Excerpt from: Greater Grace: A Story of God, Redemption, and Steve McQueen
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/youngfogey/2012/12/greater-grace-a-story-of-god-redemption-and-steve-mcqueen/
“in the spring of 1979, he left Malibu for the small, quiet town of Santa Paula, where he ultimately married his third wife Barbara Minty. For a period of time, they lived in an airport hangar which he had filled with his entire motorcycle collection. He bought a yellow Stearman bi-plane and learned to fly it, quickly mastering the craft as he had mastered motor racing before.
The pilot who taught him was a man in his early 60s by the name of Sammy Mason. Self-described as cranky and difficult to get along with, he became fast friends with McQueen. As they shared long hours in the air, talking together about the meaning of life, Steve sensed that there was something different about him. The more time they spent together, the more he wanted to know what Mason’s secret was. One day he asked him outright. Mason sat down with the aging actor and explained what, or rather who, had made the difference in his life. The answer, he said, was Jesus Christ.
McQueen was intrigued. He had so much respect for Mason and his family that he began regularly attending Ventura Missionary Church with them. The pastor was Leonard Dewitt. DeWitt later recalled that the famous icon had sat quietly in the balcony without even introducing himself for several months. When he finally requested a meeting with the pastor, he began firing off questions about life and faith, one after another. After a couple of hours, he leaned back and said, “Well, that about covers it for me.” Dewitt said, “Steve, I just have one question for you.” McQueen flashed his signature grin. “You want to know if I’ve become a born-again Christian,” he preempted. Then “still smiling, but very serious,” he told DeWitt that one morning when the pastor had given the invitation, he felt convicted by the Spirit and came forward. “When you invited people to pray with you to receive Christ, I prayed. So yes, I’m a born-again Christian.”
Everybody around him could tell that he was changed. In Sammy Mason’s words, it was “dramatic.” He said, “I doubt that I have ever seen a man flourish with more spiritual reality in such a short time.” Another close Christian friend, John Daly, said that the star’s conversion had stunned him. But when Steve talked about his new-found faith, there was no denying the seriousness of his commitment. In Daly’s words, “I think I had more faith that my saw and hammer would have gotten converted before Steve, but I was hearing it from the horse’s mouth. I was blown away.” Under the discipleship of Mason and DeWitt, McQueen could often be found praying or poring over his Bible. Around that time, he heard Kris Kristofferson’s “Why Me, Lord” and embraced the lyrics as his own testimony. He also shared his testimony with friend and former personal assistant Mario Iscovich, who a decade earlier had been forced to stand by and watch as the actor “lost himself” down the “dark, ugly road” of his sin. As Iscovich puts it, McQueen “felt he had hurt a lot of people” but had finally “made peace with God.”
Shortly afterwards, McQueen traveled to Chicago to shoot his last film, The Hunter. Although his health was continuing to deteriorate, he was actively reaching out to various people in need. (He had always been generous, especially to kids, but now it sprang from a desire to serve God instead of trying to “cancel out” wrongdoings only Christ crucified could pay for.) One of the film’s extras was a feisty 15-year-old girl...........”
Well.
Bless You and thanks!
Steve’s Stearman BiPlane was reportedly at Gillespie field where I frequently hung out, Awesome WWII Era aircraft. Steve’s conversion was discussed in the Hangers’
There, Good Times.
The Link is Exceptional.
Thank you so much for that. I never knew any of that. It was never in any of the books I read about him and I read so many about him years ago, the memory is dim.
I have clippings in an old scrapbook when he went to Tijuana for cancer treatment and when he passed. I remember in one book him asking for help to get into his plane one last time as he wanted to take one more flight but I think he had to call it off as getting in the plane was even too much for him.
More coming back to me now as I read these postings. The wife Barbara with him in Santa Paula was after Ali McGraw.. I have a book his first wife Neile Adams wrote - a beautiful woman who adored the man.
I remember he got an Academy Award for The Sand Pebbles - the best one of his movies IMO. The guy was really a natural!!