Who Killed Sal Mineo? (Paperback)

~ (Author) "There are two seasons in Los Angeles, day and night..." (more)
Key Phrases: Sal Mineo, New York, Kate Lyons (more...)

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster (February 1, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0743237706
• ISBN-13: 978-0743237703
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 1.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,973,343 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Braudy Misled Like Many Others, March 31, 2007

By	C. Kaye "Dreamer Getting Old!" (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Who Killed Sal Mineo (Hardcover)

Not too many years ago the killer of Sal Mineo was caught. He had been pulled in for another crime, his girlfried had also been interviewed by police and told the police the story her boyfriend, the killer, told her. He corrorborated it in a written confession shortly therafter. Mr. Mineo was in the wrong place at the wrong time and was killed by a small time thug. The murder had NOTHING to do with his lifestyle.

I am aghast at the slander of the murder victim I have heard over the years, and if you are one of the defilers, I hope you ask your God for forgiveness. It seems his gayness nudged people into a viciousness of conjecture that might not have been if Mr. Mineo were straight. At any rate, it would be nice to see Ms. Baudy publish or at least verbalize an apology, instead of standing behind this repulsive scenario she entirely cooked up in her head.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars legend untarnished, November 21, 2005

By	jade malone "jam" (shreveport,la) - See all my reviews

I BECAME A SAL MINEO FAN WHILE WATCHING EXODUS,DINO AND THE GENE KRUPA STORY.FOUR YEARS LATER I BOUGHT AN US MAGAZINE THAT INCLUDED AN EXCERPT FROM THIS BOOK WHICH WAS RATHER VULGAR AND EVEN DIABOLICAL.I HAD A NIGHTMARE.IT WAS HARD TO THINK OF A MAN I'D IDOLIZED IN SUCH A GRUESOME AND SEXUAL NATURE.I PURCHASED THIS BOOK HOPING TO FIND A MORE COMPREHENSIVE PORTRAIT THAT FOCUSED ON OTHER ASPECTS OF SAL MINEO'S LIFE BEYOND HIS SEXUALITY AND ALLEGED DRUG ISSUES.I FOUND ONLY THE TYPES OF GARBAGE ONE WOULD FIND IN ONLY THE TRASHIEST TABLOIDS.THIS WAS SAD FOR MINEO FANS,A CHARACTER ASSASINATION OF MR MINEO AND AN INSULT TO HIS GRIEVING FAMILY.I WAS FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO SPEAK TO SAL'S NOW DECEASED OLDER BROTHER,MICHAEL MINEO,AND HE THOUGHT THE BOOK WAS TRASH AND SAID IT HURT HIS MOTHER DEEPLY.EVERYONE THAT I'VE EVERY SPOKEN TO;BE IT THE OWNER OF MEMORBILIA I'VE PURCHASED OF MR MINEO TO A WAITRESS IN A RESTAURANT WHO'D WAITED ON MR MINEO EACH REMEMBERED HIM AS A KIND,FRIENDLY WARM TYPE PERSON WHO WAS INTELLIGENT,INTELLECTUAL AND COMFORTABLE AROUND ALL KINDS OF PEOPLE.IF YOU ARE A SAL MINEO FAN THIS BOOK WILL ONLY IMPAIR YOUR IMAGE OF THE MAN,THEACTOR,THE DIRECTOR,THE FRIEND,THE SON,THE BROTHER AND THE HUMAN BEING CAPABLE OF THE SAME FAULTS WE ALL SHARE,EVERYTHING ELSE IS SPECULATION,OUTRIGHT LIES AND FUEL FOR FURTHER SCANDAL.ONLY SAL MINEO KNOWS AND THAT'S HIS OWN PERSONAL BUSINESS....

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Gay Bashing Does Not A Review Make, October 23, 2004

By	Berkeley A. Hunt (Studio City, CA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I hesitate to suggest that anyone's parents, even Marmoset's, restrict their child's access to a bookselling site. But a barely coherent rant against gays in general and Sal Mineo in particular(see below)hardly qualifies as an informed critique. While master Marmoset may be as literate as others in his seventh grade English class, he displays a gross misunderstanding of the use of the topic sentence, the building blocks of a readable paragraph, Mineo's career or the novel inspired by his brutal death.

What is sad is not Mineo's life--he was a millionare twice over by the age of 18 and was twice nominated for the Oscar and once for the Emmy by the age of 21--but that both master Marmoset and author Susan Braudy chose to discard the facts in favor of their own, far less interesting inventions.

Plodding and unclever,the book holds no surprises and works neither as a mystery nor as a romance. Strangely Braudy, a journalist who wrote about the murder herself, has discounted some of the fascinating details that still surround the Mineo tragedy in order to focus on more mundane ones of her own invention.

She has, for instance, given him pedophillic tendancies. At a party crowded with twenty-somethings, she shows him preoccupied with the beautiful "puppy bodies" surrounding him. (In fact, Mineo's most famous partner was Rock Hudson, a couple of decades his senior.) And while the real Mineo was, among other things, a bodybuilder and artists' model, Braudy has two of her characters looking askance of photos of him in the nude while one pronounces him "no bathing beauty." But far worse from a mystery reader's standpoint is that Braudy's reporter-heroine shows no great insight or resourcefulness when it comes to solving the crime, instead choosing to spend her time being romanced by one of Mineo's bisexual friends.

Although I can't recommend Braudy's work, those who are knowledgeable about Mineo's life and death may get a chuckle from the sequence in which director Nick Ray laments how James Dean "turned" Mineo gay while the two were making "Rebel Without A Cause." This in spite of Gore Vidal's observation that it was Ray himself--the real Ray, not Braudy's version--who was "openly having an affair" with the adolescent Sal.

Berkeley Hunt