Steve McQueen should have been murdered by Charles Manson’s followers in August, 1969, but lucky for him he was an adulterous husband. Towards the end of the 1960s, with free love and hippiedom in full swing, McQueen, reaching his 40s, was not one to be left out of a good time and subsequently escalated his habit of extra-marital affairs whilst married to his first love, successful Broadway star Niele Adams.

According to Marc Eliot’s Steve McQueen biography, on August 7th 1969, Jay Sebring, a friend and well known celebrity hairdresser, travelled to Steve McQueen’s house to cut his hair. McQueen and Sebring had been friends for years, having met at the Whiskey a Go Go on the Sunset Strip in the early 60s. According to McQueen’s producing partner Robert E. Relyea, McQueen and Sebring had three shared passions: fast cars, motorcycles, and women.

At dinner Sebring invited McQueen to a small party at Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski’s rented house on Cielo Drive the following night, in Benedict Canyon. McQueen agreed he would attend. McQueen already knew Sharon Tate, who had been in a relationship with Sebring prior to 1967.

Polanski was in London at the time scouting locations for an adaptation of Robert Merle’s book The Day of the Dolphin (a movie later directed by Mike Nichols in 1973). But his wife Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring would be attending, among three other friends that night.

After agreeing he would attend the party, on August 8th McQueen received a call from young blonde he’d been casually seeing, whom he also invited to the party, but instead it was agreed that they should spend the evening alone together.

Just past midnight on August 9th four members of the Manson family murdered all five occupants of the Polanski house on Cielo drive, including Jay Sebring and Sharon Tate. McQueen fortuitously wasn’t there, and like that he had dodged a bullet that would scar Los Angeles for decades.

LA resident and writer Joan Didion famously described the tragic event as an ending:

“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9th 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true.”

Joan Didion’s The White Album

Later that day on Saturday August 9th McQueen heard about the death of his friend and ordered for Sebring’s residence to be cleaned of narcotics and sexual paraphernalia, anything that might damage his reputation. He delivered an eulogy at Sebring’s funeral. 

It’s hard to overestimate the effect the Tate-LaBianca murders had on Hollywood, for it created a level of hysteria that was new to the city. The Los Angeles Times ran the story of the Tate murders on August 11th (news was slower back then), but by that point Hollywood’s ears were already burning. Supermarkets sold out of door locks. Hollywood’s elite invested heavily in expensive alarm systems, security guards, and guard dogs, for it was still unknown up until December 1969 who was behind the murders. Like most national tragedies, popular culture was blamed at first. The October 1969 issue of LA Magazine implied the murder was the result of a generation of drug takers, hippie culture, and movies as ‘strange’ as Rosemary’s Baby (1968), also directed by Polanski:

“But [the tate murders] seems to belong to this time and this place. Somehow people identified with it, in the way people seem to identify these days with strange movies like Rosemary’s Baby.”

LA Magazine Oct 1969

It’s ridiculous now that LA Magazine put part responsibility of the Tate-LaBianca murders onto one of Polanski’s movies, right up there with other famous cases of cultural paranoia. This was 1969 and the party was over.

McQueen understandably became paranoid after the incident, installing the latest security equipment in his home, hiring bodyguards, and applying for a gun permit so he could carry a Magnum by his side at all times.

By the end of 1969 McQueen’s production company Solar was broke, he was forty years old and his latest movie The Reivers (1969) released to modest success on Christmas Day. He next poured his energy into Le Mans (1971), which would ultimately become his most divisive and unsuccessful film.

Later in a letter to his lawyer Edward Rubin in October 1970, McQueen requested to have his gun permit renewed as it was his ‘only sense of self-protection’ for him and his family. He also asked Rubin to follow up with ‘one of the higher-ups in police whether…all of the Manson Group has been rounded up and/do they feel we may be in some danger.” The letter itself is below and is an interesting read, if only to provide insight into his mindset when he was shooting Le Mans on location in France. This image has already made its way across various internet sites, but I want to add context: it was written at a time when McQueen was at his most vulnerable. His only true stable relationship with his first wife Neile Adams was coming to an end, not least because he was sleeping with other women - twelve per week as crew testified. The friendship and working relationship with director John Sturges, who had made him a star in The Magnificent Seven (1960) and The Great Escape (1963) was coming to an end, finishing with Sturges quitting midway through Le Mans (1970), due to their quickly deteriorating relationship and Steve’s refusal to commit to some basic commercial choices. The production of Le Mans itself was becoming impossible to manage, seemed clueless, and was spending huge amounts of money on a race with seemingly no story.

The residual fear of the Manson murders experience was not something to be taken lightly or shaken off with any ease. Here was Steve McQueen, working on the film that he considered would eventually become his greatest artistic accomplishment, and his life was coming undone. It became his obsession to film racing the way he’d always dreamed off – as dangerous as possible. The ultimate result is a genuine Hollywood curiosity, an expensive fictional documentary, almost a silent movie, with little plot or character, but for all its faults gives you a decent impression of what it would feel like to drive a car at Le Mans, which I suppose is McQueen’s point. It’s clear now that it was not in any way a commercial endeavor for McQueen, for it keeps you cold and distant, a project uninterested in people but fascinated in machinery. It didn’t recoup its budget. The experience seemed to somewhat dim McQueen’s passions. He never raced professionally again.