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-There's Steve McQueen, and then there's cool.

He walks onto the screen, and he kidnaps you.

You just want to look at Steve McQueen.

-Steve had an edge.

You can't fake the way he was.

-Every man I met wanted to be him.

Every woman wanted to sleep with him.

Every kid wanted to be mentored by him.

-He was larger than life in the public eye

and in our family.

-I think what Steve stood for was impulse.

-His need for speed was so genuine.

Speed was a fix that he had to have.

-If he wanted to go fast, he would go fast.

If he wanted to fight, he would fight.

-And he would fight to the death

to get his way.

-Where does one begin to pick a favorite Steve McQueen movie?

-The chase sequence in Bullitt.

There's one massive slide-out... Waah! when he gets loose.

Every single time, I'm like, [gasping]

-Those eyes...

He could give you that stare, and you knew he meant business.

-You work your side of the street,

and I'll work mine.

-He lived life to the fullest, man.

-Steve McQueen was the coolest of the cool,

with searing performances in blockbusters

like The Magnificent Seven and Bullitt,

and his love for fast cars, beautiful women,

and life on the edge.

He was one of the hottest cultural icons

of the 20th century.

-My dad has gotten the nickname since he's passed

"The King of Cool,"

but, you know, even when he was alive,

he always had that.

Everybody would say, "Your dad's so cool."

"He's cool," you know? He was cool.

-There's Steve McQueen, and then there's cool.

-Steve McQueen is somebody too cool to be bothered

with the things that bother the rest of us 24 hours a day.

[slapping]

-Ow!

-It's one thing to have that confidence, though.

It doesn't hurt to look like Steve McQueen.

It doesn't hurt to have those eyes.

-Those eyes were just...

They were just piercing.

When he's in a scene, even if he's not talking,

there was so much being said.

-Everything that Steve McQueen did,

he looked cool doing it.

Driving that dune buggy in The Thomas Crown Affair,

or, of course, you know,

the Mustang chase scene in Bullitt.

My favorite images of Steve McQueen

are of him holding a beer next to his pick-up truck

with the beard and the cowboy hat.

Whatever look Steve McQueen had, it looked cool.

-It's that something, you know?

He was a man unlike any other, and he owned it.

-He's the guy's guy.

He embodied all the things that every...

Man, I want to be able to jump a motorcycle

and race cars and get the girl, and, you know...

-He loved women.

He loved the danger of life.

He lived on the edge.

He came out of a rough-hewn kind of existence.

-I like a guy to have, you know,

maybe a little dirt under his fingernails,

but to be able to put a suit on and have that sophistication,

it just added a whole 'nother level.

-Great looks, charisma, masculinity,

vulnerability, menace...

He had the lot, you know?

All his numbers came in.

-In Hollywood, there are actors who play the part...

And actors that live it.

This is the story of one man who pushed the boundaries,

broke the rules,

and drove through life on his own terms,

but for McQueen, the road to success was not an easy one.

-Steve McQueen really had

all the odds stacked against him.

He had two alcoholic parents.

He was born six months after the Great Depression.

He was on the fast track to jail,

and he lived pretty much a homeless existence.

-He had a very crappy existence as a kid, you know?

-You know, Steve came up from nothing.

He was in a boys' home, the Boys Republic.

-From the way I hear it,

it was because he was doing delinquent... you know?

He was stealing and, you know,

and I don't think he was stealing

just to be one of the guys.

I think, if anything, it was to feed himself.

-He escaped from the Boys Republic,

and they caught him,

and, of course, they punished him,

and he escaped another time,

and then they brought him back

and said, "Okay, if you don't settle down,"

he said, "We're going to have to really be severe with you."

-If you screw up after Boys Republic,

you go to prison. You go to jail.

You go to the big house.

-As Steve learned to curb his wild side,

his estranged mother, Julia,

invited him to live with her in New York City.

-She sent him a little money, $5,

and so with $5 on him,

the Boys Republic gave him a pair of jeans and a shirt.

It's hard for me to go through that.

I don't know why, but every time I think of it,

I really see this kid at 16,

traveling across the country with only $5 in his...

With only $5 on him,

going to New York to meet up with his mother,

you know, and then when he got off the bus,

he smelled liquor on her breath,

and she had started to drink at that point in time, you know?

-My dad's mother, Julia, my dad really never...

Never brought her up that I can remember.

I know there was a tremendous amount of anger,

as expected,

but then my mom tells me the day she died, he broke down,

so you try and figure that one out, you know?

It's a heavy dynamic.

-You did come from a broken family

and you went through, probably, what, 50 odd jobs?

-I went through an awful lot, dishwashing, truck driving,

post office, everything.

-At 17, he joined the Marine Corps.

He was assigned to the motor pool,

and then he became a tank driver.

He was one happy boy over there

because suddenly,

all this machinery was right in front of him,

and he was fascinated by it all.

The Boys Republic and the Marine Corps

really were his true homes.

He found an anchor in his life, you know, for the first time.

When he was discharged at 20,

he was looking around to see what to do.

-With the GI bill, he decided to take up acting,

like a lot of people did, because of the girls.

It's God's way, man.

Look, he ended up being one of the best actors ever.

-It may well have been the girls,

but in the '50s, if you wanted to act,

you chased the dream to New York City,

like James Dean, Marilyn Monroe,

and thousands of actors that never had a chance.

-I know that when I was studying in New York,

I knew that I couldn't afford to fail,

because it was the only thing that I knew how to do,

and I didn't know any other trade,

but then I really... I do enjoy acting.

It's a great craft, you know?

I mean, it's a marvelous kind of feeling, you know?

-Steve, at that time, was...

Oh, he was real skinny

and he wore some kind of an old black raincoat

all the time,

and he spent all of his time hustling people

and trying to get work,

and he would do anything, he said, anything for a part.

-When you were accepted in this famed school,

it was quite a turning point of your career

and certainly a thrill for you, wasn't it?

-Oh, boy, yeah.

I was living on a coldwater flat

under the 3rd Avenue El,

and, you know, working all night and going to school all day,

and at the time, I guess it doesn't seem much now,

but at the time, they were accepting something

like four out of 2,000 people a year, you know,

to be accepted in the studio,

and it was free,

and you could go three days a week.

-I went to a drama school in London.

It is a great education to have for any actor,

but at the end of the day,

you can have all the instincts and all the intellect

and be able to talk till the cows come home about it,

but if you can't do it,

then, you know, you're dead in the water,

and acting is about doing.

-I'm an intuitive actor. I mean, I don't...

I couldn't sit and talk about acting and say,

"This is what I do,"

because I don't really know.

-And yet you studied it for years

in some of the finest academies.

-Yeah, but it's a study...

-And intuit yourself?

-Yeah, I did. It's self-therapy. I mean, that's what it is.

-Steve was fiercely competitive.

I mean, really, fiercely competitive.

If you were blond and blue-eyed and good-looking...

-What's it going to be?

-You were just like a rattlesnake to Steve.

-Because I'll kill you right now.

-And he knew

he just had to somehow get past you

to achieve his goal.

-I got my chance

simply because I could run harder than some other guy,

but if I want a chance now, I've got to grab it.

-He believed, in some weird way,

that I would be in the way from him getting,

achieving what he really wanted to achieve,

which was desperate.

He actually would say things

like, "I'll just run over the son of a bitch," you know?

"If he gets in my way, I'll just drive over him."

-I didn't come here to be a petty thief.

-I mean, that's what New York was like.

It was desperate. It was a desperate time.

-Despite some modest success, McQueen was getting nowhere fast

until he met a rising Broadway star

everyone was talking about.

-I was a Broadway baby.

My life was all about dancing.

I'd just come out of Carnegie Hall.

I had been rehearsing for a show called Pajama Game.

There he was, with a dog, a big dog.

He had a German shepherd with him,

and he said, "Hi. You're pretty,"

and I said...

I didn't know what to say.

I just saw those blue eyes, you know,

and I said, "Well... you're pretty too."

-I don't know. I suppose that opposites attract,

but I guess if there was ever a thing

of falling in love with a girl at first sight,

I guess that was it, because, boy,

I sure had to chase her for a long time.

-He picked me up on his motorcycle one night,

and that was it.

Four months later, we were married.

And everybody kept saying, "You shouldn't marry him."

-At the time,

I didn't have too much collateral going for myself,

and I think her mother, and rightfully so,

I think she was a bit...

she thought I was a little crazy, you know?

-He was a starving actor,

and I was really working hard, you know?

I was never unemployed at that time.

He just kept trying...

He just felt that he would make it eventually, you know?

-He showed hunger, determination,

and, as a result,

he was signed by Neile's manager.

Neile would always say,

"Well, this is what I see in you.

If you give a little of that in your performance,

then you will be recognized,"

and that's where you really see

the first of the McQueen persona starting to emerge.

-There's that thing that he has,

which is the passion.

You've got to have that to just keep going,

because you're just going to get,

you know, knocked down,

and, I mean, the sea you swim in is rejection.

-A rugged bounty hunter who played by his own rules

was pure McQueen,

and with this big break,

he was determined to make his mark.

-After years of struggling, Steve suddenly became a big hit

and became a household name in Wanted: Dead or Alive.

-Hollywood producers who were willing to watch television,

of which there, I don't know how many there were,

since they were deathly afraid of it

in those days,

if they went home at night

and watched Wanted: Dead or Alive,

they obviously saw a guy

who could succeed as a movie star,

as long as they were willing to get past the notion

that no TV star could ever be a movie star.

-You know, he always knew that he would make it.

It was Steve's destiny to make it big,

because he was such an original.

-Then McQueen, he makes The Magnificent Seven

with John Sturges,

and it's got Yul Brynner in it, and he's an Oscar winner,

and he's obviously the star,

and within a couple of scenes,

you see scenes being stolen from Brynner,

who's terrific in the film,

but McQueen, mostly by not saying anything,

is sort of stealing Brynner's thunder.

[shaking]

-The shaking of the shotgun shells...

You'll see him fiddling with a hat, you know,

anything to usurp or take away attention from Yul Brynner.

-Litterbug.

-You have two people on a screen,

and you want to watch this person

more than you want to watch that person.

You just want to look at Steve McQueen.

He walks onto the screen, and he kidnaps you.

-Steve McQueen's characters all had a very defining quality.

He was the guy that was tough

but without putting it in your face.

He was the guy that you don't want to mess with,

but you look up to him,

and as an actor, yeah,

those are the parts you want to play,

and those are, that's who you want to be.

You watch a movie,

and there's always that character

that you want to be,

and he found a way to always be that guy.

-Brynner was very much the king.

He was living in a lovely home,

and we were all living in a motel that we all stayed in.

We all had connecting doors.

There was a knock on my door. It's Steve.

"Hey, hey, hey, listen to me."

He said, "Did you see that gun Brynner's got?

That silver gun?"

He said, "It catches the sunlight."

Well, he didn't like that at all.

He was very competitive.

He was watching Yul Brynner

like he was lining up somebody to shoot.

-McQueen's street smarts really came into play

with this movie.

-He was one of the first people, if not the first,

to make that transition from TV to being a movie star.

-And all of a sudden,

then a guy who many had predicted stardom for

achieved it.

-With McQueen's new status at the box office,

he realized that to stay on top,

it would mean his films had to be on his terms.

-Steve was looking at The Great Escape

as he was the star of that movie,

but he felt that what was written on the page

wasn't necessarily going to take him there.

He didn't just want to be part of this ensemble.

He wanted that separation so that people could say,

"Okay, this is the guy that we want to follow."

McQueen knew he had to do whatever it took

to get that part to where it needed to be.

-During production, McQueen quits.

He walks out,

and United Artists is panicking.

This is a big movie, a big-deal production.

They've got a big-time director in John Sturges.

They've got a big cast,

and their biggest star is all of a sudden not cooperating.

-There's a great deal of compromise involved,

you know, in movies, I suppose,

and I get a bit undone when people try to use me

or there's compromises or injustice,

and I fly off the handle.

-Right is right, and you know what that is,

and being willing to sacrifice if it comes down to that.

In his case, walking off set, it's a pretty big statement.

-When he believed

in a direction that he wanted to go,

he would fight for it.

I mean, he would fight to the death

to get his way,

and if anybody got in the way of his vision, you know,

get ready.

-McQueen said, "I want you to assign a writer to me"

so that I can put my signatures on the film.

-McQueen gets the rewrites.

His character gets enhanced significantly,

and, oddly, the writer who comes in,

Ivan Moffat, who'd been Oscar nominated,

he is responsible

for so many of the things in the movie

which we now associate with McQueen,

which really are the things in the movie

that we associate with the movie,

in the cooler,

with the baseball glove and the great sound.

Da-dum.

[throwing ball]

I mean, when I sit at home

and I bounce a tennis ball off the wall

without a baseball glove

and catch it,

you think about that, of cour...

You don't just think about it. I'm imitating him.

-For him to stay true to himself,

no matter what that meant,

whether he had to walk off set

or ask something to be rewritten or change his dialogue,

that takes a lot of balls.

-Hills, isn't it?

-Captain Hills.

-John Sturges has written in the script

that when I make my escape, I steal a German motorcycle,

and then we start our escape over the Alps into Switzerland.

-My dad would ride motorcycles when he...

Even when he was working, you know,

he'd sneak off and go to the track.

He incorporated his love for cars and motorcycles

in his films.

-To go in when you're... when a machine can fall apart,

aren't you scared?

-No, no. It doesn't scare me.

-Steve McQueen just took a jump on a dirt motorcycle,

and this is what he calls "scrambling."

-Whether Steve McQueen was doing the actual,

all of the stunts or not,

the fact that he was so obviously capable,

it made it really easy to interchange

between an actor and a stunt guy.

I can recognize when it's him on the motorbike.

There's something kind of bouncy about him,

like he's sort of always got his feet,

using his legs as suspension.

-He loved Bud Ekins.

They were very, very close.

He trusted him.

Bud went with him

and did the picture as a stunt double for him.

-Bud Ekins came into town because Steve had wanted him,

because he wanted to do some motorcycle stuff.

I watched them build this jump.

Every day, he kept jumping,

and the thing got bigger and wider.

One day, after conferring with Steve,

Sturges asked Bud,

"Can you jump five feet over that fence?"

and Bud said, "I think I can do it better."

Bud jumped something like 14 feet

in I don't know how wide.

Steve did it,

but insurance wouldn't let him do it on film,

because if something had happened,

he had fallen,

that film would have shut down,

and it would have cost them a fortune.

-Wasn't it a while ago

that the studios prohibited you doing any racing

while you were actually in production?

-Shh.

-When McQueen's character on film made that jump,

audiences jumped in the air and cheered for him.

- Variety, 1962.

"There are some exceptional performances.

The most provocative single impression

is made by Steve McQueen."

-After making The Great Escape,

he is if not the biggest star in the world,

he is in the top two or three.

-Now a bona fide movie star,

McQueen set his sights

on Hollywood legend Edward G. Robinson.

-I went up to his house.

There was a pool table, and he said, "Do you play?"

I got lucky and sank a few balls.

There was applause.

He said, "Tell me about Edward G. Robinson,"

and I could tell

that he was worried about Edward G.

I said, "He's a good actor.

I think you should be careful with Edward G.,"

because right away I was trying to set him up

so that he was a little insecure.

That scene where he just looks at him...

and you feel the tension right away.

-You're good, kid,

but as long as I'm around, you're second best.

You might as well learn to live with it.

-There was something impish about him,

so I used to have to talk to the other actors

because they were always complaining.

He'd be looking down or he'd be looking off,

and then when it came to his line,

he'd look right just off the edge of the camera,

bing.

He had all these little tricks, and actors used to hate that.

"Why doesn't he look into my eyes?

He's not giving me anything."

I said, "Because he doesn't want to."

-He always played with such mystery.

He had such a reserve to him,

and he had this emotional underpinning,

keeping you, the viewer,

involved with what he was doing.

-As an actor, he was not that secure.

He liked an older director.

I said, "You're looking for a father image."

I can't be your father, but I can be your older brother,

the one who went to college.

You can always count on me.

"I'll look out for you,"

and I think he believed that,

and that's why we had a great relationship.

-Sometimes you bump into a director

that really will challenge you,

or you're opposite an actor

who is just so electric, so smart,

they raise your game.

The Digital Fix, 2005.

"Steve McQueen is effortlessly watchable as the Kid,

providing a master class

in the power of natural screen presence.

-All that stuff

that was moving around inside of him

all of his life

came across on the screen,

that madness, that... chilling quality that he had.

-It came from his childhood.

It came from the life he lived as a young man.

It came from the insecurity of life,

the pain of that insecurity.

-What do you remember most about your childhood?

You didn't go very far.

You didn't dig school, I know that.

-Oh, I liked it all right,

but I had to get out and earn a little bread.

I had to get out and earn a living.

Oh, what do I remember most about my childhood?

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches,

if you want to know the truth.

-That's great. That's great.

-We went back to the Boys Republic

for the first time,

and he was all dressed up in his Brioni suit.

I said, "Why are you getting so dressed up?"

He said, "I want those boys to see me now, today",

so that maybe one of them will look at me and say,

"I want to be him someday."

-On-set he would sometimes have these diva-ish demands,

like hundreds of razor blades and hundreds of T-shirts

and hundreds of blue jeans.

He would donate all of that to the Boys Republic.

Steve had a huge heart, and he wanted to give.

-He came from dirt poor with nothing,

and he rose to be the number-one star.

I mean, talk about a success story.

He opened up so many minds.

If he could do it, anybody could do it.

-He was larger than life in the public eye

and in our family.

-I mean, can you imagine coming from nothing,

and all of a sudden, he's living in Oakmont,

the compound at Oakmont in Brentwood.

No, I mean, he had a good time.

He loved life, man.

He enjoyed it.

-Life was good,

and McQueen's two children, Chad and Terry,

meant everything to him.

-Terry really was the apple of his eye, you know?

He saw the world through the eyes of a child, you know,

and so he always related well to kids.

Terry was the powder puff champion at 14, you know?

They were riding bikes at Indian Dunes,

and, of course, Chad,

being the boy who idolized his dad,

was just...

Did everything that Steve did.

-They had this big party, the best in Hollywood,

young people are there.

I saw Steve out on the veranda, looking out toward the ocean.

I said to him,

"When you were back there in Greenwich Village

with Neile on the back of your bike,

did you ever think you'd wind up like this?"

There was a long pause,

and he said, "What makes you think

I'm going to wind up like this?"

It was a terrifying moment.

I mean, he didn't even look at me.

He just said it out into the air.

Something was hovering over him all the time

that made him aware that this was transitory,

this life that he was living.

-He had all these stories about his childhood,

and he was a bad kid,

I mean, because he was looking for a father.

That's who...

I'd bring it all down to that.

Steve was really looking for his father.

-Once my dad became successful, he wanted to find his dad,

and he was trying to hunt him down.

-Steve was like a detective.

When he wanted to find out something,

he would be tenacious over the whole thing.

Eventually, we found the trail,

and we met up with his girlfriend.

-And he'd died two weeks before.

He used to watch Wanted: Dead or Alive

and go, "I think that could be my son."

-But he'd had a heart attack, you know.

It was sad.

-You never know with a Hollywood star

whether you're seeing the real person, you know?

Everyone said that John Wayne was a great hero,

but the reality is

that John Wayne played great heroes.

With McQueen, you definitely got the idea

that you were seeing an authentic person.

-Filmed exclusively in Taiwan,

McQueen would star in an epic wartime saga

that garnered him

his first and only Academy Award nomination.

-Welcome aboard the Sand Pebble.

That's what we call it.

We're sand pebbles.

Juan will show you your bunk.

-I want to look at the engine first.

-If you look at his character, Jake, in Sand Pebbles,

it was all about that engine room.

-Hello, engine.

I'm Jake Holman.

-That's when he came alive.

-It was just so much Steve.

It was adding those little things

that just put his touch on it.

-If you let me run that engine room

the way I'm supposed to, sir, I can give you up to 12 knots...

Sand Pebbles represents his military experience.

His films were biographical.

They all represented a certain part of his life.

-So I guess I started swinging.

So anyhow, the judge says, "You've got three choices,

army, navy, reform school."

-McQueen, throughout his career,

had this ability,

which is the mark of a really talented actor,

to convey these sort of powerful emotions

without saying a word.

-He's instinctive.

If you say to a director with balls,

and you say, "I'm saying all this,"

with a look, that's instinct.

That's someone sort of doing their work.

You can hone intuition.

You can sharpen intuition, work on intuition,

but you have to have the bloody thing to start with.

-If you look at his scripts, he would cross out the dialogue.

He said, "Everybody else fill in the story,

and then when there's something really important to say,

I'll say it."

He knew what his strengths were.

-The art of it is to make it look effortless.

Steve McQueen made acting look as easy as breathing.

- New York Daily News, 1966.

"McQueen gives the most important

and best characterization of his film career."

-When he got the Academy Award nomination for Sand Pebbles,

my dad was... I don't think

really gave a... about stuff like that.

-I do believe one thing, though, that I believe that

I want to lead the type of life that I want to lead.

In other words, my private life is my own,

and I will fight to have that.

-Whatever part of the world my dad was working in,

he'd make sure we went with him.

-So Sand Pebbles,

we thought it was going to be a short shoot.

We were there for nine months.

-As a son, it was so cool

to know that okay, my dad's going away,

but we're going with him, you know?

I'm not going to be away from my dad,

or my mom, or my sister, you know?

-He's criticized for certain things,

but a father was never one of them.

Like, he was, they were his kids,

and there was no getting around that.

-He dug having us around.

I know a lot of that stems

because he had no family at all,

but that being said,

being a six, seven-year-old boy

and moving to Taiwan,

it was pretty, pretty mind-blowing.

It was quite a culture shock.

-The fact that Steve traveled with his family,

I mean, I love that, that he was a good dad.

That got me.

-I said, "Have you read that script

that I put up on your desk?"

He said, "Well, it's okay."

I said, "Well, it's too bad

Norman doesn't want you for that."

He said, "What do you mean?"

I said, "Well, Norman doesn't want you for it,

for that thing."

He couldn't believe what I was saying,

and I said,

"Well, everybody else has the script, too, you know.

There's Sean Connery, Rock Hudson,

Robert Wagner, Paul Newman.

Everybody has the script."

So he said, "Well, excuse me."

So he got up and went upstairs and called Norman.

-And I said to him right away,

I said, "You know, you've never played a part like this."

There's no motorcycles.

There's no gun play.

I've never seen you wear a tie.

"I mean, how can you play Thomas Crown?"

-By the time the conversation ended,

he'd got the part.

-Doing Thomas Crown Affair, it was a departure,

and it was a challenge.

It was about excess.

It was about the theatricality and the flamboyance of excess.

It was about money.

It was about luxury, and it was about sex.

-He was a little worried about the casting.

He wanted me to meet a couple of other women

that he felt would be right for the Faye Dunaway part.

I said, "Listen, I saw her.

I think she could be very, very sexy.

I think it's all in here.

It's all in your eyes, and..."

The chess scene, for instance.

It's not really about chess.

It's about power.

It's about control.

Who's got the control?

She looks at the chessboard and looks at you,

and you look at her looking, and all you say is...

-Do you play?

-Try me.

-And that's it, and we're going to play chess

for the next three or four minutes of screen time.

She's going to win.

When she says "Checkmate"...

-Let's play something else.

-And that's going to be

the longest kiss in screen history.

He liked that.

He liked the challenge of it.

-Who plays chess like that?

The love scene he has, the longest kiss ever.

-Who wears a British-cut tailored three-piece suit

better than Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair?

I mean, no one looks as good in those clothes.

He's sophisticated and he's...

-Hello.

-Charming, and this bit of street underneath.

Any minute now,

he could sort of say, "Don't... with me."

-With success and money, McQueen collected cars,

and only the best.

Shelby Cobra...

Jaguar XK-SS,

Porsches, Lotus...

They all found a home in McQueen's garage.

-I would talk to random people and they'd say,

"You know, when I was younger, I was driving,

and this car just raced past me, and I looked in the window.

It was Steve McQueen."

-Money meant toys, lots of trucks,

lots of motorcycles, some planes.

-His tastes were all over the place,

but if you look at what he was buying

and what he kept, you know, 30 years later,

I mean, they're significant pieces of machinery.

-Steve definitely seemed passionate about his cars.

He had an eclectic collection,

from the Mini to the XK-SS

to the, obviously, the Porsches and the Ferraris,

and he seemed to get the most

out of whatever it was he was driving.

-The '58 Porsche Speedster,

that was his first new car he bought,

and the first car

in which he won his first race at SCCA,

and he sold it.

-I paid $1,500 for it.

The gentleman that owned it said,

"Oh, by the way,

the original owner was Steve McQueen."

It was like, "Well, that's cool."

-A Porsche dealer in Hollywood

said he knew this guy Bruce had had my dad's old Speedster.

My dad said, "Impossible. No way."

-A few weeks later, I get a call from Steve.

"I understand you have my car, but you couldn't have my car."

-My dad went back where he had the roll bar in place.

-He pulled back the tonneau cover.

It had this German weave carpet,

and he literally just... it's glued down.

He just kind of peeled it back,

and I'm kind of thinking,

"Well, that's kind of presumptuous,"

and there was the mounting for the roll bar.

He says, "Oh, my god,"

and he was just all over the car,

and you could tell he was going through, you know,

a real connection with this car.

He says, "You've got to sell me this car,"

and I said, "I don't want to sell the car," you know,

"I enjoy the car. I've had it a long time."

-My dad could be persuasive, to say the least.

Three months, four months later,

the car's at our house.

-I think if they brought it to market now,

I wouldn't be able to afford it.

It would be a seven-figure number.

Not single million, but millions,

and at the Peterson Automotive Museum,

we have his XK-SS,

which is an extremely rare car.

A car like that today, without the McQueen provenance,

would be in the neighborhood of four or five million dollars,

and if that car came available today,

I'm guessing it would be well over $10 million.

-When the D-Type Jaguar became uncompetitive,

they turned the last 16 into road cars.

The XK-SS, he loved that thing.

It was really a racecar for the street.

My dad used to flog that thing.

When he decided to pedal down,

it was, you know, get ready for a ride, you know?

-Once you're behind the wheel, it's freedom.

-I'm not a doctor, but I always imagined

that somebody who came from McQueen's background

was always trying to get away as quickly as possible

from wherever he was, from that situation,

so the idea of explosive speed,

I could see how that would appeal to somebody.

I mean, that is armchair psychology

in its basic levels,

but it seems to make sense for a guy

who, according to everybody

who knew him from the earliest age,

lived to drive fast, to go fast.

-The need for speed is in your DNA.

It's not like you can train somebody to go fast

or brave speed.

It's just part of your genetic makeup.

It's a mutant gene that just is very hard to satisfy.

No matter how fast you go, you need to go faster.

-And McQueen would go faster.

He competed at the highest level,

bankrolling his own racing team,

Solar Racing,

entering Santa Barbara, Del Mar,

and Sebring's 12-hour, around-the-clock endurance race.

-Steve was a very talented driver

and very gutsy and fearless,

and that's a terrific combination,

and every motorhead and every racer

respected Steve

for his genuine, bona fide driving talents.

-It was always about testing himself.

He always wanted to measure himself against the best.

- Motor Trend magazine, 2004.

"Steve McQueen's legend lives large.

His love of all things mechanical

was legitimate and genuine."

[♪♪♪]

-Every one of my dad's cars,

they've all got their little stories.

The funny thing about that car,

I get more thumbs-up in that one than anything.

People know that car from Bullitt.

-When anyone ever does a top 10 list

of car chases onscreen,

it's always Bullitt that's number one.

The interesting thing is that in this script,

it just says, really, two words, and that is "car chase."

In McQueen's head,

he knew exactly what he was going to go for.

-To have that kind of control,

it's like a kid in a candy store,

like, he gets to write his own car chase?

He got to do what he loved

and do it the way he wanted to do it.

-The genius of my dad

was when he knew he was going to do Bullitt,

he had to figure out a great car that a detective could afford.

They picked the Mustang,

and then he got some of the best engineers

to work on the car,

get it ready for jumping.

-The chase sequence in Bullitt...

Every time I watch it,

there's one massive slide-out... Waah! when he gets loose.

Every single time, I'm like, [gasping]

-We had Bill Hickman, who was probably

one of the finest stunt drivers in the world today,

and myself, who's probably the worst.

We felt that we should start off

working in close harmony at a racetrack

so that Bill Hickman and myself

would be used to working close to each other

at high speed,

so we went out to Cotati Raceway

up above San Francisco

and worked at high speeds at well over the ton mark.

-It seems real, you know, it really does seem

that that was a no-holds-barred chase.

It really feels

like you're there with them in the driver's seat.

It's just thrilling.

-The fact that Steve was doing it

made it maybe the coolest car chase

in the history of car chases.

-When I watch Bullitt,

I believe that Steve did it all, you know,

and the truth is that he did a lot of it, you know,

and, of course, the studio freaked out.

-There are going to be those times

where the risk is if you're doing it enough,

the possibility and the chances of you getting nailed

become more likely,

and if he hurts himself, the whole production's screwed.

Your lead guy, if he's out,

the whole production has to stop.

He kind of liked that rebellious

"screw you, I'm doing it."

-It's authenticity.

Audiences, especially movie audiences,

can smell out a fake from, like, miles away.

-He saw the inside

of how police work was really done.

-You work your side of the street,

and I'll work mine.

- Bullitt was released in October of '68.

The reaction was absolutely through the roof,

and the profits were just crazy,

and Steve McQueen as Bullitt just became an instant icon.

This is truly

where the Steve McQueen legend really takes off.

-The New York Times, 1968.

"Existential cool,

less taut and hardshell than Bogart,

McQueen simply gets better all the time."

-I mean, no one looks better

in white Levi corduroys and sneakers

than Steve McQueen.

No one wears sunglasses like Steve McQueen,

and no one can look as wonderful

behind the wheel of a fast car.

-On and off the screen, McQueen was paired

with some of the hottest actresses in Hollywood.

Never one to turn down a good time,

the line between the two worlds began to blur.

-At that point in time in Hollywood, you know,

we're talking the '60s and '70s,

when everything was sort of a free-for-all,

I don't really think that he knew how to adjust.

He obviously wanted to retain his family

and be the family guy,

but then there were these temptations on the other hand

that just made that impossible.

-I mean, a beautiful woman

wouldn't have been a real problem, you know,

at all, you know,

and I certainly saw women coming up to him, you know,

they could basically not formulate three words together

because it was Steve McQueen.

-There's just something about him for me

that starts, just, like... what was I talking about again?

-And he'd just look at them and be very charming,

which he totally could.

He had that one down,

which was why, you know,

he was the King of Cool, you know?

-Girls would blatantly throw themselves at my dad

in front of their boyfriends or husbands,

and he was always so cool about it.

-There was just free love and free everything,

and sometimes he would come to me and say,

"Why do I have to work for love at home

when I can get it for free outside?"

-Every man I met wanted to be him.

Every woman wanted to sleep with him.

Every kid wanted to be mentored by him.

He just had that extraordinary, charismatic

sort of sexual but dangerous but soft underneath,

bright, street-smart power.

-He's pretty hot.

I've gone back a couple times and gone,

"Okay, maybe if I didn't know him

to be as cool as he was,

and if you just take a random photo

and you see a photo

and, I mean, he's got pretty eyes and this and that,

and then you watch any footage where he's talking,

and the dude's just hot.

-There's no way out.

You've done too good a job, Vicki.

-Steve's body was really just perfectly shaped, you know,

and he kept it that way.

He had a bus stop sign

that he had stolen from one of the streets in New York,

and he would work out with that.

-Being, you know, in front of the camera,

being a leading guy like he was,

you've got to have that physical presence,

especially when you start wearing a couple hats,

producer and leading man actor,

you've got to be in great shape to have the concentration

to be able to do that for long periods of time.

Because he was that kind of hands-on type of guy,

it was natural for him to gravitate towards martial arts

and towards a sport like that that's very physical.

There's also a mental discipline involved.

It probably tripped a lot of triggers for him.

-And McQueen would train with the very best,

Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, and Pat Johnson.

-Steve was probably the most aggressive guy

I've ever, ever trained.

He really wanted to get the martial arts

so he could learn some self-discipline.

He had an ego, no denying that at all.

He had a real short fuse.

He could go off in an instant,

but he wanted to learn to control that temper

and to... as well as know how to fight,

so if somebody did get in his face,

he'd be able to either walk away

or know that he could put the guy out right now.

-You're out there all by yourself.

You're going to get out of it exactly what you put into it.

-I can totally see why martial arts

and working out every day

was a really important part of his life.

It's so much more than, you know,

physically looking good.

It's very mental.

- L.A. Times, 2010.

"McQueen embodies effortless cool,

dangerous masculinity, edgy charisma

that are coveted by men, embraced by women."

-Everybody knew that Steve McQueen

was the coolest of them all,

but I found out as I worked with him, you know,

I think he was a warlock.

I think he was affected by the moon.

-I, uh... I rarghhh...

I bark and growl.

Every full moon, I go like an animal.

-Whenever there was a full moon,

I'll never forget his publicity guy said to me,

"You'd better watch him next week.

Full moon, you know.

He's affected by the moon."

I said, "What are you talking about?"

and sure enough, he disappeared on his motorbike,

out on the desert.

It was kind of strange.

I'm thinking [inhales].

I think there was a little pot going there.

He totally disappeared,

and nobody knew where he went.

-And it's no secret my dad liked his grass,

and it was the '60s, you know what I mean?

I mean, they were trying everything, you know?

Dennis Hopper told me a story once

about him and my dad in a Jeep

taking mescaline out in the middle of nowhere

in the desert.

Just take it right up to the edge.

That was my dad.

Everything was right up to the edge, wasn't it?

[♪♪♪]

-Do you ever relax, though?

-Sure, sure. I'm relaxed right now.

-Are you? -Yeah.

-Yeah? So you do relax.

You seem to relax... just a little thing,

I was watching you race,

and when you're on a motorcycle, you seem to be loose,

and there seems to be a little tenseness

about you otherwise.

-The only time I really, really, honestly relax relax

from the tensions,

it seems as though is when I'm motor racing.

I do relax a lot at speed.

One really has to, you know, I mean, you must stay relaxed,

because then if any trouble comes up,

you don't want to be tense.

You want to stay very relaxed so that you can cope with it.

[engines rev]

-He liked the speed and the action and the muscles

and the dirt in the face

and the rain and rocks hitting you

and falling off and all that.

It was all part of his world of masculinity.

-You're dealing with a few-hundred-pound motorcycle

and taking it through circumstances

that not a lot of people can handle.

-He was very strong,

he was very fast,

and he showed that in the way he rode a motorcycle.

He was very aggressive.

If you were in front of him in a race, sooner or later,

he'd be on your tail, because he had to pass you.

That was his personality,

and that's why he was so successful

is because he had to win.

-And Steve was a natural,

racing competitively at Sebring, Baja, Elsinore,

and the International Six-Day Trials.

-He dug hanging out with guys like that, you know?

I mean, he was really... he was in his element.

I think for him, doing movies was a battle, you know?

He knew that he had to get his game face on.

With motorcycles,

he'd just blend in with the rest of the guys.

-He really lived life.

It wasn't like he was in this Hollywood box,

trying to be that actor or trying to be anything.

He just was who he was.

-Once he got a helmet on, nobody knew who he was.

He was the biggest star in the country, in the world.

-He just... he wanted to be one of the guys.

He wanted to be one of the racers.

He entered the Elsinore Grand Prix

under "Harvey Mushman."

When you saw the guy with the white helmet

and the yellow jersey go by,

it was Harvey Mushman.

-I was a big fan of his,

and when I decided to try and do On Any Sunday,

I went up to his office in L.A.,

and he was familiar with the Endless Summer,

the surf film I made.

Told him what I wanted to do, and he went, "Oh, cool,"

you know, "What do you want me to do?"

and I went, "Well, pay for it," and he started laughing.

He went, "Hey, man, you know, I'm in movies.

I don't finance them,"

and I went, "Well, you can't be in my movie then,"

and he laughed, and the next day he called me

and said, "Okay, let's go for it."

Put the money up, and he was a great, great partner.

-This is Steve McQueen,

and I'm proud to have a little ride on the film.

Whether you ride or not,

I think you'll enjoy On Any Sunday.

-The thing is that most people have the feeling

that motorcyclists are, you know, long sideburns

and those great, funny motorcycles and everything,

and they're all kind of, you know,

looking for trouble and everything,

and that really isn't the case.

People who enter into competition,

especially in the United States,

are very good sportsmen,

and all of them are very keen on the sport

and interested,

and they're some of the best sportsmen

I've ever run into in my life.

-And when I'm six years old,

he got me my first minicycle, a little Benelli,

and we used to go three days a week, you know.

After school, he'd pick me up

and take me and Terry

out to Indian Dunes to go practice,

and then during the summers, our races were Friday nights.

During the winters, they were Sundays.

My dad never missed one, always there.

When he got into the vintage motorcycles, same thing.

He hung out with the vintage crowd,

you know, the old guys that would go on runs.

-Triumph remade the bike from The Great Escape,

and I found out

that there was only a thousand of them being made.

I had to get one.

It was a really cool experience.

Me and my dad were driving those bikes around.

Of course, his is all souped up.

There was just this moment of riding down by the beach,

and, I don't know,

it just, it kind of made me feel closer to my grandfather,

and it was really cool.

I wish when I was younger

that was something

that we could have all experienced together.

-He was good, you know, in that Elsinore race,

there was a thousand guys,

and he finished in the top 10 in both classes.

We were at my house after the race,

and his foot was like a basketball,

all swollen up, and he goes, "I think I broke my foot.

Well, I know I broke my foot."

-Two weeks later and despite a broken foot,

McQueen would race the grueling 12 hours of Sebring.

-He said he was going to race the race,

and they let him drive it with a cast on his foot.

It's unbelievable, you know?

-I busted it in a motorcycle race

up at Lake Elsinore.

It was a 100-miler.

Busted it in six places and I'd already said I'd drive,

so I got the cast on

and we just taped it up, and I can't use a foot rest,

we had to cut part of it off

because I'm five and one-eighth inches

across the bottom of my foot,

and we put some sandpaper on the bottom,

taped it on

so I can keep it on the clutch pedal

and adjust it.

-He was so at ease.

You see, that's the thing that people don't realize.

I think he was, like, a born car-racer.

Some people just are completely natural.

He lived it 24 hours a day.

I mean, that's all he could talk about,

racing, racing, racing.

-McQueen was neck and neck

with Mario Andretti in the Ferrari 512S.

With an average speed of 113 miles an hour,

McQueen and his team would challenge for the lead

in their Porsche 908 Spyder

throughout the 12-hour marathon.

In the end, Andretti would cross the finish line

a scant 23 seconds ahead of McQueen.

-I think if you were to ask him then

if he was an actor or a racecar driver,

he wouldn't have known what to say.

-His passion definitely was motor sports.

It was a fix that he had to have.

-When you're racing, it's life.

Anything that happens before or after is just waiting.

-Nobody else would make a movie about the 24 hours of Le Mans

except Steve McQueen,

and because it was the thing he knew,

the thing he loved,

nobody, nobody else would make that movie.

-He had been wanting to do that film for 10 years.

He was finally able to bring it to life.

-Steve was completely obsessed with making Le Mans

the greatest car racing movie ever, ever filmed.

He was, like, very obsessed with the action

and the new way of filming the car racing,

and trying to find ways to show the sport

and to make the person feel like you're part of it,

the audience,

in a way that was never done before.

They had really tricked out a car

with a lot of cameras on it,

and it was a camera car that actually drove in the race.

-That 917 he drove at Le Mans, every day I would say,

"Dad, you've got to give me a ride in this thing, please."

You know, yeah, yeah.

I'm busy. I'm busy.

They're shooting down the Mulsanne,

my dad in the other car's coming down off the kink,

and they're braking to hang the right

into Mulsanne corner.

He opens the door and he, "Come on. Come here."

I'm going to get a ride in the 917.

So he sat me down in his lap

and I remember the seatbelt sticking into my back,

and I kind of went to the side,

and that sound of the flat 12 and the G-forces,

as a kid, pressing back into my dad.

There's nothing to hold on to for me,

so I put my hand on top of my dad's glove,

on the wheel, on the 917.

He went through the first three gears, whap, whap,

and then just for a brief second,

he took his hands off,

so I was actually steering a 917 at 10 years old.

I think that's what got me

addicted to motor sports and driving myself,

was that feeling that I felt of the G-force,

I mean, just and the sound, and, you know, sitting so low

with the fenders up high like that.

It just, the whole thing was an addicting experience,

to say the least.

- Le Mans was kind of a crazy experience.

It was doomed from the beginning.

He wasn't focused.

He'd much rather hang out with the guys

than hang out with the executives, you know?

-John Sturges wanted to make it a love story

with the race as a background,

and McQueen was like,

"I didn't wait to make this movie

to have the race be the background.

It's about the race."

-Sturges kept saying, "Well, where's the human story?"

because it was just all about machines.

So you had them bumping heads from the very beginning.

-John wanted a script, and there was no script.

-I don't think Steve McQueen says anything

for the first 35 minutes of that film,

but you're just sort of drawn to it.

It's almost like you could smell it, you know.

That's how visceral and visual it is.

-He was in the car five days a week,

and, you know, going racing speeds,

and he said,

"Every day I thought I was going to get killed."

-It was a very, very dangerous film set.

There was rain.

There were crashes.

There was a driver that lost his leg.

-And I think, in a way,

it's like the painter's madness.

I think that he went mad a little bit

in the making of the film.

The obsession took over, and he lost control.

I mean, he just went, he went nuts.

- Le Mans was a disaster film for everyone involved.

It was a disaster for me.

It was disastrous for Steve.

It was disastrous

for his relationship with John Sturges.

-He wasn't showing up for the filming.

The director got fed up, John Sturges.

They finally had a big blowout, and John left,

and they replaced the director,

and from then, it just became something different.

-In asserting himself

and essentially parting company with John Sturges,

who he'd been so successful with,

and getting the television director to come in

and really having McQueen direct this movie,

perhaps he wasn't threatened.

-He wanted to be a filmmaker,

and he was being adored by everybody.

Everything was "Yes, Steve," and "Yes" that.

-I don't think Steve was that cooperative.

One thing led to another,

and things began to disintegrate.

-I mean, the whole thing,

they took the money away from Steve.

They took the production, everything.

They took everything away from Steve,

and everybody at that point in time

seemed to be doing drugs.

That was the start of the tearing of the family,

because it was just getting too heavy.

-I think the issue was Steve at the time.

He was distracted by cars, car racing,

motorcycle racing, women.

-There were times that I didn't look away,

and there was a time when I retaliated,

and when I did, the marriage never recovered from that.

He had a terrible temper, you know, and it just...

he, uh...

He terrified me, so I just said, "I have to leave."

-With Le Mans, McQueen was all in.

He gambled everything on Le Mans, and he lost.

- Los Angeles Times, 1971.

"Le Mans loses revs

the minute it gets off the track.

It is more than a little schizophrenic."

-At the age of 40,

Steve McQueen now found himself divorced, broke,

and doesn't really know

what's going to happen with his movie career,

because he's suffered this huge flop.

-Straight ahead.

The Getaway, obviously a life-changing experience

for Steve McQueen.

He meets his co-star, Ali MacGraw.

-Hi, Doc.

-McQueen produced The Getaway.

The casting process was very simple.

Steve said, "I want the girl from Love Story."

-I was married to Robert Evans,

who was then the head of Paramount.

-She's married to Robert Evans,

perhaps the most powerful man in Hollywood,

but yet this is still Steve McQueen.

-Steve called and said,

"I want to talk to you about doing this film

and maybe using your wife."

I had to be talked into doing it.

I thought I was wrong for the part,

and they all said, "Wow, I mean,

you get to work with Steve McQueen.

This is an absolutely brilliant career move,"

and, of course, I knew

he was one of the biggest stars in the world,

but that in itself was kind of intimidating,

because I was such a neophyte.

I had no clue how to play in that league.

The first day with Steve on The Getaway,

he and Sam Peckinpah picked me up at the airport

and did, like 360s down the freeway.

That was kind of a "Wow, we're all going"

to have a very different kind of life

than you're used to,

you repressed New England non-actress.

"Have a look at this."

-As soon as they meet,

there's this instant electricity.

-I do literally remember

watching him walk out of the house

to the edge of the pool,

which was the color of his eyes,

which I could see from 700 feet.

I mean, it was an overwhelming, visceral, turn-on,

who-is-that kind of feeling.

You know, that's a stunner.

It doesn't happen a lot.

The attraction was electrifying.

It was scary.

-It was a foregone conclusion

that something was going to happen.

-And of course, eventually she leaves Robert Evans,

the head of production at Paramount,

for Steve McQueen while they're making The Getaway.

Steve McQueen had that sort of power.

-Steve fell in love with the girl from Love Story,

and Ali fell in love with one of the most, you know,

charismatic actors of the century, you know.

It was a no-brainer, really.

- Los Angeles Times, 1972.

"Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw

generate between them as much electricity

as any of the fabled screen teams of the past."

-It was like being a student on an advanced film set.

Sam Peckinpah once said, "If you want to learn

everything there is to know about acting for film,

watch his eyes,"

and that's powerfully true.

Nobody that I've ever watched

has come close to doing what he did.

There are many great things to do.

He nailed his version for all time.

-In one of the most challenging roles of his career,

McQueen would put it all on the line

in a role based on a true character

who had risked everything to be free.

-In Papillon, there was just this broken man,

and that was amazing to see.

All his other movies, he was very strong.

There was always this steel wall

that no one was going to get through,

and that was the movie

that you just saw that kind of crumble.

[bell tolling]

-Franklin Schaffner did a brilliant movie,

and they killed themselves for him.

They were up to your waist

in hot, bug-infested Jamaican mud

and blistering heat.

-It's physical.

It's mental, emotional, and physical.

You were just in that awful situation with them.

-It's a grind, 12-, 14-hour-plus days

on a lot of days.

There's a physicality to that.

There's a mental discipline

that it takes to stay focused and on task.

-You'll be killed, you know that.

-Maybe.

-He insisted that he was doing that stunt himself.

He wasn't going to have some stuntman do it for him.

-My assumption was it must have not been Steve,

because we were so wide

we couldn't tell if it was or not,

so why not get in on his face?

That seemed sort of wasteful to me in this day and age.

I guess back then, maybe it was more like,

"Well, he's just going to do it,

so we're just going to shoot it how we'd normally shoot it."

Instead of it being five cameras on it,

and we want one on his face

and we want to see him all in one frame, in one,

you know... I want to see that.

-With The Getaway in '72 and then Papillon in '73,

if there was a sense after Le Mans

that the decade of Steve McQueen had come to an end,

those two films certainly shattered it.

They were box office successes.

They were largely critical successes,

and Steve McQueen was back on top.

-After Papillon, Steve was exhausted.

We lived at the beach, and he said, "I want a break."

On a good day, and there were many, many, many good days,

we were the most sort of ordinary,

all-American happy family.

Chad lived with us, which was great,

because he looked so up to his father,

and I found Steve a terrific father,

you know, really caring.

-At the end of the summer, it's time to go back to school.

It was like... you know.

My dad came in one night and says, "Hey, listen.

You can live with me if you want, you know,

or your mom, whatever."

I thought about it.

I think, God, it took me about a half a second,

and I said, "I'm going where the action is, Dad.

I'm going with you."

-He was a superb film actor, without any doubt,

but like a handful of people,

he had this kind of... bits of danger,

like what are you really going to do?

Underneath that, there was tremendous insecurity

and softness and sensitivity,

but the survival mechanism was that, like, combustible,

dangerous, mysterious now-you-see-it, now-you-don't.

When it was good, it was very, very, very good,

and when it was bad, it was horrendous.

There was no kind of gray, boring ground.

-It's all in love or all out of love,

you know what I mean?

It's 100% one way or the other, and it's just the way it was.

-In the heat of skyrockets in the night passionate love,

you just go, "Wow, it's always going to be like this,"

but it isn't.

He was the biggest movie star in the world,

but I was having my five minutes of being pretty conspicuous.

You're running in the fast lane,

and people are clapping every time you turn the corner.

We were both having such a difficult time communicating,

it was one of those, like, explosions.

-I'd wake up in the morning and go down to the kitchen

and there'd be a plate sailing past my head.

They're throwing plates, you know.

-The kids don't know who's going where.

They're scared when they hear arguments.

They're relieved when they hear that you're happy together.

They wonder why they can't go to Father's Day weekend

because he's in some other country,

or where's your mother?

I mean, it's a rotten family scenario.

The fact that our marriage wasn't working

was very disturbing to him.

He was not happy, and I was unhappy,

and we weren't doing anything about it.

He sort of checked out.

-Yeah, you know, eventually,

they didn't see eye to eye, you know,

but the time she was there,

it was pretty fun.

It was good.

-McQueen not only left Ali, he left Hollywood,

the star machine,

the highs, the lows, the whole crazy thing.

-He didn't want anything to do with the movie world, you know?

He wouldn't even let a script come to the house.

I'd have to go pick it up at the gas station.

-McQueen walks away from Hollywood,

but Hollywood doesn't necessarily

want him to walk away.

Every great role of the '70s that you can think of

was offered to McQueen first.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,

Close Encounters of the Third Kind,

First Blood, The Gauntlet, Apocalypse Now,

all these great, classic films

that sort of fit the McQueen type,

and he turned it all down.

-At 47, McQueen decided to start a whole new life.

At age 23, Barbara Minty was the perfect partner.

-And she was a cover girl, you know?

She was very young, very exotic,

and my dad saw her.

-It was an ad for Club Med.

It was my butt.

I was turned around.

I was clicking my heels up,

and I guess maybe he liked the spirit?

-My dad, when he sees somebody on the cover of a magazine,

"Hello?"

-When I first laid eyes on him in the Beverly Wilshire,

he was a scruffy, scary...

Looked like a homeless old hobo.

He asked really serious questions.

I mean, he was going to my soul, to my heart,

and I think he was that kind of a guy

that he wanted to know if I was real

and if I was going to, you know, mess with him or do anything.

-And she liked Coors Lite and Old Milwaukee like we did,

so she fit right in.

-We definitely matched.

The ages were a little different,

but it worked, you know?

We just loved the same things.

-It was all trucks, you know?

We all drove trucks from the '40s.

-We just had so much fun together.

I liked cars and motorcycles

and, you know, good pick-up trucks.

-I toured the western states with him

looking for a ranch for him to buy,

because he wanted to get out of L.A.

-He just said, "Honey, come on.

We're going to go to Santa Paula airport.

I found something. Here's the hangar."

The next day, you have a plane,

and the next day you have 30 motorcycles with the plane,

and then it's, "Honey, I bought a house."

It was a great little house.

I mean, it was so perfect for us.

It was old, everything.

We had the old pull-chain toilet.

I think he was happy.

I mean, it was a whole new Steve.

And had a couple years here,

and then we had a year in the hangar,

and this was his little privacy.

It was his playland.

-He was walking around the airport

and he happened upon a guy,

a World War II veteran, Perry Schreffler.

Steve asked Perry

what would be the best way to learn how to fly,

and Perry said, "Well, that's the way I learned how to fly",

with a military instructor in a Stearman.

-I don't think he even thought about it.

He just went home and bought two Stearman,

and he learned how to fly.

-He was sitting on the john reading Trade-A-Plane,

and he called a guy from the potty

and bought it.

-Steve's first Stearman he only owned for a day or two

because my dad made one comment

that he didn't think it was a good Stearman,

so instantly Steve got rid of that

and bought that Stearman.

-He could drive cars and he could ride motorcycles,

but he was a... pilot.

There's Steve McQueen the actor and Steve McQueen the man,

so I was lucky enough to know the man.

We had quiet times.

I got a quieter, more mature McQueen.

We used to get in the old pick-up truck,

and we'd just go driving.

He'd say, "Well, it's going to be for a week or two,

so pack a little more,"

and we'd just go for a while.

It was fun.

It was... insane, actually.

-The life that he chose to live

with the particular movies he chose to do

after he and I were divorced,

I think was the life he wanted to live.

-Steve McQueen really used himself 100%,

and he didn't really go outside of that box.

He played to his own strengths

and his own passions and his own imagination,

and found pieces that fit him like a glove.

-Living his new life,

McQueen would climb back in the saddle

to play rogue lawman Tom Horn.

-People don't realize this, but he was a filmmaker.

I mean, Tom Horn he pretty much directed himself.

-He asked me to be the assistant director

and take care of him

while he was making this picture.

About a week into the picture,

he looks over at me and I said, "What's wrong?"

He says, "I can't do it anymore.

My director is driving me crazy."

-He knew what he wanted.

It was his film.

He wanted it filmed a certain way.

He wanted everybody to do it his way.

-We drove into the compound

where the dressing rooms were and et cetera,

and he got out of the truck,

walked into the director's motor home,

and fired him.

-He was difficult, I'd say.

I wouldn't want to work for him.

-Like my dad was with everything else,

you know, 100%.

He lived out on the set with Barbara in the motor home.

-We had a house in Tucson,

a penthouse at, like, the Hilton.

We had all these beautiful places to stay,

but we stayed in the RV

and absolutely had the best time ever.

-All of a sudden, this limousine pulled up

and a guy in a suit got out,

walked over to talk to Steve for a couple minutes,

and got back in the car again and drove off,

and I said, "What's going on?"

He held up a check,

and that check was for a lot of money.

He always was concerned about his lungs,

and he would say, "What would happen

if your lungs were bad or you couldn't breathe?"

It was there in some little way,

you could see that he'd be protective about this or that,

and you just left it alone immediately.

You didn't get involved.

-I was working as a production assistant,

and we knew he was sick,

but I never thought, like everything else,

anything was going to happen to him.

He's bulletproof.

-We thought it was desert fever,

something like that,

and when they went and did a chest x-ray,

the doctor in Santa Paula said,

"Go to the big hospital in Los Angeles,"

and that's where they found out,

and that's where the doctors said...

-He went in for that exploratory surgery

at Cedars-Sinai, you know,

and I remember getting there that day,

and they said, "Hey, we got the tests back,"

and my dad was like...

-A friend called and said, "You need to know that... ",

God, this is a bad story.

"That Steve has cancer."

"How do you know that?"

"Because somebody

in the examination room at the hospital

took that x-ray and leaked it to the trashy press."

-It gave a lot of people their first glimpse

into just how horrible tabloid journalism can be.

-I think this is the most immoral thing

that I've ever witnessed.

-The manner in which they got the story

was just horrible

and embarrassing to anybody who cares about journalism,

and certainly terrible

for anybody who cared about Steve McQueen.

-I'm not going there,

because it pisses me off to this day,

because I've still got a little anger management

with the doctors,

but there is no cure.

-50 years old,

it was way too early for this story to happen,

and yet he'd been exposed to asbestos,

which is, I gather, what was

the specific root of that cancer.

-He was in the Marines, and he was cleaning up the...

Of course, he went and chased some girl

and he got in trouble,

and they made him clean out the hulls of these ships,

and they had asbestos.

That's where he breathed in the asbestos,

and asbestos takes, mesothelioma takes

probably, usually 20-some years

to get into your body and get going.

-It was so sad for me,

because this good-looking, handsome man,

just so full of energy and so full of life

was suddenly, you know, really thin, emaciated.

This was something internal.

Something was eating him from the inside.

Something has taken over his body.

-You know, when you're riding the bike

and the wind's in your hair

and you're going 60 miles an hour,

he's God,

but then I think he felt the vulnerability,

and I think that vulnerability

turned to some questioning about what it's all about.

-If he had a great fear, it was of dying young.

I went to see him.

I went up to his room, to his bedroom,

and the fan was whirring around, and there he was, you know,

and I stood above him for a while,

and then he opened his eye and he said, "Hi, honey."

I said, "Hi."

I said, "How are you feeling?"

He said, "Not good,"

and he said, "I thought I'd never see you again,"

and those were the last words we said to each other.

-He asked me about some painkillers

and I suggested

the one that you should be working with is morphine,

because he was obviously in a lot of pain,

and he asked me, he said, "What shall I do?"

and I said, "Steve, you have no choice.

You've got to go up to Mexico."

-He knew the doctors wrote him off

here in the United States.

That's why he went to Mexico.

He wasn't about to stop fighting.

-He fought like a son of a bitch to stay alive.

-And he fought so hard, and he didn't want to go.

He could not accept it,

and because he liked to win, he couldn't understand.

-He tried his hardest, and you know what?

Cancer sucks.

-It's an intensely private time,

and it had passed the time

when it was about who's married to him and who...

There was none of that.

It was just trying to think

about how he and his immediate, his new wife and his family,

Neile and Terry and Chad, could best be taken care of.

-We were down in Juarez, Mexico,

and this clinic,

they couldn't get our blood type down there in Mexico,

so they had me eating raw steaks

and they hit me twice a day for blood.

They were wheeling him to surgery,

and the last thing he said to me was, "You'll be all right, son,"

but I didn't put it together, you know?

I didn't think,

but I think he knew he wasn't going to make it.

-The call came at about 3:00 in the morning,

and Terry said, "Mom, Dad just died."

-Every life's lesson, I got from him, you know?

Good, bad, or indifferent,

and even though, you know, he passed so young, at 50,

boy, he crammed everything in.

He crammed it all in.

-McQueen fought to live his life his way,

squaring off against anyone who slowed him down.

His roles mirrored his own life.

He was the King of Cool, the lone wolf.

Steve McQueen was an original.

-The characters that you've played on the screen

who have been loners,

they've been rebellious a little bit, moody...

Have you interjected your own personality

into these characters?

-Yeah.

-Yeah? -Yeah.

-You are a loner? -Yeah.

-Normally, you hear stories about grandparents

and you don't ever get to see them.

You don't... Maybe pictures.

I get to see my grandfather in movies.

I get to be inspired by him, and that's amazing.

-He definitely wouldn't have been a normal grandpa,

I can say that with certainty.

He would have been that guy

that obviously everyone wants to have around,

and probably that guy

still acting like he was a teenager, you know?

-I miss him, but I think of him every day,

just a passing glance, you know,

but there are times when I'll say,

"Oh, you would have loved this, Steve."

-I can't believe that he died at 50.

It never leaves me, never, ever, ever.

-We were meant to be together, I know that for a fact.

I mean, we worked.

We understood each other, and I've never had that since.

He should be here.

-We didn't toss a lot of footballs around,

me and Dad,

but it was, you know, way more...

-A man becomes what he dreams.

That's what makes us love him, that he did push the envelope,

constantly, in love, in life, and right to the end, in dying.

-But with the passing of Steve McQueen,

the world has lost

one of the top two or three great film actors of our age,

maybe the best.

I loved him a lot.

-I think of all the actors I've worked with,

I was closer to him

because I think I understood him,

and I think he needed that.

He needed someone.

I miss him.

-I would have loved

to have watched the man grow old.

We missed out

on a bunch of really phenomenal performances

from a guy who matured in front of the camera

and behind the wheel and on the bike,

and, you know, because there'd be a time

when maybe it'd stop being about that.

-He was that good at 50.

Imagine what 60 and 70 might have brought us.

He might have been the oldest guy to win Le Mans.

Who knows?

-He has the magical alchemy,

and that is what makes him...

a legend and an iconic figure.

-We haven't lost Steve McQueen

because he's there, indelible, in all these movies,

all these films that sit on a shelf

as a beautiful tableau of a man's life.

It still works today, and it still burns brightly.

It still jumps off the screen at you.

[♪♪♪]

-You know, sometimes I wish I had, like,

I could give you a pair of glasses

and you could see what I've seen, you know?

It's been a long, good ride.

And let's face it, my dad was it.

-To all the people who see me in the movies,

and to all the people who read about me,

I am what I am,

and if you like me, I'm glad.

Steve McQueen.

[♪♪♪]