Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen is a major Hollywood star whose success casts a long shadow over Rick Dalton’s career and whose personal presence unsettles Roman Polanski. He appears less often than the people who talk about him, but those appearances make him a potent measure of changing stardom: McQueen is at once an elusive ideal, a source of romantic rivalry, and an old colleague who briefly meets Rick on unexpectedly familiar ground.

Identity and Public Image

At the time of the events surrounding the Bruce Lee Incident, McQueen is not yet the movie superstar or legend he will become. He is known to television audiences as Kato, the Green Hornet’s sidekick on The Green Hornet, a low-budget series made to capitalize on Batman’s popularity. Within Hollywood, however, he is also known as a private martial-arts student of Bruce Lee. McQueen, James Coburn, Roman Polanski, Jay Sebring, and Stirling Silliphant all take lessons with Bruce at home, an arrangement that makes the martial artist a familiar presence among wealthy and influential figures even as he pursues a film career of his own.

McQueen’s celebrity depends partly on the distance between his appeal and his availability. Italian producers want him badly enough to offer exceptional inducements, yet he refuses to work with them. Marvin Schwarz tells Rick Dalton that McQueen will not spend two months at Cinecittà, even though he has worked for nine months in Indochina with Robert Wise. Dino De Laurentiis, according to Marvin, offered to buy him a villa in Florence; other producers offered half a million dollars and a new Ferrari for ten days’ work on a Gina Lollobrigida picture. The offers underscore his value, while his refusal makes that value difficult to obtain.

The Role Rick Nearly Played

McQueen’s career intersects with Rick’s through the story of The Great Escape. Rick recounts that John Sturges offered McQueen the title role of Hilts, the Cooler King, while Carl Foreman was also offering him a leading part in The Victors. McQueen’s indecision reportedly led Sturges to draw up a list of possible replacements. Rick says he was among four names, alongside George Peppard, George Maharis, and George Chakiris.

Rick has told the story so often that he has reduced it to its basic elements, and he resents having to tell it again. To him, it is an old anecdote about a part he did not get, not evidence of a career opportunity still within reach. Schwarz, by contrast, treats the near-miss as useful material: he says Rick could have played the role and imagines that Italian producers will respond to the story. The distinction becomes painful when Schwarz explains that they want McQueen but, unable to secure him, will seek a McQueen they can hire. Rick can feel tears beginning as the agent’s optimistic sales pitch exposes the substitution beneath it. McQueen’s prominence thus shapes Rick’s prospects even when McQueen is nowhere in the room.

The novel repeatedly sets McQueen against the changing expectations of Hollywood. In the discussion of a new western, Rick’s Caleb DeCoteau is imagined as a role that might have gone to a familiar television star, while the series’ younger lead, Johnny Lancer, carries the show’s antihero appeal. The broader movement toward younger, more stylish western heroes helps explain why McQueen’s image has such force: actors once cast as villains can become leading men, and the old divisions between hero and heavy are being rearranged. The account also notes that Jim Stacy had read for a McQueen role and lost it to Monte Markham, another reminder of how McQueen’s parts serve as career benchmarks for other performers.

Relationships and Rivalries

McQueen’s friendship with Sharon Tate predates her marriage to Roman Polanski, and that history troubles Roman. At a party at Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion, Roman has to make nice with McQueen despite their mutual dislike, because McQueen is one of Sharon’s oldest friends in Los Angeles. Roman suspects that McQueen and Sharon had sex before she married him, but he has never confirmed this with her; the suspicion belongs to Roman’s interpretation, not to a disclosed conversation between the couple. What sharpens his jealousy is McQueen’s apparent pleasure in the tension: Roman reads McQueen’s glances and smiles as reminders of a past intimacy.

Roman also resents the way McQueen handles Sharon physically, picking her up and spinning her around until she responds playfully. Roman believes McQueen knows he cannot do the same, and interprets the gesture as a pointed display of physical confidence. His account reveals as much about Roman’s insecurity and irritation as it does about McQueen. The two men tolerate one another because of Sharon, but the narrative presents no reconciliation between them.

Bruce Lee’s Hollywood connections provide another view of McQueen’s position. Bruce teaches McQueen and other prominent students while trying to get The Silent Flute made with Stirling Silliphant and James Coburn. The narrative compares Bruce’s hopes of becoming a movie star to Charles Manson’s ambitions in music, and likens his Hollywood students and collaborators to the connections through which those ambitions might advance. McQueen is named among the important figures in Bruce’s circle, but the evidence does not say that he joined or endorsed the film project. His significance here is as one of the powerful Hollywood contacts around whom Bruce’s prospects gather.

The Meeting at Cielo Drive

Near midnight, Rick hears the noise of the party at the Polanski residence while rehearsing his lines at home. A convertible Porsche speeds up Cielo Drive and stops at the gate. Rick recognizes McQueen and calls out. He is standing in a red silk Japanese kimono with a beer stein, tape recorder, and garden hose; McQueen initially has to place him before answering. Rick walks over, and the two exchange greetings and a handshake after a long interval without seeing each other.

Their conversation turns quickly to the practical signs of their different circumstances. McQueen asks whether Rick built his house, then remarks that Rick was sensible with his money and compares his situation with Will Hutchins and Ty Hardin, whom he has heard are in financial trouble. Rick answers that he is making a living, though he is not starring in The Sand Pebbles. The exchange is friendly, but Rick recognizes that McQueen is about to leave. The house, which Rick owns, becomes both a point of connection and a quiet measure of the distance between their careers.

Before McQueen goes through the gate, Rick reaches for a shared memory rather than trying to prolong the conversation with professional talk. During the first season of Rick’s show and the second season of McQueen’s, they played three games of pool at Barney’s Beanery. McQueen remembers the sequence: Rick won the first game, McQueen won the second, and by the third the bar had lost interest. Neither can remember who won that last game. Rick is moved that McQueen recalls the occasion; for a moment, their old television characters, Josh and Jake, and the attention their meeting once attracted return as a private joke between them.

McQueen suggests that he might knock on Rick’s door one day so they can return to Barney’s and finish the game. Rick knows this is unlikely, though he sincerely says it would be good to see him again. McQueen then addresses Sharon through the Polanski residence’s call box, calling her baby and asking her to open the gate. The gate opens, and McQueen’s car, followed by another car, disappears up the driveway. Rick remains outside with his drink and rehearsal equipment as the gate closes. Their cordial parting does not erase their different lives; it gives Rick a brief, remembered point of contact before McQueen returns to the party.

Narrative Significance

McQueen functions as a recurring comparison through which the novel makes stardom concrete. Rick’s almost-role in The Great Escape places him near McQueen in a story about casting, but the Italian producers’ imagined replacement turns proximity into evidence of Rick’s lesser market value. At the same time, the pool-game recollection resists reducing their relationship to a hierarchy. Rick remembers a moment when they were both television leads and the bar watched them compete; McQueen remembers it too, including the diminishing audience as the games went on.

The encounter also places McQueen within the book’s social geography: he crosses Cielo Drive in a fast Porsche, enters the Polanski residence at Sharon’s invitation, and leaves Rick at the edge of the gathering. Yet the scene grants Rick a small dignity of his own. He initiates their shared reminiscence, and McQueen recognizes it rather than dismissing it. Soon afterward, Rick’s conversation with Trudi Frazer leads him to consider the people, places, work, and house his acting career has given him. The novel does not present McQueen as the cause of that renewed gratitude; instead, their meeting makes the contrast between career prestige and remembered experience visible. The unfinished third pool game stands for a connection that can be acknowledged, but not restored to the life the two men once shared.