Weird Rivalry: Steve McQueen and Paul Newman

Steve McQueen's chronicler Marshall Terrill evenhandedly dishes on the King of Cool’s collisions with fellow superstars Paul Newman, Elvis Presley, and John Wayne. As cerebral San Francisco Police Lieutenant Frank Bullitt, McQueen, stuck with his Colt Diamondback in Peter Yates’ “Bullitt,” won critical acclaim and strong box office receipts on October 17, 1968. Guilty as charged for penning authoritative tomes about Steve McQueen going back to 1993’s Portrait of an American Rebel, Marshall Terrill doesn’t sugarcoat the actor’s ceaselessly fascinating, complex life as was evidenced by a “Biographer of the Year” accolade bestowed by The Arizona Republic. Terrill also served as executive producer of the documentary Steve McQueen: The Salvation of an American Icon, which offers an interview probing McQueen’s lifelong rivalry with Paul Newman, the Boys Republic alum’s competitive romantic streak with Elvis Presley over stunning fashion model-actress Barbara Leigh, and an evening when the King of Cool stumbled upon John Wayne backstage at an awards ceremony.

Broadway had a new lead in Hatful of Rain. At this point, however, one might recycle that old folklore axiom, “Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.” The part often seemed to overwhelm Steve McQueen, especially as he later confessed, in terms of a basic technical capacity, such as voice projection and effectively handling lengthy dialogue passages. He further revealed, “I had this one big scene where the character, who’s a dope addict, gets delirious—and it really spooked me. I mean, each night, doing that scene I got more and more depressed. Got so I couldn’t eat, and I began losing weight. I felt lousy. There was so much about acting I still didn’t know.” Among the major publications covering his Broadway debut, only Variety found him “mildly effective” as Johnny Pope. Not surprisingly, McQueen was dropped from the part after six weeks, with the play closing a month later (October 13, 1956). Paradoxically, even the great achievement of getting into the Actors Studio had been followed by a letdown. The central Method guru at the Studio, Lee Strasberg, was brilliant but also bullish. McQueen’s first wife Neile Adams wrote, “Strasberg had a way of dissecting and criticizing an actor’s work that Steve found intimidating and frightening at the same time. Steve would say ‘I would rather take my chances outside the Studio.’” 

McQueen still learned a great deal at the Studio, but more and more it was about watching others present special scenes. Fittingly, both this perspective and a fear of Strasberg’s merciless criticism, was something McQueen shared with fellow Studio actor (and McQueen's idol) James Dean. People whose association with the Studio put them in the audience for a scene presentation by either Dean or McQueen would include: Marilyn Monroe, Shelley Winters, Eli Wallach and Carroll Baker. James Dean was so hurt by Strasberg’s criticism he threatened to leave the Studio. His vulnerability was later revealed when he confessed, “I don’t know what happens when I act—inside. But if I let them dissect me, like a rabbit in a clinical research laboratory, I might not be able to act again. They might as well sterilize me.” 

Also Marilyn Monroe felt anxious in this environment. It's said James Dean and Steve McQueen, who tried to woo her, only annoyed the iconic blonde star; in the case of Dean probably due to his neuroticism; in the case of McQueen, due to his naked ambition. It seems the only male sex-symbol that attracted her was Paul Newman, and Newman was in love with Joanne Woodward. Somebody Up There Likes Me was undoubtedly the source for McQueen’s beginning of his one-sided rivalry with Paul Newman. New York’s new golden boy after the death of James Dean, Newman now represented the antihero bar for young actors. Being an unbilled player to Newman’s star turn made McQueen set his goal on eclipsing this other blue-eyed, soon-to-be superstar. McQueen later accomplished this goal, for a time, during the 1960s. Yet, McQueen’s fierce pride paid a price, too. For example, he later had an opportunity to costar with Newman in the now celebrated Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), but only if he received top billing. Being naturally generous, Paul Newman, responsible for offering the part to McQueen in the first place, was willing to go the standard compromise route of cobilling, but negotiations broke down when McQueen was adamant that he would have to be number one. 

McQueen never forgot a slight, whether real or imagined. And Newman was always the actor he had to beat, including McQueen’s request for more lines than Newman when they both appeared with an all-star cast in The Towering Inferno (1974), a film in which McQueen received top billing. The bottom line is that McQueen was a kid from the streets who brought that same take-no-prisoners mentality to acting. One might best demonstrate that philosophy by his cutting comments upon the death of Dean, a performer whom he both admired and aped in some of his early roles: "I guess now there will be more roles for me." With James Dean’s death, Paul Newman had become a new McQueen role model, too. Biographer Penina Spiegel drew the following analogy: “Paul Newman was everything Steve McQueen wanted to be: Newman acted, raced, he was sort of an intellectual, he conducted a private life and a private love affair with the same woman. Newman had a reputation for sensitivity and good breeding, yet he was indisputably masculine. Newman was verbal, he was bright, and he was seemingly comfortable in his own skin—all the things McQueen felt he wasn’t.”

Ironically, for all this arbitrary competition and envy toward Newman as a paper lion, McQueen’s attraction to no-account screen characters often seems Newman-like. For example, McQueen’s part in Love with the Proper Stranger was originally earmarked for Newman. And The Cincinnati Kid is very much like The Hustler, in which another young hotshot is pitted against a wily veteran—only the game has changed, from pool to poker. Paradoxically, by the time Le Mans (1971) finally appeared, even McQueen’s self-appointed rival, Newman, had released a well-received racing film, Winning (1969). In The Towering Inferno, Newman is saddled often with the most stilted dialogue. Toward the movie’s conclusion, after the fire has finally been extinguished, Newman and his lover (Faye Dunaway) are safely at the tower base, and he says of the burned out skyscraper, “Maybe we should leave it this way as a kind of shrine to all the bullshit in the world.” 

For critics of the movie, which received decidedly mixed reviews, this quote was a popular target. To illustrate, New York Magazine’s Judith Crist responded directly to the actor in her critique, “Not all the bullshit in the world, Paul—just in movies co-produced by Twentieth Century-Fox and Warner Bros.” A suite at the Wilshire hotel was where McQueen met his third wife, fashion model Barbara Minty, twenty-four years his junior. He had seen her in a Club Med advertisement, and he set up a movie audition for a female part in Tom Horn (1980). Ironically, given McQueen’s long one-sided rivalry with Newman, Minty initially thought the audition would be with Newman. How was Steve McQueen intertwined with Elvis Presley? Sonny West told a story of how the two met one day on the way to the studio in the mid-’60s. Elvis was in a limousine when McQueen pulled up on a motorcycle. They were pleasant to each other but the exchange was brief. The two legends really collided when they were competing for the affections of actress Barbara Leigh, who Marshall Terrill also wrote a book with: The King, McQueen and the Love Machine [2002]. Barbara Leigh was Steve’s co-star in his 1972 rodeo western, Junior Bonner.

Before she met Steve, Barbara Leigh was dating Elvis and Metro Goldwyn Mayer studio executive Jim Aubrey in August 1970. She then got the role of “Charmagne”, and she and Steve started seeing each other on the set of Junior Bonner, and even after the movie was completed. Barbara, Steve, and Elvis had a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding the people they were dating. Steve knew she was still seeing Elvis and that Elvis knew she was seeing Steve. So when Elvis would call, he’d ask, “How’s that motorcycle hick”? And Steve would ask, “Was that the guitar hick?” It wasn’t often that McQueen or Elvis had to compete for a woman, but Barbara Leigh, who was a stunner, was worth the chase. When you got down to it, Barbara was really in love with James Aubrey. She knew Elvis would never give up other women and realized she and Steve weren’t a great match. The film that Terrill regretted seeing McQueen turn down the most was William Friedkin’s The Sorcerer. That’s a very good film with Roy Scheider in the lead role, but McQueen would have given it another dimension and made it a classic. Friedkin [The French Connection, The Exorcist] would have pushed McQueen to greatness on that film. It’s a shame that he didn’t make that movie, because right around the time he did An Enemy of the People in 1977, he could have used a box-office hit.

Psychologist Peter O. Whitmer believes that Steve McQueen had what he called a “weird professional sibling rivalry” with Paul Newman. In retrospect, did Newman speak about McQueen on-the-record? That’s a very interesting question because I’ve never come across an article or interview where Newman commented on the record about McQueen either during his lifetime or after his death. I find this very telling given that Newman lived almost 30 years after McQueen passed away. Newman’s lifelong friend, A.E. Hotchner, writes about visiting Newman on the set of The Towering Inferno. Hotchner said that Newman was very unhappy with himself and McQueen, going so far as to call McQueen "chicken shit" for counting up the lines in the screenplay and demanding parity. — Steve McQueen: The Great Escape (2009) by Wes D. Gehring