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 SAL MINEO
A BIOGRAPHY

M I C HA E L G R E G G MI C H AUD

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 Copyright © 2010 by Michael Gregg Michaud

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown Archetype,
an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group,
a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Crown Archetype with colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

All photographs are from the collection of the author unless otherwise credited.

Back jacket photo captions: top row (left to right): With James Dean in Rebel Without a
Cause, 1955; with Jill Haworth in Cyprus, 1959; with friends, the Bronx, July 1956;
bottom row ( left to right): at the Gotham Health Club, New York, 1956; with Courtney
Burr III, Norfolk, England, 1971; with Gigi Perreau at the Chinese Theatre, Hollywood,
1956.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data is available upon request.

ISBN 978-0-307-71868-6

Printed in the United States of America

design by barbara sturman

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

First Edition

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 Sal Mineo, 1955

T H I S B O O K I S D E D I C AT E D T O

JILL HAWORTH AND COURTNEY BURR—

two very different people who loved the same complicated man.
Without their loving recollections and willingness to
bravely and graciously share their stories with me,
this book would not have been possible.
In writing this story, I have learned why Sal loved them both.

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 FOREWORD

I
n 1957, a magazine editor asked eighteen-year-old Sal Mineo to write
an autobiographical feature article for an upcoming issue. The young
star was riding high, having earned nominations for an Academy
Award and an Emmy Award for his acting abilities.
“It’s hard to write about yourself,” Sal said at the time. “I just
wanted to do a story about a boy who gets into show business. I wanted
to do it in the third person, and then at the end say, ‘And, by the way,
his name happened to be Sal Mineo.’ But the editor said that wasn’t
being fair with the readers. That it was a freshman-theme device. So
I had to do it over. And I really labored. How can you tell all about
yourself in four thousand words? If you leave something out, then it
isn’t true.”

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 PA R T O N E

THE BOY FROM

THE BRONX

Sal, the Bronx, 1950

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 1.

“Should I spend all of my time dancing to become

like Fred Astaire or all of my time with a bat and
ball and be Phil Rizzuto?”

T
he winter was mild with little snow in New York City in 1939.
Just east of town, in a marshy wasteland in Flushing Meadows,
construction proceeded on exhibition halls and pavilions for the
1939 New York World’s Fair. In spite of the dark war clouds hovering
over Europe, the fair’s theme was one of international cooperation.
The exciting lure of the World’s Fair went unnoticed by most immi-
grant families trying to survive in an unsteady economy and struggling
to pay fourteen cents for a quart of milk and nine cents for a loaf of
white bread.
On Tuesday, January 10, a child was born to a Sicilian immigrant
and his American-born Italian wife in an apartment in Harlem. As is
the old Sicilian custom, this third son would be named after his father.
Salvatore Mineo Jr. was a healthy baby.
“The original pronunciation of our family name was ‘Min-ayo,’ ”
Sal explained, “but we use the Americanized ‘Min-ee-o,’ with the ac-
cent on the first syllable.”
Josephine, a short, well-proportioned woman, was adamant that
only English be spoken in her home. Quiet by nature, Mr. Mineo
was always self-conscious about his accent, though he was fluent in
English. With the exception of a few words and phrases, Sal never
learned to speak Italian.
Two days after Salvatore Jr. was born, a gangster was murdered just
outside the Mineo apartment, and his parents decided to move their
family immediately. They took a small, three-room, cold-water flat on
the fourth floor of a brick building in an Italian section of the Bronx.
The monthly rent was $20. The bathtub in the middle of the room
doubled as a dining table. “The move,” said Sal, “was a step up.”
“My father was born in Sicily,” Sal explained. “He came here when
he was sixteen, and for two years he could only get odd jobs, doing all
kinds of dirty work.” Salvatore Mineo Sr. was tall, lanky, and darkly

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 4 / Michael Gregg Michaud

handsome. He fled Sicily in 1929 with nothing more than a sense of

adventure and a wooden mandolin strapped to his back. In the day-
time he sawed wood for carpenters, laid bricks, and carved little ani-
mals in ivory and wood that he sold on the street. In the evening, he
courted a young, American-born Italian girl named Josephine Alvisi.
“My mother was born in New York City of Neapolitan parentage,”
Sal recounted. “My dad tried to date her, but she wouldn’t go out
with him—not unless he could speak English. When he finally took
her out, she was amazed at how quickly he had learned the language.
Here’s a guy with ambition, she felt.”
Salvatore married Josephine in 1931 when they were both eighteen
years old. He was working as a cabinetmaker and finish carpenter when
their first child, a son named Victor, was born in 1935. A second son,
named Michael, was born two years later.
When Salvatore Jr. was born in 1939, his father had begun work-
ing for the Bronx Casket Company. In the beginning, Salvatore hand-
finished the coffins. “My father was so good,” Sal said, “they made him a
foreman. He worked like a dog—even nights. It was my mother though
who really made him. Here you are, she told him, working like a dog
for others. You should be working for yourself, and for your children.”
The family struggled for several years. The three boys slept in one
bed in a small room off the kitchen. Sal wore hand-me-down clothes.
Their baby sister, Sarina, born three years after Sal, slept in a nearby
crib. “We always had plenty of food,” Sal recalled, “but we did eat lots
of spaghetti.”
“Pop and Mama came to realize that they couldn’t make a go of
it on the money he was earning,” Sal explained. “And so Pop decided
to borrow money and start a business of his own. He knew something
about coffin making and chose that as the business he’d sink or swim
with. My father didn’t have a dime, but friends insisted on putting up
the money to back him. So, in 1946, he went into business with my
uncle, and they opened up Universal Casket Company.”
To begin, the Mineos rented the basement of the building they
were living in for the coffin business. A small room was used to show
two casket models for prospective clients. Salvatore worked slowly and
meticulously, crafting one or two caskets each week.
Josephine decided her husband needed a secretary. She scraped

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 Sal M i n e o / 5

together a staggering $160 and took a business course by correspon-

dence. At first, she did her husband’s accounting at night. But Jose-
phine was ambitious. She told her husband that in addition to doing
all the bookkeeping, she would solicit orders on his behalf so he could
concentrate on making coffins.
Her husband worried about their four young children. Josephine
had this problem figured out as well. “Some days,” she said, “so they
don’t forget who are their parents, they come to the shop and they stay
with us.
“Of course,” Josephine explained, “I had to take them to the shop
more than I thought I’d have to. Because they were only children and
they couldn’t seem to stay home all day without me and not get into
some kind of mischief.”
The boys loved to play jacks and marbles in the gutter and swing
like monkeys on the fire escapes, climbing up one and down the other.
They played stickball with broom bats in the street, and Sal and Mike
regularly got into trouble for dropping piss bombs (urine-filled bal-
loons) on unsuspecting, and sometimes targeted, passersby beneath
the roof of their building.
Kathy Schiano, a childhood friend, recalled Sal fondly. “Sal was
just so little, and always trying to keep up with his older brothers. He
just threw himself in the mix. Victor stuck close to his younger broth-
ers, but Sal and Mike were thick as thieves.”
“The first five years were the toughest,” Sal recalled. He never for-
got what it was like for his father in those early days. “I never saw a
man age so fast. He and my uncle used to do all the work themselves—
hauling lumber, making the caskets, painting them, even delivering
them. My mother used to go down every day. And as soon as they
were old enough, my two older brothers worked at the company. And
as soon as we were old enough to handle tools, Pop taught us how to
pitch in and help with the repair work. Soon all of us boys could use a
paintbrush, splice a wire, and solder a pipe.”
Sal’s main job was staying at home and babysitting his sister. “I
guess that’s why I’m so close to her,” he said. “I took care of her—
everything from feeding to good-night stories when my parents were
working late. Sure, I wanted to be out playing with the other kids, but
we all had to help out.”

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 6 / Michael Gregg Michaud

Every penny Mr. Mineo earned went back into the business, and
still they struggled. But Mr. and Mrs. Mineo somehow managed to
ensure that none of their children ever wanted for anything. “Even
if they had to deprive themselves,” Sal added. All three sons got the
same treatment, too. If one boy wanted a bike, then all three boys got
bikes.
The kids in the neighborhood challenged Sal all the time about his
father’s business. “A guy would come up to me and ask, ‘What does
your father do?’ knowing exactly what he did,” Sal said. And Sal would
defiantly clench his fists and answer, “He makes caskets. What are you
going to do about it?”
Josephine instilled a healthy fear of God in her children. Sal was
six when he received his first communion at the Holy Family Church
on Castle Hill Avenue in the Bronx. A devout, churchgoing Catholic,
she enrolled her children in parochial school. He was confirmed at the
age of seven.
Sal was introduced to acting at the age of eight, when he attended
St. Mary’s Parochial School in the Bronx. “The sisters asked me to play
the Savior as a boy. I was like a kid dumbstruck. I had seen the movies
and knew there was such a thing as acting. But to have these women
ask me to portray Jesus as a youth—well, that was something beyond
my understanding,” Sal said.
“I was scared at first; I was afraid that it would be wrong. That after-
noon I took home the script and studied it as though my life depended
on it. A few days later in a religious book I was studying I saw a picture
of Christ as a boy. In it he was carrying a staff. I decided I wanted one.
The sisters told me it wasn’t necessary to have one in the play, but I
had become a stickler for realism. I had to have a staff. Someone sug-
gested a sawed-off broomstick. I wouldn’t hear of it. By the afternoon
of the play I still didn’t have a staff. We dressed in one of the class-
rooms. When I was ready, I walked down the corridor to the rear of the
stage entrance. I felt awful without the staff.
“And then I saw it. It was hanging on the wall. A fire hook over a
sign: ‘For Emergency Only.’ For me, this was a genuine emergency! I
took the hook down, and I tied a blue ribbon from my costume on the
top. Can you picture me walking onto that stage, so happy, with that
fire hook? Anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking of the stage.”

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 Sal M i n e o / 7

Sal’s days at St. Mary’s School were numbered. He was sensitive

about his size, being slight for his age, and was often picked on by
other boys. Sal always met their challenge, though, and he was quick
with his little fists. He was expelled from the fourth grade for slugging
a rival boy.
Josephine appealed to a priest who helped enroll Sal in another
parochial school called Holy Family. In fact, she wouldn’t leave the
priest’s office until he accepted Sal. The discipline-minded nuns found
him too much to handle, though, and again he was expelled for fight-
ing in the school yard, and for being incorrigible.
“Sal’s our baby brother,” recalled Victor Mineo, “but he’s the
toughest guy in the family. If Mike or I got into fights with the boys
around the neighborhood, Sal would always come running, fists
flying.”
In a couple of years, the Mineos managed to repay some of their
debt to friends and family, and the coffin business began to turn a
small profit. In an effort to get their family away from bad “city” influ-
ences, they found a dilapidated, three-story, wood-shingle house in
the Throgs Neck section of the Bronx at 2485 Wenner Place near East
217th Street and the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge. The Mineos moved
into the top two floors and rented out the first floor to help pay the
mortgage. Josephine was relieved that her children could safely play in
open fields instead of the streets. There was a nearby creek where the
kids went fishing, and a swimming hole. On one side of the house a
lane led down to the sound.
Sal Sr. converted an extra kitchen tucked into an eave on the third
floor into a makeshift bedroom for Sal. The sink and kitchen cabinets re-
mained, and it was painted pale blue—Sal’s favorite color. Sal loved his
room, which was the smallest in the house, and enjoyed having privacy
for the first time. Each child had a room of his or her own. Josephine
converted the back porch into a home office where she could work.
To keep off the streets, Sal and his brothers spent Saturday morn-
ings running errands for their father’s business. Josephine would pre-
pare a picnic lunch of sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, which they’d
share. Afterward, the boys played hide-and-seek among the unfinished
caskets in the woodworking shop.
Once, Sal hid in a casket and the lid snapped shut, trapping him

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 8 / Michael Gregg Michaud

inside. Mike found him an hour later and asked him if he had been
frightened. “No,” Sal said. “I knew someone would come and find me
pretty soon.” Sal knew his brothers were always watching out for him.
“They didn’t fight with me; they didn’t tease me,” he said. “They
protected me.”
Sal’s experiences at his next school were no better than before. On
his first day at PS 72 in the Bronx, the guys ganged up on him in the
boys’ room. Sal tried to fight them off one at a time but was quickly
overtaken.
Soon, Sal established himself with his schoolmates, however. A
bully pulled a switchblade on him in a school yard fight. Sal knocked
the knife out of his assailant’s hand with the buckle of his garrison
belt. Then they had a bloody, vicious fight, until a teacher pulled them
apart.
“If anybody won, I guess I did,” Sal recalled. “But the important
thing was that, for the first time, I felt the other kids were rooting for
me. Y’know?”
Sal couldn’t recall a time in his childhood when he wasn’t running
with a gang or getting into street fights. Still, he loved going to the
movies, and it was his mother who introduced him to movie musi-
cals. His love of Fred Astaire movies caused the kids in his neighbor-
hood to call him a sissy. He quickly responded by beating them up.
“I could have gone on the wrong track,” Sal confided to columnist
Sidney Skolsky years later. “I didn’t get my nose busted acting in mov-
ies,” he laughed.
Sal may have been perceived as a tough character in the neigh-
borhood, but to his sister, he was the “most soft-hearted person” she
knew. He walked home with Sarina after school and stayed with her
until their mother came home from the shop.
Sarina said, “It was Sal who cheered me, cracking jokes and teach-
ing me to play checkers and Monopoly whenever I was sick. To under-
stand Sal, you have to realize he is strong and sensitive at the same
time. He seems to know what you’re thinking and feeling before you
quite know it yourself. And then he’s able to comfort and guide you,
no matter what the trouble is.”

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 Sal M i n e o / 9

ON A sweltering day in the summer of 1948, Sal was playing with his
sister and some neighborhood boys on the sidewalk in front of their
home. A man approached the children. Sal took Sarina’s hand and
looked at the stranger suspiciously.
“How would you kids like to be on TV?” the man asked. “Dancing
and singing?”
The kids laughed, but Sal stood up to the man and said, “What we
gotta do?”
“Take lessons,” the man said. “After you take some lessons, I’ll put
you on TV.”
Sal looked at his friends, who were snickering at the stranger. “I
think you’re fulla baloney,” Sal snarled. Then he jumped on the curb
and started to sing and dance to mock the man and amuse his friends.
“Son,” the man said, “you have talent. Take me to your mother.”
Moments later, the man was explaining his proposal to Josephine,
who was skeptical. The man told her that Sal had potential and he was
so appealing and good-looking. He assured her that he could get Sal
on television, and he had connections to a dancing school in Manhat-
tan that might have room for one more student. He promised to get
Sal an audition for a popular local television program called The Chil-
dren’s Hour. Josephine was unconvinced.
Sal begged to attend the school. “Ma, send me, Ma. Give me
lessons, Ma . . . huh?” He nagged his mother until she accepted the
stranger’s card. Josephine said she would talk it over with her husband
and call him.
That night the Mineo family had a meeting. Josephine felt that
something had to be done to keep Sal out of trouble, so she decided
that Sal could get his dancing lessons, and Mike and Victor would
get music lessons. They wanted to learn to play the saxophone and
clarinet.
Josephine took Sal to the dancing school, but her skepticism was
soon confirmed. The school wanted to charge the Mineos for photo-
graphing their son and requested a hefty enrollment fee. In addition,
the stranger had no real connection to the school or any apparent con-
nections to television. In spite of this, Josephine enrolled Sal.
“Since I was too small to be left home alone,” Sarina said, “it was
decided that I’d take singing and dancing lessons too, and while Mom

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 10 / Michael Gregg Michaud

took Sal and me to the school, the other two boys had a music lesson
at home. In this way, we were all kept busy at the same time and no
one got into trouble.”
“We didn’t have very much money,” Josephine recalled. “To pay
for the kids’ music and dancing lessons, I used to do typing and
bookkeeping at the school. It was worth it because Sal was in seventh
heaven. I couldn’t stop the boy from dancing.”
The boys helped to pay for their lessons by maintaining paper
routes. Sal went into the newspaper business at the age of nine. “I sold
papers in the Bronx,” Sal remembered. “My spot was near a subway
kiosk and my brother Victor warned me never to get on the trains
without him. But one afternoon I wanted to get on one and go. And
all of a sudden I was on Broadway. A million miles of colored neon,
earsplitting whistles, and those head-piercing police sirens. I thought
the world had gone mad. And I was alone. I was so small, people fell
over me.
“Then I saw a theater marquee. You know what I did? I counted
the letters to see if my name would fit. ‘Salvatore’ was too long, so I
changed it right then and there to ‘Sal.’ ”
Sal and Sarina quickly outgrew the dancing school and Josephine
found another, the Marie Moser Dance Academy. Her two youngest
children were soon dancing again with renewed enthusiasm.
One evening Josephine was worried about Sal’s disinterest in any-
thing but his dancing lessons. “Salvatore,” she said to her husband,
“I can’t get it out of my mind. Sal is such a nice little boy. He should
be running and playing, not thinking all the time about work, and
dancing and being an acrobat. Who knows what he’ll think of next? It
seems he doesn’t want a childhood.”
Sal thought about his mother’s comments that night. He sat up in
bed and wondered, “Should I spend all of my time dancing to become
like Fred Astaire or all of my time with a bat and ball and be Phil Riz-
zuto?” Sal loved baseball. He collected baseball cards and he and Mike
snuck into Yankee Stadium to watch games.
The next morning over breakfast he told his mother, “I really
want to go to dance school. I’ve decided because if I become a ball-
player, I can’t start working till I’m eighteen, but as an actor I can start
tomorrow.”

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 Sal M i n e o / 11

For two years, he would go twice a week for three hours straight of
lessons.
“It was almost frightening the way Sal applied himself to his work,”
Josephine recalled. “Hour after hour, he’d practice in his own room.
I’d have to make him go out and play.”
Because of their financial limitations, Josephine couldn’t afford
dancing lessons and two sets of shoes for Sal, one for dancing and
one for school. There was only one solution. Sal had to wear his tap
shoes to school. “I’d walk in the dirt instead of the pavement so the
kids wouldn’t hear the big taps on my shoes,” Sal said. But his dancing
lessons still earned him many black eyes from his schoolmates. One
particular brawl broke Sal’s ten-year-old nose, making him more deter-
mined than ever.
“The dancing school had a Saturday afternoon program on TV,”
Victor recalled, “and Sal and Sarina were scheduled to dance. Then
came the big day! Sal was so excited; you could hardly get him to talk
about anything else.” With Sal’s carefully combed hair and natty suit,
and Sarina’s curls and crinoline dress, Josephine’s youngest children
smiled broadly beneath a sign that read marie moser’s starlets as the
recital was broadcast locally in New York City. Their many weeks of
rehearsals paid off. Shortly afterward, Sal and Sarina, and several other
star pupils from the school, appeared on The Ted Steele Show, a variety
program broadcast live from New York City.
Sal’s appearance on this very popular show caused him problems
with his schoolmates and friends, though. “The day after I danced on
The Ted Steele Show, I was out of the gang again,” Sal recalled. “I got the
‘sissy’ routine from them and I wound up in a long and bloody fight
with the gang president. We got taken to the principal’s office, and he
wanted to know why I’d started the battle. So I told him. And I had to
dance eight bars to prove it!”
School continued to be a problem for Sal, especially since he be-
came interested in dancing and performing. He had aptitude but was
easily distracted from his studies. “Sal is a bright boy,” a schoolteacher
wrote on his report card, “with great potential. Too often, though, his
energy is channeled in the wrong directions.” Sal was called into the
principal’s office weekly for brawling. He was even brought into the po-
lice station a few times to answer questions about his local gang’s antics.

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 12 / Michael Gregg Michaud

“We were just kids,” Sal recalled, “and we were always getting into
trouble. It wasn’t anything really terrible—mostly things like breaking
windows, stealing small things just for the hell of it. I was a hood. The
school would call home, or the cops would, and my family couldn’t
stop me. Finally I got brought into court.”
Sal’s gang had decided to steal sports equipment from the school’s
locker rooms. Sal was the smallest kid, so he slipped into a basement
window and handed the equipment up to his friends. They hid their
stolen goods in an empty coffin in Mr. Mineo’s shop.
The judge admonished Josephine and assigned a social worker to
the case. “This boy will be sent to a correctional institution unless an
alternative can be found,” he said. Sal’s teachers and the social worker
felt he was causing trouble because he was bored rather than emotion-
ally disturbed. They searched for a way to channel his energy into
something more productive.
“They told my mother that she should send me to a school in
Manhattan where I could study acting,” Sal said. “They thought it
would keep me too busy to raise hell—and they were right.”

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 2.

“It wasn’t really acting. We just ran across the stage

laughing and chasing the goat. But during that
year, I began to want to be an actor.”

S
al’s court-recommended school in Manhattan accepted kids at
very early ages and occupied them for four or five hours a day
with singing and dancing lessons for a small enrollment fee.
Many years later, Sal recalled, “I thought it was a gag. And I told
the buddies back home how I got out of going to a boys’ school hav-
ing a ball, singing and dancing and all that. Actually, most of the time
I was playing cards in the washroom while everyone else was singing
and dancing.”
One day in early December 1950, Sal had accompanied Sarina to
her dance class and was standing along the wall in the studio waiting
for her lesson to conclude. Earlier in the year, their dancing had earned
them a second appearance on The Ted Steele Show and an uncredited
soft-shoe routine on The Milton Berle Show, the highest-rated show on
television.
A casting agent, looking for children for a new Broadway play, had
gone to the Bronx looking for “an Italian-looking” boy. He spotted
Sal, wrote an address on his business card, and told him to be there the
next afternoon.
A suspicious Josephine took Sal to a cavernous theater on Broad-
way the next day. Sal joined fifteen other boys onstage and confidently
recited the line “The goat is in the yard.” Daniel Mann, a director from
the Actors Studio, and veteran producer Cheryl Crawford, picked Sal
to play the part of Salvatore in The Rose Tattoo, a new play by Pulitzer
Prize–winning author Tennessee Williams. Sal was instructed to come
back to the theater in two days to begin rehearsing with the principal
actors, Maureen Stapleton and Eli Wallach.
“Who’s your agent?” Crawford asked Sal.
“What’s an agent?” Sal answered, looking at his mother.
Crawford sent Mrs. Mineo and her son to a veteran theatrical
agent named Alec Alexander at 70 East Fifty-sixth Street. With Sal’s

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 14 / Michael Gregg Michaud

black curly hair, big brown eyes, and olive-colored skin, Alexander
thought the boy looked “a little too ethnic.” Still, knowing he had a
sure bet since the kid had just been offered a role in a Broadway show,
the savvy agent agreed to represent him.
Josephine sat in stunned silence all the way back to the Bronx.
Clutched in her hand was an open-ended contract for her son to act
in his first Broadway play for $75 per week. Eleven-year-old Sal would
now be earning more money than his father.
The story, one of playwright Williams’s most poignant, was set
among Sicilian immigrant fishermen in a small village along the Gulf
Coast of the United States. The Rose Tattoo told the story of Serafina
Delle Rose, a restless widow, and the man she chose as her lover. Sal
had a small part as a village boy. When the curtain rose, he chased a
live goat across the stage and cried out, “The goat is in the yard!”
“After taking dramatic and dancing lessons for three years, I finally
auditioned for a real big show,” Sal recalled. “I was eleven at the time,
and I had to show them I could read a script well, so I figured when
they signed me that it was for a pretty good part. I can clearly remem-
ber how hurt I was when I showed up for the first rehearsal. My big fat
part consisted of chasing a goat onstage. Worse still, that damn goat
stole the scene every time. But it was Broadway!”
Sal went to the theater every day to rehearse his one line and run-
ning entrance. When he wasn’t on the stage, he sat for hours carefully
watching director Daniel Mann work with Stapleton and Wallach. Sal
explained, “Daniel Mann taught me a great deal. I learned by watching
him direct others, and I think this is an important part of any perform-
er’s career. He made me really want to act, and it gave me confidence.”
Williams insisted his new play preview in Chicago. Sal’s father
was not pleased by the prospect of Sal’s working and was especially
concerned about putting his youngest son alone on a train bound for
Chicago. Once again, five-foot-two-inch Josephine imposed her will,
assuring her husband that Sal would be fine.
Sal’s family and aunts, uncles, and cousins gathered at Grand Cen-
tral Station to watch him board the train. “I cried when I left,” Sal
remembered. “This was the first time I had been separated from the
family. But we all knew that this might be the beginning of a career.”
The Rose Tattoo premiered on December 29 at the Erlanger Theatre.

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 Sal M i n e o / 15

The days in Chicago were exhausting and endless for the cast. Wil-
liams fussed with the script daily, adding or deleting lines and chal-
lenging the director’s choices.
Sal had an indulgent and devoted family, he told columnist Hedda
Hopper years later, but what he learned about life, he learned from
theater people. “It was Eli Wallach who told me about the birds and
the bees when we were in Chicago,” Sal explained. “He once studied
medicine and he gave me my first instruction in the facts of life. I had
very little to do in the play so I helped Eli put on his makeup. One day,
using all the correct terms, he told me about sex. When he got through
I said, ‘I know all that, only we used different words.’ He nearly fell off
the stool. Then when I told my family it was their turn to laugh.”

T H E R O S E TATT O O opened at the Martin Beck Theatre in New York

on February 3, 1951, to glowing reviews. “I knew what I wanted to do,”
Sal recalled. “When I saw people performing on the stage and then
saw the audience burst into applause for them, acting became my big
dream. Everyone said, ‘So you want to become a big star!’ There’s no
harm in dreaming.”
Sal’s trying days of school and formal education ended once and
for all when he was cast in Williams’s play. He continued his dancing
and drama lessons, but his irregular acting schedule, and now occa-
sional trips to casting agents’ offices, made it necessary for his mother
to hire a private tutor.
Sal had always been curious and wanted to learn, and the tutor
seemed to suit him very well. The older people Sal was now spending
most of his time with encouraged him to study. He enjoyed reading
classic plays. He became interested in writing, which would eventually
become an ambition. Sal also liked to draw and paint.
Josephine and Mike shared the task of taking the daily bus and
subway trips with Sal from the Bronx to Manhattan, which sometimes
took an hour. Mike would usually take Sal in the early evening. They
had to leave by 6:30 p.m. so Sal could make his 8:30 p.m. curtain. Mike
would sometimes spend the day with him during matinee Saturdays
and Wednesdays. Josephine would be waiting in the evening backstage
when the show was finished to ride back to Wenner Place with Sal,
who often fell asleep with his head in her lap as she read.

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 16 / Michael Gregg Michaud

“I CAME home one day, full of ‘Mineo the future star’ plans as usual,
to find the house empty,” Sal recalled. “That seemed kind of funny,
and I prowled around, wondering where all the family was. Then I
found the note. It said for me to go to the hospital right away. I ran the
whole distance, about half a mile, with my heart in my mouth and my
whole body in a cold sweat.”
Sarina had been admitted to the hospital and diagnosed with
polio. The infection affected her throat, and she was soon breathing
with the aid of forced oxygen. The doctors felt she might not recover.
Josephine was stoic and confident Sarina would recover. She sent
her husband back to work and told the boys not to worry. “We tried,
but it was hard to seem cheerful as we sat in Sarina’s hospital room,”
Sal said. “All we could hear was the sound of my sister’s labored breath-
ing under the oxygen tent. But Mother insisted that we believe, and
tell Sarina we believed, everything would be all right.”
That evening, Josephine accompanied Sal on the long ride to the
theater. They didn’t talk about his sister’s illness, though he knew from
his mother’s expression that Sarina’s condition was at a critical point.
“Before I found out that Sarina was so sick,” Sal said, “I used to
spend all my spare time writing her crazy joke cards with drawings and
pictures I used to take. Then, when I found out how serious her condi-
tion was, I somehow didn’t feel like making the joke cards anymore
or taking the crazy pictures. Instead, I began to sit down and write her
letters as a much more mature person. I began to understand people a
lot more and got a different outlook on life. Maybe this is how I began
to become an actor.”
Weeks passed, and Sarina gradually regained enough strength to be
released from the hospital. Josephine set her up on the sofa in the front
room so she could be a part of family activities. Sal stood by the sofa
and began to cry. Sarina asked Sal why he was crying. “Because you’re
home,” he said. “We’re a family again.”
After Sarina had recovered, Sal helped her regain strength by
coaching her with some dancing and swimming lessons. “You can al-
ways count on Sal,” Sarina said.

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 Sal M i n e o / 17

O N S U N D AY evening, March 25, 1951, the Mineo family listened to

the Tony Awards presentation broadcast live over New York radio sta-
tion WOR from the Waldorf Astoria Grand Ballroom. The Rose Tat-
too won four Tony Awards, including Best Play. The next morning,
Josephine sent eight-by-ten-inch portrait photographs of Sal, which
he personally autographed, with a letter proudly stating that Sal was
appearing in the best play on Broadway, to his many aunts, uncles,
cousins, and family friends.
Sal enjoyed his role in The Rose Tattoo, but he had higher ambitions
and made the rounds of casting agents’ offices regularly, always accom-
panied by his brother Mike. “Call it ambition, call it drive, call it what
you like,” Sal said. “One weekend I remember there was an elevator
strike. So I climbed up and down flights of stairs to ask producers, cast-
ing directors, and secretaries to place my photo in their files.”
Josephine had ambitions of her own for her youngest son, and
she set the tone for Sal’s interviews and auditions. Since he was now
appearing in the most popular and critically acclaimed show on Broad-
way, she was determined the attention should not go to his head.
Keeping the family tightly together was her only defense. “If Sal was
with his brothers,” she explained, “he couldn’t help but realize he was
no better than the rest of them. When problems came up, we’d all sit
down around the dining room table and thresh them out, no holds
barred! Sometimes we’d sit up until two o’clock in the morning after
Sal got home from the theater, just talking.”
Sal worked well with his tutor, but he was anxious to prove himself
as an actor. “I want to be a real professional,” he told Josephine. “I
want to be accepted in show business.”
But Sal was still a scrapper and wasn’t easily intimidated. He got
into a backstage fistfight with one of his young costars in The Rose Tat-
too and told his mother proudly, “Even if I am in show business, Ma, I
don’t ever want to become conceited.”
Josephine’s accounting chores now included managing Sal’s acting
income. Some portion of his earnings was diverted into his father’s
casket company, but the added paycheck proved to be a headache
rather than a windfall for the family. His private tutor cost $500 each
semester, his union dues were $115, his agent took 10 percent, and
publicity photographs cost $150. Additional costs included buses,

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 18 / Michael Gregg Michaud

subways, and taxicab rides to and from the theater in Manhattan. His
wardrobe, makeup, dramatic lessons and coaching, and daily meal and
tip costs quickly added up. In fact, when the addition and subtraction
was completed, Josephine was running in the red.
“But I didn’t mind,” she said. “I was investing in Sal’s future. I be-
lieved in him, and I wanted him to have good clothes, good meals, and
an education.” Still, something had to give.

AFTER MONTHS of trudging the New York streets handing out pho-
tographs to agents, Sal was called to audition for the part of Candido
in a Theatre Guild production of The Little Screwball at the Westport
Country Playhouse in Connecticut. Film veteran Walter Abel was to
star in the limited-run production. With Abel’s approval, Sal won
the role.
This new job offer provided two opportunities to Josephine. It
gave Sal the chance to assume a larger role in a new Broadway-bound
play for the prestigious Theatre Guild. Mike had been understudy-
ing the boys’ roles in The Rose Tattoo for about a month. Sal stepped
off the stage at the Martin Beck Theatre, and Mike assumed his little
brother’s part.
The Little Screwball, a heartwarming comedy written by Walt An-
derson, opened in July of 1951 at the Westport Country Playhouse,
not far from New York City. Later renamed Me, Candido! the play
told the heartwarming story of a homeless eleven-year-old shoe-
shine boy named Candido (played by Sal) who lives on the streets
of New York. He is unofficially adopted by Papa Gomez, a poor im-
migrant Puerto Rican family man; a gruff restaurant owner named
Mr. Ramirez; and an alcoholic but philosophical ex-longshoreman
named Mike McGinty. The adoptive fathers save Candido from the
streets and try to legally adopt him and keep him from being placed
in an institution.
The play was successful and ran for several weeks. Sarina was also
cast in a small role in the comedy. When Sal wasn’t entertaining his
sister, he was playing cards with the stagehands. Josephine now had
three children gainfully employed. She took Sal and Sarina by train to
Westport every day. Mike, now appearing in The Rose Tattoo on Broad-
way, had to fend for himself.

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 Sal M i n e o / 19

closed, Sal returned to New York and

A F T E R T H E L I TT L E S C R E W B A L L
began visiting casting agents again. In September Sal read for the part
of another shoeshine boy, in a new play called Dinosaur Wharf. He
won the role and anxiously began two months of arduous rehearsals.
Sal’s picture appeared in the New York Times on November 4, 1951,
to promote Dinosaur Wharf. His mother and her friends bought many
copies of the newspaper that day. Josephine began to compile a large
scrapbook about her youngest son’s burgeoning career and pinned a
copy of the newspaper picture on the wall in her kitchen.
Dinosaur Wharf opened at the National Theatre on November 8,
1951, and closed on November 10, 1951. “Rehearsals passed quickly,”
Sal recalled. “My excitement was great that first night when I received
telegrams from my family and friends. But the play was not a success,
and when it closed after four performances, I learned another very im-
portant part of show business: disappointment.”

Mich_9780307718686_4p_01_r1.indd 19 8/24/10 9:14 AM

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Sal Mineo
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