Excerpt from Steve McQueen - Portrait of an American Rebel
by Marshall Terrill - Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1993

     In 1962, Richard McKenna's first novel, The Sand Pebbles, spent twenty-
eight weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. The book was based on
his experience as an enlisted navy man in war-torn China in 1926.
     Director Robert Wise read the novel and wanted to do the film as
soon as possible. The movie rights for the novel had been sold for
$300,000 to United Artists. Soon thereafter, a budget dispute evolved
and 20th Century-Fox wound up with the rights.
     It was early 1963 when Steve McQueen was first mentioned as a
possible lead, but Paul Newman had the first right of refusal in Wise's
eyes. The Great Escape had not yet been released, and McQueen wasn't
as big a star as Newman.
     Wise knew the kind of effort that had to be put into The Sand Pebbles,
an epic film. Fox suggested that San Francisco would be an ideal loca-
tion for filming. Wise nixed that idea. "We could have built cities on the
Sacramento River, but no one had a quick answer to obtaining up to
twenty river junks, several hundred sampans, and authentic Chinese
extras," says Wise. "For some scenes, I needed a thousand people, and I
doubt San Francisco could guarantee that on any given day."
     No, Wise thought, it would have to be shot on location in the Orient,
and it would take time for all the locations to be scouted, the sets to be
built, and the proper permits to be taken care of. It would take eighteen
months for The Sand Pebbles to get under way. Meanwhile, director Wil-
liam Wyler had left the set of The Sound of Music at 20th Century-Fox.
Wise was asked to take over the musical, and the rest is history. The
picture went on to win the Academy Award for Best Picture, and Wise
for Best Director.
      Paul Newman had turned down The Sand Pebbles and in the last eigh-
teen months of preparation, Steve McQueen had become the number
one box office attraction in the world. When Newman dropped out of
the race, McQueen was the natural choice for the lead role of Jake
Holman.
      Wise was invited to the Castle to discuss the film with Steve. As he
entered the palatial grounds, he thought to himself, "In a single de-
cade, McQueen had gone from being broke and hungry to living in a
mansion on a hill." The last time Wise saw McQueen was when Steve
was unemployed and pestering Neile on the set of This Could Be the
Night. Several times during the filming, Wise had to shoo McQueen
away. How times had changed.
     When Wise left the Castle, Steve had been offered his most challeng-
ing role to date. In addition, he was to be paid most handsomely, a
$650,000 salary and a percentage of the profits. Not knowing what was
to come, McQueen earned every penny.
     "He was the perfect choice for Jake Holman," said Wise. "I've never
seen an actor work with mechanical things the way he does. He learned
everything about operating that ship's engine, just as Jake Holman did
in the script. Jake Holman is a very strong individual who doesn't bend
under pressure, a guy desperately determined to maintain his own per-
sonal identity and pride. Very much like Steve.
     "He's marvelous in the picture, because he has the attitude and looks
to carry the dialogue. He's not only an emotional and instinctive actor,
but a thinking actor."
     Following The Sound of Music, 20th Century-Fox gave Wise the red
carpet treatment; its success practically bankrolled The Sand Pebbles' $8
million budget. Wise could have anything he wanted, and he took ad-
vantage of Fox's generosity.
      Then the most expensive prop ever for a film, a $250,000 re-creation
of a gunboat used in the 1920s, was built for the film, the San Pablo.
     The Sand Pebbles would be the first major American film shot entirely
in Taiwan. It had four locations: Keelung, Tamsui, Taipei, and Hong
Kong. Wise would bring with him a 111-man crew, with forty-seven
speaking parts and thirty-two interpreters. A thousand extras would be
required for several scenes. To get the Taiwanese government to agree
to this, a $100,000 building was erected near the river for the film's
town station, which would be turned over to the local government when
the crew left. For all of this to go as planned, eighty days were originally
slated for filming. Unforeseen problems turned that into seven grueling
months.
     Taiwan at the time was still technically at war with China. Just ten
days prior to the production startup, a defecting Communist pilot had
crash-landed a Russian-built 1L-28 jet bomber near Taipei. A week be-
fore, nationalist Chinese gunboats had fought a pitched battle in the
Formosa Strait, then limped into Keelung victoriously. The Sand Pebbles
began filming on November 22, 1965.
      Between projects, Steve always let himself go a bit. An extra ten or
fifteen pounds might be gained when he wasn't on a picture. On The
Sand Pebbles, Steve never appeared to be more fit. He had his home gym
shipped to Taiwan to keep him in shape when he wasn't working. "Law-
yers sharpen up with law books, and astronauts in pressure chambers,
but an actor has to do it the way a prizefighter does," McQueen rea-
soned.
      Many things contributed to the constant delays that plagued The Sand
Pebbles. The first major delay occurred when the Keelung River, where
the San Pablo was supposed to dock, was at low tide, and the crew had to
wait two weeks for high tide. When the San Pablo finally arrived, the
rainy season began. Steve Ferry, an extra on the film, remembers, "For
three weeks, the rain put us out of business, but we still got paid."
McQueen and crew did the best they could to beat the boredom. "We
spent a lot of time together. We were all trapped on a little boat, and we
amused ourselves as best we could: playing, diving, swimming, all those
warm water things," says Ferry.
      Steve found Taiwan to be a whole new world. He watched the people
and observed their ways. "The thing is," he insisted, "everything is
different over there, I mean all of life from top to bottom. It was wild.
Like they say that's a nice shirt you've got on, and what they mean is
there's a spot on it." On their work ethic, "They were building a house
near where we lived out in the country, and I used to watch the guys
working. You'd see this cat going over to pick up a beam. A big 8-by-10
beam and this skinny guy gets one end up, see, and he squats down and
lays it on a pad on his shoulder and he works his way in the center and
lifts up the whole damn thing. He's got this huge heam balanced there,
you know, and he runs a couple of steps forward and a couple of steps
backward and leans into it and takes off across the field. I mean one
guy!" Steve added, "And those studs on bicycles. Everything tied on
somehow. You know, boxes and baskets and old suitcases and God
knows what--all piled up ten feet high. Rickety-rackety down the street.
You couldn't believe they'd make it, but they always did."
      While in Taiwan, Steve and Neile discovered an orphanage for young
girls, mainly prostitutes, run by Edward Wojniak, a Catholic priest. In
Taiwan, a boy was often the preferred child, as he could help lend a
hand and support the family as he got older. A girl's only asset to her
family was earning money through prostitution, and Steve found this
way of life disheartening. He donated $25,000 to Wojniak's mission and
continually supported Wojniak until the priest's death in the late seven-
ties. Says a friend, "Steve supported that mission even after Father
Wojniak's death. He sent them money; he sent them clothes; he sent
them autographed pictures, and remember, he didn't sign autographs.
He never wanted anyone to know about this. He just reached out to
help. Steve was a very generous man. He would give the shirt off his
back to anyone who needed it."
      When the cameras finally did start rolling, Wise found himself at
his wit's end with Steve. McQueen insisted that a scene be shot totally
opposite the way Wise wanted it. Finally, Wise came up with a solu-
tion. A scene would be shot both ways, a Wise version and a Mc-
Queen version. If Steve liked his version better when the film was be-
ing edited, then Wise would accommodate him. This procedure
would prolong filming and eventually add to the film's budget. (Inci-
dentally, none of the scenes that Steve insisted on made it to the final
version of the film.) Says Wise, "The thing with him was that you
never quite knew what the mood was going to be. I was trying to line
up a dolly shot. It was a difficult thing, and then all of a sudden, I
felt a tap on my shoulder and it was Steve. He said, 'Now, Bob,
about this wardrobe,' and I blew up. I said,'Steve, for heaven's sake.'
I used a little stronger language, frankly.'Please don't bring that up
now, I'm in the midst of something difficult right now. Let's talk
about it tonight. That's it.' Well, he was really hurt, and he didn't
speak to me for three days. Here I was directing the star of the film
and he took directions and he was in the scenes and he would listen
to me, but he did not speak one word to me for three days." Steve's
agent, Stan Kamen, happened to visit McQueen that weekend.
Kamen and Wise got together to decide what to do to get Steve to
talk to the director again. It was decided that Wise would let Steve
watch his dailies, something that Wise never allowed. "When Steve
saw the dailies and saw how good he looked, he decided to talk to
me again. As a matter of fact, Steve never gave me a hard time
again..."

      Steve Ferry, a friend of both McQueen and Bergen, refutes her
charges of fighting with the locals. "In all the time I knew Steve,
he got in one fight. That was in Hong Kong. He was in a club and
some guy gave him the movie star routine and followed Steve into
the john. McQueen punched him out and left him there. He panicked
because it had just hit him that he was with a publicity guy. He disappeared
and left the publicity guy looking for him. He went home immediately."
      Loren Janes, Steve's stunt double on the film, actually dated Bergen
during the movie. He doesn't remember McQueen getting in fights either.
"He'd go out with the boys for a drink every now and then, but he
didn't go out and beat people up. I don't think Candice liked him too much."
Janes asked Bergen how she felt the picture was going and she responded,
"It's going okay under the circumstances." Janes pressed her for a more
detailed answer. "What do you mean?'' he asked. "Well," responded Bergen,
"the director, the actors. How can I work with these people? There's no talent
there." Janes couldn't believe his ears. Robert Wise, Steve McQueen,
Richard Attenborough, Richard Crenna. How could she work with these
people? "In my opinion, " says Janes, "the guys with the little parts in the
movie had more talent in their little finger than she did in her whole body.
I think she was just young, impressionable, and thought there was more to her
than there was."

     McQueen's other costar, character actor Mako, saw another side
of the movie star. The two men first met on the lot of 20th Century-Fox.
"He seemed like a quiet, unassuming type of fellow," recalls Mako. "He
was wearing blue jeans and a blue polo shirt and sweat socks and sneakers.
He did possess confidence and charisma, but he was very quiet."
Mako was a newcomer to feature films and was portraying Po-Han, a
friendly local who befriends Jake Holman on the ship. Mako was pretty
much left to do his own acting without much direction from Wise. Mc-
Queen, however, liked his scenes acted out before him. During a scene
in the engine room, Mako scratched his head during a rehearsal. "Are
you going to scratch your head in the scene!" McQueen asked him.
Unaware that he was doing anything out of the ordinary, Mako re-
sponded, "I don't know." McQueen thought Mako might steal the
scene with the very act of scratching his head, something he certainly
did with Yul Brynner on The Magnificent Seven. Now that Steve was a
movie star, no actor, big or small, was ever going to steal a scene from
him.
     Mako learned later on when seeing the film for the first time that
McQueen "really impressed me. Not so much when you're working
with him in person, but when you see his work on screen. There is little
wasted emotion. He came to know the camera so well. His work was so
subtle and right on the money. I think that he was unique in the fact
that he chose to do less on the screen. By doing less, he brought simplicity
on the screen, and at the same time he was very much the image of
the American man."
     On almost every location, Steve had Neile bring Terry and Chad to
to visit him. His family was his number one priority. “Our family was
important to him, and he'd bring us on location to be together,” says
Terry. The McQueens would stay in a rented villa outside Taipei. For
Steve and Neile, it was the best time of their marriage. The Sand Pebbles
was our happiest period ever. Steve was having a terrible time, but we
were totally together. No temptations..."

     Times got even tougher in Taiwan when Steve became sick with the flu
for three days. He had never missed a day on the set, and it was a blow
to his ego when he couldn't come to work.
      One day, while Steve was out, Wise began shooting the fireball scene
in which the extras were throwing torches at the San Pablo. Camera
operator Paul Hill took a flaming torch in the chest. No one had it easy
on The Sand Pebbles.
     To this day, director Robert Wise claims The Sand Pebbles was the most
difficult picture he's ever made. "I must say that the cast and crew came
through a very difficult situation admirably. It's not easy for Americans
to be dropped into a country that is completely foreign, and then be
subjected to lengthy delays." (Ten years later, when Francis Ford Coppola
was experiencing the same problems on Apocalypse Now, he requested
a copy of The Sand Pebbles from Wise. He wanted to show the
crew what the end result could be in spite of any problems.)
     In May 1966, after six months abroad, three months of delays, and $3
million over budget, The Sand Pebbles was completed. Said Neile, "I
never saw him work so hard or get so bored as he was after those six
months in Taiwan. By the time we got to Hong Kong, he'd really had it.
He couldn't wait to get home." When the McOueen family safely landed
on U.S. soil, Steve got out and literally kissed the ground.
     "Anything I ever did wrong," Steve confessed, "I paid for in Taiwan.
I just hope something good comes out of it." What came out of it, for
Steve McQueen, was an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor...

     For The Sand Pebbles, he embarked on an unprecedented publicity
tour. David Foster was called by the president of 20th Century-Fox,
Richard Zanuck, to accompany Steve to New York for a media blitz. "In
those days, publicity in New York helped a picture tremendously," says
Foster.
     Foster lined up all of the shows on whichMcQueen was to appear. He
first went on The Ed Sullivan Show. It was tradition at the beginning of
the show for Sullivan to announce a celebrity in the audience. And so,
Sullivan said, "Now, tonight in our audience is Mr. Steve McQueen.
Steve, would you please take a bow." And Steve took a bow. Next was
What's My Line?, on which he appeared as a mystery guest. He then did
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. "He was excited about all of these
things. It meant that he had arrived," says Foster. "He didn't enjoy
doing them, but he also realized that these things made him a star. He
was uncomfortable in one sense, but he realized the value of what it did
for him. Certain things he did for great pleasure because it elevated
him."
     Zanuck hired a limousine for McQueen and Foster as they made the
rounds. Each day in New York, a full schedule of interviews with reporters
was slated. By the second day, Steve had had enough. He told Foster,
"You call Fox and dump the limo. I can't stand it. Have them
deliver a Volkswagen and I'll drive us around to the interviews." Foster
complied with Steve's wishes, and they finished their interviews with
McQueen driving them around the Big Apple.
     Foster also remembers a night at the Metropolitan Opera when he,
his wife Jackie, Steve, and Neile had been given choice seats. Five minutes
into the show, Steve got up and left. "He didn't say to us, 'Hey, I'm
bored, let's go do something else.' He didn't even bother to tell Neile he
was leaving. He just got up and left," laughs Foster.
     Three months later, Foster got a phone call from Zanuck.
"Remember when you guys were in New York for The Sand Pebbles?"
Cautiously, Foster answered, "Yeah?" Zanuck continued, "What the hell
happened to that Volkswagen?" Foster remembered that he and McQueen
had taken a limo back to the airport. He quickly put in a phone call to Steve.
"Steve, where did you leave the rental car in New York?" Steve thought
about it for a second and remembered, "In the parking lot of the hotel."
Foster says incredulously now, "It had been in a parking lot of some
hotel for three months and the clock was ticking, and Dick Zanuck was
breathing down my neck." It all came down to movie star behavior.
Now that the studios were picking up the tab, Steve could act like one.
     The Sand Pebbles premiered at the Rivoli in New York on December
20, 1966, to rave reviews. Arthur Knight of The Saturday Review wrote,
"Richard Crenna is outstanding, Candice Bergen attractive, Richard
Attenborough effective-and all of them dominated by Steve McQueen,
who is nothing short of wonderful in the pivotal role of Holman." The
New York Times raved, Performed by Steve McQueen with the most
restrained, honest, heartfelt acting he has ever done, . . . we see the
ultimate reward for the kind of service he ruefully performs." Vanety
announced, "Steve McQueen delivers an outstanding performance and
looks the part he plays so well. Wise's otherwise expert direction is
matched by meticulous production."
     The Sand Pebbles was nominated for eight Academy Awards, including
Best Actor for McQueen, the first and only Oscar nomination of his
career. The others nominees were Paul Scofield for A Man for All Sea-
sons, Richard Burton for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Michael
Caine for Alfie. It was a British sweep for the Oscars that year and Paul
Scofleld took the Academy Award home, though it is McQueen's portrayal
of Jake Holman that is much better remembered today than Scofield's
Sir Thomas More.
     Neile believed it was fate, as Steve would have been impossible to live
with if he had won the Oscar. As to some consolation, Steve won the
World Film Favorite award for favorite actor by the Hollywood Foreign
Press Association and received the Photoplay Gold Medal Award. In
Japan, he was named the most popular foreign star for the second
consecutive year...

End of excerpt from Steve McQueen - Portrait of an American Rebel
by Marshall Terrill - Donald I. Fine, Inc., 1993