This is an artistic story told through the memory of my father, made with deep respect for Bruce Lee, his legacy, and the martial arts. Some of it is real. Some of it is the way it was told to me. AI-generated visuals are used as period reconstruction, never as documentary footage. Take it as a story. My father keeps a file drawer in the bottom of his desk.
Metal drawer, slightly warped from being opened and closed for 40 years. He doesn’t lock it. He doesn’t hide it. But he doesn’t open it in front of people, either. I’ve seen inside it maybe four times in my life. Last spring I was at his apartment helping him move some furniture, and he asked me to pull something out of that drawer.
A tax document, I think. I knelt down, slid the drawer open, and saw what he keeps in there. A stack of Manila folders. A few old photographs in plastic sleeves. A bundle of letters tied with string. And on top of everything, folded twice, was a page torn out of a magazine. I could tell it was old by the paper.
Yellowed at the edges. The fold creases had gone soft the way paper does when it’s been folded the same way for 30 years. I said, “Dad, what’s this?” He looked over from where he was standing. He said, “Black belt. 1986. Put it back.” I put it back. I didn’t read it. I didn’t ask again that day. But I asked a month later, over coffee, what was on the page.
My father said, and this is the sentence the whole video turns on, so I want you to hold it. My father said, “That’s the page where Steve McQueen finally told somebody what he put in Bruce’s coffin.” Bruce Lee was buried in Seattle on July 30th, 1973. Lake View Cemetery, on the slope of Capitol Hill, in a plot that overlooks Lake Washington if you stand at just the right angle.
The funeral was small by the standards of what Bruce had become. Fewer than 100 people. The service was private. The family kept the press on the other side of the gate. Eight men carried the casket. Two of them were Bruce’s brothers. One was his closest student from the Los Angeles years, Dan Inosanto. One was Taky Kimura from the Seattle school, the Taky I talked about last video.
One was a man named Peter Chin, who had known Bruce since the Hong Kong days. One was Bruce’s older cousin. And two of them were movie stars. James Coburn, Steve McQueen. Coburn flew up from Los Angeles. McQueen flew up from Los Angeles. They carried the casket shoulder to shoulder with the brothers and the students and the cousins.
And then, before the lid was closed, one of them placed something inside. Steve McQueen didn’t tell anyone what it was for almost 13 years. My father was 18 years old that day. He was standing outside the cemetery gate in the rain. It did rain that morning, briefly, and then cleared, with maybe 40 or 50 other people who had come to stand at the edge of something they weren’t invited into.
He didn’t see the casket. He didn’t see McQueen. He read about the note in a magazine in his kitchen in 1986, when he was 31, and he tore the page out and folded it twice and put it in a drawer, where it still is. This is a story about that page. And about the two men who flew up from California. And about what it means, when a famous person dies, to notice who actually came.
I want to tell you what Steve McQueen was to Bruce Lee before I tell you what happened at the funeral. Because if you don’t understand that, the funeral is just celebrity showing up for celebrity, and it wasn’t that. It wasn’t anything like that. They met in 1967. The exact circumstances are a little cloudy.
There are at least two versions told by people who were around at the time, but the cleanest version is this. Bruce had just started teaching private lessons in Los Angeles. He had been fired, more or less, from The Green Hornet the previous year when the show was canceled. He wasn’t broke, but he wasn’t rich, either. He was charging $10 an hour for group classes and 50 for private lessons, which was respectable but not serious money.
A friend of a friend mentioned Bruce to McQueen. McQueen was, at that point, one of the biggest movie stars in the world. He had done The Great Escape in 1963, The Cincinnati Kid in 1965, Nevada Smith in 1966. Bullitt was coming the next year, in 1968, and would make him even bigger. He was already the guy. He had the money, he had the motorcycles, he had the house in Brentwood.
And he was looking for something to do with his hands. McQueen was the kind of man who needed a physical practice. He had done boxing. He had done judo with Bruce Tegner in the ’50s. He raced motorcycles on weekends at a level that terrified his studio. He needed to move. He needed to hit something. He needed a teacher who could push him past where he already was.
Bruce went to McQueen’s house in Brentwood for a first meeting. I think it was September or October of 1967. Bruce was 26. McQueen was 37. Bruce came in his car. He was driving a used Porsche at that point. He loved that car, and McQueen met him at the door. They talked for about an hour. Bruce didn’t demonstrate anything.
He didn’t throw a punch. He just talked about philosophy, about movement, about what McQueen wanted and why. At the end of the hour, McQueen said, “When do we start?” Bruce said, “Now. In your garage. Take your shoes off.” They trained in McQueen’s garage 3 days a week for about 5 years. Let me say that again because I don’t think it lands the first time.
Steve McQueen, at the height of his fame from 1967 through roughly 1972, trained with Bruce Lee 3 days a week in his own garage in Brentwood. Not at a school. Not with other students. Just the two of them. Bruce would drive over in the late afternoon. McQueen would open the garage door and for an hour and a half they would work.
There are almost no photographs of this. McQueen was famously protective of his private life. Bruce was protective of his teaching. Neither of them wanted it to be a publicity thing. The garage had a concrete floor, a heavy bag hanging from a beam, a speed bag, and the two cars McQueen wasn’t driving that week pushed off to the sides.
That was the gym. Dan Inosanto, Bruce’s senior student from that era, told an interviewer years later that McQueen was the most naturally athletic student Bruce ever had. Not the best technically, that was probably Inosanto himself or a student named Larry Hartsel, but the most athletic. McQueen could move. He had, Inosanto said, “The coordination of a cat and the aggression of a dog.
” He was hard on Bruce. He didn’t go easy in sparring. He hit hard. He wanted to be hit hard. Bruce, apparently, loved that about him. By 1969, McQueen had introduced Bruce to James Coburn. Coburn was another private student Bruce taught him separately twice a week at Coburn’s house. Roman Polanski came through for a while.
Sharon Tate trained briefly before she was killed. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar showed up later in 1970. But the core was McQueen. McQueen was the one who was there the whole time. And here is the thing that I want to say carefully because it is the thing that matters for the funeral. McQueen and Bruce became friends. Not teacher and student.
Not celebrity and trainer. Friends. They went to dinner. They talked on the phone. McQueen came over to Bruce’s house and played with Brandon who was five, six, seven during those years. Linda Lee, Bruce’s wife, liked McQueen. She found him plainer and more direct than most Hollywood people, which was true, and she appreciated that he treated Bruce like a person and not a curiosity.
McQueen once lent Bruce money when Bruce was short. A few thousand dollars, I think. Bruce paid it back within a year. Neither of them ever made a thing of it. They argued sometimes. McQueen could be difficult. He was moody. He had a temper. He drank more than Bruce approved of. Bruce could be difficult, too.
He had an ego. He was competitive. He sometimes pushed McQueen in training harder than friendship would have required. But they kept coming back to each other. 4 5 years. That was the relationship. That was what was real. That is why McQueen flew to Seattle. I want to tell you something my father said to me about this because it’s the thing that made me want to make this video.
We were at his kitchen table. This was a few weeks after I first saw the magazine page in the drawer. I had asked him why the note mattered. Why a gesture by a movie star at a funeral 50 years ago should matter to anyone now. My father put his coffee down. He said, McQueen flew up for him. Coburn flew up for him.
Those were the guys who came. That tells you everything. I said, “Everything about what?” He said, “About who Bruce actually was. You can tell who a man was by who shows up when he’s in the ground. Not by who talks about him on television afterwards. Not by who writes the articles. By who gets on the plane.” He looked out the window for a minute.
It was gray outside. Some kind of November afternoon, I think, when this conversation happened. Then he said, “Those two flew up from California and carried him. They didn’t send flowers. They didn’t send a statement. They put their hands under the box. That’s the whole test of a friendship right there. Who puts their hands under the box? I’d been thinking about that sentence for a year.
Bruce Lee died on July 20th, 1973, in Hong Kong. I’m not going to go deep into the circumstances of his death in this video. That’s its own story, and I’ve been careful about it in other videos, and I’ll be careful here. The short version is that he was at the apartment of an actress named Betty Ting Pei. He had a headache.
She gave him a painkiller called Equagesic. He lay down, and he didn’t wake up. The autopsy ruled it cerebral edema, swelling of the brain, from a reaction to a component of the painkiller. He was 32 years old. The news reached Los Angeles within hours. It reached Steve McQueen through a phone call from Linda Lee. She called him before she called most of the press.
She called him because he was family, in the way that word is used when you’ve had someone in your garage 3 days a week for 5 years. McQueen, according to a biography written by Marshall Terrill with McQueen’s surviving family’s cooperation, said almost nothing when he got the call. He listened. He said he would come.
He hung up. He sat in his kitchen for a long time. His then girlfriend, I think it was Ali MacGraw at that point, they were living together, said later that she had never seen him that quiet. Not sad, exactly. Quiet. Like something had been removed from the room. He called James Coburn that same afternoon. Coburn was equally stunned.
They agreed, on that first call, that they would both go to Seattle whenever Linda decided to have the service. The body was flown from Hong Kong to Seattle over the course of about 6 days. There’s a whole other piece of this story, a weird, unresolved piece about what happened with the two funerals. Because there were two.
One in Hong Kong on July 25th, which was enormous, 25,000 people lining the streets of Kowloon, a spectacle. And one in Seattle on July 30th, which was the opposite. Small. Private. For the people who actually knew him. Linda Lee made the decision to have the real burial in Seattle. Bruce had lived there from ages 18 to 24.
His mat, his first school, his first students, his wife, his early adulthood, Seattle. He had moved to Oakland in 1965 and to Los Angeles in 1970, but Seattle was where he had become who he was, and Linda wanted him buried there. Lake View Cemetery. A plot she had already looked at, I think, though I can’t confirm that.
McQueen flew up on July 28th, 2 days before the service. He stayed at the Olympic Hotel downtown. Coburn arrived on the 29th. They stayed at the same hotel, different rooms. They had dinner together on the 29th at a restaurant downtown. I don’t know which one, and they barely spoke. A waiter who served them, who was interviewed decades later for a magazine piece, said the two men sat across from each other and ate quietly and ordered one bottle of wine and left half of it on the table.
My father was 18 years old and living with his parents about 3 miles from the Olympic Hotel. He didn’t know McQueen was in town. Nobody in Seattle knew, outside of a small circle of people around the Lee family. The press had not yet figured out that the private funeral was in Seattle. Most of them were still filing stories about the Hong Kong ceremony from the week before.
But my father knew that the funeral was going to happen. Because Taky Kimura had told my grandfather. And my grandfather had told my father over breakfast on the morning of the 29th. My father told me years later that he had asked his father if he could go. Not to the service. He knew he couldn’t go to the service.
To stand outside the gate. To be on the street when it happened. My grandfather thought about it for a minute. Then he said, and my father remembers this exactly, because it was one of the few times his father ever said anything about Bruce directly, my grandfather said, “Go. Stand quiet. Don’t get in anybody’s way.
A man should see a thing like that happen in his own city.” So my father went. That’s where the next chapter starts. The morning of July 30th, 1973. Rain clearing by mid-morning. An 18-year-old boy taking two buses across Seattle to stand outside the gate of Lake View Cemetery. And inside the gate, already assembling, a small group of people that included two of the biggest movie stars in the world, there for reasons that had nothing to do with being movie stars.
My father left the house at 7:30 on the morning of July 30th, 1973. The service was scheduled for 11:00. He took the number seven bus from his parents’ neighborhood down to Capitol Hill, then walked the last eight or nine blocks to Lake View Cemetery. He was wearing a dark blue shirt, gray slacks, and a jacket he had borrowed from his father because he didn’t own one that was appropriate.
He was 18. He had graduated from high school 6 weeks earlier. He was supposed to start at the University of Washington in the fall. He got to the cemetery gate at about 9:15. He was not the first person there. There were already maybe 15 or 20 people standing on the sidewalk across from the entrance. By 10:30, there were 50.
By 11:00, closer to 70. The gate was a wrought iron thing, not very tall, with a driveway running through it into the cemetery grounds. There was a police officer standing just inside the gate. Not aggressive, not pushing people back. Just present. The family had asked for privacy, and Seattle PD had sent one officer to stand there and make sure that was respected.
My father stood across the street, on the sidewalk, with his hands in his jacket pockets. It had rained lightly from about 8:00 to 9:30 that morning, and then cleared. The sun wasn’t out, but the rain had stopped. The air smelled like wet cedar and exhaust. He didn’t know any of the other people on the sidewalk.
Most of them were silent. A few talked quietly to each other. One woman, older, was holding a small framed photograph of Bruce against her chest with both hands. A man, maybe in his 30s, was crying quietly, without making any sound, standing by himself near a lamp post. My father watched the cars come in. He didn’t know what he was looking for.
He didn’t know most of the people who would be attending. He had never met Linda Lee. He had never met Brandon or Shannon. He had seen Taky Kimura maybe twice in his life years before as a child when my grandfather had taken him to Taky’s grocery store. He didn’t know what anybody inside the gate looked like.
But around 10:40 a black Lincoln Continental pulled up. Two men got out of the back. My father knew who they were before the doors closed. Steve McQueen, James Coburn. I want to stop for a minute and say something about this moment because my father has told it to me maybe three times over the years and every time he tells it the same way which for him is unusual.
He was standing on a sidewalk in Seattle with a crowd of strangers and two of the most recognizable faces in American cinema got out of a car 20 ft away from him and nobody on that sidewalk said anything. Nobody gasped. Nobody pointed. Nobody pulled out a camera. People had cameras in 1973.
They just didn’t have them in their pockets the way they do now. The 70 or so people standing outside the gate all saw McQueen and Coburn get out of that car and the response was silence. My father says that one woman near him put her hand over her mouth. Another man took his hat off. But nobody spoke. My father says they weren’t there as movie stars.
Everyone on the sidewalk understood that immediately. Even the people who had come because they were fans of Bruce’s movies, even they understood. Those two men were there as friends. And when you saw them get out of that car, you understood the scale of what had been lost. Because if those two were flying up from California to carry the box, then the man in in box had been something more than any of us could have known.
McQueen was wearing a dark suit. Not black, charcoal, my father thinks. No tie, or maybe a loose dark tie. He can’t remember exactly. He had his hair combed back. He looked, my father says, like a man who hadn’t slept in 3 days and didn’t care who noticed. Coburn was taller, in a black suit, dark sunglasses, moving more slowly.
They walked through the gate without looking at the crowd. The officer at the gate nodded them through. They didn’t nod back. They weren’t being rude. They were somewhere else. They walked up the drive toward the chapel building and disappeared from my father’s view. That was the only time he saw them that day.
The service inside was small. About 100 people in the chapel. Linda Lee in the front row with Brandon, who was eight, and Shannon, who was four. Bruce’s mother, who had flown in from Hong Kong. Bruce’s brothers, Peter and Robert. A handful of students from the Seattle years. A handful of students from the Los Angeles years, led by Dan Inosanto.
Taky Kimura. James Coburn. Steve McQueen. A Presbyterian minister, because Linda’s family was Presbyterian, even though Bruce himself had been raised with a mix of Buddhist and Catholic influences and had moved beyond all of that in his own thinking by the end. The casket was at the front of the chapel. It was bronze, I believe, though I’ve seen it described in different places as copper or dark bronze. I’m not certain.
It was closed for most of the service. Linda had decided earlier that week that the casket would be briefly opened for viewing before the burial, but closed during the service itself. The service lasted about 40 minutes. The minister spoke. Taky Kimura spoke. Dan Inosanto spoke. Linda spoke briefly, holding Brandon’s hand the whole time.
Bruce’s brother Peter read a short passage in Chinese. McQueen did not speak. Coburn did not speak. They sat in the second row on the left side next to each other. They didn’t touch. They didn’t exchange looks. They sat the way men sit in a room when they don’t want to be anywhere else in the world but there. After the service, the casket was opened.
This is where the note goes in. I need to be careful here because I’m going to tell you what McQueen said in the magazine and I want to get it right and I also want to tell you what I don’t know. What I don’t know is the exact choreography. I don’t know who was standing next to the casket when McQueen approached it.
I don’t know whether Linda was there or had stepped aside. I don’t know whether Coburn did something similar. He may have and McQueen just didn’t mention it in his interview because he was talking about himself. What I know is what McQueen told the journalist in 1986 which my father has in that magazine page folded twice in his drawer.
McQueen said he walked up to the casket after most of the people had filed past. He said he had something in his jacket pocket that he had brought with him from Los Angeles. He said he had thought about it on the plane up and thought about it in the hotel the night before and in the morning he had put it in his pocket before he left for the cemetery without telling anyone including Coburn.
He said he looked at Bruce for a long time. He said Bruce didn’t look like Bruce. He said he didn’t recognize the man in the casket not because the mortician had done a bad job but because Bruce had never been still in his life and stillness wasn’t something Bruce’s face knew how to wear. McQueen said he stood there and tried to make the face in the casket match the face he remembered from the garage and he couldn’t.
Then he took the thing out of his pocket and he placed it inside the casket. He put it in next to Bruce’s left hand. And then he stepped back and let the next person come forward. What McQueen put in the casket was a small white envelope sealed with nothing written on the outside. Inside the envelope was a note.
Handwritten. One side of a page, not long. McQueen did not in 1986 quote the note. He did not say exactly what it said. He said only this, and this is the part my father has underlined in pencil on the magazine page in the drawer. McQueen said, “It was a note thanking him for what he taught me. The things he taught me that I couldn’t say out loud.
I wrote them down and I put them in a note and I put the note with him because I wanted him to have them. I didn’t want anybody else to read them. That was between him and me. I don’t know if you believe in that kind of thing, a letter to someone who’s gone. I don’t know if I believe in it. But I did it. That’s all he said.
He didn’t say what the things were that Bruce had taught him. He didn’t say how long the note was. He didn’t say if he cried when he wrote it or when he placed it. He didn’t dramatize. The journalist, a man named John Corcoran, who wrote for Black Belt through most of the ’80s, didn’t push him. Corcoran, reading between the lines of the piece, seems to have understood that he had gotten as much as he was going to get and that pushing would have ended the interview.
McQueen talked about other things in the piece. About the training. About the Porsche Bruce drove. About a time they’d argued over something stupid and not spoken for 2 weeks and then Bruce had shown up at the garage as if nothing had happened. Normal friendship stories. But the paragraph about the note is three sentences long and then he changed the subject.
And as far as I can tell, and I have looked, McQueen never spoke about the note again in any interview, in any public forum, for the rest of his life. He died in 1980, 7 years after Bruce, from mesothelioma. He was 50 years old. He gave maybe a dozen interviews in the last 3 years of his life, when he knew he was dying, and in none of them, as far as the record shows, did he return to the subject of Bruce’s funeral or the note.
The 1986 Black Belt piece ran 6 years after McQueen’s death. Corcoran had been sitting on the interview. He had done it in early 1980, a few months before McQueen got sick. He held it because McQueen had asked him to. McQueen had said, “Don’t run this while I’m alive. Run it after.” That’s the only reason we know about the note at all.
If McQueen had died before that interview, or if Corcoran had lost his notes, the note in the casket would have gone into the ground with Bruce, and nobody alive would have known it was there. My father bought the Black Belt issue at a newsstand on Rainier Avenue in the fall of 1986. He was 31 years old. He was married to my mother.
They had been married 3 years. I was about to be born the following spring. He was working at a machine shop in South Seattle. He bought martial arts magazines now and then, not because he trained, he had never really trained, but because of the childhood thing, because of the window on University Way, because of the diner in 1967 that I told you about last video, because of all of it.
He bought them occasionally and read them at the kitchen table. He brought the issue home on a Friday evening. He sat at the kitchen table, and my mother made dinner while he read. He got to the Corcoran piece on McQueen maybe 40 minutes in. He read the paragraph about the note. He read it again. He put the magazine down, got up, walked to the back of the apartment, stood in the bathroom for a few minutes, came back out, sat down, and didn’t say anything for the rest of dinner.
After dinner, he took the magazine to his desk, the desk he still has, the desk with the drawer, and he tore out the page with the McQueen interview, and he folded it twice, and he put it in the drawer. My mother asked him later that night what had happened. He told her about the funeral. About standing outside the gate when he was 18.
About McQueen getting out of the car. About not knowing for 13 years what McQueen had been carrying in his pocket. She asked him why it mattered so much. Why he was so quiet about it. My father said to her, and my mother told me this story years later, after my father had mentioned it only once in passing, and I had asked her about it, my father said, “Because I was on the sidewalk.
I was 20 ft from him when he walked in with the note in his pocket. I didn’t know. Nobody on the sidewalk knew. We stood there and watched two men walk past us, and one of them was carrying the last thing anyone was ever going to give Bruce, and we didn’t know. And for 13 years, I didn’t know. And now I know, and I can’t I can’t do anything with knowing.
I can only put the page in the drawer. That’s what my mother remembers him saying. She says he said it quietly, not upset, not crying, just flat. And then he went to bed. And the next morning, he didn’t mention it. And he has never, to this day, mentioned the page in the drawer to me directly, except to tell me to put it back when I saw it last spring.
I asked him, when we had the coffee conversation a month later, why the note mattered to him so much. I expected him to say something about friendship. About McQueen and Bruce. About the weight of a private gesture between two men. He didn’t say that. He said, “It’s not about McQueen. It’s about who shows up.
” I said, “What do you mean?” My father said, “McQueen flew up for him. Coburn flew up for him. Those were the guys who came. Dan Inosanto was there. Taky was there. The family was there. A hundred people in a chapel. That’s what Bruce actually had at the end. Not the 25,000 in Hong Kong. Not the articles in Life magazine.
A hundred people in a room. And two of them flew up from California and carried him. And one of them wrote him a letter and put it next to his hand. That’s the whole thing. That’s the measure. Not how many people know your name. How many people get on the plane? He drank his coffee. He looked out the window. It was gray again.
Late afternoon. He said, “I’ve been carrying that question around since 1986, and I don’t have an answer. I don’t know who would fly up for me. I don’t know who would put a note in my pocket. I’d like to think somebody would. But I don’t know. Nobody knows until it happens. And then it’s too late for you to know anyway because you’re in the box.
” He laughed a little when he said that. Not a real laugh. A sort of acknowledgement. He said, “That’s what the page in the drawer is. It’s a reminder that the question exists. That you should live in a way where the answer might be yes. I want to tell you one more thing and then I’ll let this one close. When McQueen was dying in 1980, the mesothelioma, which he had probably gotten from asbestos exposure on movie sets or from a stunt job he did in the ’50s, nobody’s sure, he went to Mexico for an experimental cancer treatment
that didn’t work. He knew he was dying. He had a few months. He made a list of people he wanted to see before he went. Dan Inosanto, who had been at Bruce’s funeral, got a phone call from McQueen in the spring of 1980. McQueen asked Inosanto to come see him. Inosanto flew down. They talked for a couple of hours.
They talked about Bruce. Inosanto, in an interview years later, said that McQueen told him, “At the end of that visit, Bruce was right about the thing he said to me in the garage. I didn’t get it at the time. I get it now.” Inosanto asked what thing. McQueen said, “The thing about time. About how you don’t have as much of it as you think.
He told me that when I was 38, I thought he was being dramatic. He was 30 years old telling me to hurry up. I laughed at him. Then McQueen said he wasn’t being dramatic. He was just early. I don’t know if there’s a clean way to end this video. There isn’t for me. I’ve been working on this one for a couple of months, and every time I get to the end, I think I have something to say, and then I write it, and it’s wrong.
So, I’ll just tell you what I have. A page in a drawer, folded twice, yellowed at the edges, in a metal drawer in a desk in an apartment north of Seattle, where a man in his 70s sits most mornings and drinks coffee and looks out the window with the same gray light his city has had for 150 years. The page says, somewhere in its middle column, that Steve McQueen wrote a note to Bruce Lee and put it in his coffin next to his left hand.
It doesn’t say what the note said. It doesn’t need to. The note wasn’t for us. My father has had that page for 39 years. He has not reread it, as far as I know in at least a decade. He doesn’t need to reread it. He knows what it says. He keeps it because of what my mother said he said that night in 1986 because he was on the sidewalk and he didn’t know and now he knows and the only thing you can do with knowing sometimes is fold it twice and put it somewhere you can find it again.
The next one I’m going to make is about what Bruce Lee did between 4:30 and 6:30 every morning. The hours before anyone else in his house was awake. The hours that made him who he was and that nobody in all the biographies I’ve read has ever really written about with the attention they deserve. But this one was about who showed up.
Two men got on a plane. They flew from Los Angeles to Seattle. They carried a casket. One of them put a note inside it. And then they flew home. And one of them never spoke of it again in his life and the other one spoke of it once to a journalist on condition that it not be printed until he was also gone. That’s the whole story.
Thank you for sitting with me through it. I’ll see you next video.
