Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [17]
Steve, perhaps sensing he had worn out his welcome, decided to drive the car back east. As soon as he left, Neile realized how much she missed him, and she arranged to fly him out every weekend so they could be together on her days off. She also continued to press Elkins and her agents at the William Morris Agency, Stan Kamen, Leonard Hirshan, Sandy Glass, and Sy Marsh, to find work for Steve. As Elkins remembered, “She was doing very well, and then she brought this guy in who I thought was an obvious user, then I saw some of what he did on TV and the bit he did in Somebody Up There Likes Me and I thought, hey, whatever he is off the screen he’s terrific on it.”
Early in 1957, Elkins told Neile he thought he might have found something for Steve, a new two-part Studio One drama, “The Defender,” that was going to be done live in New York City. The producer, Herbert Brodkin, and the director, Robert Mulligan, were looking for a young, good-looking actor for a major part on the show. Elkins promised Neile he would send Steve up for the part. He kept his word, and Steve got it.
Studio One was one of the jewels of CBS during the era of live TV (though many later episodes were either filmed or videotaped). It was a weekly anthology program that dealt with a wide variety of subjects and employed many New York theater-trained actors and actresses. “The Defender” centered on a murder trial. The defendant, Joseph Gordon (Steve, billed as Steven McQueen) is accused of murdering a psychiatrist’s wife. The rest of the cast included Martin Balsam, Betty Furness, Ralph Bellamy, and William Shatner.3
This time Steve had no problem playing a disturbed young man, even without smiling. The TV camera did for him what the stage couldn’t; it focused in on his intense eyes and his facial expressions during the testimony of various witnesses, effectively conveying that his character was a bit off-balance. It was his most effective performance to date and helped to spin “The Defender” into a highly successful lawyer series, The Defenders, which ran for four seasons Saturday nights on CBS.
The two-part pilot for “The Defender,” which aired February 25, 1957, just shy of Steve’s twenty-seventh birthday, featured Ralph Bellamy in what would become the E. G. Marshall role in the series, that of a conscientious lawyer in the years when such a thing was not immediately laughable. His son was played by Shatner; Robert Reed would play the part in the series. The hook of the pilot was that Bellamy believes the young grocery clerk (McQueen in a one-off) is guilty but still deserves the best defense possible.
The day after it aired, Sid Shalit of the New York Daily News wrote, “One thing must be said for the first half of ‘The Defender,’ the acting was uniformly expert. Bellamy, Martin Balsam (the prosecuting attorney) and especially McQueen.” The second part was also well received; the ratings actually went up for it.
Herbert Brodkin, the producer of Studio One, was so pleased with Steve’s performance he sent him a personal letter, dated March 5, 1957, written on official CBS Television stationery, thanking him for helping to make the show a hit, and to let him know that several women had called to find out who this Steven McQueen was. Stan Kamen, one of Neile’s agents at William Morris, watched both parts of “The Defender” and was completely disarmed by Steve’s performance. For the first time he thought the young man might have some real potential, and set out to find something for him.
Not long after, Kamen got Steve a small role in trash novelist Harold Robbins’s upcoming film adaptation of his own first trash novel, 1948’s Never Love a Stranger.