I bought this 2010 bio by Michael Gregg Michaud from a terrific used book store in Boca Raton of all places, instantly smitten by the cover photograph. Of course I was mostly familiar with Sal Mineo from his iconic role in Rebel Without A Cause (1955), as Hollywood's prototypical (but closeted) gay boy with a crush on the smoldering James Dean, but I'd also recently watched him playing a courageous young Holocaust survivor in Exodus (1960). He got Best Supporting Actor Oscar nominations for both, the first when he was just 17.
In other words, Mineo became a star a lot earlier than most of his contemporaries. Born to a Sicilian family and raised in the South Bronx, Mineo was discovered in a dancing school where his mother had put him to keep him off the mean streets. By age 11, he was earning more than his father, a coffin-maker, on Broadway, first in The Rose Tattoo and then in The King and I, where Yul Brynner became his mentor and lifelong friend. He was--and would remain--the go-to guy for ethnic roles on stage, the big screen and television, risibly including Native Americans in a Disney picture (Mineo rides bareback!) and John Ford's last film (he and the director, a "man's man," did not get along).
Author Michaud is nothing if not thorough in his biography. He documents the actor's career in gig-by-gig detail, including a misbegotten stint as a pop singer engineered more by his mother's desire to capitalize on Mineo's popularity as a teen idol than any particular talent, and a wackily charming appearance on "What's My Line?". Two of the people closest to Mineo--Jill Haworth, his love interest in Exodus and eventually his girlfriend, and Courtney Burr III, his gay lover with the most stickiness (their off-and-on relationship was what would today be known as "open")--clearly trusted Michaud enough to speak freely about their friend who struggled less with his sexual orientation than its impact on his short life in the limelight.
Mineo's "bisexuality" doesn't come up at all until Haworth, who lost her virginity to Mineo, discovers him in bed with Bobby Sherman in their Malibu beach house, more than halfway through the book. From there, it's as if a dam has broken; for the next 200 pages, which covers a period in Mineo's life when he can find work only on television and the theater (often the kind that also serves dinner), it suddenly seems as if he's all gay, all the time. He becomes mostly defined by other people's perceptions and his pursuit of "edgy" material that can be produced in an increasingly more sexually liberated world.
Fortune and Men's Eyes, a play addressing homosexuality in prison that he both directs and stars in, is the most successful example. Don Johnson, fresh out of drama school in San Francisco (later Mineo's roommate), is also in the cast. Tellingly, Michaud does not include Johnson--who personifies Mineo's "type"--in his acknowledgments despite what the book depicts as their close friendship. It's also a shame that another gay actor who got his start as a child, Roddy McDowall, died before he could spill the tea about his pal Sal. McDowall incorrectly fingered Mineo's lover as a suspect in the actor's brutal murder (they hated each other).
In fact, I got more insight into Mineo's psychology by chance as a result of a coincidental revival of one of the actor's mid-career movies at the Film Forum. In Who Killed Teddy Bear?--co-starring Elaine Stritch (!) as a no-nonsense lesbian trying to seduce a savvy and sexy Juliet Prowse--Mineo plays Larry, a nightclub waiter whose obscene phone calls escalate into murder (hysterically, the uses his fake "What's My Line?" voice). The lead NYPD detective investigating the case specializes in sexual perversion and director Joseph Cates pans as lovingly over the scholarly texts on his desk as he does the magazines that Larry peruses in a Times Square porn shop. But Larry, who is shown being seduced by his mother, has a good side, too, taking care of his younger sister who, after witnessing their tryst, fell backwards down the stairs, suffering permanent brain damage. This is cuckoo, I thought, as I watched Mineo's luridly compelling performance: whatever possessed a two-time Academy Award contender to accept this bizarre role which also includes exposing lots of skin and wearing white pants as tight as any pair sported by Peter Berlin?
And then it hit me: Mineo, whose own mother was overbearing at least and ended up bankrupting him, may have been both pushing boundaries in an attempt to generate audience sympathy for "sexual perversion" in general AND winking at a subset of the audience who appreciated his homoeroticism with a little gay exhibitionism. As they say now, if you know, you know.
In February, 50 years will have passed since Mineo, the random victim of a robbery, was stabbed to death at the age of 37. We likely will never know his real story but Michaud's book could provide a solid foundation on which to base a killer series about the costs of a dimming star's refusal to play the fame game in a pre-Stonewall world. An entire episode could be devoted to the filming of Giant, surely the gayest major motion picture film set in history. In addition, to Mineo, who played a Mexican-American ranch hand, it featured Rock Hudson, James Dean, Earl Holliman and Elizabeth Taylor.
Calling Ryan Murphy. Right now!
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