Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [30]
Sinatra wanted Steve for that film as well, and this time Steve wanted to do it, until Hopper heard about it and summoned him to her home for dinner and a career summit. She warned him that he would be throwing his career away if he became one of Sinatra’s Rat Pack flunkies. Steve took her advice and turned Sinatra down, using his second-year, more prohibitive contract with CBS for Wanted: Dead or Alive as the reason he had to bow out.3 Sinatra let it rest there, but never again asked Steve to appear with him on film.
THE RATINGS success of the first season of Wanted: Dead or Alive gave Steve more power and control on the set, and to those who had to work with him, both in front of the camera and behind it, it made him a royal pain in the ass. Although he had absolutely no experience in screen or television writing and had had no hand in the first season’s scripts, he now demanded rewrites—as his new contract allowed—with scenes in which he was to have more dialogue and fewer shootouts. The demands were made with a belligerence that previously no one had seen from him. He was not alone in complaining about the quality of shows; most sitcom and western stars routinely complained about everything from their salaries to their co-stars. What made Steve different and gave him an added boost was that between seasons he had made the transition to A movies, and knew that he now had real power. Ironically, while he was never one to trust authority, once he tasted it he became exacting and controlling, and as a result, gained a reputation for being difficult.
Nonetheless, high ratings meant bigger budgets per episode and more characters. Several up-and-coming actors willingly did guest shots, some returning in different roles from the first season, among them tall, rugged-looking James Coburn, whom Steve especially liked. Coburn had appeared in dozens of live and filmed TV shows and one movie, Budd Boetticher’s 1959 Ride Lonesome, a star vehicle for perennial Hollywood cowboy actor Randolph Scott that co-starred future TV Bonanza star Pernell Roberts. Coburn’s good looks and his friendship with Roberts resulted in three guest shots on Bonanza, after which he became a guest staple of TV westerns. From Bonanza he went to Rawhide with Clint Eastwood, then two Laramies, five Klondikes, two Lawmen, two Zane Grey Theatres, four Death Valley Days, and finally, three Wanted: Dead or Alives. To pass the time between setups on Wanted, Coburn and Steve would retire to his trailer and get stoned.
WHILE FILMING the second-season episodes, despite turning down Sinatra, Steve worked on several other projects, although as his contract stipulated, no feature films. In the late fall of 1959, just before Never So Few opened, Foster hit a home run when he arranged for Steve and Neile to be invited to join Bob Hope’s annual Christmas show to entertain the troops in Alaska (although much of it was actually shot at the Air Force Academy in Colorado). When Steve asked for CBS’s permission to do it, even though it cut into the series’ production time, which would inevitably mean overtime paychecks to virtually everyone who worked on it, the network, recognizing the PR value in it, said yes. That opened the floodgates. He did a guest spot on Perry Como’s musical hour, at the time one of the highest-rated shows on NBC. And then it was on to an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, on CBS.
“Man from the South,” which originally aired January 3, 1960, was based on a short story by Roald Dahl and adapted by John Adams into a twenty-two-minute teleplay set in Las Vegas about a bet between Gambler (Steve) and Carlos (the venerable Peter Lorre) that Gambler can’t light his cigarette lighter ten times in a row. If he does, he will win Carlos’s brand-new