Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [129]
On the rare occasions when he did engage in meaningful conversation with Ali, it was more often than not some kind of put-down. “Baby,” he said to her on one occasion, “you have a great ass, but you’d better start working out now, because I don’t want to wake up one day with a woman who’s got an ass like a 70-year-old Japanese soldier.”
Although MacGraw signed up for exercise classes the next day to please her powerful husband, she was far more interested in becoming a powerful woman. For a long time, Ali later confessed, “I did the sullen holdback. I was tight. Judgmental. Simmering … inauthentic at the beginning. I didn’t state my case, ‘You know, even though I told you I’d rather be on a motorcycle opening a can of beer, the truth is I’d rather go to Paris.’ ”
For his part, from the beginning of their relationship Steve had no interest in her onetime world of glamour. According to writer Sheila Weller, “He resisted going to a formal party for his film Papillon because ‘the intellectual heavyweights like Jonas Salk’ would be there. ‘But there isn’t one person in the room who can’t wait to meet you,’ [Ali] implored him, forcing him into his tuxedo.”
One of the few times during those years she did manage to book a modeling shoot—in the summer of 1976, for photographer Francesco Scavullo’s book Scavullo on Beauty: The World’s Most Beautiful Women—she flew to New York by herself and stayed at the house of a girlfriend who was away and left her the key.
She was thrilled to be back in “her” city. In the afternoon she was interviewed by the Vogue writer doing the captions for the book. At night she had a bowl of pasta with a friend, and afterward the two walked the streets of the city catching up on all that had happened. The next day she had just taken a long and soothing bath when the phone rang. It was Steve. He wanted to tell her how much he loved her. They spoke for a few minutes and she hung up. About an hour later there was a pounding at the front door. She went to open it, and there stood Steve, drunk and disheveled. He had flown in from L.A., certain she was having an affair with another man, and called her from the airport in New York after his plane had landed. That night he gave her the same kind of sit-down-in-this-chair grilling he had given Neile the night he’d made her confess her affair with Maximilian Schell. Ali was both furious and frightened, and she had nothing to confess, which kept Steve going for hours. Then he wanted to make love, after which he passed out on the bed, leaving a highly upset Ali to curl up with her cashmere shawl on the bathroom floor in front of the toilet.
The next morning, before Scavullo could shoot her, she had to have her eyes made up extra heavily to hide the black rings of sleeplessness.
BACK IN Trancas, Ali continued to think about Convoy, a project she really wanted to do. She decided to tell Steve she was returning to making films, and he hit the low ceiling of his hot temper. At first he offered to make another movie with her, which Ali thought might not be a bad idea, except nobody wanted them. Ali could have any film she wanted, but Steve, in his present condition and with his reputation for being difficult, was a hard sell. Then, when Ali told Steve she had decided to make Convoy, “he was sitting in a chair, nursing a beer. He turned to me and said, ‘In that case we are filing for divorce.’ ”
Ali remained cool. She pointed out that she had no money and that if their troubled marriage did indeed fall apart, she would be left penniless: the film was a good way for her to make fast cash. Steve offered to match the deal she was offered out of his own pocket—in essence, paying her not to work.
She said no and took the film, even if it meant divorce.
Steve backed off from both his offer and his threat.
STEVE WAS approached about starring in Sorcerer, Billy Friedkin’s bizarre remake of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 masterpiece The Wages