Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [15]
They stayed up talking all night, and by dawn, despite the fact that they didn’t have sex (or maybe because of that), Neile believed she had finally found her soul mate.2
Steve believed he had found his too: “I wanted to marry Neile a few weeks after I met her.” Unlike all of the women before her, Neile had tapped in to an emotional engine stronger than the one that usually drove Steve’s sexual wants. Women were available to him anytime he felt like it; mothers, real or surrogate, were so much harder to find.
In her memoir, Neile wrote that she thought Steve wanted to sleep with her right away and she resisted because she didn’t want to lose him that quickly. She had been around and knew the hit-and-run nature of most Broadway one-night stands. She saw something in Steve that she thought made him better than that. He was fascinated and intrigued that Neile seemed to find something of value in him above the waist. It was an entirely new dynamic for Steve, who was the kind of man who didn’t take no for an answer when it came to sex, and almost never had to. One night she showed him a long scar on her leg where Japanese shrapnel had ripped it open. “Poor kid,” Steve said to her. Then he told her some things about his childhood, and his mother. “Poor kid,” she said to him.
According to Neile’s memoir, the mutual and heavy attraction they had for each other was rooted in shared childhood experiences. Both had mothers who had gotten pregnant too young. Steve’s father had abandoned him in infancy; Neile had never known hers. Steve was raised in Missouri by his grand-uncle Claude; Neile was raised in the Philippines by a kind old man. Steve had gone to reform school; Neile had spent time in a Japanese concentration camp. Both eventually drifted to New York to pursue careers in show business. Steve was all-American and aggressive; Neile was Asian and submissive. To her, there was an element of predestination about them; they were meant to be together.
STEVE SHOWED Neile things about New York City she’d never seen before—late-night jazz clubs, midnight double features on 42nd Street, Fire Island. And always, back at her apartment, Steve would walk in first, throw his clothes off, and fall backward onto the bed while Neile efficiently picked up after him. She didn’t mind that part; she was used to a neat and clean household. Nor did she mind that Steve had unofficially moved into her place. His walk-up could not compare with her spacious digs on West 55th Street, which was far better suited for both of them.
The only thing she really didn’t like was Steve’s pot smoking. He was a big-time pothead and had been ever since coming to the Village and discovering the joys of weed. Whenever she did bring it up, he would shrug it off and tell her that it was just his way of unwinding, but she could never get used to that pungent sour-sweet smell or the yellow clouds that invaded every room of her apartment.
IN SEPTEMBER 1956, Neile’s run ended in The Pajama Game, the same night that Steve’s did in A Hatful of Rain. His performance did not lead to any immediate career-lifting offers. He had never been able to fully immerse himself in the character of Johnny. Neile, on the other hand, could have stayed with the show longer, but Robert Wise, the same director who’d cast Steve in Somebody Up There Likes Me, was making a new movie, This Could Be the Night, and was looking for an actress who could do a killer strip. Veteran Hollywood film producer Joe Pasternak had seen Neile in The Pajama Game, been totally charmed by her performance, and when Wise asked Pasternak if he knew anyone who could play a stripper, he immediately recommended