The many lives of Steve McQueen. Steve and Porfirio Ribirosa, Rafael Trujillo and he got Flor

A man's man and a woman's dream.

Enjoy.

Quite revealing, Atabey.
I was interested in listening to the part about his relationship with the Trujillos and his sojourn on the native soil. However, it was Flor de Loto Trujillo, El Jefe's oldest daughter that Steve was acquainted with, not Angelita. On another note, I was a McQueen fan. I especially liked his role in The Great Escape, Bullit, and Papillon. If I'm not mistaken he also starred in The Magnificent Seven with a roster of top movie stars of contemporary Hollywood stars. But, I would reserve the title of Mr. Cool for James Coburn, Mr. Flint; In my opinion Coburn was more the Cool, Calm and Collected of the era. And James' Flint sequels were the best...




http://stevemcqueenstyle.blogspot.com/2010/03/dont-step-on-his-brown-suede-boots.html
A minor observation: last time I watched "The Blob", I noticed that Steve McQueen was wearing PLAYBOYS (by London Character) shoes, the epitome of hip footwear when I was growing up. I BOUGHT A FEW PAIR MYSELF at London Character - 125 St, and on Delancey St....
Yeah, he was cool; and I remember the trials and tribulations he went through trying every type of treatment to combat his cancer...which lead him to Mexico for I believe an experimental treatment derived from apricot of peach seed...

As Guarocuya observed it was Flor de Oro (not Angelita or Flor de Loto), that befriended Steve, which was not unusual, due to Flor's own life direction and her "advanced" views of sporting sex.
I don't doubt Steve's pay for sex revelations of the author, since Hollywood in those days, much more than in today's sexual harassment rich environment, it was a "who you blow", and not "who you know" closed community. Many executive directors and producers offered their stars their "casting couch", as a matter of fact, in their casting calls, and many where gay.
I did notice the author's preponderance of self righteous comments and judgement calls, bringing out the buying public's desire for sensationalism and tabloid type gossip stories, which I think is a cheap shot, (could he be the the author is Mr. Danford Princestein, instead of just Danford Prince),
and is just out to make some more money tarnishing another dead icon's reputation?
Because those who dead, can't contest, sue, or fight back?

Steve McQueen was bi-sexual

The drama of Steve McQueen's life far surpassed anything he ever played on screen. He followed in the footsteps of his mother, a prostitute, who eventually seduced him as part of an Oedipal fling. Earlier, he'd been brutally molested by some of this mother's "johns," and endured gang rape in reform school. In a bordello in Santo Domingo, he hired himself out as a sex object and porn performer.

Returning to New York, he hustled on the streets of Times Square. Later, in a borrowed tux, he became a "gentleman for rent," the toy boy of rich, aging women, two of whom included Joan Crawford and Lana Turner. When stardom finally came, the abused became the abuser. "The last thing I want is to fall in love with a broad." The string of seductions that followed earned him an almost mythical status as a pansexual Love Machine. His A-list conquests included Jacqueline Bissett, Faye Dunaway, Lauren Hutton, Sharon Tate, Mamie Van Doren, Tuesday Weld, Natalie Wood, and Marilyn Monroe.

Publicly, he insisted that he loathed homosexuals, yet he often went to bed with them, especially if they were bikers or race car drivers. He had a tumultuous sexual relationship with James Dean, and a longer love/hate affair with Paul Newman. Other sexual liaisons developed with Peter Lawford, Sal Mineo, Rock Hudson, Chuck Connors, and George Peppard.

McQueen lived life at top speed, like the machines he raced so famously. His early death remains a source of lurid speculation, all of it explored within this pioneering biography by celebrity chronicler Darwin Porter.

And here's one American Icon he was romantically connected to.

James Dean

Culture
Film
Rebel Without A Cause

Guardian and Observer books season 2011
Mad about the boy

James Dean was the embodiment of young male vulnerability, heroism and torment. Who would have guessed he was gay? Fifty years after his death, it's all too obvious, argues Germaine Greer


Germaine Greer Blog
Germaine Greer
The Guardian, Saturday 14 May 2005 12.22 EDT
Article history

James Dean
Acting like a kid ... James Dean. Photograph: Kobal

Looking back over half a century to the meteoric career of James Dean, the one thing that now seems obvious is that the boy was as queer as a coot. It wouldn't matter a scrap if he hadn't also been groomed to perform vulnerable young male innocence, tormented by inchoate yearnings for heroism, freedom, and true love with the right girl. The studio made sure that he acted it out in real life by supplying him with starlets to be seen with in public.

Rebel Without A Cause
Production year: 1955
Country: USA
Cert (UK): 15
Runtime: 111 mins
Directors: Nicholas Ray, Ray Nicholas
Cast: James Dean, Natalie Wood, Nick Adams, Sal Mineo
More on this film

After he wrote himself off, 50 years ago this September, in his new Porsche 550 Spyder at the age of 24 on a highway near Salinas, there was no reality left to intrude on the myth. Robert Altman, then a naive outsider in Hollywood, was given the job of making a black-and-white pseudo-documentary based on the account of Dean's life, fashioned by William Bast, Dean's "closest friend and room-mate for five years". Altman's film presents Dean as the studios wanted him to be remembered. He is adolescent torment personified, his the loneliness of every male trapped between childhood and manhood. Dean would be forever the boy who "belonged to no one".

When he knew Dean, Bast was a would-be actor; he is now one of the most successful screenwriters in Hollywood and well out of the closet. Bast has successfully reworked the Dean myth several times; on his website he now threatens to write a new book to be called Surviving James Dean . "In it among other things I am including everything the law and my faint heart didn't allow me to say in 1956, when I published my first bio of Dean - the one Gore Vidal refers to as my 'baby-book'."

In the 1950s homosexuality was so far off the suburban radar that Jimmy Dean could give us all the visual clues, and we would see nothing. He could flirt outrageously with the camera, and get away with it. There was no gay establishment; young men growing up "different" had no easy way of identifying what it was that troubled them or why it was that they couldn't fit in with teen culture of dating and necking and boasting. A friend of mine, obsessed with the movies, trained himself to walk like John Wayne, straight-backed, shoulders wide, head immobile on a stiff neck, rolling on the balls of his feet. He still walks that way, in all a living caricature of screen masculinity. Before he came rocketing out of the closet in the late 1960s, he even asked me to marry him. A good many marriages were made that way in the old days, and a great deal of grief and destruction they caused.

Dean projected a new, sensitive masculinity, with a broad streak of brutality running across it. He didn't invent it. The credit for that goes to Marlon Brando. At the end of 1947 on stage in New York, 23-year-old Brando had created a new style of sensitive-brutal, working-class hero. As Stanley Kowalski, in A Streetcar Named Desire, he was the original thug who cried. Director Elia Kazan would hone that performance of young masculinity in On the Waterfront. Everything that would later be said of James Dean was first said about the young Brando, whom Kazan saw as challenging "the whole system of politeness and good nature and good ethics and everything else... There's a helluva lot of turmoil there. He's uncertain about himself and he's passionate, both at the same time." The role and the player morphed into one. The same slippage would happen with James Dean; he would actually be the rebel without a cause.

If boy heroes had not taken centre stage it is doubtful whether little Jimmy Dean could ever have become an actor, let alone a star. The publication of The Catcher in the Rye and East of Eden in the early 1950s was accompanied by a host of TV dramas about vulnerable country boys falling into the clutches of city slickers and organised crime.

It wouldn't have done much for the box office if it had turned out that the sole cause of the incomprehensible behaviour of the rebel without a cause was his own unslaked need for transgressive sex. At the beginning and for most of his short life there's every reason to believe that Dean hadn't understood what his problem was either, because until he was 18 years old Jimmy Dean was a short, nerdy, basketball-playing redneck, with bottle-glass spectacles and a hayseed hairstyle.

The underlying cause of Dean's teenage misery and restlessness was understood by his hagiographers and his stern conformist grandparents to have been the death of his mother when he was nine years old. The boy was born in Marion, Indiana; a few years later his father's work took the family to California, where his mother became ill and died. Her body and the boy were sent back to Indiana on the same train. His father promised to attend the funeral and never showed up. Dean lived with his grandparents on their 350-acre farm in Fairmount, Indiana, until he was 18, and did his best to fit in with small-town America. He busted 15 pairs of glasses and got his front teeth knocked out in his struggle to become the star basketball player of Fairmount High School. At the same time, he was modelling knobby objects in clay and giving them names like Self, and painting moody pictures of trees standing in bleak cropland. His hard-working, God-fearing kinsfolk considered him deep, sensitive and hard to understand, but what would you expect of a boy who lost his mother so young and was ignored by his father? He liked to tell women who tried to get close to him that he was still grieving for his mother. It made a good alibi.

Everyone who knew James Byron Dean in real life called him Jimmy; the diminutive was unavoidable because he was small in stature. He looked junior. He would be referred to as "boy" and "kid" all his short life. At a crucial point he realised that if he grew himself a tall quiff, left the glasses off and pouted a little, he could look really tasty. He also realised something else; through a camera lens nobody need look small. That was probably some time after he left Indiana for California and moved in with his father and his new wife in Santa Monica. Jimmy was supposed to be going to business school; when he told his father he had decided to become an actor, his father kicked him out of the house. The funny thing is that Dean père was probably following the universal prejudice that acting was no job for a real man, that actors were sissies, fags even, and yet nobody doubted the genuineness of any matinee idol's heterosexual credentials. Now that Errol Flynn and Rock Hudson have been outed, we are wiser.

Once he had fashioned himself in his new toothsome boy image, Dean fell in love with it. He learned to do sexy things with cigarettes, rolling them along the lips of his half-open mouth, looking up at the viewer from under his eyebrows or slouching crotch forward, broodingly. For the next five years he was seldom far from a camera; if there was no one else to photograph him, he photographed himself. Usually the camera was held by another man, not always a professional. There is a photograph of Dean, stark naked, squatting in a tree above the photographer, knees apart, presenting with a radiant smile what appears to be a truly enormous erection. (Sometimes there are pictorial advantages in being a small man.) I saw this picture in an art gallery some time in the mid-1970s. What's become of it since, I don't know; if anyone out there has a copy I'd love one.

In 1951 Dean earned enough from a Pepsi TV commercial to pay his car fare to New York. He got into the Actors' Studio, which had already produced Marlon Brando. He studied the mannerisms of the street people he saw around him, and reproduced them on stage and television, with rather curious results. Among the 40-odd TV dramas he played in his two years in New York, Something for an Empty Briefcase from the Campbell Sound Stage series has survived. The story is as mawkish and moralistic as most such popular entertainment in the 1950s. Dean, dressed in black stovepipe trousers and turtleneck, produces different complicated hand movements to accompany every utterance, distracting the viewers' attention from everything else that is said or done. If he had continued in this vein, he would never have become the iconic actor of East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. The difference was made by Elia Kazan, who managed to discipline the young actor who had never willingly accepted direction. In his last TV role as Jeffrey Latham in The Unlighted Road, aired in 1955, Dean's acting style has been cleansed and slimmed down; he is still playing a confused and guileless kid but now doing it without archness.

In New York Dean also studied ballet, and moved in with Leonard Rosenman, one of Schoenberg's American students. This friendship seems to have endured; Rosenmann would compose the incidental music for East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause. As well as these male friendships, Dean buddied up with taxi drivers and bar-keeps. The official wisdom was that he needed a mother but his behaviour, in New York or Hollywood, suggests that he was seeking a father, a father to love and protect him, a father to imitate and to quarrel with.

In 1952 Dean had his first Broadway success in the stage version of Gide's L'Immoraliste, playing an Arab street boy who seduces both a husband and his wife. As a bisexual tart he was utterly convincing. The reviews were great, but two weeks after the opening Dean walked out and went back to Hollywood. He had landed the part of Cal Trask in Kazan's production of East of Eden. The rest is history.

Both women and men fell in love with Dean in real life. In Altman's version, a starlet called Arlene Sachs reveals in a scripted interchange that when she told Dean she loved him, he said, "You can't love me, because I'm bad," which was as near as Altman could let himself get to the truth in 1957. Which brings us to Dean's curiously insubstantial love affair with Pier Angeli, who is supposed to have broken his heart when she married Vic Damone in 1954. The 23-year-old "boy" who is being groomed for mega-stardom now comes before the public as the hero of his own tragedy, which began long ago when his angel mother abandoned him and broke his heart. He yearns and grieves all his young life till another angel appears, mends his aching heart, puts an end to his nightly dreams of his mother (according to William Bast and Robert Altman) and then dumps him.

In 1957 Altman couldn't name her; these days the affair with Pier Angeli is part of Dean's official biography. They met when Dean was working on East of Eden and are supposed to have become engaged; the engagement was broken, supposedly by Angeli's Italian mother, on the grounds that Dean was not a Catholic. One can think of other reasons. Before her suicide in 1971 Angeli apparently said that Dean was the only man she ever loved. And so the myth of doomed youth rolls on.

In New York, Dean had been an efficient professional actor, never in trouble, never out of work. In Hollywood he was unpredictable, temperamental, practically hysterical. The other actors on the set of East of Eden found his behaviour intolerable, and complained that he never said the lines as they were written or did a scene the same way twice. He monopolised Kazan's attention, as if he was playing Kazan's needy son, "acting like a kid", behaving years younger than his age. He was actually learning everything he could from the man who had directed the performance that would win Marlon Brando an Oscar, and he was competing with Brando for Kazan's affection, just as Cal competes with his brother Aron for their father's attention in the film. The confusion of the role with the player was a deliberate and calculated strategy. It's hard to see now how the quintessential boy-hero could ever have been allowed to grow up. Steve McQueen and Paul Newman would both negotiate the transition between boy and man better than Jimmy Dean ever could have.

· A James Dean retrospective, including a new print of Rebel Without a Cause, is at the National Film Theatre, London SE1, until May 28. James Dean: Forever Young, a new documentary, will be screened at the NFT on May 24. Box office: 020-7928 3232. James Dean - the Iconic Images of Phil Stern, an exhibition of rare photographs, is at Proud Central, London WC2, until June 24. Details: 020-7839 4942.

Jeremy Roberts
http://www.examiner.com/pop-culture-in-national/steve-mcqueen-a-tribute-to-the-king-of-cool-an-interview-with-biographer-marshall-terrill-pt-5
July 1, 2010 -


Steve McQueen in a classic pose, mid 1960sSteve McQueen in a classic pose, mid 1960s
Credits:
SteveMcQueen.com

This week Steve McQueen fans need to take notice. Author Marshall Terrill has written a handful of definitive McQueen books, including the just-released Steve McQueen: A Tribute to the King of Cool. Terrell kindly agreed to an in-depth discussion concerning his fascination with the box office star.

Thirty years after his untimely death, Steve McQueen remains the epitome of cool. Pure, plain, & simple, the actor inspired millions of people to go see his movies, buy motorcycles, race cars, fly planes, or imitate his fashion sense.

For Part 4 or any other sections you might have missed of this interview with McQueen biographer Marshall Terrill, please go here. The conclusion follows below........



Did McQueen know how many people enjoyed him & his work?

I believe he did, but his vision of his popularity was skewed. He rated his success in terms of box-office receipts. Plus, he lived most of his adult life in Southern California where everyone “loved him.”

I think fame scared him to a certain degree, which is why he didn’t hide but mostly ducked the whole Hollywood experience. I think he retained his edge by remaining the Hollywood outsider, which is why he chose to live privately. He said more than once, “To have your obscurity and keep your identity is the ultimate.”

For this I completely respect him because it shows he wanted a balance in his life. Living in Hollywood can make any celebrity unbalanced, and McQueen gets major kudos for being his own man.



If you had met McQueen, what would you have said to him?

This is a very interesting question because McQueen didn’t talk much about the art of filmmaking or his movie roles; instead, he preferred talking about his motorcycles and machinery. I know nothing about engines or machinery & have no interest in them whatsoever as long as it gets me from point A to point B.

I remember producer David Wolper telling me that he sat in between McQueen and actor Lee Marvin at a benefit dinner, and it was like listening to a pair of mechanics talk shop. He said it was the most boring night of his life! (His passage is in Steve McQueen: A Tribute to the King of Cool).

I thought that was a fascinating insight into McQueen. So to answer your question, I’m not sure what we could have talked about. I’m of the belief that a biographer probably shouldn’t meet his subject. I’d much rather rely on family, friends, and associates to paint his/her portrait.

A biographer should be the proverbial fly on the wall and listen, observe, research, and take in all the information before sitting down to write, and make sure to give the full picture of the person.



What do you enjoy doing when not writing a biography or newspaper article?

Lately, I’ve been into mountain biking. Arizona has some of the most gorgeous terrain in the country, and I try to ride at least an hour a day after work. It’s very peaceful and relaxing, and I usually ride off the beaten path with my iPod blaring. I listen to my favorite tunes while I look at mountains, cactus, parks, lakes and critters of the desert.

My wife and I watch a lot of movies & current tv series such as Entourage, Weeds, True Blood, Mad Men, & Breaking Bad. We're huge fans of reality tv including The Real Housewives of New York City, Celebrity Rehab, Sober House, The Hills, and Seinfeld reruns. I also read a lot of books – biographies, autobiographies, memoirs, history, always non-fiction.

One last question: What other projects are you thinking about, or is McQueen still taking up all your time?

After I finished Steve McQueen: The Life and Legend of a Hollywood Icon, which is more than 600 pages, I’m thinking of retiring altogether or taking a very long break. Writing is very stressful because of the amount of concentration and because you’re dealing with facts.

In the beginning it was fun and a new adventure. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more of a perfectionist, and I place very high standards on my work, and that can be very emotionally and physically draining.

You might think the more you do something the easier it gets, but it doesn’t. It gets harder because there’s more expectation of me, and I also expect more of myself. I’ve heard more than one author say what I’m telling you now, and I don’t feel this is an isolated case.

So for now, I want to sit back and enjoy my life as opposed to being chained to a computer for 8 to 10 hours a day, which is what I did for this last McQueen book. For the first time in 20 years, I’m not going to actively pursue a book project, and I’m absolutely at peace with the idea.



A sincere thanks goes to Marshall Terrill for granting this engaging interview on the American rebel that is Terrence Steven 'Steve' McQueen. To find out more, please visit Mr. Terrell's official website.

This one quote guaranteed Steve McQueen's place in the Pantheon of Cool

Mc Queen was definitely a complicated man and he lived his life to the fullest. Not too many have the guts to do so.

Here's a picture of James Dean's car after the crash:



"Little Bastard" Porsche 550 Spyder That Dean Died In

James Dean in addition to his acting took up competitive race car driving. While James Dean was filming Rebel Without a Cause, he acquired a Porsche 550 Spyder. The car which would become part of the legend was one of only 90 Porsche Sypders, it was numbered 130, had a tartan seat design along with two red stripes at the rear. The car was called "Little Bastard".

A week before his was killed James Dean met the British actor Alec Guinness who commented car appeared "sinister" and said to Dean : "If you get in that car you will be found dead in it by this time next week." Words that would prove to be prophetic.

On September 30, 1955, Dean was driving to a race along with Rolf Wütherich (a auto mechanic) They were traveling in the new Porsche Spyder. At 3:30PM, Dean was caught speeding and recieved a speeding ticket in Kern County for traveling 65 in a 55 mph zone.

As Dean drove west on on what was to become State Route 46 in Cholame, California, Donald Turnupseed a student in a 1950 Ford Tudor, approached in the opposite direction. The Ford driver attempted to turn onto State Route 41 at a fork in the road. The driver crossed into Dean's lane and the two cars collided nearly head on. Dean survived immediately after the crash but was pronounced dead on arrival at 5:59PM after reaching Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital. His last words, according to Wütherich who was ejected from the car, but survived with a broken jaw were: "That guy's gotta stop... He'll see us."

http://crashteams.com/Services/Special-Services/James-Dean/James-Dean-Accident-Reconstruction.html