Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [13]
After graduating, Neile, who wanted to be a dancer like her mother (not exactly like her mother), landed a summer stock job in upstate New York, and in 1952, at the age of twenty, she moved to New York City, took a small apartment, and enrolled in the American Theatre Wing, the American President School of Acting, and the Katherine Dunham School of Dance, all located in the heart of the theater district. Her auditions had been good enough to win her scholarships. To pay her living expenses she began modeling for detective and crime magazine covers, in what were considered suggestive poses at the time. None of it bothered her because she felt the photo sessions were antiseptic and businesslike, and it was the easiest work around. Like Steve, whom she didn’t know at the time, she did it strictly for the money.
And like Steve, she didn’t have to do it for long. By the end of 1953 Neile had made it to Broadway as a featured dancer in Kismet, starring Alfred Drake. “I made the chorus as one of the three princesses of Ababu in Kismet,” she later recalled. “I was singing in the elevator at the Ziegfeld going up to the dressing rooms after a performance—I sing everywhere—and Maurice Levine, the show’s musical director, heard me and suggested I study voice.”
Four months later she replaced Reiko Sato as the lead dancer and remained in the show for the rest of Kismet’s two-year run. After a 1955 summer of stock theater, she returned to New York and negotiated a major deal with the Versailles Club, at the time one of the biggest nightspots in the city, to be part of a revue that also featured the slick, good-looking, silver-haired Jack Cassidy. The revue ran for six months, and when it closed, legendary Broadway director George Abbott chose Neile to replace Carol Haney, the star of his current hit musical The Pajama Game.
During her days off she took singing and dancing classes in some of the many studios above Carnegie Hall. It was 1956, and Midtown Manhattan was teeming with young actors and actresses appearing on Broadway, doing live radio and TV dramas, and working in a fair amount of movies (mostly in the outer boroughs of Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx, where there was ample studio space). Socializing among the performers was fast and easy in the glitter and flash of the Big Street, and they bounced into and off each other as if they all lived on the surface of one gigantic pinball machine. They were good-looking and talented, with great bodies and heavy hormones, and the bedroom action among them reflected their endless energy, onstage and off.
It was in this heady atmosphere that Neile first noticed the good-looking, slightly stooped, rough-around-the-edges Steve McQueen one night after class. “I was coming out of dance class at Carnegie Hall, coming out the door, and he was out front and saw me. He came towards me and said, ‘Hi. You’re pretty.’ I said, ‘You’re pretty too!’ He was starting to ask me what my name was when a friend of mine, another dancer, blonde Sigyn Lund, who he happened to be with that night, smiled, took him by the arm and said to me, ‘See ya!’ ”
They didn’t run into each other again for several weeks, until one late afternoon Neile, who was going with actor and jazz pianist Mark Rydell, stopped with him at Downey’s Steakhouse at Eighth Avenue and 49th Street for a bite before her performance that evening in The Pajama Game.1
Downey’s was one of a number of Midtown restaurants that serviced the theater district and was known affectionately as the poor actor’s kitchen. Downey’s, like Mama Leone’s, Lindy’s, and Howard Johnson’s, had separate menus for “civilians” and “professionals.” Steve loved Downey’s steak and potatoes and pasta dishes made only for theater regulars and ate there as often as he could. The afternoon Neile and Rydell stopped by, she happened to spot Steve sitting with Frank Corsaro, a Broadway director who currently had Michael Gazzo’s A Hatful of Rain on the boards. Neile remembered Steve