Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [64]
Steve was also close to Jay. They had met one night at the Whiskey and had become such good friends that Steve let Jay restyle his blond hair into the look of the day—short, flat, and combed to one side—and lighten it a bit to give him more of a California beach-boy look.
Natalie Wood showed up alone; Ben Gazzara brought his wife, Janice Rule. Steve had taken over for him on Broadway a few years earlier in A Hatful of Rain and now Steve was a much bigger movie star. The two had remained friends. Gazzara’s pal John Cassavetes and his wife, Gena Rowlands, also came along with dozens of other members of the young Hollywood pop-culture elite.
The next day Steve and Neile and their two children left to spend the entire summer traveling around Europe, backpacking it and camping whenever they could. On days it got to be too much with the kids, they would check into hotels. Or Neile would—Steve wanted to avoid any chance of reporters or paparazzi knowing where he was.
Upon the family’s return to the States that August, Steve and Natalie Wood were invited to co-host a cocktail party given for President Lyndon Johnson to help invigorate his reelection campaign by tapping in to a little JFK-style Hollywood glamour. If Johnson couldn’t draw the Rat Pack (who avoided him like the plague), he had Steve McQueen, one of the hottest actors in the country. Neile came along, just to make sure that Steve and Natalie didn’t dance too close. She needn’t have worried. Steve danced all night with Johnson’s younger daughter, Luci Baines Johnson. The party, with accompanying photos, was featured in newspapers around the world.
After that, it was back to Europe for a trip that combined pleasure and racing. This time it was just Steve and Neile. The fun part was Steve joining the American team for an international six-day, 1,200-mile motorcycle endurance race in East Germany. He rode a Triumph Bonneville that his friend, mechanic, and sometime stunt man Bud Ekins had modified for speed.3 During the race someone quipped that if Steve had ridden this cycle in The Great Escape, he would have made it to freedom.
Steve finished out of the money, but finished, something he was quite proud of. Then he and Neile packed their bags and reluctantly headed for the City of Lights, where the French premiere of Love with the Proper Stranger was scheduled for that September.
Steve was the superstar in Paris that he wasn’t yet in America, primarily because Wanted: Dead or Alive had played repeatedly for years on French television. Steve, who liked expensive clothes and always wore custom-made suits, looked resplendent at the opening, his beach-blond hair offset by dark sunglasses. Neile dressed smartly, with an elegantly long scarf around her neck. To the French, they were the new inheritors of the throne of cool that Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg had ascended to in 1960 as stars in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless, a film that reinvigorated French cinema with its youthful combination of passion and insouciance.
After the opening there was a party at Maxim’s, where crowds of young screaming girls stood outside the front door and backed up into the streets of Paris for blocks just to catch a glimpse of their blond American idol.
Steve loved the attention he received in Paris, so much so he began thinking about a return to the movies, but only if he could make meaningful movies like those Belmondo did in France—more personal, less Hollywood, something that showed off the hipper, contemporary side of him.
Back in L.A., while waiting for that script to come along, Steve spent his days mostly at home working out to take off the weight that he tended to put on when he wasn’t filming, and his nights drinking at the Whiskey, smoking pot, occasionally snorting the new “in” drug on the Strip, cocaine, and even, when the opportunity presented itself, tripping out on some sugar cubes laced with acid, which was