Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [29]
Only it wasn’t. Never So Few didn’t turn Steve into a star or compartmentalize his career the way it did for another member of the cast, Charles Bronson, whose portrayal in the picture of a defensive tough-guy Native American became the character template for much of the rest of his highly successful career. It did, however, introduce Steve to a larger audience who liked what they saw, even if they didn’t exactly know who he was. So did Sinatra, who now wanted to make Steve a card-carrying member of the Rat Pack. Steve turned him down, claiming he was a family man now and that had to be his first priority.
On June 5, Neile had given birth to a beautiful baby girl they named Terry Leslie. Steve just made it home in time that day from the MGM soundstage to take her to the hospital.
Fatherhood triggered a sudden desire in Steve to find out what had become of his own father. He soon discovered that Terrence “Bill” McQueen’s last known whereabouts were in Los Angeles, somewhere in the Silverlake section, not very far from Hollywood. Like a detective in a movie thriller, Steve went to the places where his father most likely would have been known, the bars and pool halls. Sure enough, someone recognized the name and told Steve she did indeed know a Bill McQueen. That same night Steve drove to Echo Park, to a nondescript apartment building, where an elderly woman who described herself as Bill’s “lady friend” told him that he had recently passed, having suffered a fatal heart attack. At the end of this visit, she gave Steve a silver lighter that bore the initials WMcQ. It had belonged to Bill and she thought Steve would like to have it, along with a photograph of his father as a young man, in which he bore a remarkable likeness to Steve. She told him that his father had also been a marine and had worked for the Flying Tigers, stationed in China during World War II.
It was the last time Steve ever talked about Bill.
AT THE party following the film’s first preview in December, held in New York City, Sinatra came up to Steve, slapped him on the back, and told him, “It’s all yours, kid!” Later that night, Sinatra and Steve threw a couple of live firecrackers out of Steve’s hotel window.
Never So Few was originally planned as a summer release but officially opened December 7, 1959, and received generally good reviews, the best going to Steve. The Hollywood Reporter, an influential industry publication read by everyone in the business, didn’t think much of the rest of the film but noted that it “provides a catapult to stardom for Steve McQueen, hitherto known principally as a television actor.” Bosley Crowther, the New York Times film critic at the time, was far less kind to both the film and Steve: “It looks as though Frank Sinatra has been tapped to succeed Errol Flynn as the most fantastically romantic presentation of the warrior breed on screen.… And John Sturges has directed it for kicks. Those who will get them are the youngsters who can be lightly carried away by the juvenile brashness of Mr. Sinatra, and by the swashbuckling antics of his pals, played almost beyond comprehension by Richard Johnson, Peter Lawford, and Steve McQueen.” On the other hand, Paul V. Beckley, writing in what was then one of the other New York broadsheets, the New York Herald Tribune, liked Steve’s performance more than he did the film: “Steve McQueen looks good as a brash, casual G.I. He possesses that combination of smooth-rough charm that suggests star possibilities.”
Commercially the film didn’t do much at the box office and is not remembered as either classic Sinatra or essential McQueen, but it did mark the auspicious start of the ongoing professional relationship between John Sturges and Steve.
Even before the film opened, Sinatra had been trying to get a film made called The Execution of Private Slovik, about the only American soldier executed for treason during World War II, and now he wanted Steve to play Slovik. However, the project fell through even