STEVE MCQUEEN His Long Road to STARDOM

HE OVERCAME A TERRIBLE CHILDHOOD AND SELF-DESTRUCTIVE IMPULSES TO BECOME THE KING OF COOL

- LOUISE A. BARILE

In 1972, police in Anchorage, Alaska, arrested Steve McQueen for speeding and doing doughnuts in a rented Oldsmobile Toronado. “He really raised hell for quite a while,” said witness Lynn Burlingame. “When they did finally get him stopped, they administered a field sobriety test and he somersaulted down the white line.” His mug shot shows a disheveled Steve smirking and flashing the peace sign.

In his younger years, the actor had known plenty of real trouble, so he shrugged off his Alaskan misadventure as a lark. And he had a point. Predictably, the world’s biggest movie star was released on bail that night. Steve fled the state and was eventually convicted in absentia of reckless driving.

For a generation of movie lovers in the ’60s and ’70s, Steve was the King of Cool who made a career out of playing nonconformist underdogs who became heroes by unexpectedly rising to the occasion. These portrayals came from an honest place. The odds were also stacked against Terrence Stephen McQueen when he was born to a 20-year-old single mother in Beech Grove, Ind., in 1930, yet he succeeded beyond anyone’s expectations. “When I did The Great Escape, I kept thinking, if they were making a movie of my life, that’s what they’d call it — the great escape,” he confessed in 1963.