Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [88]
The only thing that upset Steve about the report, which Jewison shared with him, was its sexual smear campaign, rumors that appeared to have been originated by the FBI itself. Despite the fact that Steve’s career was based on his macho image as a strong, tough leading man who drove women crazy, and that if they had done any real investigating they would have known about his consistent womanizing, rumors now began to leak that he was leading a secret gay life.9 He and Neile received anonymous phone “tips” that Steve was on a list of “known homosexuals,” and it proved unnerving to the both of them. These rumors never completely disappeared and remain today the basis for a subindustry of articles, books, and magazine articles looking to “reveal” the secret life of Steve McQueen without offering a single shred of credible evidence. In that sense, the campaign against him was quite successful.
DURING PRODUCTION, Steve was having trouble finding some way to physicalize his portrayal of the character of Thomas Crown. He tried dozens of standard Method exercises, including sense memory, improvisation, and searching for the moment in a scene that provided its motivation. Nothing worked for him until he began to rehearse in costume. Ironically, it was this external trigger that led him to an element of his character. Wearing the elegant clothes of Thomas Crown made him feel elegant. It was as if he were living inside Crown’s skin rather than merely wearing his wardrobe. In this case, clothes did indeed make the man.
Still, Steve’s idiosyncratic behavior on the set drove Jewison crazy, much the same way it had Robert Wise on The Sand Pebbles. Once again he demanded to see dailies, asked endless questions about why something was being shot the way it was, and argued against whatever Jewison offered by way of explanation. It was Steve’s favored style of working, a manic sort of Stanislavsky-meets-Socrates coupled with his long-standing distrust of authority, but it certainly wasn’t Jewison’s.
One day, Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler wanted to capture a certain outdoor light for a beach scene and had only a brief window of time to do it. They had to wait for hours, and just as they were about to shoot, Steve, who was in the scene, got in his dune buggy and drove away. Nearly half an hour later, when the light was long gone, Steve returned, hopped out, and asked with a big grin on his face, “What’s everyone waiting for?”
“You know goddamn well what we’re waiting for … we’re waiting for you,” Jewison snapped back. Many believe the rift that opened that day between the two never healed.
Another time when Steve disrupted filming and left the set in a huff, Jewison threw his hands up and screamed, “I don’t care whether I ever finish this picture!”
Jewison eventually figured out a way to keep Steve out of everyone’s hair. Nikita Knatz, a fifty-year-old Russian-born American war hero, was hired by Jewison ostensibly as an on-set sketch artist, but really to keep Steve distracted when he wasn’t being filmed. Knatz kept Steve’s attention by demonstrating to him the art of sword handling, and soon enough Steve began practicing along with him. Steve eventually introduced Knatz to Bruce Lee, and when the filming was completed all three began practicing martial arts Sunday afternoons at Lee’s house. With his help, Steve eventually earned a black