Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [9]
He was then assigned to duty in the Arctic, barely eighteen, where he saved the lives of five other marines during military exercises when he pulled them from a boat that was about to sink into the icy water. For that he was put into the honor guard assigned to protect President Harry Truman, and when his three-year enlistment was up, he was given an honorable discharge for his heroics. That day he headed straight for Myrtle Beach and Sue Ann.3
When he met Sue Ann’s family, they took an immediate liking to Steven, especially her father, who’d made his fortune in industry and wanted Steven to marry his daughter. In return he promised he would set up Steven financially for life. Steven thought it over and realized it wasn’t what he wanted, and took off in the night without saying goodbye to anyone.
He never saw Sue Ann again.
HE STOPPED off for a while in Washington, D.C., where he got by as a taxi driver and mechanic, on his way to his final destination, Greenwich Village.
When he got there, he was shocked to discover that Jullian had moved back to San Francisco. He decided to stay on in the Village and found a new small flat to sublet. The rent was $19 a month, and the toilet and shower were shared by everyone on the floor.
Greenwich Village was a section of southern Manhattan that had once been an Indian tobacco field until the Dutch turned it into cow pastures. It wasn’t until the British arrived that it became a livable hamlet. Soon its cheap housing and tranquil setting attracted writers, actors, and musicians. By the mid-twentieth century Cole Porter, Martha Graham, Howard Clurman, Eugene O’Neill, James Baldwin, Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett, e. e. cummings, Allen Ginsberg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and scores of others had all called the Village their home. Coffeehouses, nightspots for jazz and folk music and “readings,” and theaters could be found on almost every street. One of them, the Provincetown Playhouse, became O’Neill’s favored stage, and actors came in droves to try to be a part of the downtown artistic community.
At the same time, the G.I. Bill made it possible for the scores of World War II veterans who lived in or near the city to take advantage of educational facilities they otherwise would not have been able to gain access to. Dozens of acting schools materialized in the Village and Midtown, with no shortage of young, good-looking men signing up to study in the hopes of making it big in theater, film, and especially television, which was in its golden age of live broadcasts of comedy and drama, most of it coming out of Manhattan, and constantly in need of new faces.
It was into this creative hub that Steven settled, slipping easily into the boho mix of beatniks and cabdrivers, mechanics and musicians, and a seemingly endless supply of young and beautiful (and easy) wannabe actresses. After a couple of months of eking out a living doing mechanical jobs and occasionally posing for the racy covers of detective magazines, always with his shirt open and a woman in a slip in a nearby bed, Steven eventually turned to shoplifting to help make ends meet. “I was so broke I’d go into New York drug stores, pick up an alarm clock or something and walk up to the cashier and say, ‘Gimme a refund on this, please’ … talk about ‘beat.’ I was it.”
He worked as a part-time dishwasher, drove a post office truck every night from 6:30 p.m. until 2:30 a.m., and even tried his hand as a professional boxer, using what little training he had picked up in the marines, until he was knocked out in the third round of his first fight, for which he earned a grand total of $65. He also thought about enrolling in classes to learn how to lay tile. The only problem was, the school he wanted to go to was in Spain—a big move and one he was willing to make, as soon as he saved enough money for the