Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [71]
Steve and Pleshette became close friends but not lovers. They had known each other from their stage days back in New York, and Pleshette was a good friend of Neile’s as well. Whenever Neile did come to visit the set, which was not that often because of the poor weather conditions, the three always hung out together. Pleshette was seriously involved at the time with another man (who was married to someone else). When Neile left, Steve happily took off for New Orleans whenever his shooting schedule would permit, to feast on the large number of available and willing young women always there waiting like ripe cherries to be picked by him.
BY FEBRUARY 1966, Steve was already on-set filming his next picture, The Sand Pebbles. He’d joined the production late in 1965 after he was no longer needed on Nevada Smith. He’d received a call from Robert Wise, who told him Sand Pebbles was finally ready to go into production. Wise, who had provided Steve his entrée into movies, was somebody to whom Steve could never say no even though he had been seriously considering two other projects.
One came from Joe Levine, who wanted to do a second picture with him. He had what he believed was the perfect next Steve McQueen film, an adaptation of Romain Gary’s novel The Ski Bum. Steve liked the book and Levine had had the rights for a long time but couldn’t make it because he had been unable to find the right actor to play the sexy, athletic lead.
The second project was one Steve was still trying to develop with John Sturges. Day of the Champion would convey the drama and tautness of auto racing through real time, by shooting an actual race, start to finish, and capturing the characters’ reactions to the various situations that come up. Although no one had yet made a film about auto racing that was a hit in America, the sport was much bigger at the time in Europe, there was talk that Paul Newman was trying to develop a similar project based on the Indianapolis 500—but Steve wanted to be first. It was the film for which he had created Solar, and he’d already invested Solar seed money in it.
But after reading the revised Robert Anderson screenplay (or, more accurately, after Neile read it and summarized it for Steve), he reluctantly put aside Day of the Champion and The Ski Bum as well and signed on to play The Sand Pebbles’s lead protagonist, Jake Holman, for $250,000 and a hefty percentage of the profits.1
Anderson, a well-known Broadway playwright (Tea and Sympathy, 1953), had made the transition to Hollywood with his Oscar-nominated adaptation of the Kathryn Hulme novel The Nun’s Story. He was hired by Wise, who was also The Sand Pebbles’s producer, to write the screen version of Richard McKenna’s ambitious, bestselling novel, which had spent half a year on the New York Times bestseller list. The story was based on his own experiences as an enlisted navy man stationed in China between the world wars.
The specific action of the film takes place in 1926, in the early years of the Chinese civil war. The Kuomintang, the Nationalist military, was perceived by the outside world as no different from its Communist enemies, especially by England, France, and the United States, all of whom had benefited from China’s natural resources for decades before the Qing dynasty was overturned and, under Sun Yat-sen, the Chinese Republic was born. Sun’s death in 1925 upset the fragile government, and Chiang Kai-shek, the head of the new military Sun had created, declared war against the Communist insurgents. Following Sun Yat-sen