But in 1986’s My Husband, My Friend: A Memoir, McQueen’s first wife, Neile Adams McQueen, exposes the fallible human behind the iconic star, with beautiful (and at times brutal) honesty, grace, and just a tad bit of righteous anger. Along the way she describes the stars who populated their world: Marlon Brando, Princess Grace, Howard Hughes, Elvis Presley, Suzanne Pleshette, Sharon Tate, Shirley MacLaine, Frank Sinatra, Faye Dunaway, Candice Bergen, and even Princess Margaret.
What unfolds is a heartbreaking, at times haunting story about a little boy who strove to become a legend, and the woman who understood his manic, at times reckless drive. “Like a gambler, he had a desire to conquer the odds,” she writes “and when that failed, he still reveled in simply having been part of the excitement to begin with. The element of danger was as necessary to his survival as breathing.”
The Lost Boy
“I came from a world of brute force,” Steve McQueen once said of his life, per Eliot. Born Terrence Stephen McQueen on March 24, 1930, in Beech Grove, Indiana, he was the product of a quickie marriage between Terrence, a deadbeat circus stunt pilot, and Julianne, a wayward teenager (whom Eliot claims was a sex worker) on her way to alcoholism.
Terrence split almost immediately, and Julianne deposited her small son on the Missouri farm of her Uncle Claude, a stoic, kindly old man. The beautiful, sullen boy was an energetic dreamer who often longed for his mother. “He told me that sometimes, during especially cold mornings,” Neile writes, “he would curl up with the cows as soon as he had finished milking them.”
Like something out of a Steinbeck novel, McQueen’s early quiet childhood shattered when he ran away to join the circus. He eventually ended up in Los Angeles with Julianne, where he was brutally abused by her partner. Angry and defiant, McQueen became a full throttle juvenile delinquent, and his mother sent him to the California Junior Boys Republic in Chino. After finding fame, he’d continue to visit and support the institution throughout his life.
“During holiday periods when the boys were allowed to go home, Steve would invariably be the only boy left at school,” Neile writes. “There he would wander the grounds alone, barely able to contain the pain that tore his heart.” At 16, he was in Greenwich Village with Julianne before taking off to become a sailor—complete with a phony able-bodied seamancard. He jumped ship in the Dominican Republic and worked as a towel boy in a brothel before bumming around the U.S. working odd jobs.
