Our salute to Sal Mineo (1939-1976) contains what may amount to revelations to some. He departed this life during a lull in his career that I feel confident would not have been permanent. But since it happened that way, the dramatic nature of his demise is not as well known as the dramatic career that preceded it.
Mineo remains best known for his role in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause (1956) as the odd man out in a troubled triumvirate with James Dean and Natalie Wood. His performance as a sensitive loner named Plato earned him an Oscar nomination, at 17 one of the youngest ever to be so distinguished. Many assume that it was this part that resulted in Mineo’s being typecast as moody juvenile delinquents throughout his early career, but it was actually the other way around. Life preceded art. A product of the Bronx, Mineo had gotten involved with street gangs when quite young. He’d gotten in trouble with the law, and was thrown out of Catholic school. To counter the influence of his surroundings, his parents (who ran a coffin-making business) enrolled him in dance and acting classes. His earliest parts were on Broadway in the original productions of The Rose Tattoo and The King and I in 1951.
Fittingly Mineo’s first screen role was in a 1952 TV movie about Boys Town. He graduated to the big screen in 1955 with Six Bridges to Cross (based on the 1950 Brinks Robbery), and The Private War of Major Benson (which was set at a military school). Both films coincidentally co-starred Julie Adams as the female lead. After Rebel Without a Cause, Mineo became a kind of idol to a certain kind of teenager. His role in Crime in the Streets (1956) earned him the nickname “The Switchblade Kid”. In 1957, he briefly became a rock and roll star, releasing two top 40 singles, one of which, “Start Movin’ (In My Direction)” went all the way to #9. Movies that played with his “rebellious youth” image included Rock, Pretty Baby (1956), Dino (1957), The Young Don’t Cry (1957), Tonka (1958, in which he played a Native American), and The Gene Krupa Story (1959), in which he played the live-wire title character, no doubt helping spawn the next generation of rock drummers who admired Krupa, guys like Keith Moon and Ginger Baker.
Mineo also played smaller roles in ensembles of major motion pictures such as Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956), Giant (1956), Exodus (1960), The Longest Day (1962), Cheyenne Autumn (1964), The Greatest Story Ever Told (1965), and Krakatoa, East of Java (1969). His one starring film role during this period was as an obscene phone caller in Who Killed Teddy Bear? (1965). He was clearly on a descent at this point. Some of the roles he began to get during this period are downright ignominious. He barely has any lines in small role as a Native American in Cheyenne Autumn. In 80 Steps to Jonah (1969) the star of the film is Wayne Newton (!) and Mineo’s character is killed almost immediately. In Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971) he is hidden behind a chimp mask, and, again, his character is almost immediately killed. He remained a frequent guest star on television through these years, but even these parts are a real come down. I’m thinking of things like a 1973 Columbo episode where he and Hector Elizondo play a couple of stereotyped Arab diplomats. Mineo plays second fiddle to Elizondo. The guileless character is framed for a murder, and then, of course, bumped off mid-episode.
Interestingly, Mineo appears to have chosen not to take a path many of his colleagues had, one that ought to have been an absolute no-brainer. By that I mean, of course, the Route of American International Pictures! Surely they loved Mineo’s oeuvre — they had been knocking out low-budget versions of his kind of movies since the mid 1950s. By the late ’60s, they were reinventing themselves with outlaw biker and drop-out pictures. Guys like Dennis Hopper and Russ Tamblyn were doing those kinds of movies, after all. But clearly Mineo wanted to move away from that image, it’s precisely what he did NOT want to, even at the cost apparently, of no movie roles at all.
What did he want then? There’s a seed of something else in Rebel Without a Cause, and once you notice it, you can’t unsee it. Natalie Wood’s is not the only character in love with James Dean in that movie, Mineo’s is too. It’s practically not even subtext, it’s right there, and the only way you’d miss it is if, for cultural reasons, you were somehow dismissing the possibility from your mind. Mineo was bi, and over time, not even that, just straight-up gay. As early as 1963 he modeled nude for Warhol associate Harold Stevenson’s 9 panel monumental painting The New Adam. This by itself doesn’t make imply that Mineo was gay, though Stevenson was, and the fact that he chose to do it seems relevant. But the following year he broke up with longtime gal pal Jill Haworth, whom he’d met while working on Exodus. Or rather she broke up with HIM after encountering him in flagrante delicto with another dude. His last years seemed largely focused on exploring his gay identity. He directed New York and L.A. productions of a gay themed play called Fortune and Men’s Eyes in 1969. In 1970 he began a long term relationship with a former acting teacher named Courtney Burr III. He came out to a reporter in 1972. And in his last project, a play called P.S. Your Cat is Dead, his character was bisexual.
Mineo was returning from a rehearsal for this play’s transfer from San Francisco to L.A. one night in February, 1976, when he was jumped, mugged, and stabbed to death by a 17 year old pizza delivery man named Lionel Ray Williams. Insomuch as it is remembered at all, the incident has been rife with accompanying urban lore. Police and the media (somewhat prejudicially) initially investigated the murder as a sex related crime, assuming that Mineo had approached the young man in the dark street for a liaison. Thattheory never panned out, but I’ll wager to this day many people still make that assumption. Another angle of course has to do with Mineo’s screen image and nickname. Was this a deranged fan situation? Some guy obsessed with stabbing “The Switchblade Kid”? But, no, it turned out that Williams had never heard of Mineo or seen his movies. It was just a coincidence that his victim was a movie star. Another creepy fact: one of Mineo’s last roles had been as a Charles Manson-like character on the TV show S.W.A.T. There are also stories of Mineo’s having dreamt of being stabbed to death, and of being visited by James Dean’s ghost in a seance, presaging his own doom. Another strange if coincidental fact: John Lennon had offered a reward for the apprehension of Mineo’s killer before the guy was caught. Then Lennon himself was killed by a deranged fan four years later. A year after that Rebel co-star Natalie Wood would follow Dean and Mineo to an early and horrible death. It’s natural I think to try to find significance in it all. But it’s also perfectly logical that celebrity and active lifestyles increase the probability of early and spectacular death.
It occurs to me that there was another (forgive me) bandwagon that Mineo didn’t jump on, either by design or circumstances. He died just when Italian Americans were having their moment. The Godfather/Coppola, De Palma, Scorsese, John Travolta, and that famous faux Italian The Fonz, and a hundred other manifestations of American Italo-philia were happening right then. And Mineo couldn’t have been any more Italian. Both parents were of Sicilian extraction; his father was an actual immigrant from the Old Country. Mineo was one of the first stars not to change his professional name to something less ethnic. His full first name is Salvatore. But Mineo somehow wasn’t part of this explosion of celebration somehow. Was it mutual? Italian culture can be pretty macho, in convenient forgetfulness of all those Renaissance painters.
I feel confident though, that, had he lived, Mineo would have continued his pioneering leadership in what we now call the LGBTQ community, and probably would have been a strong voice within it. And his might have been the persuasive kind of voice that might have brought some of his fans along to a more tolerant place in the years that followed.
James Franco made a 2011 bio-pic called Sal, depicting the actor’s last hours, and there are books and articles (Peter Bogdanovich wrote a famous one for Esquire) but I confess I want an old-style Hollywood Confidential style exploitation picture, done in the manner of Mineo’s own movies, shot in black and white, and complete with the James Dean seance. It wouldn’t be for everybody, but it sure would be for ME. To those who would claim that it wouldn’t be respectful, you need to imagine that the entire thing would be an homage to his cinematic art. I’d argue that it would be disrespectful to shoot his story any other way!