Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [47]
To ensure the realism of his portrayal, Steve fell back into Method 101 and antagonized Field offscreen, admonishing her and all the British for their externalized acting, while at the same time buddy-buddying with Wagner, who was decidedly not a Method actor and who welcomed Steve’s friendship on an uncomplicated level that helped the two avoid any ego clashes over who was better-looking, a better ladies’ man in real life, and so on.
As for Leacock, Steve liked him because he wasn’t very forceful and didn’t demand a lot of takes. The affable director, in turn, admired Steve’s rough edges and even consented to letting him race cars once in a while on his days off, even though it was specifically prohibited by Steve’s contract. One rainy day when exterior shooting was canceled and there was only one major scene left to film, Rickson’s doomed last flight, Leacock gave Steve the go-ahead to take a modified Formula Jr. Cooper he had just purchased out to Brands Hatch, where he promptly smashed it into a wall, leaving his face banged and bruised. Fortunately, in that final scene in the cockpit Rickson is wounded and bloody, which made it easy to incorporate Steve’s real-life injuries.
As the days of production wound down to pickups and second-unit shoots, Steve had very little to do and often spent his afternoons writing to the industry journalists he had liked best, Hedda Hopper and Sidney Skolsky. To Hopper, he confessed “England’s fun, Hedda, but I miss California very much. I am an American and I never realized how deep-rooted this was until I was a foreigner in someone else’s land.… [S]ometimes when I get home from work if I have got a few hours to spare, Neile and I go down to the market along the Thames and have fish and chips.… I should be back home about the middle of January and I’m going to make a bee-line for Palm Springs and do nothing as hard as I can.”
To Skolsky, he was a little more graphically descriptive about the native food that was far less appealing to him than a home-grown menu: “Sid, we are just finishing up with the movie and I’m going to be damn glad to get home. I would give my left nut right now for a hamburger, a chocolate milk shake and some French fries from Schwab’s. Fish and chips are coming out of my ears.”
This resulted in Skolsky anointing Steve as the subject of his December 23 nationally syndicated “Tintype” column, an appearance in which was a boost for any Hollywood actor. According to Skolsky’s column, “He has an insatiable appetite and never gains a pound—thinks nothing of ordering two helpings of potatoes and a couple of sandwiches for lunch … all his spare time is spent tinkering with his Porsche sports car … he sleeps in a double bed in the nude and has one luxury. Neile often brings him coffee before he gets out of bed—after all, you can’t walk down to the kitchen like that!”
THE WAR LOVER opened in October 1962, just four months after Hell Is for Heroes, and received mixed-to-negative reviews. The first hint that the film was not going to do well was the review in Daily Variety, a paper that had an uncanny ability to predict the taste of the moviegoing public, even if, in this instance, it totally missed the essential meaning of the film. It said, in part, “This production of John Hersey’s novel The War Lover is accomplished in all respects save one: lack of proper penetration into the character referred to by the title. The scenario seems reluctant to come to grips with the issue of this character’s unique personality—a ‘war lover’ whose exaggerated shell of heroic masculinity covers up a psychopathic inability to love or enjoy normal relationships with women.… [T]hat the central character emerges more of an unappealing symbol than a sympathetic flesh-and-blood portrait is no fault of McQueen, who plays with vigor and authority, although occasionally with too much eyeball emotion. Robert