Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [12]
IN 1955 Steve landed the male lead in a new off-Broadway production, Two Fingers of Pride, which co-starred Sam Jaffe, but it soon closed and with nothing else happening, Steve decided to return to class. Because he was now a “working actor,” meaning he had actually earned money for his work, he was eligible to try out for the mecca of training schools, Lee Strasberg’s Actors Studio, where the acceptance rate was about one out of two hundred.
For his audition, Steve put together a monologue from Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy, a Group Theater production about a young violinist who really wants to be a prizefighter, a role that had made a star out of William Holden in the Rouben Mamoulian 1939 film version. The so-called park scene monologue was a popular one among young male actors, and it served Steve well; he was personally accepted into the Studio by Strasberg, who was impressed, as Meisner and Berghof before him had been, with Steve’s easy, strong, youthful energy and a certain mumbling, indefinable quality that made him a perfect fit for the classroom stylistics of the Method.
For Steve, the Studio was a great place to study and find new girls and more work. Offers to work on live TV were plentiful, as agents regularly dropped in to observe classwork and were always impressed with his acting and presence, as they forever trolled the waters for the next Marlon Brando.
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1 Tinker and Ford were likely paid recruiters.
2 Various sources claim that Steve starred in a series of porno films there. None have been reliably authenticated.
3 According to Neile McQueen Toffel, McQueen’s first wife, the discharge came exactly three weeks before the outbreak of the Korean War, in which his entire former outfit was wiped out in combat. Toffel, My Husband, My Friend, p. 12.
4 Strasberg, for instance, relied on the actor’s recalling a parallel experience in his own life to find the essential reality in the character he was playing, while Adler relied less on sense memory than exploring the reality of the character’s moment. Meisner’s technique emphasized working off an actor’s partner in a scene, to act by reacting—what he called “living truthfully under imaginary circumstances.”
5 1944—“Outstanding Child Actress” for her performance in Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis.
6 Frequently and incorrectly reported as Gep, or The Gep.
I’m not a prodigy of the beat generation. I’ve knocked around a lot, and there’s nothing very romantic in it. Responsibility toward my profession is something I’ve learned just recently.… If I hadn’t become an actor I might have gone the other way—into an anti-social life, possibly a life of crime.
—STEVE MCQUEEN
LIKE STEVE, RUBY NEILAM SALVADOR ADAMS, OR NEILE, as everyone called her, never met her father. She was the daughter of a Manila-based woman of German and Spanish descent by the name of Carmen Salvador, known professionally as Miami, a hula star. In 1932, when Miami was twenty, she met a handsome stranger of English, Filipino, and Chinese origin, became pregnant, and married him. Unfortunately, he was already married to someone else, and that was the end of that.
Whenever Miami worked the islands, she left Neile with relatives in Manila. The nine-year-old child was caught there when the Japanese attacked it and Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. A month later, the Japanese occupied Manila.
Six months after, Neile returned to school and soon became a child spy for the Philippine underground. “I spoke five languages so it was my job to carry messages from one band of guerrillas to another. Children were never searched and there was usually something to eat as a reward.” In 1945, during the island’s liberation by Allied forces, Neile suffered shrapnel wounds in one of her legs. After the war, Miami returned to Manila and sent Neile off to the States to attend Rosemary