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write in his sleep (and which played like he had). The role went instead to Anthony Franciosa. Steve turned down a role in Carl Foreman’s The Victors, an antiwar movie by the once-blacklisted producer-writer of such great films as Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 High Noon. The Victors, set in World War II and, like The War Lover, was an American film that was going to be made in England, but so blatantly antiwar it made The War Lover seem by comparison a romantic comedy. Steve had first become interested when he heard that Foreman had gone after Ava Gardner, Simone Signoret, and Sophia Loren for the female roles in the film, but when none of them signed on and Steve could not get the percentage of the profits that he demanded, he turned the project down as well. Eventually the role went to George Peppard (and the female parts went to Romy Schneider, Melina Mercouri, Rosanna Schiaffino, Jeanne Moreau, and Elke Sommer). It turned out to be a prescient choice for Steve. The Victors, a very good film, was considered far too prole in its anti-American sentiment—Frank Sinatra’s version of “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” is sung over the U.S.-ordered execution of an American soldier for treason—and bombed big-time at the box office.

Besides Sturges’s involvement, the other things that appealed to Steve about The Great Escape were the $100,000 fee and the fact that he would be part of another ensemble cast, which he was ready for. It meant after two flops he wouldn’t have to take all the credit or get all the blame. In the right ensemble, he knew, he could shine, as he had in The Magnificent Seven, thanks in no small measure to the rough-and-ready Sturges, whose directing style he liked and whose toughness he appreciated.

After announcing to the public that he was going to be in The Great Escape, and while Sturges was putting together the rest of the cast, Steve tried to recover some of his emotional balance after having thrown himself so heavily into the role of Rickson. He told Hedda Hopper, “It really twisted me up, so I decided to knock off for a time. But I think it’s a magnificent picture. It’s the best work Bob Wagner has ever done and Shirley Anne Field, the English actress, is good in it too.… I’m trying to regain some of the weight I lost before I go back to Europe for The Great Escape in June. I’m not an actor who can go on the set and just turn it on when the cameras start to roll; I have to live with it and it’s very uncomfortable.”

To relax, Steve kept busy with his racing. He’d brought back two new race cars from England, the repaired Cooper and a souped-up Land Rover. That April, barely a month after having returned to the States, Steve raced the Cooper at Del Mar and scored a sweep on successive days. A week later, at Cotati in Northern California, a crack in the combustion chamber robbed the Cooper of the thrust it needed to win. “Everything went wrong,” he said later. “I tried to stay in the race by slipstreaming, following in the vacuum or suction of another car, the first day. So I caught a rock in the eye, which shattered my goggles. The second day I pushed too hard through the corners to make up for ground lost in the straights and wound up off the track and into some tall weeds. That was quite a scene! The Cooper sits pretty low and I nearly drove out of sight. There I sat looking up into the face of a big sun flower.”

STURGES HAD been trying to make The Great Escape for thirteen years, ever since 1950, when he first read the newly published novel by Paul Brickhill, based on his own real-life experience flying for the RAF during World War II, being shot down by the Luftwaffe, and being sent to the prison camp Stalag Luft III, sarcastically called Göring’s luxury camp by Allied prisoners of war. During his more than two-year confinement, Brickhill took part in the planning and execution of a massive escape plan. Out of the seventy-six soldiers who attempted the escape, only three made it safely to England. British-born Brickhill was one of them, and in 1950 he put down on paper, with great accuracy and