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He dated the young Sicilian-Irish actress Gia Scala while serving his theatrical apprenticeship, and earned money by racing motorbikes at a track on Long Island. In 1955, having made his Broadway debut in A Hatful of Rain, he left for Los Angeles. Quickly taken up by the ambitious young agent Hillard Elkins, he made his film debut in the boxing biopic Somebody Up There Likes Me, starring Paul Newman and directed by Robert Wise, who thought McQueen “a bit cocky”, but appreciated the coiled energy he displayed in a rooftop knife-fight. His first lead role came in The Blob, a sci-fi movie in which he was called upon to deal with a lethal amoeba-like creature from outer space: “IT CRAWLS! IT CREEPS! IT EATS YOU ALIVE!” Soon he met Neile Adams, a gamine, young actress two years younger. “Hi, you’re pretty,” he told her. “You’re pretty, too,” she replied. Married in 1956, they had a daughter, Terry, and a son, Chad, and the marriage would last through his years of greatest success. Although already acquiring a reputation as a troublemaker, he proved a loving and attentive father, particularly once the children were old Steve McQueen on set in Hollywood in the 1956 Jaguar XKSS he called the ‘Green Rat’. He owned it twice PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES/JOHN DOMINIS 58 THE JAGUAR
MCQUEEN MCQUEEN’S DARK GREEN JAGUAR XKSS WAS ESSENTIALLY A ROAD- GOING VERSION OF THE LE MANS- WINNING D-TYPE enough to ride motorbikes with him. The big break came in 1960, with John Sturges’ The Magnificent Seven; his subtle touches of visual characterisation led Yul Brynner, the star, to accuse him of trying to steal scenes. Three years later, Sturges cast him in The Great Escape, in which he demonstrated, when confronted by a prison camp commandant, how to make a smile into an insult. His sexual allure was on full beam in The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), while challenging Faye Dunaway over the chess board: “Do you play?” “Try me.” Neile called him “a macho man who dared to be vulnerable,” and the masculinity was never better expressed than at the wheel of a Mustang GT 390 in the wild car chase up and down the switchback streets of San Francisco that formed the centrepiece of Bullitt, also in 1968. The look was now fully formed and being captured by the photographer William Claxton, who had helped shape the image of the Cool School trumpeter Chet Baker in the ’50s. But whereas Baker never looked comfortable in daylight, or indeed anywhere outside a small basement jazz club, McQueen was designed for the outdoors. He and Claxton went on many road trips together, sharing their love of high-powered machinery, most notably a dark green Jaguar XKSS, essentially a road-going version of the Le Mans-winning D-Type. McQueen loved that car, one of only 16 built before a fire at the Coventry factory ended the run. Having sold it in 1969, he bought it back in 1977 and kept it until his death. The string of late-’60s successes made him big enough, or so he believed, to write his own script. With his own company, Solar Productions, he planned the film that had been forming in his head throughout his own racing career. A hymn to the experience of driving a racing car, Le Mans used real cars and real drivers on the real track. There were a couple of attractive women in the cast, but the real lust objects were the cars. McQueen’s backers, however, wanted a proper story. A frustrated Sturges, the original director, baled out, replaced by a Hollywood writer chosen by the money men. When the replacement requested one more take, McQueen responded: “Listen, I’ll tell you when there’s one more.” Having taken six months to shoot while seriously exceeding its $6m budget, Le Mans crashed and burned at the box office in 1971, taking his career as a producer with it. Now he was just a movie star again. In The Getaway (1972) he played runaway ex-con Doc McCoy and shocked moviegoers with a now-famous slap delivered to the face of Ali McGraw, who ironically became his second wife after he and Neile had split up. That was followed by decent turns in Papillon (1973) and The Towering Inferno (1974). But his long-time fondness for marijuana had by then evolved into a relationship with cocaine, and off-screen his long hair and beard made him look like an associate of Charles Manson – on whose murder list he had featured a few years earlier. McGraw eventually divorced him in 1977, and in December 1979, while filming The Hunter, the first signs of cancer were detected. Eleven months later, after a variety of conventional and alternative treatments, and having married his third wife, the former model Barbara Minty, he died after a heart attack while asleep in a Mexican hospital, 12 hours after the removal of several tumours in a procedure against which his own doctors had warned him. “Do you let anything reach you? Really reach you?” Jacqueline Bisset had asked him in Bullitt. Of course he did. In life and death, the appeal of Steve McQueen was rooted in the suggestion that underneath the brawling, biking, battlehardened exterior lurked the vulnerable soul of an abandoned little boy who spent most of his life trying to recreate the simple joy of riding a tricycle around his uncle’s farm. THE JAGUAR 59
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UN-PLUG AND PLAY SAY HELLO TO JAGUA
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The Jaguar 01/2017 18 32 Editor in
Page 7 and 8: THE JAGUAR COLLECTION 2017 MADE TO
Page 9 and 10: January BOWIE, ONE YEAR ON “David
Page 11 and 12: 23rd March ART BASEL, HONG KONG Fou
Page 13 and 14: April 24th April TOUR AUTO, PARIS T
Page 15 and 16: PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES, HARRY KE
Page 17 and 18: AD Image courtesy of Home Theater o
Page 19 and 20: THE SHOCK OF THE NEW ON THE ROAD IN
Page 22 and 23: TECHNOLOGY 22 THE JAGUAR
Page 24 and 25: I-PACE CONCEPT ENGINEERING The I-PA
Page 26 and 27: 26 THE JAGUAR
Page 29 and 30: I-PACE CONCEPT DRIVING ELECTRIC Wit
Page 31 and 32: THE JAGUAR 31
Page 33 and 34: PHOTOGRAPHY: LKJDÄLKJDF KJLÄKJ Ö
Page 35 and 36: SEASON 3 RACE CALENDAR Race 1: 9th
Page 37 and 38: FORMULA E PHOTOGRAPHY: SPACESUIT, L
Page 39 and 40: “IT’S A STEP INTO A NEW TECHNOL
Page 41 and 42: DRIVING THE FORMULA E: TWO YEARS AG
Page 43 and 44: OUT THERE Silvia Weidenbach’s Gra
Page 45 and 46: MIXED MATERIAL ARTS: 3D modelling g
Page 47 and 48: DESIGN “Even in the era of 3D mod
Page 49 and 50: SUBTLE CUES TRANSPARENT SLEEVES GIV
Page 51 and 52: Designers look to the ’50s and
Page 53 and 54: NEW STREETWEAR THESE FABRICS ARE MA
Page 55 and 56: STYLE FROM HEPBURN TO MCQUEEN A STA
Page 57: PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES/JOHN DOMI
Page 61 and 62: En route discover the Lådfabriken
Page 63 and 64: TRAVEL WHERE TO EAT VATTEN RESTAURA
Page 65 and 66: “THIS IS A BEAUTIFUL PLACE THAT W
Page 67 and 68: PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES (2); LAIF
Page 69 and 70: Endless FROM CALIFORNIA TO THE NEW
Page 71 and 72: Heading south out of Dallas on the
Page 73 and 74: overpasses appeared. In addition to
Page 79 and 80: JAGUAR GEAR PERFORMANCE PERSONALISE
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