Steve McQueen - Marc Eliot [97]
One such script came from an aspiring musician who believed he could also write movies. Someone at Solar read it and returned it with a note that said simply, “Not interested.” It was one step up from a form rejection letter. The recipient was not happy. His name was Charles Manson.
STEVE DECIDED to leave the preproduction of The Reivers in Relyea’s hands and spent what was left of the summer in Europe with Neile and the kids, knocking about, seeing the sights, and visiting friends. Actress Claudia Cardinale, who had met Steve in Hollywood, had invited him and the family to visit her and her husband, Franco Cristaldi, in Italy. From there it was on to London to visit Richard Attenborough, one of Steve’s favorite co-stars from The Great Escape and The Sand Pebbles.
According to Neile, Steve managed to slip away several times during the London part of the trip to go to the Playboy Club, which was, like the rest of London, “swinging” with young and beautiful “bunnies.” The Playboy Club was manna for Steve, with no shortage of girls eager and willing to be with him.
After Steve and his family returned to Brentwood, he had only a few days at home before his departure for Carrollton, Mississippi, for the scheduled fourteen-week shoot for The Reivers, to be filmed entirely on location (except for the climactic horse race, which was to be shot at the Walt Disney Ranch in Southern California). To direct, Relyea had chosen Mark Rydell, whom Steve knew from his own days of live TV out of New York. Rydell had gone on to a big-screen career that before The Reivers totaled just one film, The Fox, a weird screen adaptation of D. H. Lawrence’s novel of the same name that included scenes of masturbation, three-way sex, and lesbianism. Made in the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the Production Code, it failed both commercially and artistically (the switching of its locale from England to Canada is an apt metaphor for Rydell’s inability to transfer the heat of the novel to the screen).
Rydell was not Steve’s first choice. Far from it. Recalled Relyea, “Steve didn’t react much to the recommendation of Rydell, other than to give me his typical nod of the head.… I didn’t know that McQueen and Rydell had a long history together. I didn’t know they attended the Neighborhood Playhouse and Actors Studio together.… I didn’t know McQueen had stolen Rydell’s former girlfriend, Neile Adams, who eventually became Mrs. McQueen. I didn’t know that Hilly Elkins, Steve’s former agent, once advised Neile not to leave Rydell for a loser who, in his opinion, would never amount to anything—and that insult stuck with him forever.”
Steve had really wanted William Wyler, but he turned down the project, as did John Huston. When Rydell’s name came up—he was already set to direct Nylon, although that film had not as yet reached production—Steve reluctantly said yes, but privately he was already having serious second thoughts about the whole project and was talking doomsday about it to Relyea. “This is career suicide,” he said. “My fans will walk out of the theater feeling betrayed, and that will be the end of it.” Relyea said nothing, but he tended to agree with Steve over this radical shift in styles from Thomas Crown and the upcoming Bullitt. Audiences wanted Steve to be the king of cool, not a sweaty southern country boy.
To write the screenplay, Steve chose the team of Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., who had successfully adapted Faulkner for Martin Ritt’s 1958 The Long, Hot Summer and Ritt’s 1959 The Sound and the Fury. The Long, Hot Summer proved a strong vehicle for Paul Newman, another actor unlikely to feel at home in Faulknerland. They had also written the screenplay for Paul Newman’s highly successful Hud in 1963, again directed by Ritt.
The plot