Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [76]
They didn’t, not that night, not the next night, not for the next two weeks’ worth of tonights. Steve, in turn, simply stopped talking to Wise for that amount of time, and afterward engaged only in minimal, grunting agreements or disagreements for the remainder of the film. Interestingly, his revolt against Wise during production neatly dovetailed with his revolt to the captain of the San Pueblo.
In the midst of all this, Steve developed a flu he couldn’t shake that continually shut down the production and made him look a little dissipated on-screen, something that helped his character but made him appear, for the first time in his career, less boyish and more wasted. He also had an abscessed tooth he refused to let anyone treat until he returned to California. Again, it may have been a Method blessing in disguise for Steve—his tooth may have either motivated him to want less dialogue or added to the character’s inner pain.
But what bothered Steve the most during the making of The Sand Pebbles had nothing directly to do with Anderson, Wise, or the film itself. What pushed him over the edge was something he saw in a copy of an English-language Hong Kong newspaper: a photo of James Garner in a race car. That was when he learned for the first time that Garner and director John Frankenheimer had begun production on a new racetrack film called Grand Prix, already being shot on location in Monaco. According to publicist Rupert Allan, “Steve went wild. Just nuts.”
He had always suspected that Garner envied him a little too much and that he had gotten into racing only because it was a Steve McQueen thing. When Steve had moved to Brentwood, Garner did the same thing, even moving onto the same block, although his house was at a lower elevation and nowhere near as fancy as Steve’s. “That gave Steve the last laugh. His favorite thing to do was to go out on his patio and piss down on James Garner’s house. He used to get the biggest kick out of that,” one of Steve’s friends later recalled.
Two days before Steve read about Garner’s film, back in the States, Bob Relyea, Sturges’s assistant director and production partner, was set to formally announce Day of the Champion as Steve and Sturges’s next picture. The day before the announcement, Sturges and Frankenheimer happened to be seated next to each other at a benefit dinner in Hollywood. As they ate, they talked about their latest projects, and Frankenheimer mentioned he was working on a car-racing film he was calling Grand Prix.
Sturges almost choked when Frankenheimer told him the film was going to be loosely based on a book of photographs called The Cruel Sport. It was the same book that Sturges was, he thought, still in negotiations for. As it turned out, while Sturges had begun dealing with the photographer’s editor, Frankenheimer cut a separate deal with the photographer himself. Aside from the legalities, the practical bottom line was that whoever’s film got out first was the only film that would do business.
An intense competition began where, among other things, according to Relyea, drivers from one production were being given obscene amounts of money to refuse to drive for the other one. Fortunes were being spent by Sturges to try to kill Frankenheimer’s movie, and the same went for Frankenheimer. Sooner or later it all came back to Steve’s participation. Sturges wanted him off The Sand Pebbles by the original date of his contract no matter what stage of production the film was in, so that he could begin working on Day of the Champion. When Wise understandably wouldn