Sky began to fantasize that Steve McQueen was her father. He was strong and kind and everything Gene Diamond wasn’t. She made a special routine of seeing all his pictures at the Gaylynn Theater on Eleventh Street. From his role in the horror film, The Blob with Miss Helen from The Andy Griffith Show. It had been the first movie she ever saw him in and watched it too many times to count.
His tv show, Wanted Dead or Alive was a favorite on Saturday mornings. Sky loved the way he’d unstrap his ‘mare’s leg’ sawed off shotgun and kill off bad people. Steve McQueen née bounty hunter Josh Randall was Sky’s hero. In her eyes, he could do anything. He was a protector.
Later on, there was Nevada Smith, the Louisiana prison scene a standout. Steve even looked good in prison stripes hot and sweaty in the Louisiana swamplands. And, Love with the Proper Stranger with Natalie Wood. And that was what love was to Sky. Without the baby, of course. They wouldn’t need a baby in Sky’s reverie.
What started as an innocent fantasy had morphed over into the various men who Sky would encounter throughout her life. Steve McQueen was everything Gene wasn’t and would become the standard archetype for the random swain. Nobody measured up to Steve.