Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [118]
8 There were nearly as many real-life twists and double-crosses connected to The Getaway as there were in the movie. As part of her exclusive deal, MacGraw had wanted to make a movie out of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby with Evans producing and Steve starring as Gatsby opposite her Daisy. That did not happen. The film was made in 1974 at Paramount, directed by Jack Clayton, starring Mia Farrow and Robert Redford.
Me a legend? You wanna know what a legend is, look at Duke Wayne. Me? I’m just a dirty old man who can’t wait to get out of here and go play in the dirt.
—STEVE MCQUEEN
THE GETAWAY WAS SO FULL OF OFFSCREEN DRAMA THAT nobody made much of one incident buried among the others. Midway through the shoot, Steve developed a hoarseness in his throat that turned into a regular cough he could not get rid of. He was talking to Neile every day on the phone, mostly about the children, and she noticed something different in the sound of his voice. She advised him to stop smoking cigarettes and grass, to which he replied that he had to have some way of winding down at night. And he couldn’t stop production to go to a doctor, he said, but he assured her he had seen the production nurse, who’d given him a packet of aspirin and told him to drink some hot tea with honey as often as he could.
When the hoarseness and cough persisted, Steve called his regular doctor in Beverly Hills, who gave him the name of a top ear, nose, and throat man at the University of Texas Medical Center. Steve never liked missing a day’s shoot, for reasons of pride on someone else’s film and pocketbook on his own. Not wanting to do so now, he reluctantly called the doctor and got him to agree to stay late at the hospital. After shooting for a full day, Steve, Ali, and David Foster drove the hour and a half from San Marcos to the medical center in Austin.
During the examination, the doctor found a small nodule on Steve’s vocal cords and told him he should have it removed as soon as filming ended. Steve, by now thoroughly immersed in his role, replied as if he were Doc McCoy: “Give it to me straight, Doc. Do I have the Big C?” The doctor smiled and told him no, he did not have the Big C, but that he should give up smoking. It was 1972 and Steve was forty-two years old.
Two days after he finished shooting The Getaway, Steve returned to Los Angeles and underwent surgery for the removal of several polyps in his throat. Ali was not there; Freddie Fields was present, and so was Neile, both of whom waited nervously in the hospital coffee shop during the entire operation.
JUNIOR BONNER opened August 2, 1972, after all the major summer releases, and grossed a paltry $2,306,120 in its first year of worldwide release. It was not a complete disaster because it had cost so little to make, but in no way could it be considered a hit. Coming after the mild box office receipts for The Reivers and the disastrous Le Mans, it was clear that Steve’s career had cooled off considerably since Bullitt.1 He and Foster were both hoping The Getaway would turn things around and restore Steve’s box office popularity.
Archer Winsten, writing for the New York Post, said that “McQueen has a chance to do a lot of what he does so well; nothing much while he thinks about some action that has happened or will. He keeps it all in focus with those steady blue eyes of his. A hero