The two co-stars Steve McQueen hated working with: “I don’t work that way”
Often thought of as the ultimate ‘King of Cool’, Steve McQueen‘s image is often accompanied by swathes of dry ice and a notable increase in people reaching for their knitted cardigans. The legendary actor wasn’t simply a commanding on-screen presence but the definition of a growing counterculture that spread from the 1960s and into every facet of fashion, music and culture it possibly could.
But to think of McQueen as some kind of eternally zen, cooler than cool, master of lackadaisical living is to misunderstand the difference between the image and the person behind the image.
McQueen was wracked with paranoia throughout most of his career, constantly underestimating his own abilities. Combining those issues with narcotics and heavy drinking, plus the odd moment of being chased down by the Manson family murderers, and you have a cocktail ready to explode like it was pre-mixed by Mr Molotov.
The truth is, despite his place on the pedestal of culture, McQueen was a heavily fuelled individual and, like the many race cars and motorbikes he would push to the limit in his lifetime, he would also see himself on the red line more often than he would have liked on set. It would result in two of his co-stars finding themselves on the hotheaded end of the ‘King of Cool’.
Why did Steve McQueen and Paul Newman hate each other?
Paul Newman and Steve McQueen should have been great friends. Similarly aged and with similar petrol-fuelled interests, the two stars could have been bona fide bros if only for their egos. On the set of Towering Inferno, their rivalry would intensify. The movie would see them both engage in petty tactics to one-up the other in a competition from which they both emerged as losers.
McQueen and Newman would battle for screen time, with the former even requesting a writer give him 12 more lines of dialogue so that he could match the number given to his co-protagonist, Newman. It would lead to the latter labelling McQueen a “chicken shit” as the two men fought for top billing.
Fighting for the top billing is the kind of Hollywood bullshit one might expect to be written into a movie, not what actually goes on behind the scenes of a real production. But, it would seem that McQueen couldn’t get over the post placement and would let it hamper not the production but his entire career as his ego sagt behind the wheel and drove things to distraction.
While Towering Inferno saw their feud worsen, it’s believed it all began when McQueen lost out to Newman for his legendary turn in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Now, why did Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen fall out?
The Magnificent Seven is the kind of picture that stands out as a big hitter before you even hit play. A western remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, in which the actor starred alongside the likes of Charles Bronson, Eli Wallach, James Coburn and Steve McQueen, the picture is widely regarded as one of the finest efforts in the western genre. However, McQueen would soon find himself in heated exchanges with another of the movie’s stars, Yul Brynner.
As written by Marc Eliot in Steve McQueen: A Biography, the actor recalled of his issues with Brynne: McQueen stated, “We didn’t get along. Brynner came up to me in front of a lot of people and grabbed me by the shoulder. He was mad about something. He doesn’t ride well and knows nothing about guns, so maybe he thought I represented a threat”.
Continuing, McQueen added, “I was in my element. He wasn’t. When you work in a scene with Yul, you’re supposed to stand perfectly still, ten feet away. Well, I don’t work that way”. However, it would seem that most of these issues stemmed from the simple fact that McQueen preferred Brynner’s gun in the movie. “Steve was intensely competitive,” wrote McQueen biographer Robert Vaughn, “It wasn’t enough just to be successful —he had to be more successful than anyone else”.
The competitive world of Hollywood not only breeds excellence but also generation after generation of actors who are irreparably damaged by the competition. While McQueen may have shown himself as the ‘King of Cool’ in photo shoots, parading around in sunglasses, smoking cigarettes while listening to records, the truth is, he was an intensely fragile man, continuously concerned that he would be found out.
Insecurity is enough to make anybody quake with fear. When those insecurities are embedded into the very fabric of the industry, then it is almost impossible to ignore them. Those feelings would colour the private life of McQueen and leave his legacy forever tarnished.
