Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [117]
Nothing helped. She was hopelessly in love with McQueen and intended to divorce Evans so she could be with him.
AN ON-SET affair is one thing; leaving one’s husband for another man at film’s completion is quite another. Production romances almost always end when the film shuts down (Steve McQueen and Jacqueline Bisset, for example) and people return to their “real” lives. With Steve and Ali, however, it was different. They got even hotter and heavier after the picture was finished, and when they returned to L.A., they were inseparable.
Still, no one in the Hollywood community could quite figure why this lovely, educated, elegant woman would be attracted to a rough cut like Steve. The consensus among her friends was a resounding “Don’t do it.” According to Sue Mengers, her agent at the time, “Ali was a saint, Steve was a prick.”
According to writer Sheila Weller, it was the very nature of their opposite upbringings that made Steve and Ali love each other so intensely. “She was the biggest female star of the year: he was the biggest movie star in the world. She was a Wellesley-educated aesthete who fantasized about living in Paris … he was a motorcycle-racing reform-school kid who had worked as a towel boy in a brothel and had spent 41 days in the brig as a marine and generally had the kind of street cred Jack Kerouac would have killed for. Theirs was one of the great love affairs of the past century.”
Perhaps the most revealing explanation came from Ali herself: “It was very, very passionate, and dramatic, and hurtful and ecstatic.… It happened at a time when psychoanalysis and therapy were considered self-indulgent, he had no way to deal with [his lifelong] pain but to drink … all the pain and loneliness festering inside while his pride kept him from revealing his vulnerability … On the one hand there was the angry, physically violent authority figure, and on the other there was a gentle, elegant loner, a kind of mysterious genius, the romantic genius with troubled eyes, capable of equal amounts of unpredictable rage and tenderness at a moment’s notice.”
Only that was not about Steve. It was about her father.
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1 One of the many scripts he turned down during this interim was Play Misty for Me, yet another Clint Eastwood film that came to Steve first. He didn’t like it, a friend said, because the woman had a stronger role in it than the man. The script then went to Eastwood, who in 1971 starred in and directed it for Malpaso. It became one of the biggest films of the year.
2 There are more, if less obvious, echoes of Bonnie and Clyde. In Arthur Penn’s movie, there is an extended interlude with an innocent couple taken hostage in the midst of the action. The couple, played by Gene Wilder and Evans Evans, are vividly reprised by another innocent kidnapped couple in The Getaway, played by Sally Struthers and Jack Dodson.
3 It was Evans’s third marriage and MacGraw’s second (she had already been married to and divorced from Robin Hoen). Evans had been previously married to Sharon Hugueny (1961–62) and Camilla Sparv (1963–65). He would be married a total of seven times.
4 Thompson later filed a grievance with the Writers Guild of America, demanding equal screen credit as co-writer. The WGA rejected his claim and Walter Hill received sole credit, although everyone involved with the making of the film agrees that Peckinpah and Steve deserved co-credit for the amount of changes they made to Hill’s original script.
5 It remains unclear whose idea it really was to cast MacGraw. MacGraw claims that it was Steve’s idea. Peckinpah’s biographer says it was Foster who wanted to put her in the movie. Foster says he’s not sure where the idea came from.
6 MacGraw agreed to defer her salary in exchange for 7.5 percent of the picture’s net profits. “MacGraw made the right move, since with advanced bookings of more than double its negative cost The Getaway made money before it even opened.” David Weddle, If They Move … Kill ’Em! (New York: Grove Press, 2001), p. 441.
7 Peckinpah was