You never know who you are going to meet at a poker table - especially in Southern California.
During the 1970s, I played a lot of poker in California -- places like Gardena, San Francisco, San Diego, and Lake Elsinore. The players included actresses from Hollywood, Beverly Hills shop owners, police officers, movie directors, and actors.
I was a reporter om the Hearst-owned Los Angeles Herald-Examiner and generally kept my cool when I recognized the player sitting across from me was a celebrity.
To me...
...a celebrity at a table was just another poker player, in the game for the money, the power, the excitement or whatever!
That was the way I felt when Steve McQueen and Desi Arnaz sat down at my table in Lake Elsinore, about 40 miles east of Los Angeles.
I recognized them immediately:
It helped when Nick Notos, owner of the Sahara Dunes poker room came by the table to introduced them to me and the other players. McQueen was in a black leather jacket and wore a red bandana. He had a beard and looked like he had just come from filming a scene in 'The Great Escape.'
Notos had obviously been talking to them earlier because McQueen asked me if it was true that I had covered the Manson 'family' murders for the Herald-Examiner.
"I covered the murders as well as the trial," I said, mucking my cards. "Pretty gruesome story."
"I'll bet," said McQueen, tossing some chips onto the table. He hesitated:
"Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski were good friends of mine. She invited me to come to the party that night. I was planning to go, but my girlfriend talked me out of it. Instead, we stayed home and she cooked a spaghetti dinner."
"That was a close one," said another player. "They would have probably killed you, too."
"Not hardly," said McQueen. "I never go anywhere without a gun. I would have been in the house with a loaded pistol in my boot. If I had been there, I could have saved the lives of Sharon and the other people they slaughtered."
All of us at the table let out a collective gasp of amazement at the story.
McQueen was born in Beech Grove, In. His father was a stunt pilot and his mother was a borderline alcoholic. The family broke up and McQueen lived on a farm with his grandparents.
Wildly restless as a teenager, he joined a gang and became a petty criminal. He broke the law and was made a ward of the Boys Republic at Chino, CA., not far from Lake Elsinore.
After his release from custody, he joined the U.S. Marine Corps. Following his honorable discharge, McQueen became a successful actor starring in movies like 'Papillon,' 'The Sand Pebbles,' 'The Cincinnati Kid,' 'Bullitt,' 'The Great Escape', 'The Getaway', 'and 'The Thomas Crown Affair.'
He was a lifelong smoker of marijuana and became close friends with Desi Arnaz after Desi's divorce from Lucille Ball. He often spent weekends at Arnaz's mansion in nearby Palm Springs. Desi was an alcoholic who loved women and rum. He and McQueen also enjoyed gambling and spent a lot of their time in Lake Elsinore or Gardena when they weren't working.
Sadly...
...about a year after I met McQueen, he was stricken with cancer and began traveling to Mexico to have the disease treated. He took controversial treatments but cancer spread. Following major surgery, he died in Juarez at the age of 50.
