One Man’s Tribute to the Late Sal Mineo : Actor turns his longtime fascination with the ‘50s movie star into a critically acclaimed performance

It is the first time actor Carlos Gonzalez has been to the Griffith Observatory, one of the most recognizable film locations in movie history. He looks around at the planetarium, the view, the bronze bust of James Dean. The bust is a surprise. He feels, as he puts it, “eerie.” He knows the gun was fired on the steps leading up to the building’s entrance, and he knows that around the building to the left, down the road, at the back, was where the stabbing took place.

Gonzalez has seen “Rebel Without a Cause”--the film that became a modern icon of troubled youth--many times. He feels that he has been to the observatory before. He looks up at Dean’s bronze face with some of the same reverence that Sal Mineo, as the film’s worshipful Plato, looked at the character Dean played in the film. For a moment, he becomes Mineo.

Gonzalez, a San Francisco actor who recently relocated to Hollywood, is used to making that transition. In his one-man show “Sal,” he performs the feat nightly. During its highly successful San Francisco run, he was nominated by the Bay Area Drama Critics Circle for his solo turn, and the show was sold out through closing night. It began its Los Angeles run earlier this month at Hollywood’s Zephyr Theatre.

For 26-year-old Gonzalez, who will be recognized as a former series regular on NBC-TV’s “Midnight Caller,” it’s been a long journey in Mineo’s company.

It began before he became an actor, when he was 17. A sales clerk in a Polk Street store commented on the fact that he looked like Mineo. Gonzalez had never heard of him.

“Oh, he’s a movie star from the ‘50s,” his older brother told him.

Gonzalez thought that was pretty cool, a movie star. At the time, Gonzalez was into the music scene, a disc jockey at Bay Area nightclubs, studying acting on the side. It wasn’t until several years later, after he and two other actors produced and appeared in some Eric Bogosian monologues, that someone suggested he do a solo show. His mind snapped back to that sales clerk’s reaction, and his brother’s cautionary, “but you don’t want to end up like Mineo.”

He began doing research into the life and death of Mineo and discovered that the movie star was stabbed to death in his Hollywood carport by a stranger.

The play was conceived and written by Gonzalez in association with Richard Talavera and Hector Correa and is produced by Marcia Gray and Theatre Adelante. Gray, who has been a friend of Gonzalez’s for a long time, saw the show in San Francisco during its last week and decided to become involved in the current production.

“It’s really moving,” Gray says. “I was affected by it. That’s why I go to theater, to feel something. Even if it’s a comedy, I want to go out feeling that I’ve lightened my heart. I’m not saying this is a downer, but you’re moved, you feel that the world lost someone that was really talented. It makes you feel that you want to know more.”

For the Los Angeles run, the play was further adapted by its current director, Bill English, and takes place during the last hour of Mineo’s life.

It’s a life that fascinates Gonzalez. “I found there was an artist who had things he was saying,” Gonzalez says. “I found a good actor, and the kind of artist I’d like to be. I started finding parallels beyond the resemblance. That took second seat.”

He found that Mineo “exhibited real commitment to his craft, and commitment to causes. You can’t be an artist without being political. It came through in his work, such things as taking risks and putting things out there, not censoring. Like anybody, you’re forced to prioritize and make compromises as far as jobs go and things like that. And the circumstances around him, even up to his death, were really beyond his control. But I don’t play him as a victim at all.”

While he was researching Mineo’s story, he says, people who knew or worked with the actor “came out of the woodwork.” Invariably he heard the phrase “he was a nice guy.”

This didn’t jibe with what Gonzalez had first heard about Mineo, the rumors about his lifestyle and his waning film career, his dark, brooding image.

“I don’t buy into that image,” Gonzalez insists. “You know, you’re tortured for your art. I believe you have to be an optimist, and be very focused. That’s something I saw clearly in Sal. He kept doing work that had to do with the outcasts, the quote bizarre close-quote people, because he felt they affected other people. These were the kind of people he wanted to characterize, people that have an effect on society.”

Not gay himself, Gonzalez is open about Mineo’s homosexuality. After what is now three years of research, Gonzalez also doesn’t buy into the many legends that have built up around Mineo’s memory. One rumor that doesn’t want to die is that of a “dungeon” in Mineo’s apartment, and his involvement in bondage and leather. The deep, dark secret Gonzalez has found is that when Mineo’s Westwood Playhouse production of “Fortune and Men’s Eyes” closed, he didn’t have any place to store the jail-set pieces, so he kept them in his apartment. So much for a dungeon. “He was directing a play!” Gonzalez says with a chuckle.

Mineo’s private life was pretty private, Gonzalez says. He worked in Hollywood during a period particularly noted for “pinklisting.”

“When he was younger,” Gonzalez says, “early in his career, you’d see the ‘beards,’ you know, girls on his arm at parties, and things like that. All the tabloids were making this teen idol, portraying him with all the girls. There wasn’t a whole lot of tabloid to his private life. When people ask if his homosexuality was an issue, how did he feel about it, was he really active, and this and that--I’ve always said, well, it was in Hollywood, where it makes a difference.

“I mean, he did date, he did do the bar thing, but the publicity things are a joke.”

Like everyone else, Gonzalez says, Mineo was on a quest for love. In one section of the play, which Gonzalez refers to as the “L.A. bar scene,” Mineo uses dialogue from “Rebel” to meet people.

“There was no one sweeter than Plato,” Gonzalez says, “in that scene where he asks Dean to come home with him. Plato was as in love as you can get. It was worship.” Gonzalez pauses to let the idea sink in. “Sal Mineo at 37,” he says, “was the kind of person who would use Plato’s lines to get lucky. It’s pretty heavy.”

Also pretty normal, perhaps, for a man whose quest for love was to be satisfied only shortly before his death.

By then, Gonzalez says, “He was in love, and things were really on the upswing. They were cut short.”

Gonzalez’s honesty in his treatment of Mineo has not been without its problems for the actor. During the San Francisco run, the family of the late star Robert Taylor threatened to close the show if his name was used in the context that the character of Mineo uses it in the play. Gonzalez says the dialogue takes Taylor “out of the closet,” and the family didn’t appreciate it, but the show closed before any action was taken. Gonzalez has had similar communications from other families, including that of Mineo’s lover at the time of his death.

But Carlos Gonzalez said he won’t stop being honest about his subject, or the human things that were a part of the makeup of Sal Mineo.