Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [135]
On July 20, 1979, Steve received his radio communications license, the last step needed before taking his final flying test, which he passed. “He got up with the chickens [every morning],” Barbara would say with a smile, “and flew away.”
All he needed to do now was to move the last of his belongings from the house at Trancas, and he and Barbara would be permanent residents of Santa Paula.
Back in February, while Ali was in L.A. on a break from filming Sidney Lumet’s Just Tell Me What You Want in New York, she had received a call from Steve asking her if she would like to take a drive with him up to Santa Paula. He explained that he had bought a house up there for him and Barbara. Would she like to see it and meet Barbara?
Ali said okay, and when Steve showed up to get her wearing “one of those ghastly trucker hats,” Ali later recalled, “and carrying a beer, and I had on my high heels and fingernails, both of which had disappeared during our marriage, the electricity was instant. I remembered exactly who it was that I had fallen head over heels in love with.”
On the way, Steve told Ali that he intended to move to Santa Paula full-time and permanently, with Barbara, and that he was going to marry her. And then he pulled the truck over to the side of the road somewhere on the highway near Oxnard and suggested that he and Ali make love, right there and then. In her memoir, Ali wrote that she was upset and saddened that Steve had suggested such a thing. It was a glimpse back into who he really was, and what he had probably been like with other women when she had been married to him. She bowed out of the rest of the drive and somehow made her way back to Los Angeles.
It was the last time she ever saw him.
STEVE QUICKLY settled into his new life with Barbara in Santa Paula, perhaps the happiest and most peaceful time of his adult life. He even began going to church regularly. He wanted nothing more than to fly his plane, pray, and make love to his wife.
All of this was interrupted in late March 1979 by the arrival in Santa Paula of producer Mort Engelberg, a partner in Rastar Productions, headed by legendary producer Ray Stark. With script in hand, Engelberg found Steve at the hangar, where he personally delivered the screenplay for The Hunter, about the true-life exploits of a famed bounty hunter who had captured more than five thousand fugitives. Steve and Engelberg talked for a while and Steve said he would think about it. He liked the fact that in the film he would play a bounty hunter; he thought it was a neat end-of-career film that completed the circle all the way back to the beginning.
In truth, there was very little for him to mull over. Free from the horse-collar contract of First Artists, he had a chance to make a bundle (estimates for what he was offered range from $3 million to $10.5 million plus percentages). After talking it over with Barbara, he agreed to do the film for Engelberg and Stark at Paramount.6
The five-week shoot, with an $8 million budget, was set to begin almost immediately. It would include a month on location in Chicago, a week in Kankakee, Illinois, and a brief postproduction stay in Los Angeles. Steve especially liked the timing of it all. Not only would it give the renovators a chance to finish all the work at the ranch, but it would also pay their fee. Barbara came with him for the duration, returning home occasionally to check on the progress of the construction.
Engelberg had reserved a luxurious suite for Steve and Barbara at the famed Drake Hotel in Chicago. When Steve arrived with Barbara, he looked the place over and then asked where Engelberg was staying. Engelberg said he would be at the Holiday Inn with the rest of the crew. Steve promptly checked himself and Barbara out of the Drake and moved into the smaller chain hotel.