Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [127]
9 The Poseidon Adventure‘s star-studded cast of past Oscar winners included Shelley Winters, Gene Hackman, Red Buttons, and Ernest Borgnine, surrounded by a tier of second-level faces—Stella Stevens, Carol Lynley, Pamela Sue Anderson, Jack Albertson, and others. The fun of these movies is to figure out who dies first by calculating the stars’ name value. The bigger the name, the longer the star lives.
10 Both authors claimed their books were based on the construction of the World Trade Center towers in New York City and what would happen if a fire ever broke out in one of them.
11 Steve McQueen came first, Paul Newman second but higher, William Holden and Faye Dunaway were third and fourth, each one successively lower than Paul Newman.
12 The film ends with the fire chief (McQueen) telling the architect (Newman), “You know, they’ll keep building them higher and higher. And I’ll keep eatin’ smoke until one of you guys asks us how to build ’em.” The architect replies, “Okay, I’m asking.” The fire chief replies, in close-up, “You know where to find me. So long, architect.” The scene also gave audiences the chance to finally see whose eyes were bluer.
13 Second was Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles ($100 million), followed by Brooks’s Young Frankenstein ($86 million), Mark Robson’s Earthquake ($79 million), and Roman Polanski’s Chinatown ($29 million), the last produced by Bob Evans.
An early publicity photo.
Ali MacGraw is a good wife for me. We’re both actors, but neither of us is a great, big, fat talent, and she’s not all wild-eyed about her career, which suits me fine.
—STEVE MCQUEEN
THREE YEARS PASSED, WITH STEVE AND ALI DOING LITTLE together that took them outside of the confines of the Trancas bunker or the house in Palm Springs. Except for occasional errands and Steve’s forays alone to his bachelor pad at the Beverly Wilshire, which he explained to Ali was his “much-needed office” to keep business out of their home, they lived the lives of rich beach hippies. Steve loved it but Ali didn’t, and she grew increasingly disenchanted with both it and Steve, who imposed it on her and kept his thumb tightly pressed down on any career offers that came her way.
And there were many. She was, after all, still one of the biggest movie stars in the world, and even though she hadn’t made a film since 1973, the three films she had starred in—Goodbye, Columbus; Love Story; and The Getaway—had grossed more than $200 million, a very impressive figure.
She was, in fact, a bigger star than Steve. In 1975, he had benefited enough from The Towering Inferno’s popularity to place ninth on the list of the top ten most popular movie stars as determined by theater exhibitors, but it would be his last time on it.1 Ali no longer listed because she had not had any new product in the theaters, but everybody in the business still wanted her and scripts arrived by messenger to the house all the time. At first, immediately following The Towering Inferno, she didn’t even look at any of them. However, as time passed and the children no longer needed her constant attention, she began to feel even more stifled in her environment, and thought about returning to films as a way to escape this sandbox life with a husband who was increasingly domineering, distant, and nonverbal. It was as if the two were living together separately.
When Steve sensed there was a problem between them, he suggested they have a baby together. It almost happened, but during the making of The Towering Inferno, while sitting with Steve between takes, Ali had found herself suddenly sitting in a pool of blood. She was miscarrying. “I never even knew I was pregnant. It was very disturbing, and Steve in particular was upset. He always felt that if we had a child, we could save our marriage. Alas, I didn’t think so. We were headed for a terrible collision and having a baby would only have created one more child whose foundation would be severely rocked, as our children’s had been.”
Ali’s agent, Sue Mengers, kept urging her to come back to work, telling