-Article taken from Premiere Magazine, September 1999.
-This article talks about Steve McQueen, who had an extreme hatred
for Dean, and was happy when Dean was killed.
“I’m glad Dean’s
dead,” said Steve McQueen, astride his BSA motorcycle. “It makes
more room for me.” It was autumn, 1955. James Dean had just been
killed in a car crash, and McQueen, a struggling actor in Manhattan’s East
Village, was elated that one more competitor had been eliminated. (Of course,
there was still Brando. But then again, the new Brando picture previewing
all over town was Guys and Dolls—a musical, for God’s sake.) Who better
to share his delight with than a fellow actor who, as McQueen well knew,
had been good friends with Dean?
Dean’s friend was John Gilmore,
another aspiring actor—one who would later light out for Hollywood, be
groomed for matinee idoldom, and then hang it all up to devote himself
to writing. All the starving artists in that part of town knew one another,
and Gilmore was more than familiar with McQueen’s brashness—and determination.
The 25-year-old McQueen had been on the scene for a few years now, landing
roles here and there. His uncontrollable cockiness, though, got him a reputation,
and sometimes got him fired, but he wasn’t going to change. And he wasn’t
going to give up.
In the circles McQueen and Gilmore hung out in, in the bars they fre-quented,
McQueen might have found himself rubbing elbows with future free-jazz pioneers
or budding pop artists—and he probably couldn’t have cared less. At the
time he had only two interests —stardom and girls. (The latter interest
was not entirely carnal. The oft-indigent McQueen “hit [up] girls all the
time for money,” Gilmore says.)
Gilmore was living with
an ex-girlfriend of McQueen’s who told Gilmore “that [McQueen] spent a
lot of his time at the mirror, running through lines of Brando’s. He looked
at himself and said, ‘I’ve gotta make it, man; I’ve gotta fucking make
it.’”
Nothing was going to stand in the way of McQueen’s quest to succeed—
not other actors, not money. He was going to escape obscurity at any cost.
McQueen had fair hair and
penetrating slate-blue eyes, but he was no pretty boy. While carefree was
never the word to describe his persona, he was certainly no bundle of nerves.
He emanated a certain stillness—the stillness of a crouched predator making
up its mind whether to attack or disappear back into the brush. There’s
no one line of movie dialogue that can summon up the power of his onscreen
presence, no “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,” no “Go ahead, make
myday.” There is only the recollection of his palpable physicality: his
aggressive merging with the steering wheel, gearshift, and accelerator
as he flies his Mustang over the hills of San Francisco in Bullitt; his
mocking, seductive smile as he snatches a pawn away from Faye Dunaway in
The Thomas Crown Affair; his insolent stride, mitt and baseball in hand,
back into the brig as the Cooler King in The Great Escape. McQueen never
needed words to prove to the world that he was the King of Cool.
Almost 20 years after the
actor’s death, Hollywood is swimming in Mc-Queen nostalgia: He’s been celebrated
in no fewer than three TV documentaries, and his Thomas Crown Affair was
recently remade, with Pierce Bros-nan, Rene Russo, and Denis Leary. But
what, exactly, is being celebrated? Even at the height of his success,
McQueen was combative, promiscuous, the archetypal “difficult movie star,”
ever on the run from one thing or an-other. Sometimes —a lot of the time
—he could be a complete S.O.B. But he possessed something—a rawness, a
sense ofgenuine danger—that scores of today's more genteel young actors
would give their souls, and more, to have.
Among downtown performers,
McQueen was known, Gilmore says, as "an opportunistic asshole" whose lack
of interest in anything other than himself, the writer admits, "is not
extraordinary in actors." McQueen studied at New York's prestigious
Neighborhood Playhouse and, briefly, at the Actors Studio. He got
his first Broadway part in 1956, replacing Ben Gazzara in the lead of A
Hatful of Rain - a job for which he was fired after three months.