Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [65]
Not long after, Steve received a script that interested him more than anything he had seen in a while, something called The Sand Pebbles, to which Robert Wise (Somebody Up There Likes Me) was attached as director at Fox. Steve had Stan Kamen begin discussions between Wise and Solar about the film. It wasn’t exactly what he was looking for, but he loved the screenplay and especially the character of Jake Holman. However, when The Sand Pebbles stalled at Fox, Steve put his involvement on hold.
Anyway, he had more pressing issues at the moment, like Mamie Van Doren, a hot little starlet pressing against him every night at the Whiskey while they danced and slapping her sweaty blond hair in his face. Their affair began the same night the Beatles came to the club, bringing with them their own special brand of hysteria. Even the usually aloof celebrity Whiskey crowd wanted a glimpse of the Fab Four, while Johnny Rivers, whom the Beatles had specifically come to see, cranked it from the club’s small stage loud and fast, a dynamo on speed.
That same night, amidst the wet fog of the club’s hot dance floor, a grinning Steve held up a couple of pharmaceutical Sandoz sunshine acid tabs and offered one to Van Doren, who in the 1950s had been a Universal contract player of the teen blond beauty type—tight sweaters, suggestive Monroe-style mouth moves. Her second career was her determination to sleep with every beautiful contract boy she could get her hands on—young Clint Eastwood was one of her conquests—and she had a real thing for Steve. Although she had told him many times she was afraid of acid, he promised her, screaming over the music, that making love on Sandoz would be something she would never forget. He was very convincing.
Later that evening, they retired to a guest bedroom at Sebring’s mansion: “I could feel the crinkle and crush of the bedspread beneath us as we lay in a tangle of arms and legs, creating our special tempo, our own frantic rhythms,” said Van Doren. “From the haze of our lovemaking I could hear music in the house, guitars mimicking the beat of our bodies. My own voice, as I cried out, sounded as though it was someone else’s. We encouraged each other to longer, more desperate fulfillments after the tidal wave of our first climax. The moments were too short, too long. We were all time, all beginning, quick thrusting, widening, our bodies each other’s receptacle, and death and life were at our side. We kept on and on through the psychedelic night.” According to Van Doren, after that night she and Steve became frequent and intense lovers; often he needed an extra boost to finish and liked to crack open a vial of amyl nitrate just before he came. Soon Van Doren wanted to marry Steve, and began to push him to divorce Neile, which, of course, was out of the question. Sex, even great sex, even super-acid-amyl-nitrate-screw-your-brains-out sex, he maintained, would never make him leave Neile.
AFTER MORE than a year of doing nothing and everything, Steve, via Solar, quietly came out of retirement and formed a one-film partnership with Filmways for a production to be distributed by MGM. Steve made little of MGM’s role at the time—he still held a grudge against them—because they were to act strictly as distributors while putting up his $350,000 acting salary separate from Solar’s future profits; in other words, his salary could not be used against the film’s costs if the film was a flop, or against Solar’s profits if it was a hit.
The script cast him as a card shark