It
All Just Fell Into Place
I'm
used to drunken men
who cry at parties pops drives us home early from,
after
two shots of Fanta, or his fourth glass of milk.
Steve
McQueen turned down roles
as he couldn't cry on cue -
it was said to be his sole failing. I don't know.
I've cried a lot both drunk and sober -
Uncle Joe
cried after two shots of H2O
at his first party, months after his wife died.
I sat beside him,
The Hunter
was on T.V.,
Steve McQueen close to tears in his final scene
at the changing of the guard.
Somehow it all just fell into place, that night
Steve McQueen, "The King of Cool," was an American movie star. In 1974 he became the highest-paid actor in the world as the star of "The Towering Inferno." After developing a persistent cough in 1978, he gave up cigarettes and underwent antibiotic treatments without improvement, and shortness of breath grew more pronounced. Filming of his last film, Buzz Kulik's "The Hunter," began in September 1979, in which Kathryn Harrold played his schoolteacher girlfriend Dotty. After rescuing her from a kidnapper, his character managed to get her to a hospital before she gave birth to their child. On 22 December 1979, after filming was completed, a biopsy revealed pleural mesothelioma, a cancer associated with asbestos exposure, and by February evidence of widespread metastasis was found. In July, before "The Hunter" was released on 1 August, he traveled to Rosarito Beach, Mexico, for treatment from William Donald Kelley, whose only medical license (revoked in 1976) had been for orthodontics; Kelley was promoting a controversial variation of the Gerson therapy that used coffee enemas, frequent washing with shampoos, daily injections of fluid containing live cells from cattle and sheep, massages, and laetrile; during his 3-month stay McQueen paid $120,000 in cash. But in late October he had an abdominal tumor on his liver removed in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico, despite warnings that it was inoperable and his heart could not withstand the surgery. He died of heart failure at the Juárez clinic on 7 November 1980, 12 hours after surgery to remove or reduce numerous metastatic tumors in his neck and abdomen. He was 50.
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