Sal Mineo: A Superb Actor or Just a Bed-Hopping Gay Peter Pan? (Part 2)

[PeterRS]

FInished earlier as I had a free day today!

LGBTQ-History Month – (Part 2 of 2)

It is hard today for us to think of Mineo as a big star because he never landed a really starring role. Yet as a teen idol he was massively popular and had a huge young fan base. By 1960 "Mineo Mania" was sweeping America. 

Mineo Mania In America

As the young writer/director Peter Bogdanovich who first met him on a movie set mentions in an Esquire Magazine article, “I have never met anyone quite so instantly disarming as Sal could be; inhibitions and prejudices dissolved in the heady rush of his good humor and happy conspiratorial manner. No one took himself less seriously than Sal, which is not to say that he was frivolous; he’d just drop off into that funny snore of his at any hint of pomposity in himself or others . . .You never felt any awkwardness around Sal; he made sure you were at your ease.”

As his boyish looks started to fade, though, so did his career, although rarely for that reason. He desperately wanted a key role in David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia. Lean's people turned him down on the basis that it would not be appropriate to cast someone who had recently played a Zionist terrorist and killed four Arabs in Exodus. He was equally desperate to play the young lead in The Godfather. Few in Hollywood then knew of Al Pacino who was thought of more as a New York stage actor. Sal again was not considered even though he was a ‘name’ and of Sicilian descent. He also read for the part given to Dustin Hoffman in Midnight Cowboy, a movie for which he had tried to buy the rights. Despite his major attraction to the relatively new teenage audience, Hollywood passed him by. Almost his only roles in major movies were The Longest Day and The Greatest Story Ever Told, in both buried among a host of other supporting actors including Charlton Heston, Henry Fonda, John Wayne and Sean Connery. Sal did not like Heston saying he had “an ego the size of Texas and a talent the size of South Dakota.”

With film offers tailing off, he took a beach house near Los Angeles where a frequent visitor was Jill Haworth. Apparently a warm and generous person, many came to visit when he was there. He loved giving large parties for anyone and everyone. At one, Rudolf Nureyev, the world’s most famous ballet dancer who had recently defected from the Soviet Union and was very gay, approached Sal. In those days the twist was the most  popular dance. Nureyev asked him, “Teach me what they are doing.” Astonished, Sal replied, “You’re putting me on! You want me to teach you how to dance?” Sal then took a towel and pretended drying his bottom for a minute or two. Moments later Nureyev was doing the twist in the middle of the dance floor!

One day he met a 19-year old singer Bobby Sherman on the beach. Learning Sherman had nowhere to stay, he quickly became a fixture in the Mineo household. In Sal Mineo: A Biography the author claims it was here that he had his first truly gay experience (it may have been the first time he had had a genuinely serious and loving gay experience, for it is claimed he had already had very brief and ultimately unhappy flings with Dean, Paul Newman and Marlon Brando). One day Haworth returned from shopping to find Sal and Bobby naked in their bed together. Appalled, she walked out. She was still only 19. Yet it was not long before the two were to continue their friendship that lasted the rest of his life. 

As Sal’s career was going downhill, Jill’s was on the up. She became a star in her own right when cast as the original Sally Bowles in the Broadway production of the musical Cabaret, even though she had never once sung a note professionally.

Bobby Sherman - photo Everett Collection

Sal’s homosexuality was publicly discovered after he and Bobby spent a night together in a hotel. A paparazzo following up a tip took a photo of the two kissing. Although the public seemed to pay little attention and still a star name, Hollywood effectively crucified Sal. Film and TV show contracts were cancelled, his career now set on a long downward spiral. Had he been under contract to a studio, like many other better-known actors it is almost certain that all would have been covered up to protect reputations. But he had never been offered such a contract.

Thereafter Sal basically lived for the moment, accepting parts in trashy television dramas interspersed with some much better plays, and whatever else came his way. Almost permanently broke, much of his later work was third-rate theatrical fare, sometimes even appearing in dinner theatre or in student productions, both of which he loathed.

He did have one major success both as actor and director. He took an option for a Los Angeles production of the Broadway play Fortune And Men’s Eyes. With its concentration on the hell of prison life and in particular its homosexuality, this was a gamble, the more so when two men had to appear on stage fully naked and one rapes the other. Sal now aged 30 appeared as the rapist Rocky and cast then 18-year old Don Johnson, another who had shared his bed and was to  become his roommate for several years, as the younger Smitty. Whereas on Broadway the play had featured the rape offstage, Sal’s 1967 production had several changes which included performing it on stage just before the lights go out for the intermission. Perhaps to avert possible discussion about being gay, Johnson married in the same year, a marriage that lasted a mere two months. Johnson quickly gained a reputation for his hedonistic lifestyle which included six marriages. The second lasted only as long as the first; the third just 10 months!

Sal behind Don Johnson

Sal’s production had added some dialogue and more nudity which did not please the play’s author John Herbert. It could all have been a disaster, but the West Coast critics all but unanimously agreed Sal had created a triumph for himself as actor and director. Johnson also impressed and would eventually take one of the two leads in the popular TV series Starsky and Hutch. 

Although it had already played on Broadway, a producer financed Sal’s production for a transfer to Stage 73 in New York in 1969. The influential New York Times critic Clive Barnes clearly loathed it. Starting his review “How far can you go?”, he continued, “Mr. Mineo’s version of this play is pure and tawdry sensationalism. I am not sure what kind of reputation Mr. Mineo has – he is a minor Hollywood player I believe – but I am perfectly certain of what Mr. Mineo deserves!” And if that is not bad enough, it gets worse! Barnes basically trashed the production. Yet it continued to play for some time.

Flyer for the New York Season

Perhaps not surprisingly it was around this time that nudity on stage, the term ‘gay’ and in general sexual freedom were becoming far more openly discussed subjects before HIV and AIDS were almost to close them little more than a decade later. The tribal rock musical Hair had opened on Broadway in 1968. In London the premiere waited a little longer until the day after theatre censorship was abolished.

Poster for the London production of Hair

With this poster designed to illustrate the musical’s anti-establishment, psychedelic and sexual experimentation nature, it was a huge success. At the end of Act 1 the cast emerge from under a large circular cloth all totally naked (albeit with dimmed lighting), It broke new boundaries and the show ran for several years in both New York and London. As much as that brief nude scene, it was the lyrics of one of the songs that shook critics – “Sodomy”.

The Boys in the Band had also opened in an off-Broadway theatre in 1968. The original production and revivals of the revue Oh! Calcutta (the title is based on a French phrase ‘Oh! Quel cul to as – Oh what a fine ass you have!’) featuring full male and female nudity in most of its sketches had opened in both cities playing for years after its New York premiere in 1969. The Stonewall Riots had taken place just four months before Sal’s production opened in New York. 

Unlike so many major figures in Hollywood, Mineo was later never ashamed of his sexuality. Behind the scenes everyone knew he was almost oversexed with a penchant for men in their late teens and early 20s. His deepest regret was for the times he had spent with some of those figures, famous actors whom he loved and he believed loved him, but only for fleeting moments before they so quickly, silently tossed him out of their lives.

A continuing mystery about Rebel Without A Cause is how it came about that the three young stars all died violent deaths when still young: Dean crashing his Porsche Spyder aged just 24, Sal murdered in a botched robbery aged 37, and Natalie Wood mysteriously drowning after falling from a yacht aged 43.

At the end of an over-active life filled with a craving for frequently unfulfilled love when he had been used by others and yet never settled down to make the hard decisions that would really develop his career, Sal remained an optimist. As he told an interviewer in Toronto prior to his death, “Now I’m a former rebel who has found his cause. I’m going to be a great movie director someday. Just you wait and see.” No matter how unlikely that might now seem, the killer’s blade ensured it would never happen. The teenage idol then in his late 30s who never had a childhood and had witnessed Hollywood turn its back on him, tragically was dead. 

Sal Mineo leaves a legacy as a gay icon who never shied away from acknowledging his sexuality. His part playing a key role in gay history is surely secure.

 

Sources: There are too many reliable sources to be listed here. I urge anyone seeking to know more to read the excellent, exhaustively researched Sal Mineo: A Biography by Michael Gregg Michaud which includes extensive interviews with Jill Haworth and Courtney Burr, and the essay by his good friend Peter Bogdanovich in Esquire magazine.

[jimmie50]

Thanks for sharing this.  I found it fascinating to read.  I vaguely remember Sal Mineo but was not familiar with his story.  

[Lucky]

I liked Sal Mineo. I was about 12 or 13 when he came...to my attention. Probably a first indication that I was gay. His last living arrangement was just a couple of blocks from the place I later lived in LA.