Sal Mineo by Michael Gregg Michaud

Sal Mineo rose to stardom with his role in Rebel Without a Cause, a performance etched into millions of hearts as a prototype juvenile delinquent.

Cast on Broadway at age eleven (The Rose Tattoo and The King and I), Rebel was his second film role, with a seventeen-year-old Natalie Wood and heartthrob James Dean, who had just completed East of Eden. Sal was nominated for Best Supporting Actor.

He filmed Giant and Somebody Up There Likes Me opposite Dean, who tragically died while filming. With fan clubs and never-ending mail, he started a recording career, earning gold records. He was the family business, yet lived on a $20-a-week allowance. Where was all the money going? Overspending, unwieldy debts, and IRS back taxes—the nest egg saved for when he turned 21 was spent before he got it.

Exodus won him a Golden Globe, and Tonka, The Longest Day, The Gene Krupa Story, The Greatest Story Ever Told, and Krakatoa - East of Java followed. Meeting actress Jill Haworth led to a serious relationship, but she was surprised by what everyone else already knew when she found him in bed with singer Bobby Sherman. Sal starred in the sexually provocative film Who Killed Teddy Bear? He directed and starred in the lurid jail rape play Fortune and Men's Eyes with Don Johnson and chose salacious roles with themes of child abuse, hustlers, and drag queens. A Toronto production of Sugar and Spice about a Manson-style murder had patrons fleeing the aisles.

With debt like quicksand, he scraped by with dinner theatre, TV game shows, and drama cameos. As director and star in the unlikely play PS Your Cat is Dead, he was back with a stage hit in 1975. As they moved the play to San Francisco in February 1976, Sal Mineo was stabbed to death by a robber. He was 37. A detailed afterword outlines the daunting process of finding the anonymous assailant, and resulting sentence of 51 years to life.

Sal Mineo will remain known to millions, frozen in time as a 16 year-old Rebel.

A polished performer regardless of the work, he turned in notable performances. The strain of turning from teen idol to adult roles was great, compounded by the times which called for edgy drama with dark angles. In the last five years of his life, his friend and lover Courtney Burr III supported and encouraged him, and both Courtney and Jill contributed greatly to this in-depth profile of a man who was often his own worst enemy. This biography is comprehensive and becomes more detailed as the murder case proceeds.

With the majority of his success well before he was 21, to pushing the envelope as an actor, this is fascinating reading. For Hollywood fans, recommended.

2010 / Hardcover / 432 pages