- 2 months ago
Steve McQueen remains one of the most recognizable figures in American film history.
His image was shaped by speed, rebellion, rugged masculinity, and a rare screen presence that still attracts attention decades later.
Because of that enduring fame, questions about his final years continue to circulate online and in popular culture.
His image was shaped by speed, rebellion, rugged masculinity, and a rare screen presence that still attracts attention decades later.
Because of that enduring fame, questions about his final years continue to circulate online and in popular culture.
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LifestyleTranscript
00:00Steve McQueen was the biggest movie star in the world. Then he found out he was dying. And the
00:05last place anyone expected him to go was Mexico. In the summer and fall of 1980, McQueen packed
00:12up, crossed the border, and put his life in the hands of clinics American doctors would never
00:17have touched. That decision would define the final months of his life. And it's the reason
00:22the King of Cool spent his last days, not in a Hollywood hospital, but in a small operating room
00:28in Ciudad Juarez. So McQueen fled to Mexico before he died. Let's start from the beginning.
00:34By the late 1970s, Steve McQueen wasn't the same guy who jumped fences on a motorcycle in
00:41the Great Escape or chased a Dodge Charger through the hills of San Francisco in Bullitt. Something
00:46was wrong, and it started with a cough that wouldn't go away. In 1978, McQueen developed
00:52a constant cough, and the following year, he was diagnosed with pleural mesothelioma,
00:57a disease often linked to exposure to asbestos. Before that, back on the set of what would
01:03become his last film, McQueen first began to suspect his condition in the summer of 1979.
01:09While he was shooting scenes for The Hunter, on location in Chicago, he felt unusually tired
01:15and lacked stamina. And after returning to Lowe's Angels, underwent a series of tests. Those tests
01:21led to a biopsy, and on December 22, 1979, a biopsy gave him the answer, McQueen had pleural
01:28mesothelioma, a rare and aggressive cancer that attacks the lining of the lungs, and is
01:33almost always caused by asbestos exposure. Here's the thing about mesothelioma, it doesn't
01:39show up overnight. It takes decades, and when doctors started tracing where McQueen could
01:44have picked up asbestos fibers, they found not one source but three. The first one goes back
01:50to when he was just a teenager. Before he was famous, before Hollywood, before any of it,
01:55before his rise to fame, McQueen worked in construction and joined the U.S. Marine Corps.
02:00He enlisted at 17, and was later stationed at Camp Leju, where he was required to remove
02:06asbestos lagging from pipes. This wasn't a one-time task in McQueen's case. He was likely
02:12exposed to it while stationed aboard a troop ship, upon which he was tasked with moving insulation
02:18from pipes. McQueen himself would later describe just how bad it was down there. McQueen himself
02:24is quoted as saying that the asbestos was so thick in the air, he could barely breathe.
02:29Then there was Hollywood itself. Asbestos could be found throughout Hollywood sound stages and
02:34film sets. And while filming stunts and action scenes, McQueen may have unknowingly inhaled fibers
02:40released from fire curtains and other materials. The stuff was everywhere on set, used for fake snow,
02:46for fireproofing, for anything involving flames, which for an actor known for doing his own stunts,
02:52was constantly. And then there was his other great passion, racing. McQueen loved cars and motorcycles
02:59more than almost anything. And that love came with a price. His love of racing could have also exposed
03:05him to asbestos. Because of its fire-resistant qualities, asbestos was used in the lining of the
03:10flame-retardant suits that he would often wear while racing, both during stunts and in his own spare
03:16time. So by the time doctors sat him down in December of 79, the cancer had already been
03:22growing inside him for years, maybe decades, completely undetected. And the diagnosis he got
03:28wasn't just bad. It was about as bad as it gets. Mesothelioma had and still has no cure. Doctors
03:34gave him a timeline, and it wasn't a long one. McQueen didn't take it quietly. Within weeks of hearing the
03:40news, his personal life shifted too, on January 16, 1980. Less than a month after his diagnosis,
03:47he married fashion model Barbara Minty, his third wife. She was 24 years younger than him,
03:53and from that point on, she stayed by his side for the rest of his life. And the two even
03:58honeymooned in
03:58Mexico that year, even as his health was failing. That honeymoon in Mexico wasn't just a honeymoon.
04:05It was a preview of exactly where McQueen's story was headed. Because within months, as American doctors
04:11ran out of answers, McQueen would look south of the border again. This time not for a vacation,
04:17but for something he thought might save his life. By early 1980, the disease was already outpacing
04:23anything conventional medicine could throw at it. By early 1980, it was found that McQueen's cancer had
04:29metastasized. With him telling the National Enquirer that his diagnosis was terminal. With
04:35traditional treatments no longer feasible, the actor sought out alternative medicine. That single
04:41sentence, traditional treatments no longer feasible, is the hinge on which the rest of this story swings.
04:47When your own doctors won't operate, when chemo and radiation aren't options. You start looking
04:52somewhere else, and McQueen being McQueen didn't look quietly. To understand why Steve McQueen ended up in
04:59Mexico. You have to understand who he went there to see. And it wasn't a licensed oncologist. It wasn't
05:06a hospital with a reputation. It was a dentist. When his doctors told him, they had run out of options.
05:12McQueen secretly met with Dr. William D. Kelly. A dentist and orthodontist, who had devised a
05:18controversial treatment regimen. He claimed had cured his own pancreatic cancer. Dr. Kelly had been
05:25blacklisted by the American Cancer Society. And had his license suspended in Texas. But McQueen was
05:31interested in the treatment. Which was based on the notion that cancers arose and grew. From a lack of
05:37enough pancreatic enzymes. Kelly wasn't just controversial. He'd already lost the one license
05:43he ever had. McQueen was treated by William Donald Kelly. Whose only medical license had been,
05:49revoked in 1976 for orthodontics. Think about that for a second. The man McQueen was trusting with his
05:56life. Had spent his career straightening teeth. And his only medical credential had been taken away
06:01four years before McQueen ever walked through his door. But McQueen was desperate. And Kelly had a
06:07theory that sounded like it might actually work. Dr. Kelly's spin on Gerson therapy was based on the
06:13belief that all cancers stem from a lack of a pancreatic enzyme. The treatment borrowed from a
06:18program developed decades earlier by a different doctor entirely. This treatment was developed by
06:24physician Max Gerson to help patients who had migraines. And he later adapted it as a cancer
06:30treatment. Kelly just put his own spin on it, mixed in some of his own ideas. And started selling it
06:36to
06:36people who had nowhere else to turn. So in the summer of 1980, McQueen made his move. In July 1980,
06:43McQueen secretly traveled to Rosarita Beach, Mexico. To be treated by Mexican and American doctors,
06:50using Dr. Kelly's regimen. He didn't tell the press, he didn't tell most of his own circle.
06:55This was a man who'd spent his whole career being chased by cameras. And now he was slipping across the
07:01border, trying not to be found. What actually happened, once he got there sounds less like a hospital
07:07stay. And more like something out of a fever dream. He received not only pancreatic enzymes,
07:13but 50 daily vitamins and minerals. Massages, prayer sessions, psychotherapy,
07:18coffee enemas and injections of a cell preparation, made from sheep and cattle fetuses. McQueen was also
07:24given Laetrile, a controversial alternative treatment made from apricot pits. Laetrile deserves its own
07:31pause here, because it was the centerpiece of the whole operation. McQueen sought a non-traditional cancer
07:37treatment, called the Gerson therapy, that used coffee enemas. Frequent washing with shampoos,
07:42daily injections of fluid containing live cells from cows and sheep. Massage in Laetrile,
07:48a supposedly natural anti-cancer drug available in Mexico, but not approved by the US Food and Drug
07:54Administration. The drug wasn't legal in the states precisely, because it hadn't been proven to do
08:00anything. In Mexico, nobody was stopping Kelly from handing it out. None of this came cheap,
08:06either. McQueen paid for these unconventional medical treatments by himself, in cash payments,
08:11which was said to have cost an upwards of $40,000 per month, during his three-month stay in Mexico.
08:17That's real money changing hands for coffee enemas and apricot pits, month after month. While his body
08:23kept deteriorating underneath all of it. And here's where it gets darker. Kelly wasn't just treating McQueen
08:30quietly, he was using him. As Kelly's regimen was applied to McQueen in Mexico. McQueen was falsely
08:36reported to be in remission, and his case enjoyed widespread press coverage. People Weekly magazine
08:42called him, McQueen's holistic medicine man. A dying movie star was, whether he wanted it or not.
08:49Becoming an advertisement for a treatment that had never been tested. Run by a man with no license to
08:55practice medicine at all. When National Enquirer reporters, eventually, tracked him down in October.
09:01McQueen didn't deny where he was, or what he was doing. After being tracked down by the National
09:06Enquirer, McQueen issued a statement saying he had mesothelioma, and was in treatment in Mexico.
09:13The secret was out, the King of Cool was fighting for his life in a foreign country,
09:17using treatments no American hospital would ever sanction. And telling the world about it,
09:22on his own terms, as always. By October of 1980, McQueen made a choice. That would put him directly
09:29on record, thanking the very system that would soon fail him. He returned to the United States
09:35briefly, that fall. And in a statement released that month, he credited the unregulated approach
09:40he'd found south of the border. McQueen thanked Mexico's unregulated approach to alternative solutions
09:46for helping to save my life. In October 1980, but his condition would only worsen.
09:52Kelly, for his part, wasn't shy about declaring victory. When McQueen returned to the United States,
09:58in early October 1980, Kelly publicly declared he'd made a full recovery, and would be back to normal
10:04life. Newspapers ran with it, the story of the year's biggest health scare had, apparently, a happy ending.
10:10Except it didn't, because underneath the headlines, McQueen's body was falling apart. Despite metastasis of the
10:17cancer, through McQueen's body. Kelly publicly announced that McQueen would be completely cured,
10:23and return to normal life. But McQueen's condition soon worsened, and huge tumors developed in his
10:29abdomen. A tumor doesn't care what a dentist tells the press, it just keeps growing. And by late October,
10:35one growth in particular, had become impossible to ignore. A mass on his liver that had reached a size,
10:41no one could pretend was manageable. This is where the real desperation kicks in. American doctors had
10:47already made their position, clear months earlier. There was nothing more they could do. Now faced with
10:53a tumor, the size of a bowling ball, sitting on his liver. McQueen didn't turn back to them,
10:58he turned south again, further this time. All the way to the border city of Ciudad Juarez.
11:04In late October, McQueen flew to Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, to have an abdominal tumor on
11:10his liver, weighing around 5 pounds, removed. Despite warnings from his American doctors that
11:16the tumor was inoperable, and his heart could not withstand the surgery. Read that again, not one
11:22warning, too. The tumor itself was considered inoperable. And separately, his heart was considered
11:28too weak to survive being cut open in the first place. Any surgeon in Lowe's Angels would have
11:34refused outright. So why Juarez? Because McQueen had heard about one man. He had heard of a kidney
11:40specialist there named Cesar Santos Vargas, who had a knack for putting mutilated bullfighters back
11:45together. Santos wasn't an oncologist either. The surgeon was Dr. Cesar Santos Vargas, a kidney
11:52specialist, better known locally for putting badly injured bullfighters back together. A man famous for
11:58stitching up matadors gorged by bulls, was now being asked to remove a 5-pound tumor from the abdomen
12:05of one of the most famous actors alive. In a small clinic that had no idea who was actually on
12:11the
12:11table. Because that's the other thing, McQueen wasn't going in as himself. He flew to Ciudad Juarez,
12:17and checked into a small local clinic under the name Samuel Shepard. An alias that carries its own dark
12:23irony. The name wasn't random. The real Sam Shepard was an Ohio doctor convicted, then acquitted on
12:29retrial. Of murdering his wife in the 1950s. A case so notorious, it became the direct inspiration
12:36for the fugitive. Whether McQueen picked it as a joke, a hiding spot, or just something that popped
12:42into his head. Nobody at that clinic clocked who they actually had checked in. The staff treating him
12:47in Juarez had no idea they were operating on one of the most famous men in the world. He checked
12:53in
12:53on a Wednesday. On November 5, 1980, two days before Steve McQueen died, he checked into Clinica de Santa
13:00Rosa in Juarez, Mexico. The plan was simple on paper, go under the knife, get the tumor out by some
13:07time.
13:08In practice, it was a last roll of the dice from a man who had already been told, by more
13:12than one doctor,
13:13that this exact surgery could kill him. His first wife, Neil Toffel, watched all of this unfold from
13:20a distance with growing anger. She didn't have kind words for the men treating her ex-husband.
13:25Toffel, who remarried after her divorce from McQueen, termed the doctors at the clinic,
13:29charlatans and exploiters. Adding that all the publicity surrounding Steve would convince other
13:34innocent people to be misled into going down there for laetrile and other unproved cures. But by the
13:40time she said any of that, the surgery was already scheduled, and McQueen had already made up his mind.
13:46The morning of the operation, everything moved fast. The surgery went ahead on November 6, 1980,
13:53beginning around 8 AM and lasting roughly three hours. Removing or reducing the tumors in his neck
13:59and abdomen. Three hours on the table, a five-pound growth coming out of his liver, plus more tumors
14:05dealt with in his neck. For a man whose heart doctors had already flagged as too weak for this,
14:09it was, by every measure, a success. McQueen survived the operation itself.
14:15Dr. Santos came out of that operating room believing he'd done something remarkable,
14:20given what he was working with. He'd later described just how far gone McQueen was before
14:25they even started. Dr. Cesar Santos, who removed a five-pound tumor from Mr. McQueen's abdomen,
14:31said the actor was in extreme pain before the operation. And the possibility of his surviving the
14:37operation was extremely poor. Against those odds, McQueen made it through. He was talking, he seemed
14:43alert. There was even a moment right after, a flicker of the old McQueen. After the operation,
14:49he showed moments of alertness and even coherent speech. For a few hours, it must have looked like
14:55the impossible had actually worked. The bullfighter's doctor, the fake name, the flight across the border,
15:01all of it had paid off, and McQueen was going to walk out of that clinic. Except a body that's
15:06been
15:06fighting cancer for a year, that's just been through three hours of major surgery. That doctors
15:12already said couldn't handle this. That body doesn't just bounce back, because the patient is briefly
15:17alert. Hours after the surgery, everything changed. Hours later, in the small hours of November 7, 1980,
15:25he suffered a fatal heart attack. He was 50 years old. By most accounts, it happened quietly in his
15:31sleep, with the people who mattered most to him close by. By most accounts he died in his sleep,
15:37with Minty and his family at his bedside. His third wife Barbara, his daughter, his son. All of them had
15:43made the trip down to Jurez, all of them were there in that small clinic, when the machines finally stopped.
15:49Not everyone at that clinic agreed on how things had gone, or whether the surgery should have even
15:54happened. One of the Mexican doctors involved in his care, before the operation, had actually pushed
15:59back against doing it at all. Believing McQueen's body was already responding to treatment without it.
16:05Rodriguez said he opposed the surgery, because he felt that McQueen's body had been making progress
16:10against the cancer. Adding, I wanted to take advantage of that, and keep going in that direction.
16:16He was in pain but nothing that you could say was really killing him, Rodriguez added. That's a doctor
16:21on the ground at the actual clinic, saying the surgery wasn't necessary, right before it killed him.
16:27By the time the sun came up, news of what happened overnight was already tearing through the wire
16:32services. El Paso and Jurez were in the national news spotlight, when actor Steve McQueen died in
16:38Jurez while undergoing treatment for stomach cancer. A reporter on the border desk got the call nobody wants.
16:45El Paso Times reporter Ramon Renteria was assigned to cover the story.
16:50Within hours, camera crews and photographers were converging on a small clinic in a border town.
16:56That had never expected to be the center of a global news story. The clinic itself confirmed
17:01what had happened and what would happen next. A spokeswoman for the Jurez clinic said the actor's
17:07wife had claimed the body and was returning it to California. And no funeral plans had been made at
17:12that time. Reactions from Hollywood came fast, and they weren't quiet, either. Jacqueline Bissett,
17:18who'd starred opposite him in one of his signature roles, learned the news and broke down.
17:23British-born actress Jacqueline Bissett, who appeared with the 50-year-old McQueen in one of his biggest
17:28hits, Bullet, wept when she learned of his death. Reporters and photographers, who'd been covering
17:34the story from the border, followed it all the way to the very end. Carlos Rosales, then a Times
17:39photographer assigned to shoot pictures of the breaking news story for the newspaper and the
17:44Associated Press. Wound up at Prado Funeral Home, where Santos performed an autopsy. A doctor who'd
17:50spent his career fixing bullfighters, was now the one performing the final examination on the body
17:56of one of the most famous men in the world. In the same small border town where he'd tried to
18:01save him.
18:02Word of what had happened in Jurez spread through Hollywood within hours, and the reaction split
18:07people right down the middle. Some mourned a legend gone too soon. Others, especially those closest to him,
18:13were furious about how it had happened. Nobody was angrier than his first wife.
18:18Neil Toffel had raised his two children with him, stood by him through the early years of his career.
18:23And now she was watching his final months play out as a cautionary tale about the dangers of chasing
18:29false hope. Neil Toffel, McQueen's first wife and the mother of his two grown children,
18:34bitterly denounced Rodriguez and other doctors at the clinic who treated the 50-year-old actor with
18:40laetrile. Intramuscular injections of animal cells, vitamins, an organic diet,
18:45coffee enemas and rubdowns with castor oil. To her, everything that had happened in Mexico
18:50was exploitation dressed up as hope, and she wasn't going to pretend otherwise just because he was gone.
18:56Barbara Minty carried a different kind of weight. She'd married him less than a year before he died,
19:01honeymooned with him in Mexico while he was already sick, and then nursed him through the worst of it.
19:06It's worth noting that McQueen's final years weren't a simple,
19:10tidy love story with Minty either. Pat Johnson, the martial arts instructor who became McQueen's
19:16closest friend and training partner in this period, later said plainly that his second wife,
19:21actress Ali McGraw, remained the one true love of McQueen's life right up to the end.
19:26Despite their divorce in 1978, Minty was the one who married him, nursed him and stayed at his bedside.
19:33But by his own friend's account, McQueen's heart never fully left McGraw. Complicated or not,
19:39she was the one who stayed through Juarez, through the fake name, through the five-pound tumor,
19:44right up until the very end. In the years after, Minty didn't just move on quietly.
19:49She turned her grief into something more public, joining the fight against the very substance that
19:53had killed her husband. In 2012, Minty joined forces with the Asbestos Disease Awareness Organization
19:59in the fight to ban asbestos, which may have caused the cancer that killed her husband.
20:05Decades later, she also broke her long silence about those final months,
20:09publishing her own account of what those days in Mexico had actually looked like from the inside.
20:14The former fashion model waited 25 years after her husband's death from malignant pleural mesocelioma,
20:20before breaking her silence in the last mile with co-author Marshall Terrell. McQueen's body made the trip
20:26back across the border the same way he'd hoped his health would, heading home. Once the autopsy was
20:32finished and his wife had claimed him. The plan was straightforward, get him back to California,
20:37away from the small Mexican clinic where everything had ended. He was cremated,
20:42and the scattering of his ashes closed the loop on a life. That had started in a small Indiana town
20:47and ended, unexpectedly, on the US-Mexico border. What remained wasn't a mystery about where he died,
20:53or why he went. That part was always documented, clinic by clinic, doctor by doctor. What remained
20:59was the question of whether a man who'd spent his whole career refusing to accept limits, jumping fences,
21:06driving too fast, doing his own stunts when nobody else would, had simply applied that same refusal
21:12to his own death sentence. Chasing one more escape all the way to the very end. He never got that
21:18escape,
21:18but he went down looking for it, exactly the way he'd lived, right up until the operating table in Juarez,
21:25ran out of road.