Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [139]
Robert Osborne, the affable columnist for the Hollywood Reporter (who would go on to be the on-camera host for Turner Classic Movies), wrote a piece about the film that was probably the best and least hostile from the critics: “If McQueen doesn’t appear to be acting, it’s because—like Wayne and Cooper—he’s learned to act this type of character so well, all theatrical trickery is virtually invisible. It’s a genuinely fine piece of good filmmaking which does justice to any filmgoer’s time. And it returns a genuine superstar to audiences after far too long an absence.”
The film earned a mere $12 million in its initial domestic release, reflecting how little interest there was in it. Osborne’s references to Wayne and Cooper were pointed—their style of film had long gone out of fashion. The big 1980 movies were George Lucas’s Star Wars Part V: The Empire Strikes Back; Colin Higgins’s 9 to 5, with the triple-threat star power of Lily Tomlin, Dolly Parton, and Jane Fonda; Sidney Poitier’s Stir Crazy, with Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder; Jim Abrahams and David Zucker’s ensemble goofball comedy Airplane; and Buddy Van Horn’s Any Which Way You Can, starring Clint Eastwood. The only two notable westerns that year were James Bridges’s Urban Cowboy, a John Travolta vehicle that also starred Debra Winger and was not really a western at all in the traditional sense (a mechanical bull is the only animal that gets ridden in this contemporary love story, and cowboy hats are the only western thing about the picture), and Michael Cimino’s disastrous Heaven’s Gate. By any measure, Tom Horn was hopelessly out of sync with the film tastes of the times.
Steve was increasingly desperate to find a cure for his cancer, even as he continued to deny that he was sick, although by now it was an open secret in Hollywood that he was seriously ill. In May, more surgery revealed not only that the cobalt implant had not done any good but also that the cancer was spreading rapidly through his body, killing him organ by organ. His doctors now gave him a month.
The first week of August, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner reported that “McQueen spent several days last week at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center undergoing treatment for an unspecified disease.”
Then through his PR spokesman, Warren Cowan, McQueen let it be known that he was indeed suffering from mesothelioma, but that his condition had dramatically improved during the last six weeks. Cowan’s statement denied that Steve’s illness was terminal.
But it was. The disease had metastasized to his neck, abdomen, and chest, ruling out any further conventional treatments such as chemotherapy or radiation. When his doctors told him he should start to put his affairs in order, he became even more desperate to find a cure.
On a friend’s recommendation, he secretly traveled under an assumed name to Dr. William D. Kelley’s four-month-old institute in Rosarita Beach, Mexico, about seventy-five miles south of San Diego. Dr. Kelley was a former dentist and metabolic researcher whose license had been suspended for five years by the Texas State Board of Dental Examiners for practicing medicine without a license. Kelley’s team included Dr. Dwight McKee, medical director of the International Health Institute, and Dr. Rodrigo Rodriguez, medical director of his own unnamed center for degenerative diseases. They treated Steve with a daily regimen of fifty vitamin and mineral pills and enzymes, with almonds substituting for meat, no protein allowed after one in the afternoon, and a Japanese vaccine made from bacilli usually used in the treatment of tuberculosis.
Dr.