Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [27]
Those comments cost Davis the role of Ringa and the $75,000 paycheck that came with it. According to Lawford, who was well aware of Sinatra’s vindictive side, “That was it for Sammy. Frank called him ‘a dirty nigger bastard’ and wrote him out of the film.”
Davis’s agent happened to be Hilly Elkins, and once it became clear Sinatra was not going to forgive Davis, Elkins went to the film’s director, John Sturges, and suggested Steve for the part. “Earlier that year,” recalled Robert E. Relyea, Sturges’s first assistant director on the film, “Stan Kamen, John Sturges’ agent at the William Morris Agency, asked the director to look at a television show featuring a young actor Kamen was also representing. Sturges had a great eye for new talent, and after watching Wanted: Dead or Alive, he asked Stan to bring the young man in. Within minutes of meeting him, Sturges knew Steve McQueen would be a star. So when Sinatra canned Sammy Davis, Jr., Sturges brought in McQueen.”
Prior to Never So Few, Sturges had made several mildly successful, prosaic mid-1950s movies that celebrated machismo and stamina as moral correlatives to freedom and democracy (though without the poetic depth of John Ford or the expansive vision of Raoul Walsh), most notably 1955’s Bad Day at Black Rock, 1957’s Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, 1958’s The Old Man and the Sea, and 1959’s Last Train from Gun Hill, the latter released earlier the same year as Never So Few. Sturges preferred rugged old-school leading men such as Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan, Kirk Douglas, and Burt Lancaster. When Elkins first introduced him to Steve, Sturges was immediately struck by the young actor’s strong masculine presence and great-looking all-American face, which fit the mold of a typical Sturges hero. He was, in fact, far more suited, both physically and in terms of his youth, to play Ringa than Davis was, but the final decision, as always, was Sinatra’s. Fortunately, Sinatra liked Steve and okayed his replacing Davis—for $25,000.
Elkins didn’t protest the salary differential, understanding that Davis was, at the time, a much bigger star than Steve. After three low-budget independent features that had done nothing for his career, this was his first major studio production, and it could be the big-screen career changer Steve had been searching for.
As a welcoming gesture, Sinatra and the film’s producer, Sol C. Siegel, invited Steve and a very pregnant Neile to an April 14 cocktail reception to be held in the MGM Executive Dining Room “honoring Miss Gina Lollobrigida on her arrival at MGM Studios for her first Hollywood Motion Picture, Never So Few.” Not long after, when asked his opinion of Sinatra, Steve told a reporter, “I kind of dig him … he’s a great talent. When I first met him recently he said to me, ‘You gas me, pal.’ I replied, ‘That’s funny. You gas me, too.’ ”
Although the publicity department touted the film’s extensive on-location filming in Burma, less than 10 percent was actually shot there. Another 40 percent was done in Ceylon, Thailand, and Hawaii, with the rest filmed on MGM’s expansive Culver City back lot, accounting for much of the picture’s artificial-green-jungle look. During the MGM shoots, Foster introduced Steve to Hedda Hopper. Hopper was one of the last surviving Hollywood gossip columnists, who in the studio era’s heyday had been one of the almighty arbiters of manufactured stardom. Like her biggest competitor, Louella Parsons, Hopper had made a name for herself as a gunslinger for the studios, patting “good” stars on the head when they behaved well and punishing “bad” stars when their studio wanted to rein them in, usually during a contract dispute or when trying to control political and/or sexual mavericks.
Through