Of course, not everyone’s life is a Greek Tragedy, and hubris can actually take you pretty far these days. In some cases, it’s absolutely necessary for success (Sarah Palin, anyone?), and McQueen’s life is a perfect case in point.   Sure I call him St. Steven, but only ironically.

If you look at his early life, there’s nothing to suggest McQueen would become the icon he is today:  he was abandoned by his alcoholic father when he just six months old, and his equally boozy mother didn’t really want him, choosing instead to dump young Steve with an uncle.   McQueen was dyslexic (it was said he could barely read, even into his 40s) and partially deaf, and often found himself getting in scrapes with anyone who might tease him about it.  On those rare occasions his mom allowed Steve to live with her, he fought constantly with his stepfather.  At 14, he ran away from  home to join a street gang and then the circus, until his rebellious streak stopped briefly when he was sentenced to a juvenile detention facility. The wild, unruly child eventually grew to be wild, unruly adult. After getting bumped out of juvie he worked in a brothel and on a oil rig before joining the Marines, where he was demoted seven times, and once spent 41 days in the brig (although he did clean up his act and was honorably discharged).

Naturally, McQueen’s upbringing turned him into a textbook pathological narcissist. The man indulged his id regularly – he was moody and supremely selfish, and quite happy to exploit others to his advantage.  Countless friends talk about lending McQueen money in his early days, never to see it repaid, even after he was famous.  It would not be unfair to say he used his first wife Neile as much as he could to get established in Hollywood, then repaid her faith and devotion by fucking anything with a hole in it.  Despite his infidelity, McQueen was enormously jealous, and was known to beat men senseless for just looking at Neile.   He also wouldn’t hesitate to beat her either (as well as his second wife, Ali McGraw) – as Neile said “he was the quintessential chauvinist pig.”   Like his parents, McQueen was cursed with an addictive personality and could out-Charlie-Sheen even Charlie Sheen with his days-long drug binges.

McQueen was like Stiffler in American Pie – a practical joker whose pranks occasionally turned cruel. He was a notorious homophobe who hated to be humiliated even as he was unafraid to humiliate others.  McQueen talked a lot about “holding his mud” with people – he nursed long-standing grudges with those who didn’t give him his way, and had zero respect for those who did.   Apparently, they couldn’t hold their mud.

Even in the early stages of his career, Steve-O was petulant and demanding with agents and studios, insisting on getting his props in ways that would seem and petty and embarrassing if they weren’t also effective.  The King of Cool would fly into rages and  hold up productions for weeks at a time until he got what he wanted – more lines, more screen time, more socks in his dressing room (no joke – he would ask insist that productions provide him with tons of socks and other dry goods. It was later revealed he was donating them to the boys at the detention facility where he was incarcerated as a youth).

McQueen was pathologically envious of other actors, paranoid they might be getting something over on him.   The most famous story involved his friend and chief rival Paul Newman, both of whom were starring in The Towering Inferno.   Newman had been cast as the lead in the film, but McQueen refused to take second billing.  To appease McQueen, the names were arranged on the poster diagonally, with McQueen’s name in the lower left and Newman’s name in the upper right, so McQueen’s would be read first, thus appearing equal to Newman. McQueen was also infuriated that Newman had twelve more lines in the picture than he did, something the screenwriters corrected.

I haven’t even gotten around to the matter of his actual acting – at risk of committing blasphemy, I have to confess I’ve never thought of St. Steven as a great actor.    His legendary economy with lines (the Inferno flap notwithstanding) probably owed more to his marginal literacy than his desire to do what was best with his character.  Instead, McQueen preferred to smoulder in close ups, but the emotional scope of his looks, in my opinion, can only be described as “Zoolander-esque”.   About the best that can be said of McQueen’s acting is that he understood his range, and played well within it.

So really, Steve McQueen’s appeal can seem like a fog – seemingly obvious from a distance, but harder to define when you get closer to the truth of the man.  He was the polar opposite of his contemporary Newman, another stylish, impossibly handsome movie star with a penchant for motorsports.  Newman was not only blessed with broader range as an actor but also a sense of humility and compassion for others (unsurprisingly McQueen envied Newman for much of his life). Nonetheless, McQueen remains one of the most venerable movie stars in the world, more than thirty years after his death. His life is a model of precisely the kind of control I seek to gain with Project Steel Nerves, even though it has nothing to do with remarkable ability (except perhaps for screwing and auto racing).

I believe it’s all thanks to hubris. Whether it was destructive narcissism, or paranoia, or a profound sense of entitlement, the man believed he deserved more than others. The remarkable thing about his hubris is it was more than a self-delusion – he successfully deluded others with it too.   His central gift was not his acting, or his good looks, but his ability to do what author Michael Chabon says is a essential trait of manliness, one I’ve mentioned frequently: “to flood everyone around you in a radiant arc of bullshit, whose source and greatest object of intensity is yourself.”    McQueen is a foremost example of how anything can be made true if  you get enough people believe it –  in expecting others to treat him as exceptional, he become exceptional. As an executive for a cigarette company who endorsed McQueen once noted  ”It was obvious to most of us…that the product he was really plugging was himself.”

Now, one could argue that McQueen was broken from birth, and beneath his iconic anti-hero exterior was a misunderstood man-child, desperate for love and acceptance. In relentlessly seeking his own way he lost the very things he wanted most, thus giving his life the proportions of Greek tragedy. That maybe so (although McQueen would probably call it psycho-babble bullshit) but in making his own myth a reality, he achieved what in my opinion is his most notable trait, and the central reason why I have always been and will remain a McQueen fan: rather than doing what the rest of us have to do and bend or compromise in order to suit the whims of the world,  McQueen the dyslexic got it the other way around – he bent the world to suit his whims. “I live for myself and I answer to nobody” he would say, and  he was right.

Of course, the trick for a Better Man is to figure out how to successfully apply hubris and still remain a decent person.  Remarkable as he was, not even McQueen could master that one.  Nonetheless, I will attempt to try – for the 30 days I will attempt to ignore both my conscience and shortcomings to apply the principle of WWMD – “What Would McQueen Do?”  I will report back in one month with the results.

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