Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [121]
With all that was going on and the difficulty of the shoot, it took some time for Steve to warm up to Ali, which she did not especially appreciate. However, she played the good soldier and did whatever she thought she needed to do to help Steve get through.
That May, somehow a week ahead of schedule, the film’s final scene was shot; Papillon hugs Dega goodbye and makes his suicide leap into the ocean and his miracle escape on his homemade coconut-shell raft. The production needed the time that had been saved, as it faced a difficult postproduction schedule to make its December 1973 release date.
THAT OCTOBER, Ali and Steve moved together into a house that David Foster had found for them in Trancas, a quiet little beach community just beyond Malibu. At the time, it had two gas stations, one supermarket, and a honky-tonk bar. Along its main stretch of sand, Broad Beach, the houses are a little funky and a bit farther apart than the ones further south, and surfboarders regularly roamed the shore waters. Trancas provided just the kind of out-of-the-way privacy that Steve wanted. They could walk, unrecognized and undisturbed, along the beach together every afternoon. Steve liked to call it living in domestic bliss.
They had one phone line in the house, with one receiver, and Steve appointed himself the official voice of the household. He was serious about wanting to get away from making movies, from Hollywood, from everyone and everything except Ali. He still felt the emotional burn from Le Mans and the physical exhaustion from The Getaway.
Ali, who went along with all of this eagerly at first, had no intention of retiring, but she did tell her agent, Sue Mengers, to maybe cool it for a while until they were settled in. Mengers, for whom Steve had no love, nonetheless called almost every day, and one time heard Steve’s voice on the other end: “[Ali] works only with me on a project I’ll choose for both of us.” After that, he angrily slammed down the phone. He didn’t want Hollywood intruding on Trancas. Steve intended to keep a promise he had made to himself about not making any more worthless movies, and made Ali promise that she wouldn’t do any either.5 The only exception was if they found something of real quality that they wanted to make together. Ali agreed, to keep the peace, but she never intended to stop working. To both her amusement and annoyance, this was Steve’s version of being a husband, except they weren’t living in the year of the Pilgrims. Surely, she believed, the first good film that came along for either would put this fantasy to rest.
They had no live-in help, except for a Frenchwoman Ali hired to help her with Steve’s two children whenever they visited and with her son, Josh, whom she had had with Evans in 1971. She had custody of Josh, and he lived with Steve and Ali. They did the everyday household chores themselves. Steve canceled all mail deliveries, threw the mailbox that was outside the house into the Pacific, and canceled his post office box. Ali decorated the small house with homegrown flowers and candles and filled makeshift wooden shelves with her favorite books. She liked to listen to classical music on a small sound system in her part of the house while Steve watched television in his. They let their dogs run free, and kicked back. It was a lifestyle that, for Ali especially, couldn’t have been further away from the privileged princess role she had lived while married to Evans. For Steve it was a split from the rat race that he’d previously never been able to get ahead of. After the failure of Le Mans, he had found himself back in mainstream moviemaking like Papillon, but to him, that had little really to do with acting and everything to do with money, something that, after