Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [123]
According to Ali, there were “blocks and blocks of time from my marriage to Steve that I cannot remember in any detail. My sense of it today is that we would go along peacefully for days on end, and then suddenly find ourselves in a horrible fight.… [O]ur worst fight resulted in Steve inadvertently backhanding me on the forehead, breaking open the skin next to my eyebrow.… After the encounter Steve was so upset that he decided that every time we had an argument it would be ‘safer’ for him to go into town to spend the night.”
Not long after their marriage, Steve rented a pied-à-terre for himself at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel similar to the one that Warren Beatty had there, and put $50,000 worth of redecoration into it to make it the perfect married man’s bachelor pad. According to Ali, a friend reported there were models and starlets going up to his apartment every time he was there. News of this confirmed what Ali feared—that their marriage was already failing. “In spite of the fact that we loved each other enormously, the situation was doomed by the phantoms of the past. Love was not enough.”
On December 16, 1973, a fully bearded and reluctant Steve, accompanied by a dazzling Ali, attended the Los Angeles premiere of Papillon. He hadn’t wanted to go; she’d insisted. He thought he was physically out of shape and emotionally out of touch with the business. He did it just for Ali, who really wanted to go.
The next day the film received mixed-to-negative reviews, with most critics dismissing Steve’s performance. Vincent Canby, in the New York Times, wrote that the film was “a big, brave, stouthearted, sometimes romantic, sometimes silly melodrama. As played by McQueen, Papillon is as all-American as a Rover Boy.”
Pauline Kael, in the New Yorker, said: “A monument to the eternal desire of movie makers to impress people and win awards. To put McQueen in a role that requires intense audience identification with the hero’s humanity is madness. McQueen is an amazing actor of considerable skill, but a reserved actor whose expressive resources are very small. If there ever was a wrong actor for a man of great spirit, it’s McQueen.”
Andrew Sarris and David Thomson stood nearly alone in their positive reviews of the film. Sarris, in the Village Voice, praised the director: “Schaffner has really made an exhilarating movie out of the most dangerously depressing material.” Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, wrote: “Papillon is not that good a film, but McQueen is very touching as the man who defies solitary confinement, madness and aging and becomes a wistful genius of survival.… [H]e has moments of inspired, heroic craziness.”
The film did phenomenal box office; clearly, people wanted to see Steve McQueen. Papillon earned nearly $55 million in its initial domestic release, making it the third-highest-grossing film of the year.7 Talk began that he was going to be nominated for and win his long-overdue Academy Award.
In early January, Steve was notified that he was nominated for a Best Actor Golden Globe. Steve replied that he would not attend the award ceremonies, and that if he won anything, they should mail it to him.
A few weeks later, the Golden Globe for Best Actor went to Robert Redford, for his performance in The Sting. Redford showed up in person, tanned and smiling and appreciative, to accept it.
Papillon was nominated for only one Oscar, for Best Original Score, which Jerry Goldsmith won.
Despite Ali’s urging him to take her to the Oscars, this time Steve did not, nor did he attend himself.
NOT LONG after, Steve, still plagued with financial troubles, asked Freddie Fields to come up with a deal so big that it would be the last film Steve McQueen would ever have to make.8 Fields quickly found several First Artists deals for Steve, among them one called The Johnson County War to be directed by newcomer Michael Cimino (who would not get the picture made until 1980, as Heaven’s Gate, which became one of the