Actors: The Mild One

People are endlessly wondering who will be the new Hemingway, the new Hornung, the new Premier of the Soviet Union. But no one yet has been courageous enough to confront the ultimate question: Who will be the new John Wayne?

Steve McQueen, of course. He may not be quite as big, rough and ferrous as the cast-iron Duke, but he has proved himself worthy. He has displayed reckless fortitude by following Yul Brynner into battle in The Magnificent Seven. He was TV’s Hessian headhunter in Wanted—Dead or Alive, serving what he describes as “three hard mother-grabbin’ years, but I learned my trade and it gave me discipline.” His range is so breathtaking that he can play either a grim soldier, as he did in Hell Is for Heroes, or a buoyantly impish soldier, as he does in the forthcoming Great Escape. Above all, he is to most other movie actors what a young oak is to a pile of fagots.

He is a blue-eyed Pan with croppy, disarrayed blond hair and lips that are pursed in a rubber grin. His overall look seems to say “Don’t crowd me.” There is a whiff of felony about him, but he is nonetheless a prototype American. With his wide ears and open face, he looks something like a young Dwight Eisenhower after sophomore year at San Quentin.

The Scam. His father, a Navy flyer, left home when Steve was a baby. “I loved my mother,” says Steve, “but my stepfather was something else again. There were a few bad scenes, and you know, I was outa the hatch and runnin’ the streets when I was 14.” Steve’s family sent him to Chino, a private school for problem boys, outside Los Angeles.

When Steve left a year later, it was the end of his formal education. He shipped out on an oil tanker, worked in lumber camps, did a tour in the Marine Corps, worked as a sandalmaker, a delivery boy and as a carny huckster. “We were selling these ballpoint pens,” he says, “and man, they were worth like 160 apiece. And we were sellin’ them for a buck. It was a full scam.

My boss was scammin’ from the public, and I was scammin’ from him. Anyway, I gave it up. Why? My conscience got the best of me. You don’t believe it? Well, that isn’t exactly right either. You see, the guy got on to me. So I left.”

Then one day in New York’s Greenwich Village he was introduced to the director of Manhattan’s Neighborhood Playhouse. With the help of the G.I. Bill, Steve won a scholarship to the Herbert Berghof Studio; later he went on to the Actors Studio. In 1956 he replaced Ben Gazzara in Broadway’s Hatful of Rain.

In the same year he married Neile Adams, a dancer-singer in Pajama Game. On their way to the church, he and Neile were doing 100 m.p.h. when two cops stopped them. The fuzz officially witnessed the wedding. Today, on his frequent romps up the California coast, Steve guns his Jag up to 140 and keeps it there. But he is more than a domestic menace. He is a big-league racing driver too. Like Stirling Moss, he was once a paid member of the British Motor Corp.’s racing team.

“Slipstreamin’ around a turn in the middle of the pack,” he says, “is what separates the men from the boys. If you can’t cut it, you gotta back out. That simple. Life’s a lot like racing. I used to want to charge right through the pack. Moss gave me some good advice: ‘Stay loose. When you have to charge, be a smooth charger.’ Dig?”

Brass Apple. Despite his hip talk, Steve McQueen would like people to think of him as a drab conservative. Expressing this, he once hung a sign on his motorcycle identifying its owner as THE MILD ONE. He keeps his motorcycle close by him—often parking it right in the middle of a movie set. When the Mild One finishes work, he departs in a shattering roar, bouncing over cables and scattering his colleagues in all directions. The noise affects everyone but Steve, since he is all deaf in one ear and half deaf in the other.

Now 34, he is making $500,000 a year, has two children, a philosophy (“God is my kids, my old lady,* green grass, trees, machines and animals”), a mountaintop Hollywood home, and business interests worth $300,000. In the language of producers, he is white-hot. He has just finished Love with the Proper Stranger with Natalie Wood, and he is making Soldier in the Rain with Jackie Gleason and The Traveling Lady with Lee Remick. “I got loot, a family, property, and I’m heading for the big apple,” he says, stepping on the gas. “You know—the brass ring. Everything’s cool.”

* His wife.