His ex-wife’s memoir and Marc Eliot’s gossipy biography paint a full portrait of a complicated man—someone for whom “the element of danger was as necessary to his survival as breathing.”

“When I did The Great Escape,” movie icon Steve McQueen once said, “I kept thinking, if they were making a movie of my life, that's what they'd call it—‘the great escape.’”

McQueen had a lot to escape: a devastating childhood, a host of inner demons. He parlayed these tensions into a career as a dangerous dreamboat in classic films including Bullitt, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Cincinnati Kid, The Sand Pebbles (for which he was nominated for a best actor Oscar), and The Getaway. A talented race car driver, martial arts enthusiast, pilot, and notorious ladies’ man, he has become a cultural icon, the definitive king of cool. “His special, unique talent was his ability to balance his inner heat (his emotional rage, his distrust of older authority figures, and his defiance of them) and his cautious, careful, catlike wariness that so beautifully translated to the screen as the ultimate in cool,” Marc Eliot writes in 2011’s gossipy Steve McQueen: A Biography.

But in 1986’s My Husband, My Friend: A Memoir, McQueen’s first wife, Neile Adams McQueen, exposes the fallible human behind the iconic star, with beautiful (and at times brutal) honesty, grace, and just a tad bit of righteous anger. Along the way she describes the stars who populated their world: Marlon Brando, Princess Grace, Howard Hughes, Elvis Presley, Suzanne Pleshette, Sharon Tate, Shirley MacLaine, Frank Sinatra, Faye Dunaway, Candice Bergen, and even Princess Margaret.

What unfolds is a heartbreaking, at times haunting story about a little boy who strove to become a legend, and the woman who understood his manic, at times reckless drive. “Like a gambler, he had a desire to conquer the odds,” she writes “and when that failed, he still reveled in simply having been part of the excitement to begin with. The element of danger was as necessary to his survival as breathing.”

The Lost Boy

“I came from a world of brute force,” Steve McQueen once said of his life, per Eliot. Born Terrence Stephen McQueen on March 24, 1930, in Beech Grove, Indiana, he was the product of a quickie marriage between Terrence, a deadbeat circus stunt pilot, and Julianne, a wayward teenager (whom Eliot claims was a sex worker) on her way to alcoholism.

Terrence split almost immediately, and Julianne deposited her small son on the Missouri farm of her Uncle Claude, a stoic, kindly old man. The beautiful, sullen boy was an energetic dreamer who often longed for his mother. “He told me that sometimes, during especially cold mornings,” Neile writes, “he would curl up with the cows as soon as he had finished milking them.”

Like something out of a Steinbeck novel, McQueen’s early quiet childhood shattered when he ran away to join the circus. He eventually ended up in Los Angeles with Julianne, where he was brutally abused by her partner. Angry and defiant, McQueen became a full throttle juvenile delinquent, and his mother sent him to the California Junior Boys Republic in Chino. After finding fame, he’d continue to visit and support the institution throughout his life.

“During holiday periods when the boys were allowed to go home, Steve would invariably be the only boy left at school,” Neile writes. “There he would wander the grounds alone, barely able to contain the pain that tore his heart.” At 16, he was in Greenwich Village with Julianne before taking off to become a sailor—complete with a phony able-bodied seamancard. He jumped ship in the Dominican Republic and worked as a towel boy in a brothel before bumming around the U.S. working odd jobs.

After two steadying years in the Marine Corps, McQueen made his way back to New York City with a chip on his shoulder and a smoldering anger masked by surprisingly boyish charm and boundless energy. “I’ve knocked around a lot,” he noted, “and there’s nothing very romantic in it.”

Just Kids

Throwing himself into the bohemian life in Greenwich Village, McQueen survived as a dishwasher, petty thief, and amateur boxer before a girlfriend suggested he join her at Sandy Meisner’s legendary Neighborhood Playhouse.

McQueen had found his calling. “They put me on the stage with a girl—a dilettante from Long Island—and we were supposed to improvise an argument. Well, she hit me,” he later remembered, per Eliot. “She hit me hard and I couldn’t stand it. I hit back as hard as I could and knocked her cold. Man, it was Panicksville!” Rather than being appalled, Meisner was impressed, and McQueen became a serial student, studying with Uta Hagen and Lee Strasberg and building his resume in summer stock and television.

In 1956, he was starting an unsuccessful stint starring on Broadway in a Hatful of Rain when he ran into Neile Adams, a musical theater star of Broadway hits like Kismet and The Pajama Game. “Suddenly, blond fella-with-dog caught my eye,” Adams writes. “’Hi!’ he said as he looked me over. I stared. Hmmm. Nice-looking I thought. As the groups passed by me, he stood directly in my path. ‘You’re pretty.’ ‘Oh, thank you. So are you.’”

“In a very unusual way our lives paralleled each other’s in texture if not in content,” she continues. Like McQueen, she had never known her father, and her mother, a famous hula dancer, left her to grow up in Manila with a kind old man while she was on tour. During World War II, Adams was part of the Philippines resistance before spending years in a Japanese concentration camp. Her mother then sent her to Rosemary Hall in Connecticut (the same high school McQueen’s future wife Ali MacGraw attended, Neile cheekily notes), and from there her dancing career began.

Within weeks, the two beautiful theater kids were madly in love. “He had an adorable smile and wonderfully piercing blue, blue eyes,” Neile recalls, “which were now simultaneously crinkled in laughter and embarrassment and quite unexpectedly taking me to someplace I had never been.” The unpredictable, motorcycle-riding McQueen taught type-A Adamshow to “live,” she says. In turn, she mothered and supported him—financially and emotionally—even though friends constantly told her that the bad boy would ruin her career and her life.

They married on November 2, 1956, only four months after they first met. “I LOVED this man!” she writes. “I liked the way he made me feel. I danced to his music. Together we burned brightly.”

America’s Most Wanted

In 1958, McQueen hit paydirt when—with his wife’s help—he scored the role of bounty hunter Josh Randall on the TV series Wanted: Dead or Alive. The show was a hit, and McQueen soon earned a role in the film Never So Few, starring Frank Sinatra. Old Blue eyes enormously admired McQueen’s spunk and spark. At the film's preview, Sinatra slapped his costar on the back and said, “It’s all yours, kid!”

The McQueens were overjoyed. They ran out of the screening room deliriously happy. "Honey, I think we're gonna make it!" Adams said—but her husband hushed her: "Not so loud. They might hear you and put the whammy on me before I even get started!"

Adams subsequently neglected her own career, devoting herself to motherhood: their daughter Terry was born in 1959, and son Chad came a year later. It was just where Steve wanted his “old lady” to be. “For the quintessential male chauvinist pig—and I say that with much affection—that was the ideal!” she writes.

At the same time, Adams diligently guided McQueen’s career, prepared his peyote, and participated in his schemes, such as getting in a planned car accident to spur contract negotiations. She also smoothed over his increasing tantrums and feuds with everyone from Yul Brynner during filming of The Magnificent Seven to his frenemy James Garner on location shooting The Great Escape.

She also overlooked his affairs with costars like Lee Remick, though in her book, she can’t help being catty about Natalie Wood’s failed attempts to seduce McQueen during the filming of Love with the Proper Stranger. (According to both Eliot and Adams, years later, the two would actually have an affair.) Despite putting up with so much, she is clear that McQueen gave much in return. “For all his toughness, Steve was a little boy,” she writes. “He was also a man who found emotional safety in me and his children. He was tender, sentimental, sensitive, dominant, strong and steady as a rock.”

His adoring children would echo that sentiment as well. “[McQueen was a] complicated soul,” Chad later noted. “But I guess that comes from him not having a dad. I got the good end of the stick on that deal. He was great.”

The Danger Zone

"We movie stars are different, you know,” McQueen liked to joke. “We shit crushed pineapples!"

But as McQueen skyrocketed from it-boy to superstar in the late 1960s, Adams saw the man she loved losing his boyish sense of humor—and himself. He spent nights with his so-called “fuck-flings” at his buddy Elmer Valentine’s night-club Whisky A Go Go and did tons of cocaine supplied by hairstylist-to-the-stars Jay Sebring, whose influence Neile resented. (Eliot claims Sebring and McQueen also participated in threesomes with Sebring’s girlfriend, Sharon Tate.)

My Husband, My Friend is in many ways a cautionary tale, a blueprint of what fame can do to a damaged person who is not equipped to deal with the spotlight. McQueen was proving increasingly that fame and fortune had gone to his head. He got obsessed with building an empire, started Solar Productions, and became a tyrant both on set and off. Drugs and alcohol became a daily habit, and his womanizing got worse in 1968, when he learned he was on a scurrilous “list” of secret gay men in Hollywood. “Steve became possessed,” Adams writes. “His ego couldn't handle the innuendo. It seemed to violate everything he stood for—most notably his macho image… That, plus the drug culture and the sexual revolution, conspired to draw him into a midlife crisis.”

Adams poignantly writes of her own torment. Though her husband was self-destructing, he made her feel guilty every time she tried to help him. In 1968, things came to a head when to surprise McQueen for his birthday during the filming of Bullitt. Waiting for him in his San Francisco hotel room, she noticed a woman’s hairbrush with long, blonde strands in it—and instantly believed that McQueen was having an affair with costar Jacqueline Bisset. (Bisset has denied ever having an affair with McQueen.)

Afraid to leave him, Adams watched her husband repeatedly betray his character. He turned down Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid because he couldn’t bear not to have billing over his longtime nemesis (and sometimes friend) Paul Newman; he gave blowhard interviews where he pontificated badly about politics. All the while, he professed that he and Adams were the perfect couple. “He was getting all that free love from the outside,” she writes. “Coming home and having to work for love seemed unfair to him.”

The Burning Bed

On August 9, 1969, Jay Sebring and Sharon Tate were murdered by the Manson family. McQueen was supposed to be with them on the night they were killed; his life was saved when he met up with a “little chickie,” and never showed up at the house on Cielo Drive. Unsurprisingly, after the murders, his paranoia ramped up exponentially. “Steve never went anywhere without a gun now,” Adams writes. “Even I had to sleep with a gun under my pillow—as per Steve's direction.”

In the summer of 1970, Adams and the children went to join McQueen in the South of France where he was filming Le Mans, his long planned passion project about a famous 24-hour auto race. Adams was highly disturbed by what she found. McQueen was out of control: sleeping around recklessly, abusing the crew, highly paranoid. He informed her that he would be sleeping with multiple women even while she was visiting, since they were “kinda separated.” That night, he cradled his wife in his arms. "I'm sorry I hurt you, baby,” he said. “I really don't mean to. I want you to know I love you. But I gotta do what I gotta do."

Things only went downhill from there. High on cocaine, he began to casually ask Adams if she had ever cheated on him. He then convinced the staunchly anti-drug Adams to take a bump and began quizzing her more. Fed up and high, she finally admitted to a brief affair with an unnamed, Academy Award-winning actor (whom Eliot asserts was Maximilian Schell).

McQueen went ballistic. What followed was a horrific night of physical and mental spousal abuse, which Adams describes in searing, emotional prose. McQueen abused her the whole night, including pointing a gun at her head, a pattern which would continue during her entire visit to France. During this nightmare, she discovered that she was pregnant, and went to London to have an abortion.

The abuse cycle continued back in Los Angeles as Adams desperately tried to save her marriage. to no avail. She finally told McQueen she had to leave him. He understood, and told her, “I love you and I will always love you.”