Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [5]
When Steven tried to shirk his duties, such as cutting wood, which for a boy of his small size was difficult, he was punished, but never complained. He believed he deserved whatever he got, if not for being not strong enough, then for his lack of determination. “When I’d get lazy and duck my chores, Claude would warm my backside with a hickory switch. I learned a simple fact—you work for what you get.”
Claude wasn’t a total martinet. He gave young Steven his own room and a bright, shiny red tricycle, which Steven became so good at riding he challenged other boys to races and never failed to clean them out of their gumdrops. And Claude always gave the boy enough money for a weekly trip to the Saturday matinee at the local movie theater. Steven loved the movies, especially the cowboys-and-Indians westerns, with their six-guns that blazed firepower every two seconds and shot the bad guys, who fell off horses with all the fury and balance of Russian ballet stars. These films instilled in Steven a lifelong love of films and guns: “When I was eight, Uncle Claude would let me use the family rifle to shoot game in the woods … to his dyin’ day Uncle Claude remained convinced I was a miracle marksman with a rifle.”
The school he attended was four miles away from the farmhouse and he had to walk it every day, regardless of the weather, but it wasn’t the walk he hated, it was the school. His teachers soon decided the sullen little boy who never paid attention to anyone or anything was what was called in those days a “slow learner.” Years later it was determined that as a child Steven was probably slightly dyslexic, not helped by an untreated hearing problem in his right ear that left him partly deaf for the rest of his life. The boy would remember most about his school days that “I was a dreamer, like on cloud Nine.”
He was a dreamer back at the farmhouse as well. Young Steven would often drift away in thought, and when Uncle Claude inquired what he was thinking about, Steven always replied by asking where his mother was. Uncle Claude would say nothing, just pat the boy on his head and move along.
Jullian was, in fact, busy marrying and unmarrying a series of men. The final count remains uncertain. One day, when Steven was nine, his mother suddenly showed up at the farm and politely informed Claude that she was taking her son back. Claude put up no resistance. He took the boy aside for a few minutes and gave him the gold watch that he kept in his vest pocket, told him to always remember his uncle Claude, and sent him away with his mother.
Jullian took Steven, whose nine-year-old lean physique, curly blond hair, and blue eyes perfectly matched hers, to Los Angeles, where she and her latest husband were living. Soon enough, Steven’s new stepfather, Berri, hated having the kid around, wanted him gone, and out of frustration and anger beat him whenever he got the chance. Steven was more than happy to accommodate him, and often spent days and nights away from the house, sleeping in back alleys when there was no place else available. Film documentarian Rob Katz describes this period of time as the “black hole” of McQueen’s lonely and violent youth.
Within months he had joined one of the tough L.A. teenage gangs that regularly prowled the neighborhood, breaking into shops after dark. And the streets had something else for Steven. When he was thirteen, a young neighborhood girl took him to heaven for the first time. He referred to this event years later in several interviews but never gave any details except that she was the first of many street girls who would dote over him and give him whatever he wanted because of his warm smile, blond hair, and blue eyes.
Unable to deal with her son’s increasingly rebellious behavior and her husband’s resentment of the boy’s presence, a desperate Jullian called Uncle Claude and pleaded with him to take Steven back. She didn’t have to cajole; he was more than eager to have him. During their phone conversation Jullian was surprised to learn that Uncle Claude, now pushing seventy, had recently