Or had the reality always been different than we thought? Five years after Dean died, I said to Lewis once that I had always had the feeling (right from the start) that Dean was usually kidding the whole crooner thing, that he was never really serious about it. “There’s a lot of truth in that,” Jerry said right away. “See, Dean could never ever sing and do it with a full heart because he wasn’t clear about his worth. He did not have self-esteem. He didn’t have self-esteem of any kind. So he would kid his singing and he would never allow it ever to get serious so that people would compare him to anybody. I don’t think he knew this.” I asked why did he think the self-esteem was so low, and Lewis said, “I heard about his demons, his fears, talking about his mother. She was a two-fisted Italian woman who gave him one credo to take through life. And that was: you take money into your pockets, you never take it out. Take. You never give. You cry, you’re worthless. You have emotional feelings, you’re a fag. And all of that was ground into his head. In just one year, I un-ground it all. He was talking to me like a kid that needed to get it out …”
During their partnership, Lewis told me, Martin surprised him one day while they were performing at the Fox Theater in San Francisco: “I’ll never forget this,” Lewis recalled. “Dean said, ‘Don’t you think I know that people go for popcorn when I sing? Don’t you think I know that?’ I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘I’m talking about us. Don’t you think I know that?’ I said, ‘Well, to be perfectly honest with you, I was hoping you didn’t know that.’ He said, ‘But I do. And it’s OK. I have committed to this and that’s part of it. It’s OK.’ He was brilliant about it. He said, ‘I’m making a fortune. I’m a big star because they’re going to popcorn during my singing …’” But it nevertheless irked Martin eventually and Lewis remembers the breakup in painful detail (see Lewis chapter).
When I asked Jerry to take me behind Dean’s supposed coolness, he said, “Dean had a wonderful device in his life. ‘Recluse’ was wonderful for him. ‘Above the crowd’ was wonderful for him. The best thing he ever had working for himself was his way of standoffishness. And I think throughout all of it, he must have peeked through the door to see what everyone was doing. I never knew that he did that, but I always wondered if he did. And did he come away from the door saying, ‘Whew, I don’t need that.’ Or did he come away from the door saying, ‘Why can’t I be with them?’ If you know about his background, you’ll see the complicated is simple. He came from a Mafia-like upbringing—an insensitive set of parents. And certainly sad to have to say they were also incredibly dumb. They were coal people. Father was a barber—started out in coal. And Angelina, his mother, wanted so much to appear like [charming TV personality] Betty Furness when she was really Jack Palance.”
Lewis paused a beat for the laugh. “Then,” he went on, “at his twenty-ninth birthday, he put his arms around me because I got my arms around him. And he liked it. And then he would push me away like I’m the kid brother: ‘What’s with the hugging?’ And he loved it. He used to do what my grandmother did. He pushed me with this hand and pulled me with that hand. Because I was the only human on God’s earth that he would communicate with then. He was kind, he was generous, he was silly, he was simple. He read comic books because that was easy. And I used to say to him, ‘Will you stop sending people for comic books? Go yourself and buy them. What are you hiding?’ He said, ‘Aw, you know, Jer.’ I said, ‘“You know, Jer”? my balls! This is something an individual, who has the inalienable right to live as a human being, with the pink slip on himself, won’t go over to a stand and buy what the fuck he wants with his own hard-earned money?’ He said, ‘Can I please send out for them?’ And I said, ‘OK.’ He was so fuckin’ cute. He loved sitting in the corner and having a beer and he had his fuckin’ comic books. And if a Western was on, he tabled that and the Western is on!”
That Dean Martin died on Christmas Day was the kind of black joke he might have made. It didn’t seem real to me until I heard that all the casinos on the Vegas Strip had turned off their lights for one minute to commemorate Dino’s passing. You could almost hear Dean saying, in amazement, “One whole minute!? I must have been a big shot.” He was.
Born Dino Paul Crocetti, June 7, 1917, Steubenville, Ohio; died December 25, 1995, Beverly Hills, CA.
Selected starring features (with director):
1950: At War with the Army (Hal Walker)
1951: That’s My Boy (Walker)
1952: Sailor Beware (Walker); Jumping Jacks (Norman Taurog)
1953: The Stooge (Taurog); Scared Stiff (George Marshall); The Caddy (Taurog)
1954: Living It Up (Taurog)
1955: Artists and Models (Frank Tashlin)
1956: Hollywood or Bust (Tashlin)
1958: The Young Lions (Edward Dmytryk); Some Came Running (Vincente Minnelli)
1959: Rio Bravo (Howard Hawks)
1960: Who Was That Lady? (George Sidney); Bells Are Ringing (Minnelli); Ocean’s Eleven (Lewis Milestone)
1963: 4 for Texas (Robert Aldrich)
1964: Kiss Me, Stupid (Billy Wilder)
1965: The Sons of Katie Elder (Henry Hathaway)
1966: The Silencers (Phil Karlson); Murderers’ Row (Henry Levin)
1967: The Ambushers (Levin)
1968: Bandolero! (Andrew V. McLaglen)
1970: Airport (George Seaton)
10
SAL MINEO
“You know what day they killed me?” Sal Mineo said with his usual macabre amusement. “The same day as Kennedy—November 22nd [1963]. We’re all up there in Monument Valley—and the Old Man likes the weather.” He is talking about John Ford on a picture called Cheyenne Autumn, in which Mineo played an American Indian, Red Shirt. “So he says, ‘Let’s kill Saul.’ He always called me Saul—I don’t know why—and they get the camera set up and old Ricardo Montalban shoots me. I fall down. Ford says, ‘That’s well!’ and they do something else. A couple of hours later we hear the President’s been murdered and Ford calls a wrap for the rest of the day. Somebody figured out that at the same time Ricardo was shooting me, Oswald was shooting Kennedy. Is this weird?” Having riveted everyone’s attention, Sal suddenly dropped his head to the left, closing his eyes as he did, and snored softly in a mock sleep. This sleeping bit was an old number of his which never failed to get a laugh from me. At that moment it was a significant gesture of self-deprecation, a trait of Sal’s. But he could as easily use the snoring to demolish pretense and ease boredom by pointing it out.
The bizarre irony of the shooting story, however, was in no way clear that cool evening in Manhattan when Sal told it in the spring of 1964. None of us had enough perspective at the time to realize how much Kennedy’s death would come to represent the end of a generation’s brief, perhaps even illusory, moment of political inspiration. Certainly Sal was far too unpretentious to make any serious connection between Kennedy and himself, yet both, in vastly different ways, became American symbols: Kennedy of the sixties, Mineo of the fifties. Nor could any of us have guessed that Sal’s death scene in Cheyenne Autumn was to be his last film appearance of note, though he was to live another twelve years. But we both were only twenty-five then (he was six months older) and there were a lot of things we didn’t know.
Sal Mineo as Dov Landau, the sympathetic Jewish terrorist, here with Jill Haworth (who fell in love with him) in Otto Preminger’s Exodus (1960), a profoundly relevant film about the birth of Israel, based on Leon Uris’ best seller. Mineo received his second Academy nomination for Best Supporting Actor, and gives probably his finest performance.
Of course, Sal knew a great deal more than I did—he’d been out in the world so much longer. A child actor on the Broadway stage—in the original productions of Tennessee Williams’ The Rose Tattoo (with Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach) and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The King and I (with Gertrude Lawrence and Yul Brynner)—Sal was a beautiful little boy riding the subways home alone to the Bronx while my parents weren’t allowing me on
the streets after dark. But Sal was from a large Sicilian family, and if his paycheck could help everyone out, where was the harm? He told me he’d seen enough John Garfield movies to sustain him in nervous situations, particularly after he started carrying around a pistol loaded with blanks.
One time in a deserted subway car, a heavyset, smarmy man in his mid-thirties tried to pick him up, only to discover that Sal’s big, innocent brown eyes were deceptive. When the guy wouldn’t leave him alone, Sal pulled out the gun and made the fellow drop to his knees, keeping him there at bay until Sal’s stop came up and the train slowed down. Then he pulled the trigger. “Jesus, the sound was so loud it scared the shit out of the guy. He thought he was dead. There was nothing wrong with him, but he started yelling. The doors opened and I ran like hell. I ran all the way home.”
By the time he was fifteen, Sal was in Hollywood making pictures. Not much more than a year later, in 1956, he received an Academy Award nomination for a supporting performance in what was only his third movie, Rebel Without a Cause, directed by Nicholas Ray and starring James Dean, a good friend who had died in a car crash two weeks before the movie was released. Sal was seventeen. Jack Lemmon won Best Supporting Actor that year for Mister Roberts, but the teenage hearts went out to Sal, a survivor of the Dean tragedy and an heir to much of the posthumous adulation that followed.
It was Mineo, after all, who had played out the surrogate death scene in Rebel: he is senselessly gunned down by police who do not know that the revolver he is brandishing has already been emptied by his friend Dean. “I got the bullets!” Jimmy yells out desperately, but too late. “I got the bullets!” he sobs, but Sal is dead. Were the public’s tears for the character Sal played or for the futility in Jimmy Dean’s cry, transfixed in the audience’s view by the knowledge of Dean’s own death? If it was reassuring that Sal was just acting—after all, it’s only a movie—what thought could ease the sadness that Dean’s offscreen fate was no fiction? For a generation of otherwise complacent American children, death suddenly became an early reality.
No character could have been more unlike Sal than the withdrawn, insecure and neurotic teenager he played in Rebel. Indeed, I never saw any movie that even remotely captured his essentially sunny, easygoing qualities, his quick wit and infectious self-mockery. The rest of his teens were spent mainly in a succession of juvenile-delinquent roles both on live TV and in pictures. Before he died, Jimmy Dean had got him a small role in the Rocky Graziano biopic, Somebody Up There Likes Me; when Dean was killed, Paul Newman took over and Sal kept his role, in which he was excellent as usual. Especially so in Dino (a hit play on TV for Sal, then repeated for the big screen). He showed real charm in Raoul Walsh’s forgettable but likeable service romance, A Private’s Affair. To play the title role in The Gene Krupa Story, Sal spent days perfecting his drumming, studying Krupa. Again, unfortunately, he was a great deal better than the picture. In George Stevens’ Giant he had a tiny role, thanks once more to Jimmy Dean, but he is entirely convincing in Don Siegel’s hard-edged Crime in the Streets—another TV play transferred to the big screen—with a superb cast including John Cassavetes and Mark Rydell.
Mineo (second from left), with Mark Rydell, John Cassavetes and James Whitmore in yet another juvenile-delinquent picture, Crime in the Streets (1956), based on a TV drama, and adroitly directed for the big screen by Don Siegel.
His finest, most enduring film performance, however, came as Dov Landau in Otto Preminger’s hugely successful Exodus, now considered among the last masterpieces from the movies’ golden age. On the film, Sal met fifteen-year-old Jill Haworth, and the two fell in love. As Exodus opened, they made the cover of Life together. He received another Oscar nomination for an extraordinarily intense, heartbreaking performance as the tortured young Israeli terrorist, certainly a rebel with a cause. But the old establishment snobs in Hollywood could never quite forgive him his teenage popularity and gave the award to Peter Ustinov for an infinitely less challenging role in Spartacus, a considerably inferior film as well.
This was symptomatic of the prevailing critical winds around Sal Mineo in the early sixties; they were anything but favorable. The best gauge of unspoken antipathy is my own reaction to finding him among the cast of the John Ford picture I had been sent to cover (Cheyenne Autumn). Not even my idolatrous admiration of the director could counteract a vague sense of distress at finding Mineo listed with the players when I arrived on the Navajo Indian reservation in Monument Valley. Preconceived notions of what celebrated people are like must account for a good measure of all the misunderstanding and hostility in our ever more informed society. It is a lesson—do not make personal judgments based on hearsay—that cannot be learned often enough, and Sal taught me first.
Not that he was particularly aware of any instruction going on. He could tell we were similar in age, and since there were very few twenty-four-year-olds around—the majority of the cast and crew were well over thirty, forty or fifty, and Ford himself was in his late sixties—I would guess Sal was pleased to see a contemporary, especially one from his hometown. We were seated next to each other at one of my first meals on the location, and he immediately struck up a conversation.
I’ve still to meet anyone quite so instantly disarming as Sal was. Inhibitions and prejudices dissolved in the heady rush of his good humor and his 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. His nature was generous—from the $350,000 Mamaroneck home he bought for his parents in the first flush of success—to the many kindnesses he showed me both before and after I moved to California in mid-1964.
Indirectly, he even paid for the trip. Enthusiastic about him when I returned from the Ford location, I talked Harold Hayes into letting me do an Esquire piece on Sal. Harold was more than a little reluctant, but a few of the funnier Mineo stories convinced him. Sal and Jill Haworth and I spent some time together in New York—along with my first wife, Polly Platt, and a young singer Sal had discovered and was promoting named Bobby Sherman. We all had a few meals, hung out at a recording studio most of one day while Sal made a single. He didn’t feel comfortable with his singing (though he had some hit singles and a popular album in the fifties), and preferred to encourage and sponsor Bobby. I met Sal’s parents, his two older brothers and his younger sister Sarina, of whom he was especially protective. Only Sal and Sarina looked related, like dark Mediterranean angels come to earth—you could instantly tell they were brother and sister. Neither of the other siblings nor the parents resembled them.
Sal brought the first Beatles records over to my tiny Riverside Drive apartment and played them loudly late into the night, joking compulsively, listening to dreamy aspirations, telling some of his own. On opening night of an ill-fated production I directed and produced off-Broadway, I received one telegram from the Coast; it read: “Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Love, Sal.” Hayes bought the article (I used the money to buy an old car and move to California), had it set in type, had photos taken, but never ran it (the original has been lost). After several postponements, he admitted finally: “I just couldn’t stand the idea of having Sal Mineo in the magazine.”
It was the dominant attitude. Sal had somehow become an anachronistic reminder of the teenage fifties—which chic people now preferred to forget. That he was also widely acknowledged as a talented actor seemed beside the point. In some circles, his name had become a punch line. As my fortunes improved in the late sixties and early seventies, Sal’s deteriorated. When I first arrived in Los Angeles, the car Sal drove was a giant four-door Bentley, and the Santa Monica home he rented was grand and spacious. But the movie jobs stopped coming while the debts remained: in particular, over a quarter of a million dollars in back taxes. Mineo’s houses kept getting smaller, and so did his cars, though it took a while to notice because one thing Sal never did was complain about anything. One afternoon, when he asked i
f he could have some run-down old furniture we were getting rid of, I began to get the picture.
As a favor, he did a walk-on for me in my first movie, Targets, but the shot was eventually cut out. Sal hung around all day to watch. He had been the first person to offer me a job in pictures, writing a script for him. We talked a lot about it but he never could get the rights to the novel he had suggested we do, William Maxwell’s The Folded Leaf. Maxwell did not want to sell them. Sal directed me one afternoon in a home-movie thriller we started but never finished. We kept breaking up too much. I would start to peer over a sand dune, as he had instructed, and as soon as I appeared over the rise, I would hear him trying to suppress laughter. I broke up and so did he. This happened about ten times before we finally stopped for lunch. One time we were hanging out in a beach house he had rented, and Bobby Sherman was listening to Sal and me discuss Michelangelo’s work. After several minutes, Bobby said, “Michael Angelo—is he the guy who directed Around the World in 80 Days?” Sal looked so shocked that he actually put one hand on top of his head, as though fearful that it was going to fly off. “No … that’s Michael Anderson,” he said wildly. “Michelangelo is only one of the greatest artists that ever lived!” And then Sal and I completely broke up.
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