Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [18]
Despite its lurid style, the novel didn’t do much in its original run, but Robbins’s second one, 1952’s A Stone for Danny Fisher, filmed before Stranger, went through the roof, and it appeared for a time that Robbins just might be the next Irwin Shaw.
Robbins, a self-styled swinging jet-setter, had come upon his fortune relatively late in life. Prior to A Stone for Danny Fisher climbing up the bestseller lists, the film rights to it had already been sold as a vehicle for Elvis Presley. As adapted by screenwriters Herbert Baker and Michael V. Gazzo (the latter had written A Hatful of Rain), for some reason, its locale was shifted from New York City to New Orleans and its name changed to King Creole. Veteran Michael Curtiz directed, and it was scheduled for a 1958 release, to keep Presley’s name in the hearts and minds of his teenage fans while he did his time in the army.
The deal for Danny Fisher had infuriated Robbins because he had sold the screen rights to Paramount before the book came out and became a surprise bestseller. The studio paid very little money for it, with no back-end participation for Robbins. Vowing that such a thing would never again happen to him, Robbins personally renegotiated the film rights for Never Love a Stranger, which was having huge sales in paperback off the popularity of A Stone for Danny Fisher. Allied Artists paid Robbins $700,000 for Never Love a Stranger and an additional $50,000 for him to write the screenplay. Robert Stevens, a journeyman TV director who did a lot of episodes of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, was set to helm the production.
Allied Artists wanted the book as a vehicle for John Drew Barrymore, a young, good-looking inheritor of the famed Barrymore profile, if not the talent (the father of Drew Barrymore), and hoped it would turn him into the next James Dean. Also in the cast was actress Lita Milan. Kamen arranged for Steve to play one of the small but key parts in the film, Martin Cabell, a Jewish district attorney who discovers that his best friend, Frankie Kane (Barrymore), is not Jewish. It is all very complicated and very Robbins, for whom autobiographical New York–style Jewishness and universal anti-Semitism were present in virtually every novel he wrote. Because of it Allied Artists had to delay the film’s release until deep into 1958, and almost didn’t release it at all, because few southern theaters would book a film about Jews without a major non-Jewish star to bring audiences in. It was only after the huge success of King Creole (in which Danny Fisher—played by Elvis—is no longer a Jew) that Never Love a Stranger was widely released.
For his part, Steve was totally unimpressed with his work in the film and thought the whole thing was junk. “That turkey wasn’t released for two years, and the only notice I got was from a critic who said my face looked like a Botticelli angel that had been crossed with a chimp.”
Steve, however, did like Robbins. He especially liked the writer’s macho posturing and his way with women. When Steve, still a newlywed, had an intensely sexual affair with Milan that everybody involved with the making of the film knew about, Robbins heartily approved. According to one observer, Steve and Lita “signaled to each other excitedly at night with torches from their adjacent suites and at one point Steve climbed into an empty maid’s room to eavesdrop on a call between Milan and a girlfriend immediately below, later repeating the intimate conversation to her in bed. There was an abandon and fun, even frivolity” between the two. Not only did neither one of them try to hide their affair from anyone, but Steve proudly told his wife about it.
According to Neile, “Steve told me after the picture he had had a fling with her. She would be the first in a long line of ‘flings’ that