Manuel Garriga
It must be a generational issue. It means almost nothing to many young people, but for quite a few of us, in our forties and fifties, his name manages to make our hearts beat faster. Actor of a brilliant career that began in the late 50s and ended with his death in 1980 due to cancer, Steve McQueen is a myth shared between the cinema and the car, the type that best embodies the communion between both worlds.
The character exerts a strong attraction on many of us. We are fascinated by his figure, his roles, his passion for everything that had an engine, wheels and even wings, his powerful personal magnetism... He also has dark, very dark parts, which on the other hand humanize him; maybe too much: son of an absent father, juvenile delinquent with long stay in reform school, ex-marine, addicted to alcohol and cocaine, sometimes despotic and unfaithful by nature, he treated many of his peers, and especially his women, with absolute contempt . What is said a real cocoon, go.
But let's what interests us, his love, from an early age, for everything that smacked of nuts and bolts. At the age of twenty, he buys a Harley K with the money he earns from trucking at night and playing poker; As soon as he gets a good role in the theater and gets paid, the first thing he does -we're in the mid-50s- is pick up an MG TC. He soon discovers how expensive a car can be to maintain and, fed up with breaking axles and changing spokes, he replaces it with a BSA 650. He's still a second-rate actor, but he's already behaving like a star and, of course, they end up throwing him out. So he changes gear and starts to repair motorcycles; He will even manage to fix that of a certain James Dean…
FIRST SUCCESSES
He finally manages to star in the TV series Wanted: dead or alive, in which he plays the tough guy. An impressive success. With streams of dollars flowing on his own, in 1958 he bought his first real sports car, a black Porsche Speedster 1600. Then follows a green Jaguar XKSS black leg (only 15 were made) with magnesium bodywork; and that will only be the beginning. In 1963, after filming The great escape, the garage of his new mansion in Brentwood, known as "El Castillo", houses a Mercedes 300 SL, a Ferrari Berlinetta Lusso 3 liters, an AC Cobra, a Lincoln Town Car, a Triumph Bonneville, a Honda and various country bikes . Later they will come a Packard Super 8, a 1909 Pierce, a 1915 Cyclone... At the time of his death he had accumulated 55 cars, 210 motorcycles and was beginning to become fond of airplanes ancient.
Shortly after having the Porsche, Steve begins to frequent Mullholand Drive, famous curvy road above the Hollywood Hills - and the title of a cryptic David Lynch film - where he dedicates himself to challenge burned like him until the police show up and they have to leave at full speed. So in order not to get into -more- trouble, at the beginning of 1959 he decided to take part in some local tests organized by the California Sports Car Club. In May he entered his first race, in Santa Barbara, and the worst thing that could happen happened: he won. Since then he has been permanently trapped by the motorsport virus, an addiction, like the others he cultivated, that was not going to leave him for the rest of his life.
Thus, he changes the Porsche for a Lotus Le Mans MkXI, making the producers very nervous, who see the star in danger and fear insurance problems. In England, where he is shooting a film, call BMC in case in the meantime you can do "some little run...". They leave him an Austin A40 with which he competes in local events, drives a Mini at Brands Hatch and finishes 3rd behind Christabel Carlisle and Vic Elford, and even befriends Stirling Moss.
ACTOR OR PILOT?
Before leaving, he acquired a Cooper Formula Junior that was sent to California, along with a Mini Cooper S and a Land Rover. Back, he continues racing, and one day he receives a proposal from a well-known English team inviting him to run a championship in Europe. There you will have your Hamletian dilemma: "I didn't know if he was an actor running or a pilot acting".
The history of cinema tells us that he chose the first option and there is his filmography, but this also attests that, as soon as he could, he put cars and motorcycles into the matter. In The Thomas Crown Affair, without going further, included a part of the script where the protagonist drives a buggy, which had itself built expressly for the film - VW chassis and supercharged 180 hp Corvair engine, no nonsense - and with which it almost ruined the production company.
Are we getting an idea of what car freak who was going to be the uncle? He loved running, it was his favorite thing in the world, apart from picking up and getting high, activities in which he was also an accomplished master but which did not bring him the income of acting, which did fill his inordinate ego.
DOUBLE OR NOTHING
Okay, now we are going to do something painful: kill the myth. Despite driving any car very well and being a consummate motorcyclist, he did not actually dub all the scenes that are usually attributed to him, but not because he was not able to do it but because his producers were not willing to have their chicken break. golden eggs ... or break them himself. The jump from the barbed wire of the prison camp in The great escapeIt is not he who does it but his friend, the pilot Bud Ekins (the bike is not a BMW as some still believe, but a Triumph TR6 Trophy Bird in disguise).
After the Dodge Charger driven by the great specialist Bill Hickman in the famous chase of Bullit he runs a Mustang driven, again, by Ekins. The story is this: Steve had filmed only the first take, in which his car collides lightly with a lamppost, and for the next take the production people tricked him by quoting him on set at 10 in the morning. Then Ekins, duly dyed blonde since 7, had finished his frenetic run against the Charger. Steve's bad milk was already legendary, and his anger was one of those who make time.
McQueen kept racing whenever he got the chance, especially desert enduros, where he was just another rider for the modest Chicken Shit Racing Team. And it wasn't bad at all. The movie On Any Sunday Bruce Brown's portrays it perfectly. According to his friend Steve Ferrry, speed was an escape valve from the pressure of his star life:
“He was running to get the shit out of his system. Before he started racing Steve was running up and down the streets like a savage, with the cops after him. So he ended up channeling all that energy into the competition.". He he knew full well that in the studio he was treated like a star, but he was not stupidThey told him what he wanted to hear and he felt like a superman. For this reason, he was aware that in the motor world things worked differently, and he openly admitted it:
“When you're in a race, the guy next to you doesn't give a damn who you are, and if he beats you it means he's a better man than you. The competition prevents me from believing that I am a divine gift for humanity”.
Forceful self-analysis of the great narcissist who, however, never stopped behaving like a true macho, homophobic and arrogant pig, which does not mean that we should judge him for it How would any son of a neighbor react to seeing himself become a superstar with everything - cars, drugs, women - at his fingertips? As paradoxical as it sounds, it was the competition, that arena where man's basest instincts are settled, that prevented Steve McQueen from being even more of a son of a bitch than he was. Green things, friends.
A NIGHTMARE ON LE MANS
But let's get to the heart of the matter with the book A French kiss with the dead, dedicated to this cult movie for so many of us: Le Mans, Is it worth the € 75 it costs? Hard to say: to the mqueeners staunch we do not care because we take everything at any cost. There is no limit to obsessions: there are those who snoop around the net in search of the strangest things and come to pay whatever it is for any minutia that has to do with, for example, Alfonso de Portago, such as the biography of their ex girlfriend or the memories of a distant cousin, just to see what it says about him.
The book has a hundred pages left over, which it dedicates to telling the story of the race and of some participating brands. It never hurts to review the Alfa Romeo, Ferrari, Lola, Matra and Porsche subjects, but dedicating a quarter of the work to it seems excessive. After that parenthesis, he enters the stage in which McQueen takes his preparation for filming very seriously and acquires a Porsche 908 with which he will compete in the 12 Hours of Sebring in 1970, teaming up with Peter Revson.
The pair rise to 2nd place, despite Steve driving with a cast on his foot after falling while racing his motorcycle the week before. The result, excellent without a doubt, legitimizes him before professional pilots -he thinks- to shoot the film participating in the real race, which is what he wants to do. But Cinema Center, which is co-producing the film and providing the capital, doesn't want to risk losing its star to an accident. According to the author of the book, Michael Keyser, the directors of the production company “They were anxious to get Steve away from the idea that he was making a documentary. What they wanted was a production within the Hollywood orthodoxy, with a solid plot line..
The deep frustration of the actor for this fact, his lack of understanding with the directors, the emotional chaos in which he lives and the march he is leading, make the filming of the movie an endless morass.
The first director, John Sturges, a friend of Steve's and an avowed autophile, sent it to hell after two months of filming. His replacement, Lee J. Katzin, had to finish it between accidents, strikes, financial problems... In essence, the thing is summed up like this: tape Never had no script or coherent narrative thread that resembled it, despite having three screenwriters full time. Steve would knock him over and over, or refuse to follow him. He had a vision. Had seen On Any Sunday, he thought that his car racing film would be a documentary and he must have deduced that a documentary did not need a script. Colossal mistake, without a doubt (I can assure you).
The result is one of the most disastrous, misunderstood, and torn to pieces with the greatest fury by critics (something logical, on the other hand: McQueen was one of the best-paid actors of his time, and to those who wrote about cinema -who didn't have to understand cars and races- they must have craved an insufferable mess, a whim of the star, and they gave him for the hair). And yet we love it. SWe know it's a real rock but we never get tired of revisiting Le Mans, perhaps because we do not seek in it more coherence than that provided by an accumulation of images and sensations, the fruit of the enlightened mind of a guy as crazy as some of us.
We are nearing the end of the road: according to the thesis of the book, his inspiration could have been born on a road trip in the late sixties, from Paris to Barcelona, where Steve and his friends were going to embark for Mallorca. If crossing the center of France the light bulb lit up, We are going to elucubrate now that our idol with feet of clay will ruminate the film at the foot of Montjuïc, while waiting for the shell of Trasmediterránea. The mythomanic Barcelona users -both indigenous and assimilated- we like to think about it. Overall, dreaming is still cheap.
Images from Youtube and Porsche files.
