Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [151]
Steve McQueen is one of those actors who, along with Eastwood and Newman, became a seminal force in the wake of the post-war Brando cinematic tsunami, and he remained so from the early 1960s through the mid-1970s. Their individual rising stars coincided with the general film industry shift from studio-originated creativity to the big business of marketing, finance, and distribution. Steve’s career, although cut tragically short, nonetheless left enough of a legacy to allow for several of his films to be auteuristically redefined as “a Steve McQueen” movie. In that sense, Bullitt, one may effectively argue, is really more Steve McQueen’s film than director Peter Yates’s.
Steve and the others were essentially transitional figures just as auteurism was entering the American mainstream consciousness. Andrew Sarris’s essential revisionism of American films has guided this biographer to a deeper insight not only into the movies Steve McQueen made but into the nature of his individual creative input.
Because of the incessantly personal nature of the films he chose, the characters he played, and the era in which he made films, I trust this revisionist biography of Steve McQueen reveals how this artist lived through his work as much as his work lived through him.
As must always be the case, many people helped with this book. Those who granted interviews or pointed me in the right direction are noted in the “Sources and Notes” section. Here I especially want to thank David Foster for his wonderful generosity of time and his belief in the process, even when those closest to Steve asked him and many others not to talk to me (most of those I approached, in the end, granted some degree of audience).
I also wish to thank the late Hilly Elkins for his cooperation and earnest recollections.
I want to highlight Robert E. Relyea’s book Not So Quiet on the Set, one of the more perceptive Hollywood memoirs.
I am indebted to the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Beverly Hills, California. Their Special Collections is one of the most formidable sources of film history available. Thanks to Neile McQueen Toffel for generously placing her dozens of scrapbooks in the Special Collections, where I was able to view them and glean an incredible amount of information. Special thanks to Barbara Hall and Jenny Romero for their invaluable research assistance at the library.
I thank the authors of earlier biographies of Steve McQueen, many of which had something of value that helped guide me to a place I wanted to get to. I must confess, some were better than others, some to my taste not very good at all, and some worthless; none were definitive. But I understand and appreciate that biography is a cumulative effort that depends upon those who came before and paves the way for those still to come. If my biography differs from the others, I think it is mostly because those who previously ventured into the foreground of Steve McQueen’s life did not have enough knowledge or experience of Hollywood as the backdrop against which it needs to be placed. By Hollywood I am talking about a place beyond physical borders, an amorphous, ambiguous industry of dreams. I have spent a good deal of my life living in, working in, and trying to understand not merely the geographic realm of America’s dream factory but the nature of the culture in which it thrives.
I also wish to thank the New York Public Library, the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, the British Film Institute, the Cinemathèque in Paris, and the library of the Los Angeles Times.
I thank Mary Steifvater for her great research assistance. She deserves special recognition.
I thank