Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [23]
The show proved a perfect showcase not only for Steve but also for the ever-increasing number of out-of-work big-screen studio players now scrounging for anything to keep their names current and their paychecks steady. Betsy Drake, fresh from her divorce from Cary Grant (wife number three), landed on a January 1959 episode playing, according to the CBS press release, “a violent, sweet-faced, murderous dressmaker.” Big-screen veterans Noah Beery Jr. and Lon Chaney Jr. appeared frequently, alongside many up-and-coming names soon to have their own successful film careers or hit TV series, including Jim Best (The Dukes of Hazzard), DeForest Kelley (Star Trek), Michael Landon (Bonanza, Little House on the Prairie, Highway to Heaven), Warren Oates (The Westerner and numerous independent feature films), and William Schallert (The Patty Duke Show), among dozens of others on both sides of the fame fence.
As Steve’s TV star continued to rise, the machinery of Hollywood success began to take over. Until Wanted: Dead or Alive, Steve had mostly depended on Neile and her continual pressure on Elkins and Kamen to get him work. Now he no longer had to fight to get their attention, especially since Neile was no longer as ambitious as she had once been, knowing full well that dancers, even those who had some personality and could act a little, were in their prime at twenty, old at twenty-two, and ancient at twenty-seven. So she happily accepted it when the spotlight shifted from her to him, beginning with his full-time commitment to a major public relations firm, a sure sign as any that Steve’s star had nowhere to go but up.
DAVID FOSTER was a graduate of the University of Southern California (USC) in the fifties, at the height of the Korean conflict, when the film school was still located in a bungalow and considered the academic slum of the university. Two days after he graduated, Foster was drafted into the army, where he became a speechwriter for General “Iron Mike” Daniels during the war, an assignment that first introduced him to the fine art of public relations. Upon his discharge, he found a job with Rogers & Cowan, a hotshot Hollywood-based firm that handled many of the largest names in film, including Gary Cooper and Cary Grant. After working there for two years, Foster approached one of the heads of the firm, Henry Rogers, and asked if there was any chance the company might one day be known as Rogers & Cowan & Foster. “He looked at me like I was a mad man and said no, but I would do very well there. So I quit. I went to work at another company where they promised me that if everything went well my name would be in lights after a year. The year ended and the owners just couldn’t manage to put another name above the title, so, along with a couple of other guys, I left and we started our own company, Foster and Ingersoll, and the clients just came to us. My first client was Steve McQueen.”
The functions of PR firms are many and varied. Sometimes they try to keep their clients’ names out of the gossips, but more often they work to get them in. They help to build the persona that attracts fans; they maximize everything that is saleable and minimize everything that is not. Sometimes they advise actors on career moves, and sometimes, as was the case with Foster and McQueen, they also become lifelong friends.
In the beginning, Foster made sure that Steve’s name was placed in major publications and always in the best possible light, and that when his credits were reviewed, The Blob was left off his resume. One Foster blurb, which appeared in dozens of newspapers