Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [138]
He spent his last Christmas with Barbara up at the newly redecorated ranch, driving into L.A. every day to undergo chemotherapy and radiation, mostly because there were no other treatments. He also volunteered to try a new, experimental drug, interferon. And he worked desperately to keep his illness out of the papers. He instructed everyone who knew that, if asked, they were to say he was suffering from a severe respiratory infection.
Steve and Barbara were married on a warm Wednesday afternoon, January 16, 1980. The ceremony was performed by Dr. Leslie Miller of the Ventura Missionary Church. The only witnesses were his flying instructor, Sammy Mason, and his wife. Steve dressed casually in jeans, sneakers, and a short-sleeved shirt. Barbara wore a white pants suit and a wreath of baby’s breath. She carried a bouquet of daisies and looked dazzling. She was twenty-five years old; Steve was two months shy of fifty.
THREE DAYS later Neile remarried. Her second husband’s name was Al Toffel. They had met a few months earlier at a luncheon for Princess Grace of Monaco. He was a former Air Force fighter pilot and an aeronautical engineer with NASA. As it happened, Steve was at the luncheon as well, and incredibly, later that night he called Neile and asked if she still loved him. Neile said sure, of course she did. He kept asking over and over again, and Neile kept on saying of course.
Neile remained married to Toffel until his death in 2005.
THE DOCTORS agreed that Steve’s racing had probably caused his illness, as the interiors of race cars are swathed in asbestos, but Steve knew better. He remembered that six-week period in the marines when he had done little but clean the engine room. The pipes down there had been covered with layers of asbestos, which he was constantly having to pull out and replace; he’d hardly been able to breathe at night from all the particles of the stuff he’d inhaled. He was certain now those six weeks had been his death sentence.
He volunteered to have radioactive cobalt surgically implanted in his chest cavity for a month.
ON MARCH 18, 1980, the National Enquirer broke the story that Steve had terminal cancer. They published a front-page picture of him with a headline underneath that said, “Steve McQueen’s Heroic Battle Against Terminal Cancer.” He vehemently denied it through his talent agency and threatened to sue the newspaper, insisting he was only battling an infection, but the Enquirer had the goods, apparently from a source deep inside the walls of Cedars-Sinai, and no lawsuit ever materialized.
TOM HORN began a week of previews on March 28, 1980, four days after Steve’s fiftieth birthday. To deny the rumors that he was terminal, Steve, noticeably overweight and with a well-trimmed beard, attended one of the previews at Oxnard, California. While Barbara beamed for the cameras, Steve joked with the photographers and reporters: “Why don’t you guys come in and see a good western!” His deep tan covered an unhealthy pallor. Afterward, as he left the theater, another barrage of photographers and reporters asked about the rumors of cancer. Steve only smiled and said, “Think you got enough pictures?” With that, he took Barbara by the arm, walked to his truck, got in, and drove away.
It was Steve’s last live public appearance.
The film opened its regular run four months later, on July 28, 1980, dumped into release by Paramount in the last week of the month, when the fewest people go to the movies. There was little promotion (Steve was not available to do any) and little advertising.
The film received reviews that ranged from mixed to dismal. Variety wrote it off as “a sorry ending to the once high hopes of First Artists Productions. McQueen certainly looks like he’s walking through the part and the picture as a whole is such a technical embarrassment the rest of the credits must have walked with him.”
It was a sad ending indeed.