couldn’t be married, couldn’t live a normal sane life. He drove her out.” Evans’s version was a little different: “My wife was fucking another guy, and I had no idea. She has as much interest in being with me as being with a leper. She was looking at me and thinking of Steve McQueen’s cock.”
Before he left, Evans had a talk with Peckinpah, whom he had never liked for the film, and that also did not go well. Peckinpah, already fed up with everyone involved in the project, failed to commiserate with Evans, who, already frustrated at not being able to get his hands on Steve, blew his stack on Peckinpah. “Fuck you, Sam,” he said. “McQueen is fucking me in the ass. Well, the fuckin’ is over. If there was going to be any fuckin’ it’s gonna be me doin’ it.”8
The next day, exactly twenty-four hours after he set the deadline, which Foster managed to meet, Evans sent a car for Ali that took her to Murrieta Hot Springs in California. Evans had arranged a two-week vacation for her to get away from everyone, including himself.