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who had learned his craft directing commercials for Westinghouse that featured many of independent TV studio Desilu’s best-known players, including its founders, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. What bothered Steve was that Adamson had hired Donner without running it by him, and he took it out on Donner. On the first day of shooting Steve got in Donner’s face over things that wouldn’t have bothered anyone else. By the end of the day, Donner had had enough and announced he was quitting. Steve took that as an insult and confronted him. The director agreed to stay on, and he completed that episode and five more, but the chemistry between him and Steve was not good. During their sixth episode together, Steve stopped a scene to go to the toilet, and Donner announced that everyone had to wait for Steve to finish taking a shit. When Steve returned, he fired Donner and told him he would never work again on the show. That was fine with Donner, who soon moved on to the big screen, and directed some of the biggest movies of the seventies, eighties, and nineties, including Superman (1978) and Lethal Weapon (1987) and its three sequels (1989, 1992, and 1998).

Steve now wanted to leave the series for good and put pressure on Elkins and Kamen to get him another “big” movie, insisting to both that “I’m going to be the biggest fucking movie star since Brando.”

WHILE WAITING for the arrival of his second child, Steve took to driving around in his brand-new Jaguar prototype XK-SS, for which he had paid the then hefty price of $5,000. The problem was, he liked to drive it day and night at speeds well above the hilly canyon’s limits, with an engine that did not benefit from any kind of effective muffler system, the growl it produced being one of its attractions. It was the noise that got Steve into an altercation with his new neighbor, fifty-eight-year-old Edmund W. George, an electrical supervisor, already furious at Steve because his dogs barked continuously twenty-four hours a day. George had already called the police several times to complain about the noise, something the police did nothing about.

On November 21, 1960, with Neile close to delivering, Steve took his sixteen-month-old daughter and his dog for a walk along the canyon’s twisty road. According to Neile in her memoir, because it was the Christmas season Steve wanted to smooth over the bad feelings that had developed between him and George. Late afternoon, Steve knocked on George’s door. According to Neile, Steve extended his hand and said, “Hi, let’s be friends,” to which George responded, “Get off my land, you coward.” Steve was stunned by the response, figuring that George had called him that because he, Steve, was holding his daughter in his arms. Steve put her down and punched the neighbor in the face. George put his hand to his chin and said in disbelief, “You hit me!”

“Right, motherfucker, and I’m gonna hit you again!”—and did. By the time George got up, his wife had come running out of the house, and Steve accidentally hit her in the face instead of George.

When the police arrived, they listened to both sides of the story, including George’s insistence that Steve had hit him first. Claiming they saw no visible signs of a physical fight despite the wife’s bruised face, they left without pressing charges.

ON DECEMBER 28, 1960, Neile gave birth to a baby boy they named Chadwick Steven McQueen. “I knew I wouldn’t be pressured to have another child,” Neile later wrote, “since we now had what Steve wanted most. A son.”

This tumultuous year officially came to an end New Year’s Eve with the late-night delivery of a Western Union telegram from Florida that read, “Happy New Year happy new baby.”

It was signed Doris and Yul Brynner.

* * *

1 The terms of the deal between MGM and Canterbury Productions/Sol Siegel and Four Star stipulated that if production on the film ran into the production time of Wanted: Dead or Alive, Steve would be released three days every week from Never So Few, and if the show had to pay overtime to its crew for any added weekend days, Steve would