Sal Mineo: A Biography

 Review of Sal Mineo: A Biography by Michael Gregg Michaud, Three Rivers Press, New York, 2012. 

Sal Mineo’s last words as he was stabbed to death at the age of 37 were: “No… no… Oh, my God… no… help! Somebody, please help me!” (p. 360).  Twice-nominated for best supporting actor at the Oscars, Mineo was dead within minutes as the knife with which he was stabbed punctured his heart.  He probably just about realised he was going to die as the lights went out on his short life.  Samuel Johnson, the great English essayist and biographer, famously remarked that “death concentrates the mind wonderfully.”  However, poor Sal had no time to contemplate the wisdom of this sage advice as his death came so suddenly and immediately.

Why did this book pique my interest at all?  Therein lies an old story.  When I was a young teacher in the late 1980s, a colleague of mine recommended a film which had just then been put on VHS video, namely Rebel Without A Cause (1955), which starred a trio of tragic actors, all to meet their end in calamitous circumstances: James Dean, Sal Mineo and Natalie Wood.  My colleague was recommending me to view this film with senior classes because she felt it dealt with adolescent revolt and alienation and would consequently engage the students in a meaningful reflection on their own lives.  It was James Dean who initially captured my attention as he was, even in the 1980s, still an international icon of youthful rebellion and mourned for his unfulfilled potential after his untimely demise in a traffic accident in 1955.  However, Sal Mineo, who passionately played the part of John (Plato) Crawford in that film, also stole several scenes.  I had even forgotten Sal’s name when I came across the book named above in a second-hand bookstore.  The film came flooding back into my mind, and the cover of the book, which portrays a young Mineo, reminded me who he was and reacquainted me with his name, which I had long forgotten.

I will again here risk repeating myself.  What kept me riveted in this biography is the fact that Michaud presents us with a “well-lived-in” life, that is with a life lived at the heights of fame and celebrity and at the troughs of apparent failures and underachievements.  It is a biography that tells the story of Sal Mineo “warts and all.”  To this extent, it is, as I have said so many times in these reviews, existential, that is, in the words of the novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch, “a lived in philosophy.”

If one were to summarise Mineo’s philosophy of life, one could put it in a nutshell: “Eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we die.”   In other words, he was a complete hedonist in philosophical terms: “I have a simple philosophy.  I feel you ought to live and enjoy it while you can – live it up, do things on a big scale.” (p. 136) This attitude to life could possibly be attributed to the fact that his father, Salvatore senior, was a coffin maker, what Americans call a casket maker, and who reportedly told Sal: “You better live your life to the full, as you will all too soon be wearing one of these (caskets).  Time, my boy, flies too quickly.”

Mineo earned many millions of dollars in the first half of his career, but he spent his earnings with complete profligacy and abandon, as well as being overly generous with all his friends.  Also, he supported his family substantially in his earlier years, with some money being used to support his father’s business and pay for his brothers’ college fees.  Michaud tells us that in the second half of his professional life, as his career was ostensibly failing, he felt that he had been exploited by his family, certainly by his mother, who had been his manager in those early years.

However, he was not one to live with regrets and curse his fate.  He was a gentle and happy-go-lucky soul who saw the silver lining even in the darkest cloud. He was always positive and optimistic, even in the second half of his career when he could find little substantial work and was widely reported to be exceedingly good company.  Everyone loved to hang out with him, and he always kept in touch with many of his old neighbourhood friends.

In more recent years, we have all read of actors who have died all too young from drug overdoses and of many others who have been in and out of rehab many times in their careers.  Was Sal a drug addict or an alcoholic?  Definitely the answer is no on both counts.  However, he was certainly addicted to sex.  In his early career, he bedded many a young actress.  In his mid-twenties, he considered himself bisexual, sleeping with many men as well as women, though towards the end of his life, he was exclusively homosexual, sharing his bohemian/hippy lifestyle with his male partner, Courtney Burr III.  Again, this addiction, showing a reduction of overall identity to the merely sexual, possibly hid a glaring abyss in his awareness of his personal identity and a poor self-concept.  Michael Anderson Junior, the British-American film star, believed, like a lot of Sal’s contemporaries and friends, that the young actor was “searching for a sense of self – was he an actor, a writer, a director, a rebel, an iconoclast, a curiosity, or a has-been?” (p. 225 - 226) Michael was a good friend of Sal and had acted with him in a TV Movie, “In Search of America,” in 1971, and his comments are revealing.

What struck this reader was that Sal Mineo was an authentic character.  His friend David Cassidy, who actually paid for his coffin, said: “Sal took a genuine interest in me.  He was a very caring and wonderful person, someone who made an effort to try and support people who were creative and talented” (p. 224 – 225). Always true to his thoughts and feelings, he was caring towards others, as was witnessed by his many friends who were interviewed meticulously by Michaud, whose footnotes detailing sources of information and interviewees run to a total of 387 items. This is a well-researched and honest work that results in a riveting biography that features exclusive and candid interviews with both Mineo’s closest female and male lovers.  It also includes many never-before-published photographs.  On an existential level, Mineo could not live an inauthentic life.  He realised all too clearly that love without truth becomes mere sentimentality and results in denial.  One may fault his reckless and profligate lifestyle, but his ability to speak his authentic truth to the power moguls of Hollywood was courageous and honourable.  When he died, Sal’s estate was valued at $ 14,152.98 while his debts ran to $ 49,707.03, which included unpaid rent for apartments, unpaid telephone bills and many more besides.  If there is one great flaw to this biography, it is the fact that the Mineo family refused to be interviewed for this astonishingly riveting, well-researched book.  They were obviously afraid that the blatant truth of his lifestyle and his sexual orientation would come out and embarrass them.  Sal Mineo was murdered in February 1976, and prejudices against homosexuals were still strong at that time.