Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [77]
BACK ON the Sand Pebbles set, Steve’s visceral response to the newspaper article caused him to begin talking out loud to himself and to anyone close enough to hear. The Sand Pebbles was going to be his last movie, and this time he meant it.
In May 1966, two months after his thirty-sixth birthday and after seven months in Taiwan and Hong Kong making The Sand Pebbles, whose original $12 million budget had ballooned to $15 million, Steve, Neile, and the children returned to Los Angeles, where Steve stepped off the plane, bent down, and kissed the ground.
IT WAS the start of a bizarre love affair of sorts. Steve was elated to be back in America, in his lavish air-conditioned mansion stocked with steaks and scotch and big beds and American radio and television, but less than two weeks after his return, despite his declaration, since made public, that he was once again “retiring” from making movies, he began an intense campaign that was aimed at getting him an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Jake Holman in The Sand Pebbles.
Steve, always in sympathy with the mood of the disenchanted young and their distrust of authority, believed that The Sand Pebbles was an important movie on several levels, not the least of which were social and political. The year 1966 saw an intense upswing in student protests against the Vietnam War, a movement that had grown out of the civil rights marches of the early sixties and now had expanded to a wider stage. As the students of America kept reminding everyone on the evening network news broadcasts, the whole world was watching.
In an extensive interview he gave to columnist Sheilah Graham not long after he returned from the Far East, Steve, sounding as if he still hadn’t completely flushed Jake Holman and his contradictions out of his system, rambled on about the war in Vietnam, one minute sounding as if he supported it, the next like the biggest antiwar activist of all time. “If Vietnam falls, the gateway to Asia falls,” he said—a statement that is almost word for word what the captain says referring to China when he turns upriver before a fierce battle with the Chinese rebels. He then told Graham that a victory in Vietnam was crucial to preventing the domino-like fall of other Asian nations. He then switched gears to personal reflection: “We made our picture sometimes only eight miles away from the Communists. Officers and GIs were continually passing through on the way to the front, and I learned a great deal of what was going on. I wanted to go to Vietnam myself—only four hours by plane from Hong Kong—but the insurance people would not allow it.” He then said something that at the time caused quite a stir in the Hollywood community: “One thing is inexcusable for our country—these boys who are writing letters to parents and wives, saying your son or husband died for nothing … I think we’d better learn to live together. It isn’t the atom bomb that is going to destroy us, it’s the war of the races.… I think in this country, the white man should start making concessions to the Negro, and the Negro should to the white man because this is our country too. I’m not a politician. I’m only a layman, but as an American, I think very strongly about my country. It’s a wonderful country and I don’t want to see it go down that drain.” He was one of the first of the major stars to come out in opposition to the war,