Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [134]
First Artists, eager to get their film made, decided that since the Goldman script was really all about the later years of Tom Horn and their film was about his early years (even though Steve was about to turn fifty), and since theirs had been written by Abe Polonsky based on Life of Tom Horn, Government Scout and Interpreter, they had the creative edge.
However, even before they went into production, Steve had Polonsky fired, claiming he didn’t like his script. That spurred the immediate resignation of Don Siegel, who had signed on to direct only after First Artists assured him Steve would not give anybody any trouble on the project. Siegel was replaced by Elliott Silverstein, who also left before a single foot of film was in the can, and was replaced, at Steve’s insistence, by James William Guercio, who had made a film in 1973 called Electra Glide in Blue, about motorcycles and solitude, two of Steve’s favorite pastimes. Guercio was quickly fired by First Artists and replaced by William Wiard, and an entirely new script was ordered, to be written by Tom McGuane and Bud Shrake. With all of these changes, by the time the film was finally released, it looked as if it had come out of a blender, with the downbeat ending of Steve being hanged on camera not adding to its commercial prospects.
The night before he was set to do the stunt hanging, Barbara called Steve and told him she had had a bad dream, a premonition about the hanging, and begged him not to do it. He assured her he wouldn’t—and then of course he did.
When the film finally wrapped early in March 1979, Steve and Barbara went up to Santa Paula, one of Steve’s favorite getaways in California, a small agricultural town about as far removed from Hollywood and Beverly Hills as possible. Its terrain reminded Steve of his boyhood hometown, Slater.
Santa Paula is fifteen miles northwest of L.A. and fourteen miles inland from the Pacific Ocean within the Santa Clara River valley, filled with lush orange, lemon, walnut, and avocado trees. The main street of this community of twenty thousand, mostly farmers and other working-class non-show-business people, still had hitching posts for horses and a barnlike general store in business since the late 1880s.
Steve loved it there, especially because those people who recognized him made no fuss about his presence among them. He had been thinking for a while about permanently moving to Santa Paula with Barbara. Now, he decided he wanted to learn how to fly a plane. Santa Paula, he figured, was the perfect place to do it because it had a small, privately owned airport that would make the trip down the coast easier on those occasions when he still had to be in Hollywood.
Steve began taking lessons there late in March. By May 1, he was soloing in a 1940 Stearman biplane. Not long after, Steve heard about a 1931 Pitcairn Mailwing biplane that was for sale at the airport. Steve bought it for $65,000 cash. He also bought a private hangar for it that he turned into a little bachelor pad for himself, complete with potbelly stove, kitchen, bathroom, and bed. There he could eat, sleep, and work on the plane’s engine.
What was this fascination with biplanes? Perhaps there is a clue in Andrew Sarris’s whimsical observation that after the death of Steve’s father, “Red McQueen remained a man in a mythological biplane flying, flying, flying through all eternity from his own baby who grew up to be Steve McQueen, King of Cool.” Perhaps Steve was, after all, looking to find and reunite with his father’s spirit, on Red’s own sky-high turf.
At this point Steve and Barbara, who had been living in Trancas until now, decided they wanted to move to Santa Paula permanently. Together, they started looking for a house. After seeing several they liked, they settled on a fifteen-acre ranch, three miles from the airport, with a four-bedroom house built in 1896. It needed work, but it had all the requisite charm Steve