Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [14]
Corsaro, who had seen Steve in Chicago in the national touring company of Time Out for Ginger, had asked him to lunch to offer Steve the opportunity to take over the lead role of Johnny Pope in Hatful, about a Korean War veteran’s addiction to heroin. Hatful had made a star out of its original lead, Ben Gazzara. A talented stage performer with a tough but vulnerable vibe and a face that always looked like it was about to break out in tears, Gazzara had also originated the role of Brick in Tennessee Williams’s Broadway production of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof but had lost out in his bid to repeat the role on film. Instead, Richard Brooks cast another stage-trained actor creating an enormous buzz, Paul Newman, to play the role. Gazzara then returned to Broadway and A Hatful of Rain.
When his contract was up, Gazzara opted not to renew, to star instead in Otto Preminger’s upcoming film Anatomy of a Murder, his breakthrough screen role after nearly a decade of television drama and stage work. To replace Gazzara, Corsaro wanted Steve, after seeing him in a number of live TV shows and in his first film, Robert Wise’s just-released adaptation of prizefighter Rocky Graziano’s memoir, Somebody Up There Likes Me, starring Paul Newman in his breakthrough role after James Dean, Wise’s first choice to play Graziano, was killed in a car crash.
To fill out the background of tough, crooked street kids Graziano grew up with and left behind, Wise had cast the diminutive, Bronx-born Sal Mineo, and Steve, who only appears in the first fifteen minutes of the film as a pool-playing, tire-stealing, fur-coat-hijacking, roof-top-jumping delinquent named Fidel. His part was not big enough for him to be listed in the front credits, but Wise liked him so much he expanded his role as much as possible (at $20 a day).
Steve and Newman knew each other casually from the several live TV appearances each had done, a rite of passage for New York actors hoping to graduate to the big screen. They often competed for the same role, although except for their both having startlingly blue eyes (something lost on the small black-and-white screens of the 1950s), the similarities between the two weren’t all that apparent. Steve had a leanness that at the time made him look a bit emaciated, which was only accentuated by his shortness (he was five foot eight, though his height shrank and grew with the progression of his career, with reports varying from five-six to five-eleven; studio PR bios always listed him as five foot ten). Like Newman, Steve was extremely good-looking, but he had a haunted, suspicious cast about him, a hardness, and those slightly stooped shoulders. Newman, on the other hand, was classically handsome, his face a Greek god’s, and while he, too, had to stand on tiptoe to reach six feet, his body was tougher, harder, and more cut than McQueen’s. And Newman, ever the charmer, always seemed to have a smile on his face. It was precisely Steve’s darker, offbeat edge that had landed him the role in Hatful over dozens of other hopefuls.
FINALLY, AFTER a week of Neile seeing Steve and Steve seeing her at Downey’s, Neile, there again with Rydell, finally walked over to the table where he was eating and said “Hi!” to no one in particular. Steve smiled. According to Neile’s memoir, after she excused herself to use the ladies’ room, Steve got up, walked over to Rydell, and told him that he intended to go after his date, as in “Sorry, buddy, but all’s fair in love, etc., etc.” When Neile returned, Steve politely excused himself and left.
The next day Steve asked around and found out who she was and what show she was in, and, like the proverbial stage-door Johnny, showed up at six-thirty one night in Shubert Alley, where the actors and actresses