STEVE McQUEEN GOES FOR BROKE IN THE ROUGH LIFE, 1963 | "IF YOU CAN'T CUT IT, YOU GOTTA BACK OUT."

Wincing, Steve McQueen gets his blistered hands treated in Pearblossom, Calif. Steve says of his dangerous sport, "If you can't cut it, you gotta back out."

Rounding a bend in a cross-country motorcycle race, Steve McQueen (right) a long-time racer, keeps up a torrid pace. He was one of 300 entrants. The race took 2 days, went across the Mojave Desert.

The race over, Steve McQueen wearily puts on his jacket after a brief cooling-off. He led the amateur class until his motorcycle broke down three miles from the finish.

Looking like a helmeted James Cagney, Steve McQueen talks with his buddies during a respite. A crack auto racer, he even raced with Stirling Moss-- but he gave up the sport to please his wife.

On a camping trip in the Sierra Madre, Steve McQueen is rudely awakened by his dog Mike, a Malamute. He often takes his whole family along on camping trips, but this time went with old buddies. "This is it, man" says Steve. "I'd rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth."

In their Palm Springs bungalow, Steve McQueen and his wife Neile chat affectionately.

"Man, if I hadn't made my own scene," says Steve McQueen, "I could have wound up a hood instead of an actor." He talks the lingo of the rough world that spawned him-- a world of hipsters, race car drivers, beach boys, drifters, and carnival barkers. Steve has been al of these. He has also tended bar, sold encyclopedias, made sandals, and even been a runner in a Port Arthur, TX brothel-- going from one job to the next, trying to run from his dreary, dreadful past.

Steve has been running that way ever since he was a kid. His father began it by running out on the family while Steve was still a baby. Mrs. McQueen farmed Steve out to an Uncle in Missouri. At 12 Steve fled to New York. He later lived with his mother and new stepfather in California, but that was no improvement. He spent so much time on the streets, and so little time in school, that his mother sent him away for rehabilitation. He promptly ran away and wound up in jail. Even in the Marines, Steve McQueen wouldn't stay put-- he spent 41 days in the brig for going AWOL.

At Big Sur, Steve McQueen and Neile take a sulphur bath together, a bottle of wine propped nearby.

He was in New York in 1951, working as a bartender, when a friend took him along with her to an acting school. Willing to try anything, he auditioned there, and to his astonishment was accepted.

"I took up acting," he explains, "because it let e burn off energy. Besides, I wanted to beat the 40-hour-a-week rap. But, Man, I didn't escape. Now I'm working 72 hours a week, so there you go."

While waiting in the kitchen for Neile to serve up a snack, Steve gives her a fond tweak.

Steve McQueen works at acting with the same urgency that he races motorcycles. "I'm the greatest scammer in the business," says Steve. "But acting's a hard scene for me. Every script I get is an enemy I have to conquer."

But he shuns the duties that go with being a movie star. He seldom attends parties or nightclubs, and sulks at movie premieres. "When I get in a room with five strangers, that's my nut," he says, "I feel like I can't breathe, O.K.?"

Steve McQueen cozies up with his wife Neile, who is of English, German, Spanish and Chinese descent. They met when she was on Broadway in Pajama Game. Says he, "My old lady is the heart of my home."

When he is with his wife and children, Steve McQueen quickly gets his breath back. Though married seven years, the McQueens are still as lovey-dovey as newlyweds. "When I come home nights," says Steve, "I dig my old lady, not the maid, serving me dinner."

Others he digs are hard-luck characters who, like him, drew a raw deal, and he tries to help them. "When you take a little out," Steve explains, "you gotta put a little back in." He and Dr. Herman Salk, a Palm Springs veterinarian who is Jonas Salk's brother, raise money to buy vaccines and antibiotics for Navajo Indians. Periodically they drive to the reservation to deliver the drugs. "I really dig those Navajos," says Steve. "They have a saying they live by: A land where there is time enough and room enough. I want that too."

Steve McQueen, who delights in giving his son the love he lacked while growing up, romps with Chad, 2.

Last week Steve McQueen bought a three-acre, quarter-million-dollar mansion overlooking the Pacific. "It's got trees for the kids to swing on," he says, voice all aquiver, "and the biggest, strongest front gate you ever saw. Man, I don't wanna be bugged by anyone, O.K.?"

But once there, Steve is likely to want out. It is too near Hollywood. "You won't find me hanging by my toes in a manhole," he promises. "Man, after I've gotten my sugar out of this business, I'm gonna take off-- and run like a thief."

-Peter Bunzel, photos by John Dominis, 1963.

In a rented tuxedo (he does not own one), Steve McQueen gives a goodnight kiss to Terry, 4, before making one of his rare appearances at at Hollywood opening. "My family is very, very tight." says McQueen. "But the world is full of phonies, so you gotta build a wall to keep them out."

"REBEL WITHOUT A CAUSE" CURSE |THE CURIOUS CAST OF CHARACTERS AND TRAGIC DEATHS BEHIND THE 1955 FILM

James Dean as Jim Stark in "Rebel Without a Cause"

The 1950s were a very cool time, I only wish I could have experienced them for myself. It is a time in American pop culture that is highly idealized for it’s music, fashion, style and culture. Everyone looked incredible, and seemed so squeaky clean– but you just knew there had to be much more going on behind the scenes. Rebel Without a Cause is one of the most iconic films from that era, and the stories behind the making of the James Dean classic are as incredible as the movie itself. And truth be told, Dean was not the only rebel on the set. Nicholas Ray, Dennis Hopper, Nick Adams and Natalie Wood definitely held there own. There is a great article from the Vanity Fair archives that is definitely required reading if you’re a fan of the film. They get into some of the details about the Rebel wardrobe and off-screen shenanigans that I have excerpted and added to–

Natalie Wood, James Dean, and Nick Ray

Striving for authenticity in every detail, Ray turned his attention to the high-school gang members who surround and threaten Jim Stark. One of the actors he interviewed was Frank Mazzola, the leader of a real gang called the Athenians. Mazzola had been weeded out by the casting director but muscled his way in to see Ray anyway. “They thought that because I was in a gang, I might create problems on the set. I came out of the Depression, really,” Mazzola explains in a West Hollywood restaurant, his hair, still jet black, tied back in a ponytail. “We didn’t have any pop culture. The guys that we loved flew, like my uncle, a pilot in the Second World War. Everybody I knew wanted to grow up and fly P-38s.… And so these clubs started forming—ours was called the Athenians. We defended our turf. You’d probably get in two or three fights a night just defending Hollywood. It was like a sport.”

James Dean and Natalie Wood on the set of "Rebel Without a Cause"

Ray not only cast Mazzola, he gave him an office on the Warner lot, from which he could serve as technical adviser on gang behavior. Ray instructed him to hang out with Dean and take him to meetings of the Athenians. “I want you to get us the cars, tell us what kind of clothes we should be wearing,” Ray told him. Mazzola had the wardrobe department buy the gang’s clothes at Matson’s, on Hollywood Boulevard, where the Athenians bought their club jackets. The wardrobe department then soiled and laundered more than 400 pairs of Levi 501s for the cast. –I would love to get my hands on those old selvedge jeans.

The iconic Baracuta jacket is often credited as the famous red jacket in Rebel Without a Cause -- but some say it was a McGregor or fabricated by the film’s costume designer Moss Mabry, as he himself claims. There are accounts from staffers that it was bought at Matson’s men’s store for use in the 1955 film, but costume designer Moss Mabry has insisted all along that he made three of the jackets from a bolt of red nylon, and painstakingly worked on the size of the collar and the placement of the pockets. “Even though the jacket looked simple,” Mabry said, “it wasn’t.” Mabry even designed a special bra for Natalie Wood for the film Rebel, which became known as the “Natalie Wood bra,” though he declined to reveal the secret of its design.

Dennis Hopper and Nick Ray many years after "Rebel Without a Cause"

Natalie Wood, who was only 16 at the time, soon became involved with director Nicholas Ray. Wood’s affair with Ray awakened her sexuality—and emboldened her to initiate another love affair, this one with Dennis Hopper, who had been cast as Goon. “I was astonished,” Hopper later said. “I came from a very conventional, middle-class family in San Diego … and this was the 1950s, when girls who’d turned sixteen only a few months earlier just didn’t do things like that.” The sexually charged situation created ill will between Ray and Hopper. Maria Gurdin, having found out about both affairs, complained to Warner Bros. that Hopper was involved with her daughter; ever ambitious for Natalie, she didn’t mention that Ray was as well. “I was furious with [Nick Ray],” Hopper said about the incident. “The studio came down on me, and he came out of it as pure as snow.” The two ran into each other years later at a Grateful Dead concert and buried the hatchet. Hopper went as far as to help the grizzled Ray get back on his feet, and even helped him land a job teaching film students at Binghamton University. Nicholas Ray is a fascinating character and some of the details of his life are pretty heavy stuff– read the Vanity Fair article and find out more.

James Dean and Sal Mineo

Sal Mineo—so affecting as the essentially fatherless outcast Plato—later commented that he had portrayed the first gay teenager on film. There are little clues: the photograph of Alan Ladd taped to his locker door, his longing looks at Jim Stark, his disguised declaration of love in the abandoned mansion. Ray was aware of Dean’s bisexuality and encouraged the actor to use it in certain scenes. Dean instructed Mineo, “Look at me the way I look at Natalie,” for their intimate scene in the Getty mansion. It had to be subtle. A Production Code officer had written in a memo to Jack L. Warner on March 22, “It is of course vital that there be no inference of a questionable or homosexual relationship between Plato and Jim.” In real life Mineo was gay, and it is even rumored that he and Ray (who was bisexual) also had a tryst while filming Rebel.

Dennis Hopper and James Dean in "Rebel Without a Cause"

The real life drama behind "Rebel Without a Cause" is still a riddle wrapped in mystery. James Dean's fatal car crash one month before the film's release resulted in the beginning of the "Rebel death curse" theories, which were further fueled when Natalie Wood, Sal Mineo and Nick Adams also suffered eerie, premature deaths. There's still plenty of talk and speculation about who actually slept with whom -- and the controversy that clouds the issue of who was the true voice behind "Rebel Without a Cause" — Nicholas Ray or James Dean?

THE ICONIC SLIM AARONS | CELEBRATED PHOTOGRAPHER OF HOLLYWOOD'S ELITE & THE AFFLUENT AT EASE

George Allen Aarons was born in Manhattan on Oct. 29, 1916. He was reared in New York and New Hampshire and was an Army photographer in World War II. His twin brother, Peter, was killed in the war. Afterward, he and his Army buddy Bill Mauldin, the cartoonist, headed for Hollywood.

Slim Aarons, who won a Purple Heart, said combat had taught him that the only beach worth landing on was ”decorated with beautiful, seminude girls tanning in a tranquil sun.” He opened a bureau for LIFE magazine in Rome, where he vowed to make a career out of photographing beautiful people, doing it his own way with natural surroundings, little makeup and no artificial light. In 1951 Slim Aarons married a young LIFE employee, Lorita Dewart.

The photojournalist who traveled the world to capture the essence of the rich and famous and made a career out of what he called “photographing attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places,” died at the age of 89, 2006.

The family for many years lived in Katonah, N.Y., spending winters in Gstaad or Palm Beach, and summers on the French or Italian Rivieras. In New York Mr. Aarons photographed all of Leland Hayward’s stage productions. In 1974 he published ”A Wonderful Time: An Intimate Portrait of the Good Life.” A sequel, ”Once Upon a Time,” in part a reprise of the first book, was published in 2003. In 2005 a third book, ”A Place in the Sun,” came out.

Slim Aaron’s most celebrated image was shot on New Year’s Eve of 1957 in the Crown Room at Romanoff’s restaurant in Hollywood. Called ”The Kings of Hollywood,” it showed Clark Gable, Van Heflin, Gary Cooper and Jimmy Stewart — what Smithsonian magazine called ”a Mount Rushmore of stardom” and the novelist Louis Auchincloss ”the very image of American he-men.”

The men are enjoy a laugh together in the picture. Mr. Aarons sometimes said he did not know why. In all truth, those chortling stars in ”The Kings of Hollywood,” Mr. Aarons admitted later, were really laughing at him. His good friend, Mr. Clark Gable, loved to jokingly recall (at Aarons' expense) just how bad he thought Slim's acting was in a small movie part he helped him land. Truth is, Slim Aarons butchered his two small scenes take after take. Clearly he had a great rapport with the stars-- When Jimmy Stewart was approached by strangers, he joked, "No, I am Slim Aarons."

Slim Aarons also shared a story on working with Hitcock here--

"You ever see the movie Rear Window? That's my apartment. Because the protagonist was supposed to be a writer-- very few people know this. The protagonist was a LIFE writer who'd been hurt somewhere, either in the war or an accident-- because it was written by a LIFE writer."

Slim Aarons was hired by Hitchcock ("Hitch" as he called him) to photograph the detailed back-shots of NYC apartment buildings that eventually became the set built for them film. Hitch loved the shots, and in a strange twist of fate, the protagonist character was changed from a writer to a photographer.

Slim Aarons' shot of Oscar De La Renta above from February 1985. The famous designer relaxes in the living room of his apartment the Casa de Madera in the resort of Casa de Campo in the Dominican Republic.

Slim Aarons' shot of Mies, circa 1960: German born American architect Mies Van Der Rohe (1886 - 1969) on the rooftop of a skyscraper in Chicago.

During a career that spanned more than five decades, Aarons photographed many of the most famous faces of the late 20th century, including Humphrey Bogart, Louis Armstrong, Lauren Bacall, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana and the Kennedys. He captured, better than anyone, the affluent at ease. And to hear Slim tell the story behind his most famous works is well, priceless.

"I knew everyone." he said in an interview with The Independent in 2002. "They would invite me to one of their parties because they knew I wouldn’t hurt them. I was one of them." –Slim Aarons

Above is Slim Aarons' famous shot of Marilyn Monroe-- he talks about the shoot here.

"There was a time when in the movies, you couldn't show her without being covered from head to foot. And so what I did was, I got the dress out of wardrobe from the studios, and then I went down... and (got) the black net lace and I covered her in head to foot in black net lace so we could get rid of the censors in Hollywood. Marilyn would do anything for photographers in those days. And Marilyn was an amazing person. She wasn't what they'd call a 'pure girl', you know what I mean? She wasn't brought up that way-- she just learned to survive. But she knew one thing-- whenever she went with a guy, she knew the guy wanted her. She had that innate thing-- but she had that same quality of being just a little girl. She'd just made a movie called Asphalt Jungle, and so I said-- did she have any fan mail? I had to think quickly... she's got barrels of fan mail. She says to me-- what do you want me to do Slim? I said-- I want you to think of the nicest possible thing that can happen to you-- but with your eyes."

Noel Coward and Truman Capote used words to record this rarefied universe, but Mr. Aarons’ photographs in magazines like Harper’s Bazaar, Town & Country and LIFE showed it. "Attractive people doing attractive things in attractive places" was his mantra.

Thomas Taylor and Bing Crosby hamming it up on Pebble Beach golf course 1977, photographed by Slim Aarons.

Slim Aarons gained entree to villas, yachts and chalets by becoming one of the crowd. He told of sailing with Katharine Hepburn and seeing a drowning man. After being rescued, the man pulled out a camera and started shooting Miss Hepburn. She threatened to break it on his head. Mr. Aarons stood by, welcomed as a valued guest, who happened to be a photographer.

The legendary photographer and personality-- Slim Aarons, on the right. Love the monogram below the pocket on the chest~ very chic.