Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [69]
However, production didn’t get very far before the film’s Louisiana location site was obliterated by Hurricane Betsy and had to be shut down for several weeks. The storm hit just days before Steve was scheduled to return to Hollywood for the gala red carpet premiere of The Cincinnati Kid. He then insisted that the receipts of the October 15, 1965, premiere, scheduled twelve nights ahead of the film’s general release, were to be donated to the hurricane’s victims.
The morning of the premiere, just as he was preparing to leave for L.A., he received a phone call from Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco informing him that his mother had suffered a cerebral hemorrhage from which she would not recover. Jullian, believing she had a bad headache, managed to put herself into a cab and get herself to the emergency room, where she was immediately put into intensive care.
Within hours of receiving the call, Steve and Neile were at Jullian’s bedside canceling their appearance at the premiere benefit. Later that same day, Jullian lapsed into an irreversible coma and died.
Her passing hit Steve very hard with a combination of grief, guilt, unfulfilled longing, and unresolved issues of abandonment. Neile wrote that his mother’s passing “produced heart-wrenching sobs and left him guilt-stricken and bereft. He had hoped she would recover if only to ask for her forgiveness for the unhappiness he had caused her. He was not able to unburden himself to her and he carried the pain around for a very long time.”
Jullian was buried in Gardens of Ascension, Forest Lawn Memorial Park, in Glendale, California, in a plot under a tree that Steve had purchased for her. “[Steve] cried at the funeral,” recalled David Foster, who had attended the services with his wife. Also present were Neile, Stan Kamen, and Steve and Neile’s two children, Terry and Chad. “He was a lost soul.”
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1 The domestic gross for the top twelve films of the year were Cleopatra, $26 million; How the West Was Won, $21 million; It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, $21 million; The Birds, $18.5 million; Tom Jones, $12 million; The Sword in the Stone, $12 million; Dr. No, $8.4 million; Charade, $6.7 million; The Great Escape, $6.4 million; Bye Bye Birdie, $6.2 million; Hud, $5.8 million; 55 Days at Peking, $5.7 million.
2 In the late 1960s, Rivers stopped performing and formed his own publishing company. Two of the first acts he signed were Jimmy Webb, the prolific songwriter, and the 5th Dimension, whom he recorded on his Soul City Label.
3 Steve rode a Triumph modified with a 1956 Triumph hub and 19-inch wheels to better distribute the weight. The forks were fitted with sidecar springs and the rake increased slightly by altering the frame at the steering crown. The rear frame hoop was bent upward with welded brackets for the Bates cross-country seats. The bars were Flanders, with leather hand guards, and the throttle cables ran over the tank, through alloy brackets to the twin carburetors. As for the engine itself, it was basically a stock Bonneville with the compression lowered from 12:1 to 8:12:1 for reliability, jumbo cams, and Lodge RL47 platinum-tip plugs.
4 Although it has been reported elsewhere, Tate did not do those nude scenes. They were done by an African American actress whose name has long since vanished from the memories of those involved.
I’ve done pretty well, considering I’m not the movie-star type. I’m not pretty by any means, and I’m not that much of an actor. I should have been a character actor, but somehow it didn’t turn out that way.
—STEVE MCQUEEN
AFTER THE FUNERAL, STEVE RETURNED DIRECTLY TO LOUISIANA and the set of Nevada Smith. If ever he had had an opportunity to employ his Method skills, this was it. He was playing half-breed Nevada Smith, a.k.a. Max Sand (half white, half Kiowa Indian), an easy enough sense-memory association or “parallel,” in Methodese, with his own childhood,