Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [128]
Steve, meanwhile, after finishing The Towering Inferno, had let himself go. He stopped working out and, with all the beer and junk food he was so fond of, quickly started putting on a lot of weight. For the first time in his life, he had a noticeable beer belly. Believing movies were no longer a part of his life, he saw no reason to keep himself in shape.
Film, to Steve, was a young man’s game. He was rich again from The Towering Inferno and still famous, but what had seemed reasonable to him at twenty-seven seemed silly at forty-seven. He didn’t want to or have the need to descend into the kind of roles that older, less wealthy actors in Hollywood had to settle for and humiliate themselves with, like William Holden in The Towering Inferno. Steve never liked to work that hard, and he wasn’t narcissistic enough to want to work to hold on to his looks. To him fat meant rich. He just wanted to sleep, eat, ride his bike, take drugs, and have sex with girls; there wasn’t a lot of room in there for anything as difficult as serious filmmaking. Besides, he’d gone to the top of his game; the only direction left was down.
The problems between Ali and Steve were many and complicated, not always obvious, and ultimately unfixable. Besides his distance, moodiness, and obsessive womanizing, the issues raised by their distinct career goals proved insurmountable. Ali was eight years younger than Steve, on the outskirts of her thirties, a time when most actresses and especially those who had begun as print models began to fall away from the Hollywood spotlight. But not Ali. She had aged beautifully; her face had gained a certain maturity that would allow her to play roles with more depth and believability than spoiled brats or lovesick college girls. At thirty-nine, she was still quite marketable as a film star. That’s where the lines were finally drawn in the sands of their marriage. She could no longer bear this decidedly ungilded cage that she had allowed herself to be put into.
As she later put it, “The early warning that my marriage with Steve was going to have its rocky times was his insistence that I sign that prenuptial agreement, because, he said, his first wife, Neile, had taken an enormous amount of money from him when they divorced. Personally, I did not think that was true at all. She had given up a promising career as a dancer and spent sixteen years bringing up their two children and holding his hand through the early days of his career.… I was caught up in the fantasy that we were so much in love that divorce was not an issue.”
Ali was no Neile; she wasn’t willing to give up her career, and she grew increasingly eager to rejoin the living, as it were, to continue to make movies and enjoy the glamorous life of a movie star. Whether it was Evans in his wildly ornate Beverly Hills mansion or Steve’s hiding-from-the-law glorified shack, she’d had enough of being the prisoner of a powerful man. She’d had enough of making sure Steve’s dinner was on the table at six sharp, meat and potatoes every night, so that he could eat with the kids in front of the TV. She preferred eating later by candlelight, in “a pathetic attempt to be civilized,” while Steve went off on a post-meal motorcycle ride around Trancas and Mulholland, and was in bed by eight, just as she was putting