Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [4]
In every movie he made—the great ones, as well as the misfires—his star-studded appeal could not be disguised. Perhaps Steve McQueen’s greatest talent was to be able to convince audiences that he was who he really wasn’t, even as he tried to prove to himself he wasn’t who he really was.
Wanted: Dead or Alive, 1959.
I left home at the age of fifteen because there really was no home.… I have had no education. I came from a world of brute force.
—STEVE MCQUEEN
TERRENCE STEVEN MCQUEEN WAS BORN MARCH 24, 1930, or thereabouts, in Beech Grove, Indiana, a suburban community in Marion County.1 His middle name was a joke given to him by the father he never knew. “Steven” was the senior McQueen’s favorite bookie and the name Steven preferred, Terrence being a bit too soft for him. Terrence William McQueen, Bill or Red to his friends, was a onetime navy biplane flier turned circus stuntman who had no idea what fatherhood was beyond the losing bet on a careless roll with a blond-haired, blue-eyed flapper he called Julia, whose real name was Jullian. He impregnated her the first night they met. He married her out of an uncharacteristic burst of honor, and an honest stab at normalcy that lasted all of six months. By then, the unusually handsome McQueen had packed his travel bags and left Jullian behind to take care of herself and the baby.
Later that same year, unable to cope with single motherhood, Jullian took the infant back to her hometown of Slater, Indiana, in Saline County, where her parents, Victor and Lillian Crawford, lived. They agreed to help her as long as they were allowed to give the boy a strict Catholic upbringing.
After only a few months of being back with her family, Jullian grew tired of church, prayer, and chastity and returned to Green Grove with young Steven. She still hoped to find a rich man to marry her and provide a comfortable life. But after three more years of struggling to keep herself and Steven warm and fed, she returned to the family farm—this time just long enough to drop off the boy before leaving again to resume chasing her own dreams.
Abandoned now by both parents, Steven was again pushed aside when Victor’s business failed and he was forced to move with his wife and grandchild to live on Lillian’s brother’s farm in Missouri, about six hours away by train.
Claude Thomson took them in but did not make them feel especially welcome or comfortable. He had no use for his sister or Victor, her miserable failure of a husband, and blamed his failure on Victor’s laziness rather than the Great Depression. He agreed to help them out only because he felt sorry for the cute little towhead. The boy was the only one, Claude believed, who was not responsible for his own misfortunes, and Claude wanted to redeem him by loving him as if he were his own. The boy’s mother was never spoken of on Claude’s farm.
Claude, unmarried and childless, owned 320 acres of prime Missouri farmland dotted with thousands of head of free-roaming cattle and endless fields of corn. He also owned an intimidating reputation as a womanizer and possibly even a killer. Rumors ran rampant throughout the county that he had murdered a man over a woman, but no one was ever able to prove such a story about this wealthy and devout Catholic farmer. His presence was imposing, his bankbook fat, his political influence powerful. In a world where money talked nicely and influence talked tough, Claude had plentiful amounts of both.
But he always had a soft spot for Steven. Not that he spoiled him in any way or gave him a free ride. From the time Steven could walk and talk, Uncle Claude expected him to pull his load, and every day woke him before dawn to begin his daily chores of milking cows and working in the cornfields.2 It was hard work for the boy, but for the first time in his life, he felt he really belonged somewhere and to