In the early 1940s, LIFE magazine reported that a Mrs. Mark Bullis of Washington, D.C., had adopted a squirrel “before his eyes were open, when his mother died and left him in a tree” in the Bullis’s back yard. Here, in a series of photos by Nina Leen, LIFE.com chronicles the quiet, rodential adventures and sartorial splendor of Tommy Tucker, the orphaned and, in 1940s America, the celebrated squirrel.
“Most squirrels,” LIFE noted (with a striking lack of evidence), “are lively and inquisitive animals who like to do tricks when they have an audience.” They do?
LIFE then went on to observe that the squirrel, dubbed Tommy Tucker by the Bullis family, “is a very subdued little animal who has never had a chance to jump around in a big tree.”
“Mrs. Bullis’ main interest in Tommy,” LIFE continued, “is in dressing him up in 30 specially made costumes. Tommy has a coat and hat for going to market, a silk pleated dress for company, a Red Cross uniform for visiting the hospital.”
“Tommy never seems to complain,” the LIFE article concluded, “although sometimes he bites Mrs. Bullis. Mrs. Bullis never complains about being bitten.”
It’s unlikely that any 26 seconds of celluloid have ever been discussed and dissected as thoroughly as those captured by a 58-year-old amateur-film buff named Abraham Zapruder on the day John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas—in a movie known ever after as “the Zapruder film.” The jittery color sequence showing JFK’s motorcade moving through the sunlit Dallas streets, leading up to the shocking instant when a rifle bullet slams into the president’s head, remains one of the 20th century’s indispensable historical records.
It was LIFE magazine editor Richard Stolley who tracked down Zapruder. Stolley’s purchasing of Zapruder’s home movie for LIFE had a profound impact on the magazine, on Zapruder, on Stolley himself, and most lastingly on the nation. Having flown in from Los Angeles within hours of the murder, Stolley was in his hotel in Dallas that afternoon, just hours after the president was shot. “I got a phone call from a LIFE freelancer in Dallas named Patsy Swank,” Stolley told TIME producer Vaughn Wallace several years ago, “and the news she had was absolutely electrifying. She said that a businessman had taken an eight-millimeter camera out to Dealey Plaza and photographed the assassination. I said, ‘What’s his name?’ She said, ‘[The reporter who told her the news] didn’t spell it out, but I’ll tell you how he pronounced it. It was Zapruder.’
“I picked up the Dallas phone book and literally ran my finger down the Z’s, and it jumped out at me the name spelled exactly the way Patsy had pronounced it. Zapruder, comma, Abraham.”
The rest is history: fraught, complex, riveting, unsettled history
Film still from Abraham Zapruder’s home movie of JFK’s assassination in Dallas, Nov. 22, 1963.
Hearing the term “D-Day” might bring to mind images of violence. In photos, movies snd old news reels, and usually all in grim black-and-white, we have seen what happened on the beaches of Normandy (codenamed Omaha, Utah, Juno, Gold and Sword) as the Allies unleashed their historic assault against German defenses on June 6, 1944.
But in color photos taken before and after the invasion, LIFE magazine’s Frank Scherschel captured countless other, lesser-known scenes from the run-up to the D-Day and the heady weeks after: American troops training in small English towns; the French countryside, startingly lush after the spectral landscape of the beachheads; the reception GIs enjoyed en route to the capital; the jubilant liberation of Paris itself.
Scherschel’s pictures most of which were never published in LIFE are resented here in masterfully restored color and feel at-once familiar and somehow vividly new.
Scherschel, who died in 1981, was an award-winning photographer for LIFE well into the 1950s. (His younger brother Joe was a LIFE photographer, as well.) In addition to the Normandy invasion, Frank photographed the war in the Pacific, the 1947 wedding of Princess Elizabeth, the 1956 Democratic National Convention, collective farming in Czechoslovakia, Sir Winston Churchill (many times), art collector Peggy Guggenheim, road racing at Le Mans, baseball, football, boxing, a beard-growing contest in Michigan and countless other people and events, both epic and forgotten.
Information on the specific locations or people who appear in these photographs is not always available; Scherschel and his colleagues did not have the means to provide that data for each of the countless photographs they made throughout the war. When the locale or person depicted in an image in this gallery is known, it is noted in the caption.
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter @lizabethronk.
American troops in England before D-Day, May 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American combat engineers ate a meal atop boxes of ammunition stockpiled for the impending D-Day invasion, May 1944.
Frank Scherschel;Time & Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Troops and civilians passed the time on Henley Bridge, Henley-on-Thames, in the spring of 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An American corporal stacked cans of gasoline in preparation for the upcoming invasion of France, Stratford-upon-Avon, England, May 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A small town in England in the spring of 1944, shortly before D-Day.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An American Army chaplain knelt next to a wounded soldier, to administer the Eucharist and Last Rites, France, 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An abandoned German machine gun, France, June 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Magazines scattered among the rubble of the heavily bombed town of Saint-L™, Normandy, France, summer 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
An American tank crew took a breather on the way through the town of Avranches, Normandy, summer 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“We thought it was going to be murder but it wasn’t. To show you how easy it was, I ate my bar of chocolate. In every other operational trip, I sweated so much the chocolate they gave us melted in my breast pocket.” – Frank Scherschel describing his experiences photographing the Normandy invasion from the air, before he joined Allied troops heading inland. Above: GIs searched ruined homes in western France after D-Day.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
View of the ruins of the Palais de Justice in the town of St. Lo, France, summer 1944. The red metal frame in the foreground is what’s left of an obliterated fire engine.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“All the civilized world loves France and Paris. Americans share this love with a special intimacy born in the kinship of our revolutions, our ideas and our alliances in two great wars.” – LIFE on the relationship between the U.S. and its longtime European ally
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Along the coast of France, June 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
From D-Day until Christmas 1944, German prisoners of war were shipped off to American detention facilities at a rate of 30,000 per month. Above: Captured German troops, June 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Maintenance work on an American P-47 Thunderbolt in a makeshift airfield in the French countryside, summer 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A French couple shared cognac with an American tank crew, northern France, summer 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
A P-38 fighter plane sat in the background as the pilot arrived in a captured German vehicle, France, 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Church services in dappled sunlight, France, 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
DAmerican Army trucks (note cyclist hitching a ride) paraded down the Champs-Elysees the day after the liberation of Paris by French and Allied troops, August 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Frenchmen transported painted British and American flags for use in a parade, summer 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Tanks under the Arc de Triomphe in Paris during liberation celebrations, August 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
“Paris is like a magic sword in a fairy tale – a shining power in those hands to which it rightly belongs, in other hands tinsel and lead. Whenever the City of Light changes hands, Western Civilization shifts its political balance. So it has been for seven centuries; so it was in 1940; so it was last week.” – LIFE after the French capital was liberated in August 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Free French General and military governor of the French capital Pierre Koenig, left, during ceremonies held the day after the liberation of Paris, August 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Celebrations in Paris after the liberation of the city, August 1944.
Frank Scherschel; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
American troops stood beside a World War 1 monument bedecked with French flags after the town (exact location unknown) was liberated from German occupying forces, summer 1944.
Over a career spanning more than 70 years, the Rev. Billy Graham preached the Gospel, in person, to an estimated 200 million people around the world and another two billion via radio, television and the Internet, and he ministered to a dozen U.S. presidents. Throughout many of those decades, Graham enjoyed a special relationship with LIFE magazine, which published his essays and followed him on more than a few of his travels around the country and across the world.
In fact, Graham owes much of his fame to two media moguls: newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and Henry Luce, co-founder of Time Inc. and creator of TIME, LIFE, Fortune, and other influential American publications. Both Hearst and Luce were impressed by Graham’s first major crusade, a marathon revival in a tent in Los Angeles in 1949. They were also impressed by the combination of his message of spiritual renewal and his strong anti-communist politics. Hearst sent his editors a telegram with the two-word order, “Puff Graham.” For his part, Luce had the L.A. crusade covered favorably in both TIME and LIFE.
Long a spiritual adviser to people in power, Graham’s first visit to Washington to counsel a president didn’t go very well. After blabbing to the press about what he and Harry Truman had discussed, Truman blasted him as a “counterfeit” and a publicity hound. Thereafter, he kept the topics of his Oval Office meetings to himself. He also held considerable sway over other Washington politicians. In 1952, during a crusade in D.C., Graham persuaded Congress to pass a law allowing him to conduct a service on the Capitol steps. Unlike other Evangelical preachers who rose to political prominence, Graham seldom advocated policy; sometimes, he was just a sympathetic shoulder, as when he spent the night in the White House praying with the Bushes in 1991 on the eve of the Gulf War.
He is one of the most famous ministers who ever lived, but Billy Graham had no formal theological training. Born in 1918 and raised on a dairy farm outside Charlotte, N.C., he received undergraduate degrees from the Florida Bible Institute and Wheaton College. Still, in 1947, when he was just 30 years old, he was named president of Northwestern Bible College in Minnesota. He served from 1948 to 1952, the years that also marked the beginning of his international celebrity as a traveling evangelist.
Graham’s road as a preacher has not always been an easy one. For example, at the height of tension over integration in Little Rock, Ark., in 1959, Billy Graham held one of his crusades there and stipulated, as he always did, that the seating be desegregated. Graham’s refusal to knuckle under to the threats of segregationists and white supremacists made a big impression on a 13-year-old in attendance with his Sunday school class, a teenager named William Jefferson Clinton. “I was just a little boy,” Clinton recalled nearly 50 years later, after he’d served as president and received Graham at the White House, “and I never forgot it, and I’ve loved him ever since.”
Controversy has occasionally tarnished, if only temporarily, Graham’s reputation as a man of God, as in 2002 when declassified White House audio tapes from 1972 revealed him uttering to then-President Richard Nixon blatantly anti-Semitic remarks about, among other things, Jews controlling the American media. In the midst of the subsequent uproar, Graham abjectly apologized, saying that “if it wasn’t on tape, I would not have believed it [was me speaking]. I guess I was trying to please [Nixon]. I felt so badly about myself I couldn’t believe it. I went to a meeting with Jewish leaders and I told them I would crawl to them to ask their forgiveness.”
Many of the photographs of Graham that LIFE published over the years captured the public man, but the private Billy Graham seen in these rare pictures relaxing with his family, preaching one-on-one to the world’s most powerful people and to the poorest of the poor, wrestling with God on the golf course may prove something of a minor revelation even to those who thought they knew all there was to know about the the man.
The Rev. Billy Graham in 1952.
Mark Kauffman/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Billy Graham, Washington, D.C., 1952.
Mark Kauffman/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Billy Graham, Washington, D.C., 1952.
Mark Kauffman/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Billy Graham and his daughter, Ruth, in 1956.
Ed Clark/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Billy and Ruth Graham and their four children in North Carolina in 1956: Franklin (who would become the pastor’s designated successor as head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association), Virginia, Anne and Ruth.
Ed Clark/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Billy Graham and family in North Carolina in 1956.
Ed Clark/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Billy Graham preached in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1959.
Francis Miller/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Billy Graham in Africa on a six-week crusade in 1960. He traveled 14,000 miles and preached to a third of a million people, some 20,000 of whom raised their hands as a sign of their born-again experience.
James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
While in Africa in 1960, Graham preached in stadiums, on banana plantations and in mud huts. One place he did not preach was South Africa. He was a vocal opponent of apartheid and insisted on desegregated seating at his rallies in Africa, as he did in the American South and everywhere else he preached.
James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Billy Graham during his 1960 crusade through Africa.
James Burke TIME & LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Billy Graham in Africa, 1960. When he first began to preach, as a student at the Florida Bible Institute, he would paddle a canoe across the Hillsborough River to a little island where, as he wrote in his autobiography, “I could address all creatures great and small, from alligators to birds. If they would not stop to listen, there was always a congregation of cypress stumps that could neither slither nor fly away.” Today, the area is the site of Rev. Billy Graham Memorial Park.
James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
During his 1960 African crusade, Graham explained the Bible to a group of Waarusha warriors living in a village at the base of Mount Meru, not far from Kilimanjaro, in Tanganyika (now Tanzania).
James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Billy Graham, 1960.
James Burke/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
As the 1960 presidential campaign heated up, LIFE asked several leaders and thinkers to address the topic of “The National Purpose” in a series of essays. Graham wrote that, despite America’s postwar prosperity, there was a nationwide sense of unfulfillment, a “moral and spiritual cancer” that could only be cured by a return to God.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Billy Graham, 1960. Golf played a key role in Graham’s life; he wrote in his autobiography that he received his calling to preach the gospel on the 18th green of the Temple Terrace Golf and Country Club.
Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Billy Graham in 1960
Alfred Eisenstaedt/LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Billy Graham read from the book of Isaiah, Chapter 33, Verse 2: “O Lord, be gracious unto us; we have waited for thee: be thou their arm every morning, our salvation also in the time of trouble.”
Alfred Eisenstaedt/ LIFE Pictures/Shutterstock
Billy Graham joined newly inaugurated president John F. Kennedy at a national prayer breakfast at Washington’s Mayflower Hotel in February 1961.
The year was 1949, and 25-year-old Marlon Brando “the brilliant brat,” as LIFE magazine called him following his astonishing work on Broadway in A Streetcar Named Desire had finally answered the call of Hollywood. He was preparing for his movie debut in The Men, the wrenching story of a paralyzed World War II vet coping with rage and insecurity. And while it’s true that Los Angeles was familiar with “Next Big Thing” newcomers, it was exceedingly rare to document the earliest days in the career of an actor of Brando’s intensity, quirkiness and electrifying talent.
Photographer Ed Clark captured Brando’s explosive arrival in California, chronicling the actor as he submerged himself in “The Method” e.g., taking to a wheelchair and struggling with leg braces while living among paraplegics at a VA hospital in Van Nuys. But Clark also came away with surprising glimpses into the more personal, private Brando.
Here, LIFE.com presents a number of Clark’s photos most of which were never published in LIFE at a time when the actor was just beginning to forge his own Hollywood legend.
Accompanying Ed Clark’s images in LIFE’s archives were meticulous notes about Brando written by Theodore Strauss, who would ultimately write the magazine’s 1950 profile that coincided with the release of The Men. Strauss details the actor’s every eccentricity: what he wore, how he ate, what he read, how he shunned any sort of red carpet that might have been laid out for him when he came to town.
“Stanley Kramer, producer of The Men, had intended on putting Brando in a good hotel, but Brando would have none of it,” Strauss wrote. “First of all he insisted on living with the paraplegics in Birmingham Veterans Hospital during the four weeks before production began. This, he felt, was necessary to giving a completely knowledgeable and valid performance in his role. He was given a bed in a 32-bed ward, where he was treated almost like any other patient.”
The actor’s reputation as a bad boy had preceded him, stories of his nose-picking, shabby dress, foul language and grumbling interviews having traveled all the way from New York to Los Angeles. But, LIFE wrote, “however infantile or irresponsible Brando may be in his personal life, he is a totally conscientious artist in his work. Unlike some of Hollywood’s pretty people, he was never late on the set, never indulged in a tantrum, never required endless retakes.”
He was also far more of an introvert, in some ways, than his reputation suggested. Brando, wrote Strauss, “reads everything, absolutely omnivorous from Krishnamurti to recent novels.” For the actor, it was all about the craft nothing else, even life’s essentials, seemed to matter. From LIFE’s profile: “His salary, for the soundest of reasons, has been sent to his father, Marlon Brando Sr., who invests the money in cattle on a Midwestern ranch called Penny Poke. Each week Brando receives a living allowance of $150. Because he rarely looks at money and sometimes pays for a package of cigarets with a $20 bill, he usually is penniless by the second day.”
Of his relationship with the real paraplegics and quadriplegics from whom he was learning for his role, Strauss noted that “Brando’s orientation and adjustment as a paraplegic was so complete that he participated in their sometimes gruesome horseplay with complete freedom one of the reasons why he was so completely accepted. [Pranks] include pillow fights and using hypodermic syringes for water pistols.”
From Strauss’ notes about Hollywood’s reaction to Brando: “Thus far no one has accused him of posing; everyone to whom we’ve spoken has a sort of confused respect for a man who, up to now, has managed to live as he feels, without caring a hoot what anyone thinks.”
In his personal style, meanwhile, the actor was unfussy and unpretentious, almost to a fault: “When Brando first arrived in Hollywood his only luggage was a battered, imitation-leather suitcase the size of a woman’s overnight bag,” Strauss observed. “He was wearing a blue worsted suit which had seen much wear and weather there were holes and tears in the jacket, and a part of Brando was visible through the seat of the pants.”
Once official production on The Men began, Brando moved out of the veterans hospital and into a small bungalow owned by his aunt, Betty Lindemeyer, in Eagle Rock, Calif. During this period Brando’s maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Myers, was also a house guest.
“She [his grandmother] was quite abashed because Ed Clark took pictures of Marlon in a bathrobe, which happens to be hers,” reported a production assistant in notes found in LIFE’s archives. Grandma Myers was also apologetic about the barbaric way her grandson ate: “Bud doesn’t bring the food to his face,” she told LIFE, using Brando’s nickname. “He brings his face to the food.”
“I do hope that Bud comes through all this without too much scandal,” she confided to LIFE at one point. “I love him more than anything on this earth, but I never know when I’m going to hear from him in San Quentin.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
Marlon Brando took a break while training for his role in The Men, 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando chatted with a production manager for ‘The Men,’ 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando trained for his role in The Men, at the Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital, Van Nuys, Calif., 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando rehearsed his role in The Men, Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital, Van Nuys, Calif., 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
As his real-life inspirations played cards in the background, Marlon Brando took a break from rehearsing for The Men, Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital, Van Nuys, Calif., 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando, Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital, Van Nuys, Calif., 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando took a spill while training for his role in The Men, on the grounds of the Birmingham Veterans Administration Hospital, Van Nuys, Calif., 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando while training for his role in The Men, 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando while training for his role in The Men, 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando while training for his role in The Men, 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando while training for his role in The Men, 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando attempted to tip and balance his wheelchair on the set of The Men, 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando, 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando, 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando kissed his grandmother as he headed to the studio for a day of filming The Men, 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando, 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando and his grandmother, 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando at his aunt’s house in California during filming of The Men, 1949.
Ed Clark The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock
Marlon Brando went for a stroll with his grandmother and her dog, 1949.
In the spring of 1963, popular from his big-screen breakout as one of The Magnificent Seven and just a couple months from entering the Badass Hall of Fame with the release of The Great Escape, Steve McQueen was on the brink of superstardom.
Intrigued by his dramatic backstory and his off-screen exploits—McQueen was a reformed delinquent who got his thrills racing cars and motorcycles—LIFE sent photographer John Dominis to California to hang out with the 33-year-old actor and, in effect, see what he could get, photo-wise.
Three weeks and more than 40 rolls of film later, Dominis had captured some astonishing images—photos hard to imagine in today’s restricted-access celebrity universe. Here, LIFE.com presents a series of pictures many of which never ran in LIFE, along with insights from Dominis about the time he spent with the man who would soon don the mantle, “the King of Cool.”
Trailing Steve McQueen was Dominis’ first Hollywood gig. “I liked the movies, but I didn’t know who the stars were; I was not a movie buff,” Dominis, who died in 2013, recalled. But he got the assignment because he and McQueen shared one vital passion: car racing.
“When I was living in Hong Kong I had a sports car and I raced it,” Dominis said. “And I knew that Steve McQueen had a racing car. I rented one, anticipating that we might do something with them. He was in a motorcycle race out in the desert, so I went out there in my car and met him, and I asked him, ‘You wanna try my car?'”
Later the two men zipped around Los Angeles together. “We went pretty fast as fast as you can safely go without getting arrested and we’d ride and then stop and trade cars. He liked that, and I knew he liked it. I guess that was the first thing that softened him.”
From early morning until late at night, Dominis followed McQueen through his action-packed days: camping with his buddies, racing his various vehicles, playing with his family, tooling around Hollywood. Even back then, Dominis recalled, he had to be mindful that his constant presence did not become irritating.
“Movie stars, they weren’t used to giving up a lot of time,” he said. “But I sort of relaxed in the beginning and didn’t bother them every time they turned around, and they began to get used to me being there.
In 1963 McQueen had been married to Neile Adams for seven years (they had two young children) but the spark between them was still very much alive. “They were always necking!” said Dominis, who also remarked upon their childlike way with each other in notes he filed for LIFE’s editors back in ’63: “They chase each other around,” he wrote, “as though it were going out of style.”
“With strangers, I can’t breathe,” McQueen told LIFE. “But I dig my old lady.”
“I was very surprised” when Steve and Neile divorced in 1972, Dominis said. “But I lived in New York, and I never saw them [after the shoot was over]. We weren’t real friends, but we were friendly. They had a silver mug made: ‘To John Dominis, for work beyond the call of duty.’ I’ve still got it today.”
At the beginning of the LIFE shoot, McQueen participated in a 500-mile, two-day dirt bike race across the Mojave Desert.
“These people are not the wild motorcycle bums who go roaring through town a la Brando [in The Wild One],” wrote Dominis in his notes. “Rather they comprise doctors, lawyers, businessmen, mechanics, and others who enjoy the competition and the open country.”
Not only was he one of the few competitors to complete the race, LIFE reported, but he also led his amateur class for most of the way, until his bike broke down three miles from the finish.
“He liked camping, he liked rugged things, he liked firing a gun,” said Dominis. (“I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth,” he told LIFE.)
He also very much liked his cigarettes: Like many Hollywood stars of the time, McQueen was an unapologetically heavy smoker, and did not break the habit until he became sick in the late ’70s.
Seventeen years after Dominis made these photos, the actor died at 50 years old, suffering a heart attack following a risky operation to remove the cancerous tumors laying waste to his body. Though Dominis never saw or spoke with McQueen after 1963, he continued to follow his movies, and cherished those three weeks they got to know each other.
“He was very open and playful,” recalled Dominis, “and just doing the things that he loved to do.”
Liz Ronk edited this gallery for LIFE.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LizabethRonk.
At his bungalow in Palm Springs, Steve McQueen practiced his aim before heading out for a shooting session in the desert, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen driving on Sunset Strip, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen and Neile Adams, his first wife, target-practiced with their pistols in the California desert, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen and Neile Adams, his first wife, in the California desert, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
McQueen worked out at the gym at Paramount Pictures while making the movie Love With the Proper Stranger opposite Natalie Wood, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen lifting weights, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
McQueen in the living room of his eclectic home in Hollywood, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen and his wife Neile Adams by the pool at their Palm Springs bungalow, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen, Palm Springs, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
At his Palm Springs bungalow, Steve McQueen put on a record, with LPs by Miles Davis, Sonny Rollins and Frank Sinatra scattered at his feet, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen with his wife, Neile, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen with his wife, Neile, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen taking a lunch break during a motorcycle race with Bud Ekins, his friend and stuntman for The Great Escape, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
McQueen at a grocery store in Pearblossom, Calif., getting treatment for race-bloodied hands, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
McQueen taking a deep swig of a tall, cool drink, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen on a camping trip, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen in his sleeping bag on a camping trip, 1963. “This is it, man,” he told LIFE. “I’d rather wake up in the middle of nowhere than in any city on earth.”
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
Steve McQueen, 1963.
John Dominis; Life Pictures/Shutterstock
With his dog, a Malamute named Mike, by his side, Steve McQueen in California, 1963.
