Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [95]
5 It’s possible that Steve first found out about the script from a friend, Steve Ferry, who may have read it while working on Norman Jewison’s The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming. Jewison, at the time, was interested in the possibilities of turning it into a movie.
6 She lost to Katharine Hepburn in Stanley Kramer’s Look Who’s Coming to Dinner.
7 It was, to be fair, quite a kiss. Long, erotic, and filmed up close, it took up fifty-five seconds of screen time.
8 It remains unclear if Steve actually attended. Several sources offer contradictory versions, and none have definitive proof.
9 Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act and other sources, the author has seen parts of McQueen’s FBI file, and has extensive experience working with Bureau files in connection with other published biographies.
I feel very protective about Hollywood, and I wouldn’t rap my town, but I’ll rap the things I didn’t have the sense to avoid—which was to get very involved.… I was working sixteen hours a day and I was the president of three corporations. And I was uh … not very happy.
—STEVE MCQUEEN
THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR HAD ITS WORLD PREMIERE at Boston’s Sack Music Hall on the evening of June 26, 1968, and began a nationwide summer run the next day. Steve and Neile went east together for the big opening, although at the last minute he had a change of heart and tried to get out of it, claiming his ears, especially the near-deaf one, were bothering him and he didn’t want to fly. However, Neile, still upset about San Francisco, managed to convince him it was an important enough occasion that he should try to make it, and that they could both put on their best brave faces for it.
Steve agreed, and that night, when they showed up, they both looked stunning in their formal attire. Steve’s black tux made it appear as if Thomas Crown himself had shown up for the premiere, and the two gave a passable performance as the perfect happily married couple.
The event had prompted a mayoral declaration of “Steve McQueen Day,” and just to get into the theater Steve had to be shielded by policemen when it seemed the crowd outside might break down the wooden barriers and crush him to death. Parties went on all weekend in celebration of the big event and sports events were held in his honor. Whenever he was asked in any of the endless interviews he consented to that weekend, he always made a point of saying of how happy he was to be married to Neile.
Those interviews, Neile said later, “gave me hope.” Even now, she wanted to believe that regardless of anything that had gone down before, even San Francisco, their love and marriage could somehow survive it. Now, however, she had to move all that to the back of her mind; this was Steve’s night and she did not want anything, most of all herself, to interfere with it.
THE REVIEWS The Thomas Crown Affair received were among the best of Steve’s career, for his performance more than for the film itself. The New York Times’s Renata Adler, a writer who was not really a film critic, did not easily surrender her imagination to romantic fantasy in the movies. But she allowed herself to be charmed by Steve: “There is a long, soon-to-be-famous kissing scene that is so mis-directed that one thinks of Edsels on a summer’s night.… McQueen is always special, and although this role is too indoors and formal for him, he does get a chance to race across the desert, or fly a glider or lounge on a beach, in the casual-intense work he is best at.”
The New York Daily News’s Kathleen Carroll wrote that “a polished McQueen, minus his motorcyclist’s mumble, shows a whole new facet of his active personality. He is cast most successfully.”
Archer Winsten, writing in the New York Post, liked Steve’s performance as well but was less impressed with the film: “McQueen, dashing around with verve, unlimited energy and bright, inquiring eyes, makes you wonder if he knows he’s hatching something