Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [122]
Meanwhile, Steve enrolled Terry and Chad in a local school, and Neile was very easygoing about it. Steve wanted to keep all the kids, including Ali’s son, Josh, whom he treated like one of his own, as far away from Beverly Hills as possible. He often took Chad motorcycling on weekends in Palm Springs. “I tried to raise him as a real kid,” Steve said later. “He likes to ride in the desert and he bought his own bike, a Yamaha 60-cc Mini Enduro, out of his own pocket money.… I grounded him for eight weeks earlier this year when his grades got sloppy. He’s shaped up nice since then. Christ, riding has got to be good for a kid. I was stealing cars at his age.”
As David Foster remembered, “He never wanted Ali to work, no matter what. Barefoot and pregnant, as the expression goes, was how he wanted to keep her, a glorious housewife all to himself hidden away from the world.” To ensure they never found that perfect script, Steve told Freddie Fields he wouldn’t even look at one unless there was a half-million-dollar “reading fee” paid to him directly and in advance.6
He took to calling Ali his “old lady.” “They lived a simple life,” according to Foster. “She put meat and potatoes in front of him every night at six. He didn’t want her to work so she didn’t”—all of which made her agent, Sue Mengers, even more furious, as Ali was the number one female star in America and a huge earner for Mengers.
Not surprisingly, after a while, listening to Bach, breathing salt air, peeling vegetables, and “living tranquil in Trancas,” as the local expression went, morphed into a mild ennui for Ali, but whenever she brought up the idea that she might work again, Steve would blow a gasket and remind her of their pledge. Ali would counter with the fact that since they weren’t married, she had no security, no assurances, nothing, and that she needed to work as a form of insurance, so she had some money in the bank in case they ever split up. One night in July 1973 “we had a terrific fight,” Ali later recalled, “and Steve said, ‘Okay, baby—if you want to get married, it’s tomorrow or never. That’s it.’ ”
She called his bluff, if that’s what it was, and the next day, Steve packed Ali and the kids into a car, drove to a nearby airport, flew them all to Cheyenne, Wyoming, rented a truck, and drove the bunch to the nearest Holiday Inn. Steve chose Wyoming because to Steve the name sounded “very cowboy-romantic.” According to Ali, “Steve and Chad slept in one bed, Terry, Steve’s daughter, and I in the other. Josh in a crib in the middle.”
On July 12, 1973, Steve and Ali were married in a public park by a local justice of the peace, the Honorable Arthur Garfield, whose name Steve had picked out of the local phone book. The ceremony was witnessed by Steve’s son, Chad, thirteen, his daughter, Terry, fourteen, and Ali’s son Josh, two and a half years old.
But not before Steve at the last minute produced a prenuptial document he made Ali sign right then and there. It said, in effect, that if they divorced, she waived any claim to his money. When he made it clear to Ali that he would not go ahead with the marriage unless she signed, she shrugged, put pen to paper, and gave the document back to him. Then they exchanged their vows in front of Judge Garfield. That same day they flew back to Trancas.
Now they played the happily married couple for a while. She cooked and took care of the kids; they all hiked together around Trancas and occasionally planned hikes up at Big Sur, during which Steve wanted to have a picnic, serving only army rations. On some weekends Steve liked to go for rides with the Hell’s Angels and hang out with them afterward. One night while Ali and Steve were alone in Big Sur, Steve invited a bunch of Hell’s Angels and their “old ladies” over to where they were staying, and one of the “old ladies” stole Ali’s bathing suit.
Another time the two invited the Reagans