As barely a teenager, Sal Mineo, my uncle, played controversial and important dramatic roles still considered the most nuanced of their era; as Plato in “Rebel Without a Cause,” he was brave and talented enough to offer a conservative post-war audience one of its first lovable, genuine homosexual characters who came across not as a negative stereotype but as a person with honest and tragic conflicts. The results of his on- and off-screen charismatic presence are, of course, well documented; Sarina Mineo, Sal’s sister and my mother, recalls numerous encounters with his fans, including an incident where a woman walked up to him from a crowd and snipped off his necktie. In an entertainment age where being a child star is practically synonymous with eventual drug use, alcoholism, and crime, it is steadying to look at my uncle’s very different experience. When his ‘heartthrob’ status cooled a bit as an adult, Sal did not experience the collapse we’ve seen many former child stars encounter, but instead he continued to stay focused on entertainment in the form of directing. In “Fortune and Men’s Eyes,” Sal brought his audience unflaggingly up-close to the severity of life in the prison system; in his version of the play, he refused to circumvent the harsh truth by keeping the final raw scene backstage. Ahead of his time, Sal used the dramatic arts not just to entertain, but also to communicate the complex and imperfect lives of marginalized people in an era before civil rights, before the Stonewall rebellion, when traditional values reigned, and most people had their eyes closed to suffering and difference. Be it the times or the market, but sadly, today such substantive use of the entertainment industry’s now unimaginably vast resources rarely occurs.
Sal, and many of the stars of his era are no longer with us, and at times their grand visions seem misplaced also. Movies like “Exodus” and “Rebel” are so dense that no matter how many times I watch them, I see something new every time; given his endless dynamism, watching his intense and varied movie performances are the best way to know Sal. Though Sal died a year and a half before I was born, I feel I have a sense of him through a mosaic of resources, the most important of whom being my mother. Now 62[sic], she keeps pictures of Sal around the house and is willing to recount stories of their adventures, but still, almost thirty years[sic] after his death, she grieves for him greatly; at the beginning of her adulthood, she lost the person she idolized and who knew her best; briefly a child actor herself, she self-effacingly satirizes the story of a childhood role in a Broadway musical she turned down because Sal hadn’t also been cast. No one misses him more than she and her remaining brother Victor; as the oldest brother, during preparations for Sal’s A and E channel biography presentation, it fell to him to read aloud the eloquent eulogy my father wrote for Sal so many years ago. I have no idea what the time right after his death was truly like for them; I’ve read the newspaper clippings and asked many careful questions, but I didn’t live it. I also see faded Polaroids of my mother, my father, my Aunt Ann and my Uncle Victor holding me as a newborn more than a year later, all smiles; it must have been something of a relief to see a new addition to the family after that unfathomable loss.
Naturally, I feel deprived because I never had a chance to meet him, but it has been wonderful for me to see this website and the expressions of love and respect for Sal from the writers of, and visitors to, the site. My mother, new to computers, has visited the site also, and is equally hopeful for Sal’s star on the walk of fame. She is attempting to collect all of his movies on DVD, and was overjoyed to hear that I’d downloaded a few of the tracks from his brief singing career. Thank you John and Karen, and thank you readers, for cherishing his memory the way my family and I do; it means a lot to us.
