Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [39]
Although he had signed on to do it, this was not the project Steve saw as the best follow-up to The Magnificent Seven. He had wanted to play Dave the Dude in Pocketful of Miracles, Frank Capra’s remake of his own 1933 Lady for a Day, at UA, but it hadn’t worked out. The part had originally been offered to Frank Sinatra, who turned it down, as did Dean Martin. Steve was then offered the role and wanted to take it, but by then he had signed an exclusive three-picture deal with MGM, and they wouldn’t let him out of his contract.
Steve was actually the second choice for the lead after Cary Grant in The Honeymoon Machine. Originally called The Golden Fleecing, it was based on a Broadway comedy that had closed after only eighty-four performances. When Grant said no, Elkins put Steve up for the role, and MGM signed him for it and two future films to be named later. However, The Honeymoon Machine laid an atomic bomb at the box office. It was so bad, even Steve walked out during the first public sneak preview, and despite owing MGM two more pictures, he vowed he would never work for the studio again. “I take full credit for that one,” Elkins later said. “It was a dumb move for both Steve and me.” MGM, not looking to lose any more money with McQueen, quickly voided the rest of the contract.
The film’s failure also damaged both Steve’s personal and professional relationship with Elkins, whom he blamed for bringing his career to a screeching halt after the success of The Magnificent Seven.
To lick his wounds, Steve took Neile and the two children to their house in the desert. Whenever Steve was at the Palm Springs house, even if it was to get away from everyone, his friend Tom Gilson could be counted on to show up. Gilson had had some success as a TV actor, most notably for his role as an Elvis-type soldier—Elvin Pelvin—in a hilarious episode of the Phil Silvers Sergeant Bilko sitcom. He was then signed to a movie contract by 20th Century Fox and made his best-remembered film appearance as another Elvis-like character in Leo McCarey’s 1958 Rally Round the Flag, Boys, which starred Paul Newman and his wife Joanne Woodward. After that he became something of a desert rat, part of his appeal for Steve.
According to Neile, Gilson and Steve would “go to the high desert, pick up peyote from some Indians they knew, and then bring it home.” Ever the helpful wife, Neile would “put the stuff in boiling water, let it simmer for approximately thirty minutes, pour in salt and enough pepper to kill an elephant and then I would watch as they gulped it down. Although the stuff was vile, the end result of being totally stoned was worth it to them.”
Their desert drug intake was not limited to peyote. They often took LSD together, and there was always grass at the McQueen house. Neile, in her memoir, recalls the constant smell of grass permeating every room, and how she became adept at drying Steve’s weed, getting the seeds and stems out, and then helping Steve hide it in case the house was ever raided. Back in L.A., most of this was done on the days when the household staff was off. In the desert, there was no staff.
Steve and Gilson remained close until, at the age of twenty-eight, Gilson was shot and killed by his estranged wife after he broke into her home on the night of October 6, 1962. Steve served as a pallbearer at his funeral.
FOR HIS next film, hoping to regain the lost moment of The Magnificent Seven, Steve returned to the ensemble action genre. The project he chose was a war film sent to him by Paramount, called Separation Hill, the story of an ill-fated American squadron, understaffed and poorly armed, trying to hold off what seemed like