by Greg Laurie
McQueen started frequenting the Old Place in the early ’70s, becoming friendly with owner Tom Runyon and his wife, Barbara, who opened the rustic roadhouse on Mulholland Highway in 1969.
Back then the Old Place catered to an eclectic mix of bikers, renegades, actors, beach bums, cowboys, and local characters who weren’t impressed by anybody’s pedigree, résumé, or reputation—which according to Flo was exactly what appealed to McQueen about it. “He could walk in here and nobody would gasp, ‘Ohhh, Steve McQueen!’ That’s not the kind of place this is. Movie stars and famous musicians could walk through that door and not be bothered.”
McQueen definitely didn’t want to be bothered, toward which end he made himself as unrecognizable as possible by growing a shaggy beard, letting his trademark blond locks grow long, wearing grungy clothes, and packing on a few extra pounds. For him it was literally a matter of life and death.
“A movie star has a very strange situation going,” McQueen once said. “To have your identification and your obscurity is the ultimate. But if you have heat on you all the time . . . people constantly wanting me to live up to the stuff they see on the screen all the time . . . I’ll die.”
When he found the Old Place, Flo says, he found a sanctuary of sorts. “Hollywood was rush, rush, rush, and he’d have to be somewhere all the time. Here, you could come and go as you please. You could come in raggedy clothes. Women didn’t have to fix their hair or wear makeup. You could be yourself. Steve felt that peace. We all felt that peace.”
“A movie star has a very strange situation going,” McQueen once said. “To have your identification and your obscurity is the ultimate. But if you have heat on you all the time . . . people constantly wanting me to live up to the stuff they see on the screen all the time . . . I’ll die.”
And come they did, with celebrities such as Bob Dylan, Nick Nolte, Bill Bixby, director Sam Peckinpah, and Jason Robards. The Old Place was also a favorite of Ronald and Nancy Reagan when they owned a nearby ranch, having been introduced to the restaurant by Steve McQueen himself.
Steve’s new appearance fooled plenty of customers when he served their drinks from behind the log. “It was his way of having fun,” recalls Flo. “A couple of people would walk up to him and ask, ‘Are you . . . ?’ and he’d shake his head, no, and walk to the other side of the bar and ask patrons if they needed a refill or a drink. He’d never say who he was. Most Hollywood types like to wear their popularity on their sleeves but not Steve. He’d downplay it.”
McQueen found another father figure in owner Tom Runyon, an Armed Forces pilot during World War II who rose to the rank of major. He was also a part-time actor and contributor of fiction to Argosy magazine. Steve gave him a role as a heavy in The Getaway, and he nailed it!
“Runyon was the most generous, crazy, loving man I had ever met,” Flo says. “When he loved you, he loved you hard. And he loved Steve. Steve felt that love of a father figure.”
McQueen’s abandonment as a boy by his biological father and the indifference and outright hostility of his mother’s ne’er-do-well string of boyfriends opened a gaping hole in his heart, one that I understand all too well. I had that same empty space in my own life. Extensive studies have been done on children who come from broken and especially fatherless homes, and there is no question—it leaves them marked for life.
Steve’s new appearance fooled plenty of customers when he served their drinks from behind the log. “It was his way of having fun.”
Steve had fatherlike figures in his Uncle Claude and to some degree in some of his film directors, including John Sturges, Henry Hathaway, and Norman Jewison. McQueen, said Jewison, “was a loner, and he was troubled, and he was looking for a father.”
Perhaps that was part of his reason for hanging out and bartending at the Old Place. Flo believes it was therapeutic for the man who craved a break from the pressures of celebrity. “When you work in such proximity to someone, you come to know who they are and where their heart is, and Steve had a big one,” Flo says as small tears make their way down her face. “There was kindness in his heart from the beginning. You can’t be a good and bad person at the same time unless you’re crazy. Steve wasn’t crazy. He was intelligent; he was sane; he was focused.”
Every Christmas, she recalls, Steve bought dozens of wreaths from the Boys Republic and gave them away to friends. One morning Flo was awakened at 6:30 by a light tapping on her own door. When she opened it, there was Steve hanging a holiday wreath. One Mother’s Day she received an early morning telephone call from him, wishing her a happy Mother’s Day.
“He loved kids and animals so much,” she says. “He had a real heart for the underdog. He wasn’t a big talker, but his kindness came in the form of his actions.”
“When you work in such proximity to someone, you come to know who they are and where their heart is, and Steve had a big one,” Flo says as small tears make their way down her face.
I can’t help but agree, just in having observed him from a distance. He certainly showed love for his children and his wives—at least when he was with them. Coming from such a radically dysfunctional home, it was virtually impossible for him to show emotion. He kept his feelings bottled up, but there’s no doubt, as Flo says, that he felt genuine love for others. He also felt deep empathy and compassion for the underdogs of life because all the statistical cards had been stacked against him, too, yet he’d succeeded on a level few have known.
Part of his drive came from his circumstances and upbringing, from his desire to prove himself. It’s doubtful he would have become the star he did without his hardscrabble beginnings. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Steve got knocked down but always got back up. Yet it didn’t heal his emotional wounds and eliminate his desperate need for love and approval.
This is a world I know well.
I, too, wanted to achieve something significant with my life, going back to my earliest days. Coming from somewhere I didn’t actually understand, I had an incredible amount of confidence that one day I would make my mark in the world. My mother didn’t encourage this ambition, of course, and no father was in my life to affirm me, no one to tell me how to be a man. So just like McQueen, I endlessly searched for some father figure to fill that gap, while never letting myself doubt that I could still overcome it.
“He loved kids and animals so much,” she says. “He had a real heart for the underdog. He wasn’t a big talker, but his kindness came in the form of his actions.”
I was knocked down many times, but I was never knocked out and kept coming back for more. When the real world became too harsh, I would create imaginary worlds with my artwork, retreating into them, dreaming of becoming a professional cartoonist. Needing to fight so hard and cope so feverishly is not an existence I would wish on anyone, and surmounting it requires virtually a whole different kind of DNA and drive than those who come from stable and loving homes. The more fortunate ones find a way through it, but too many from broken and alcoholic homes give up, spiraling into destructive cycles that first land them in the gutter and then on a coroner’s slab.
If not for the grace of God . . . .
Flo doesn’t recall faith being a big topic of conversation when McQueen was around. But she says he and everyone in their circle openly wore their hearts on their sleeves and showed affection and mutual regard by attending one another’s parties, watching out for one another’s kids, and just enjoying one another’s company.
The Old Place became even more of a refuge for McQueen as his marriage to Ali MacGraw unraveled. They’d been happy for a while, but the relationship was volatile, and there were knock-down, drag-out fights as their disparate personalities grated on them. “There were certain kinds of independent lady behaviors that I showed that really threatened him on a profound level,” MacGraw would say. “Not on the level that the press likes to call ‘Steve McQueen wouldn’t let Ali MacGraw work.’ That’s a total distortion. It was a much more profound thing. It was a deep, deep sen
se of being abandoned like a child.”
Flo says it boiled down to the simple fact that McQueen wanted out of Hollywood and MacGraw wanted back in after briefly joining him on sabbatical.
The more fortunate ones find a way through it, but too many from broken and alcoholic homes give up, spiraling into destructive cycles that first land them in the gutter and then on a coroner’s slab.
“The Hollywood thing took over his life, and he couldn’t overcome it until he sat down. Steve wanted to stay home,” Flo says. “He wanted that slowness, that normality. He wanted to sit at the kitchen table and be still.”
I understand this. And so do you. When we’re quiet, when we’re listening, when we’re ready, that’s when God talks to us the loudest. Steve was finally slowing down and beginning to think deeply about the meaning and purpose of his life. He’d had his fill of fame and fortune.
He just wanted to be left alone.
McQueen’s third wife and widow, Barbara, told me that his ultimate hope was to move to Idaho and live a much simpler life. She thinks he would have transitioned nicely into a character actor, preferring it to the burden of being a movie star. This had already been realized to a certain degree in his amazing performance in Papillion.
From my view, I think the Lord was beginning to whisper to Steve. The Bible speaks of the “still, small voice of God.”
Steve was finally slowing down and beginning to think deeply about the meaning and purpose of his life. He’d had his fill of fame and fortune. He just wanted to be left alone.
Steve was finally beginning to listen.
Good things were about to happen to him. He would finally find the ultimate father figure he’d been searching for, as well as the peace that had eluded him from the beginning.
NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN
_____
If Steve McQueen thought going into self-imposed exile from the silver screen would make people forget about him and leave him alone, he was badly mistaken. What occurred next was exactly the opposite of that. The studios and the public’s interest in him actually became even more insatiable, if that’s possible.
Hollywood was like an alternate universe where “no” meant “yes,” “up” meant “down,” and “let’s do lunch” meant “I hope I’ll never see you again.” The more McQueen said no to studios and producers, the more they kept coming at him with scripts and offers. The films he turned down during this period became huge blockbusters with others in the starring roles. The list includes First Blood, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Gauntlet, A Bridge Too Far, Silent Movie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Dirty Harry, The Bodyguard, Superman, as well as sequels to The Towering Inferno and Gone with the Wind. In November 1975, McQueen refused the lead role in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
When the offers kept coming, McQueen ripped the mailbox from its post and tossed it into the ocean. He arranged for his mail to be delivered to the local gas station and usually sent his son Chad to pick it up there. In a further effort to get the studios to leave him alone, McQueen demanded fifty thousand dollars just to look at a movie script. When his agent told him no one would pay it, Steve said, “Good—then I won’t have to read anymore lousy scripts.”
The more McQueen said no to studios and producers, the more they kept coming at him with scripts and offers.
He even went so far as to personally bequeath his crown as King of Hollywood to Burt Reynolds. Reynolds was getting fitted one day for a film wardrobe at Western Costume Company in Hollywood when McQueen walked in. At the time, The Towering Inferno was smashing all box office records.
“It’s all yours, kid,” McQueen told Reynolds, who was coming into his own as a film star after transitioning from the small screen the way McQueen had. Reynolds had no idea what he was referring to and asked him what he meant.
“Number one, kid,” said McQueen. “It’s yours. I’m stepping down.”
In many ways, Steve reminds me of the biblical king Solomon. Though surely Steve was not the wisest man in the world, as Solomon was said to be, they nevertheless had quite a bit in common.
The son of King David, Solomon as a young man found himself placed on the throne as king of Israel. His reign started off well, but then he began to squander his opportunities in pursuit of pure hedonism. With unlimited wealth to indulge his every whim, Solomon went after it all. There were epic drinking binges and interminable parties. He had a thousand women at his beck and call, of whom seven hundred were wives and the rest concubines. Compared to him, Hugh Hefner is a celibate monk.
When the offers kept coming, McQueen ripped the mailbox from its post and tossed it into the ocean.
Solomon eventually decided to embark on a research project. He would try every experience and every pleasure this world had to offer. No stone would remain unturned. In pursuit of that goal he ignored affairs of state and neglected his family.
Solomon later wrote,
With the help of a bottle of wine and all the wisdom I could muster, I tried my level best to penetrate the absurdity of life. I wanted to get a handle on anything useful we mortals might do during the years we spend on this earth . . . . Everything I wanted I took—I never said no to myself. I gave in to every impulse, held back nothing. I sucked the marrow of pleasure out of every task—my reward to myself for a hard day’s work! Then I took a good look at everything I’d done, looked at all the sweat and hard work. But when I looked, I saw nothing but smoke. Smoke and spitting into the wind. There was nothing to any of it. Nothing. (Eccles. 2:3, 10–11 MSG)
Isn’t it amazing how things have changed so little over the thousands of years that have passed? People chase after the same empty things, generation after generation, ignoring what Solomon learned: “There is nothing new under the sun” (Eccles. 1:9 NKJV).
In many ways, Steve reminds me of the biblical king Solomon. Though surely Steve was not the wisest man in the world, as Solomon was said to be, they nevertheless had quite a bit in common.
It boils down to, as journalist Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote, that, “All new news is old news happening to new people.”
Steve McQueen was at the very pinnacle of his hard-won success. He was again the biggest movie star on the planet. He had the fame, the women, the booze, and the drugs. And like Solomon he found out, “There was nothing to any of it. Nothing.”
His self-destructive demons seemed to be off and roaring louder than ever at this point in his life. His second marriage was crumbling, he’d been in exile for two and a half years, and now the studio lawyers came at him with a contract he’d signed in 1971, guaranteeing them two more films. Later, at the end of his life, McQueen expressed the belief this movie deal triggered the cancer that was killing him.
Backed into a legal corner, McQueen had little choice but to do it. But instead of the action film the studios and public wanted, he chose to make a big-screen adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s An Enemy of the People, a turn-of-the-century play about a doctor who stands up to municipal corruption in a Scandinavian resort town. It was and still is widely believed that McQueen made that choice out of spite to stick it to the studio forcing him to come out of retirement.
The film’s thirty-three-day shoot occurred while McQueen’s Trancas Beach home was being remodeled, so he moved into a suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, ostensibly to be free of distractions that might impair his concentration on the movie. All he really did was substitute another distraction in the form of an endless parade of starlets, models, and professional party dolls.
Isn’t it amazing how things have changed so little over the thousands of years that have passed?
Ali MacGraw purposely looked the other way, a decision she came to regret.
“It was a place I never went,” she later said, referring to McQueen’s hotel suite, “which was stupid. I should have gone in, opened the door, and kicked the crap out of whomever was in bed with him. He would have enjoyed it!”
Shunning most public appearances, industry par
ties, and private get-togethers, McQueen ventured out in public only when it was something he felt was important. Sometime in 1975 he attended a birthday party in Canoga Park for the son of his karate instructor, Pat Johnson. That’s where Mel Novak met McQueen.
“Of course Steve was a big star, but you wouldn’t have known it,” says Mel. “He was a friendly, gracious person who gave my daughters a big, warm hug. We talked about life in general but not much about the movie industry. After meeting successful actors who are so full of themselves, it was impressive and refreshing to see he was just a good old boy.”
Mel Novak is an actor, martial artist, ordained minister, and an evangelist who preaches on skid row and in prisons—a villain on the screen and a hero in the streets. I first met him a few years ago at Fred Jordan Missions on LA’s Skid Row. Fred Jordan was my uncle, and the mission is now run by his wife, my Aunt Willie Jordan. Mel regularly conducts chapel services there, and I’m meeting him at the mission today.
All he really did was substitute another distraction in the form of an endless parade of starlets, models, and professional party dolls.
At one of our first meetings, Mel gave me a flyer about his ministry that included a picture of him with Steve McQueen. It definitely grabbed my attention. Mel has appeared in more than forty movies and always does his own fighting and stunts, even at age seventy-four. He dueled Yul Brynner in The Ultimate Warrior, duked it out with Chuck Norris in Eye for an Eye, shot and killed Bruce Lee in Game of Death, and verbally jousted with Steve McQueen in Tom Horn.
In real life he’s still a brawler but more of “street fighter,” reaching out to those who are knocked down in life and have lost hope.
“God’s forgiveness is bigger than anyone’s sin,” is the theme of Mel’s message, and it has brought many to faith in Christ over the years.
