A Rebel Without a Cause
His mother, Julia, who just couldn’t handle parenting, decided to send him back to Slater. When McQueen was 12, Julia wrote a letter to Claude, asking to take her son back again. This time, he was to live in her new home in Los Angeles. Her second marriage ended, and she was then in her third marriage. According to McQueen, he and his new stepfather “locked horns immediately.”
Steve McQueen, Jim Hutton, Jack Mullaney, The Honeymoon Machine – 1961. Photo By MGM/Kobal/Shutterstock
McQueen remembers him as “a prime son of a b****” who didn’t mind using his fists on the boy and his mother. But as patterns tend to repeat themselves, McQueen began to rebel again, and his mother sent him back to live with Claude for the last time. But even his loving uncle wasn’t enough to keep McQueen in the home.