“When a horse learns to buy martinis, I’ll learn to like horses.”
Known for his quiet cool and an affection for motorized vehicles, as showcased in The Great Escape (1963) and The Getaway (1972), Steve McQueen performed many of his own stunts. Abandoned by his father as a boy, he was remanded to reform school as a teenager and worked as a janitor in a brothel, a lumberjack, and an oil rigger before enlisting with the Marines at seventeen. After an honorable discharge in 1950, he went to New York to study acting. McQueen gained notoriety in B-movies (most notably The Blob, 1958) and television (Wanted: Dead or Alive) before The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape established him as a major movie star. He had a string of successes throughout the decade and received his lone Oscar nomination for The Sand Pebbles (1966). By the time he made The Getaway, directed by Sam Peckinpah and costarring McQueen’s future wife Ali MacGraw, he was the highest-paid movie star in the world. But he retreated from Hollywood shortly after release of The Towering Inferno (1974), appearing in only three movies over the next six years while battling cancer. His final picture was The Hunter, in 1980. McQueen’s status as avatar of all things cool remains rock solid, as evidenced in the film The Tao of Steve (2000).
THE ROOM HADN’T SEEN many happy endings, but Steve McQueen intended to change that. After countless drinks and a couple tabs of acid, he and cheesecake actress Mamie Van Doren were alone in a bedroom at the home of hairdresser-to-the-stars Jay Sebring.
This had once, long ago, been the bedroom of MGM producer Paul Bern and his wife, Jean Harlow. As the story goes, Bern shot himself in the house because he was physically incapable of pleasing Harlow in the bedroom—this bedroom, the very one in which McQueen and Van Doren, after a promising first encounter, were now tripping.
McQueen and Van Doren had met exactly two nights prior, at the Whisky a Go Go. McQueen was a regular, with his own permanently reserved booth. There’d been dancing and booze, and a drunken tryst back at Van Doren’s house that hadn’t gone quite as far as McQueen had hoped. But Van Doren promised there’d be other nights, and tonight was turning out to be one of them.
Just like before, they’d met at the Whisky. McQueen suggested they go to a party Jay Sebring was throwing at his house. The Bern-Harlow house. There, while drinking and hanging out by the pool, McQueen dug into his pocket and pulled out some LSD. Van Doren was hesitant. “No bad trips,” McQueen assured her. “This stuff’s pharmaceutical. It makes sex a totally new experience.”
If there were two things McQueen lived for, they were sex and new experiences. Although a guy who drank Old Milwaukee by the case when he first arrived in Hollywood (and never stopped), by the late 1960s he was open to every substance that came his way: peyote, hash, cocaine, amyl nitrate. As for women, they were in no short supply. Friends would tell stories of casual evenings they’d had with McQueen while he sat across the room, going at it with two, three ladies at a time. “Look,” McQueen would say, “a certain type of broad goes to a movie and there’s this guy on the screen—it’s like seeing a rock at Tiffany’s. They go after what they want…. I’m being chased around by them.” And he wasn’t going to let his marriage get in the way.
If there were two things McQueen lived for, they were sex and new experiences. A guy who drank Old Milwaukee by the case when he first arrived in Hollywood (and never stopped), he was open to every substance that came his way by the 1960s.
McQueen and Van Doren were in bed together by the time the acid kicked in. She would later describe the experience as flashes of light skyrocketing around the room. And that afterward, with McQueen asleep at her side, she hallucinated a nude Paul Bern in a full-length mirror across the room, a mask over his eyes, a gun in his hand.
WHAT’S THERE TO say? It is hardly novel. But then again, given all the craft/micro/artisanal beers out there—the pale ale, blonde ale, brown ale, oatmeal stout, dry stout, sweet stout, porter, wheat, etc.—maybe Old Swill has become novel. After all, Pabst Blue Ribbon has enjoyed a resurgence, made hip by Dennis Hopper in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet: “Heineken? Fuck that shit! Pabst Blue Ribbon!”
Besides, Old Milwaukee was always good enough for McQueen.
IT WAS DURING A TRIP across Europe in 1963 that former Chicago cop Elmer Valentine stumbled upon the germ of an idea that would transform the culture not only of Los Angeles but of the United States.
Traveling with money he’d made selling his interest in the restaurant P.J.’s in West Hollywood, Valentine stopped one night at a discotheque in Paris, where the sight of young people enthusiastically crowding the dance floor motivated him to return to the states and open his own club, one so closely modeled after its inspiration in Paris he even stole the name: Whisky a Go Go.
Though nominally a discotheque, Valentine’s Whisky specialized in live music: opening night, 1964, featured Johnny Rivers (“Secret Agent Man”), whom Valentine had signed to a one-year performance contract. Between sets, a DJ in a slit skirt shook and shimmied while spinning records in a cage suspended high above the crowd—a happy accident (the cage was planned; the skirt wasn’t) that spawned the go-go dancing craze of the 1960s.
But the Whisky proved to be much more than a gimmick: historically, it’s one of the most important rock venues of all time. When the Doors were still practically unknown, even in Los Angeles, Valentine hired them as the house band. (He later fired them, after hearing a drunk Jim Morrison sing the lyrics to “The End.”) During a single two-week stretch in 1966, the band would open for Buffalo Springfield, Captain Beefheart and His Magic Band, Love, and Them (featuring Van Morrison). The Byrds could be seen at the club on a regular basis, as could Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. Alice Cooper, Led Zeppelin, the Kinks, the Who, the Animals, Cream, Big Brother and the Holding Company, Jefferson Airplane, the Velvet Underground, War, the Zombies, King Crimson, Fleetwood Mac—name a band of the era, they played the Whisky.
The club was enough of a sensation to attract such Hollywood elite as Steve McQueen and Cary Grant, and even drew a reservation from President Lyndon Johnson (which he made only to appease his daughters; he never showed). The Whisky was eventually franchised across the country, with sister locations in Atlanta and San Francisco. When punk and new wave overtook metal and hard rock in the late 1970s, the original Whisky didn’t miss a beat, booking the Ramones, Blondie, Talking Heads, Patti Smith, and locals such as the Germs (who recorded a live album there) even as they packed the place with future arena rockers like Mötley Crüe and Van Halen. As the novelty of punk started to wear off, however, the Whisky started to lose steam. Valentine, who by then had also opened the Roxy Theatre and the Rainbow Bar & Grill to tremendous success, eventually sold his share of the club. Though still active most nights of the week, today the club’s glory is but a memory.
