Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [22]
Because Steve’s gun was not a fake prop but the real thing, it had to be listed with the LAPD as a lethal weapon. Steve could not take it out of the studio without a special permit, which he had to get in order to take it to Davis’s house. Davis was happy to show Steve how to use the piece and after weeks of practice, Randall’s “Mare’s Leg,” or “Laig” in Josh’s drawl, became a natural extension of Steve’s (Josh’s) right arm. He was quite proud of his newfound skills and loved to brag about how proficient he had become: “Technical matters are quite beautiful to me. I love guns and gunnery, [too]. [Sammy Davis Jr.], who is a very good friend, is fast on the guns, extremely fast. I’m about the fourth fastest in California now. I can put a book of matches on the back of my hand, drop it from waist level, draw and fire two shots into it before it hits the ground.”
THE FIRST half-hour episode of the series was produced on the 20th Century Fox back lot in West Los Angeles, now Century City, and on location in Arizona (the rest of the episodes were mostly shot at the Selznick Studio in Hollywood). It debuted at eight-thirty Saturday night, September 6, 1958, sandwiched perfectly for maximum ratings between the enormously popular one-hour Perry Mason (in the 1950s network TV began prime-time broadcasting nightly at seven-thirty) and a shipboard sitcom that anticipated The Love Boat, The Gale Storm Show, which in turn was followed by the number one show on TV, Gunsmoke, and opposite Jubilee USA on ABC and the second half of The Perry Como Show on NBC.
Wanted: Dead or Alive became the unlikely career changer that Steve had been so desperate to find. It was the instrument that catapulted him into the forefront of the new TV season, and his gimmicky “Mare’s Leg” became the latest craze among kids who wanted one just like it. The promotional ads for the show emphasized both the gun and Steve’s sulky style of acting: “Steve McQueen, as Josh Randall, bounty hunter, uses a sawed-off rifle with a trick firing mechanism for a weapon. The holster is an entirely new type especially-built for a fast draw. And the role he plays is a brand-new technique for avid western fans.”
All the show’s focus was on Steve and his portrayal of Josh Randall. He had brought something new and different to TV westerns: a contemporary, Method-driven style of acting that let his face and body, rather than his words, do the talking. As the syndicated TV columnist Erskine Johnson put it, “Stanislavski [sic] has come to the TV West.” Steve liked to describe his character as “Brando on Horseback.” When pressed about what he meant, Steve would only shrug and say, “When you’re hot you can play it very cool.”
As for Steve’s diminutive size, he turned it into a character asset, a boyish toughness that made his villains bigger and meaner and therefore his conquest of them more heroic. Steve brought stature rather than height to the role of Randall, and that quality instantly clicked with viewers, as did the character’s rebellious nature—he was a Confederate States of America Civil War veteran, which helped explain Randall’s edge.
The series’ single national sponsor, the standard practice in those days, was Viceroy cigarettes. Looking to link TV’s newest hit character with its product, the advertising dubbed Josh Randall “the thinking man’s cowboy” and Viceroy “the thinking man’s cigarette” (although in real life Steve was a two-pack-a-day Lucky man).
The show consistently made it into the top ten and Steve’s salary quickly went from $750 an episode to $100,000 a year, enormous money by 1950s TV standards. Just shy of his twenty-ninth birthday he was, as newspapers all over the country described him, America’s newest “overnight star.”3
Wanted: Dead or Alive was a top-ten hit despite reviews that were less than glowing, and all of