The Twinkie Defense
An interview with Sal Mineo's Surviving Partner Courtney Burr
September 28, 2024
In February 2011, following an interview I did with Michael Gregg Michaud, the author of Sal Mineo: A Biography, I was pleased when he introduced me to Mineo's surviving partner, Courtney Burr. Burr had been with the actor for years at the time of his tragic stabbing death and had provided Michaud with many invaluable insights into Mineo's personality because he "just wanted the story of what happened in our lives to be truthful and to reflect even the things some people might find strange."
I met with Burr, once looked down on as Mineo's "twinkie" and later a respected acting teacher, and Michaud at the Universal Hilton in Los Angeles on a brisk day, but was immediately warmed by Burr's gift of gab. His story holds interest not only as a peek into the private life of Mineo, but as a candid look at how two men fell in love and made it work until it was taken away unexpectedly.
Continue reading this lightly re-edited piece to be regaled with Burr's memories of his lover's artistic vision, to find out if Mineo identified as gay, to get pissed off at how the Mineo family mistreated him after Sal's murder, to get dish on the infamous Broadway version of Harold and Maude and to hear what it was like directing first Oscar winner Janet Gaynor...
What was your opinion of the books written about Sal prior to Michael's book?
I was so offended and there was so much misinformation that when Michael called me I hung up on him — twice. I just said, “You know what? I’m not interested.” ‘Cause I didn’t believe anybody. No matter what. And all the months and years right after Sal was killed, I got a lot of calls from different people saying, “Oh, I wanna do it,” and I’d say, “Well, what interests you?” and of course it was always the sensationalism of his death and all of that stuff. I wasn’t interested. I mean, it offended me again. So they just went and wrote shit anyway. So it really offended me. There were things about me in half the books that were completely inaccurate, there were so many things about Sal that were completely inaccurate and stuff about our relationship.
“I wanted it to be the truth, both about our relationship and Sal’s life, which was an extraordinary life.”
It was really important to me that if anything was gonna be written, that it was truthful — I wasn’t gonna hide anything, you know? For some people, some of that honesty they really appreciated — I got e-mails and different things from people who said, “I really appreciate that you would write about your life together and your personal life with so much openness and honesty.” And that’s what I wanted it to be. I’m not ashamed of any moment of my life at all. He [Michael] keeps telling me I should be, but I’m not. [Laughs] So I wanted that to be true and I wanted it to be the truth, both about our relationship and Sal’s life, which was an extraordinary life. Which, when Michael finally got me to stop hanging up on him, he told me what his interest was and how long he had respected Sal as an artist and really felt he should be fulfilled, which was something I always wanted to see done.
Mineo giving singing a try:
What made Michael's approach different?
He’d already done four years of research, which, the other thing about these other books is they took half of their information from Conversations with My Elders [a 1986 book of interviews with closeted stars by Boze Hadleigh, the authenticity of which has been challenged] and half out of this other person Susan Braudy’s totally misinformed book [Who Killed Sal Mineo? (1982)], and blah-blah-blah — I guess she wrote hers as a novel didn’t she? Yeah, but using everybody’s name as if it were accurate, and it wasn’t. And I had told her I wouldn’t do an interview with her, and so she showed up at my door — and this was really a short time after [Sal's murder] ... When she came to see me, I said, “Look, I’m not gonna tell you anything.” The way that appeared in the book, I believe, but certainly in the article, was that I didn’t want to say anything because I thought it would interfere with my inheritance from him or the money that I was gonna get from him, that I was fighting the family for it. And I thought, “Well, that is the biggest joke,” because there was no money — there was nothing in terms of that. Obviously, there was a time when Sal had money; I didn’t know him during that time at all. [Laughs] It was during a very different sort of financial situation.
So, it was really the fact that Michael had really approached it from the right point of view. Starting at the early part of his life, he had done so much research, like an archivist. In fact, he knew more about Sal at this point than I did — [my information] was mostly personal, but all of the things that Sal had accomplished as a young man, as an actor, those were not things that we spoke a lot about, Sal and I, because ours was, you know, basically what was going on between the two of us. I mean, I knew of them, but, I mean, he knew every detail, you know, in terms of every TV show, every interview ... Sal rarely talked about his singing career because he was not happy about that. I think he was cognizant of the fact that some of those choices weren’t so smart for him, and that may have in some way impaired his career later on because people sort of looked at him, “Well, is he really an actor or is he a teen idol?” You know what I mean? And so he was not proud of that.
You helped Michael by reaching out to Sal's former lover, the late Jill Haworth.
Because I knew how important Jill was in Sal’s life. That was his sort of boy-girl, at the age he was, that he got to have with a girl, a woman. 'Cause he went out on lot of dates with Playboy bunnies and whatever, but I don’t now that he had sexual relations with them all. In fact, in almost every interview you’ll notice that he keeps saying, "I just wanna have girls who can have fun." It was a much more social thing, though there were clearly a lot of women that he did have sexual relationships with.
“Sal never hid anything.”
It was not as a beard because, as I say, he didn’t have any awareness. And even after I knew him, there were times when he had sexual relationships with women. Infrequently, but it still happened. So it wasn’t like something he just tried to hide …Sal never hid anything. I never knew Sal to hide anything, and he certainly never hid a damn thing from me—I knew about all of the people 'cause he didn’t need to hide things.
I said to him, "You do what you gotta do." And part of that was what attracted me to him, that he was that passionate and interested and that flawed. It’s always nice to know that the other person you’re with is flawed as well as you. [Laughs] When they’re too perfect, it’s scary.
Did you know anything of Sal when you met him?
No. I had no idea. The first time I read his name was in a review of Fortune and Men’s Eyes when it opened at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York [in 1969]. My upbringing was a little strange; it was sort of a more European upbringing. My family, we didn’t associate with very many people, except people-who-came-over-from-Europe-type of thing, and I was in private school. So I didn’t really … I had never heard of him, I’d never seen any of his movies.
But anyway … that was the first time and what it talked about was how Sal had changed the original script in terms of bringing it up to date, and I said, “How dare these obnoxious Hollywood actors…” because I was very theater, “…I mean, taking a script and tampering with it.” Well, shortly thereafter I went to see Fortune at the Manhattan Theatre Club — I was so stunned and blown away by the experience. It was really one of the greatest things I have ever seen on stage as far as being exciting and sensual and disturbing all at the same time. One minute you were laughing your ass off and another minute you were gasping [gasps] in despair. And I always remember at the end of the first act, the lights dimmed and nobody moved. Everybody sat there stunned. And then everybody sort of quietly filed out and then you thought, “Okay, that was the first act, what can they possibly do in the second act?” And then everybody came back in and it was really thrilling — his direction was superb and his changes were absolutely right on. It wasn’t until later on when I had read the actual original by John Herbert that — this was supposed to be a bunch of convicts and of course there were no swear words in it and one of my favorite phrases was, “If you do that again, I will carve my initials in your gizzard.” I went, “Oh, my God!” And of course the first line in Sal’s production of Fortune was, “Where the fuck is my chess book?” and it sort of took off from there.
And of course he added the whole thing where Michael Greer got to do his performance in drag to entertain the guys in the cell, which was not in the original, and it was superb. I mean, it just, again, it got you laughing and laughing and laughing and took you to another place just before some really terrible things were gonna happen. So it was beautifully directed by him and I thought, “Oh, God…” — I decided I really wanted to play Smitty. Mark Shannon had done it in New York. “I just said, "Aw, I’ve gotta play that role.” Some other friends said, “Oh, I don’t think you’re gonna be able to do it.”
They were auditioning for either a Toronto or San Francisco, I did audition for it, and the first time I saw Sal — and I had no image, I didn’t see any pictures beforehand — I was so stunned at his appearance. He’s not terribly tall and he had a sort of Pancho Villa mustachio thing and a funny hat on and purple Levi’s so tight that you could see the veins in his legs, let alone anything else. I thought, “Oh, my goodness … what an incredibly unattractive man.” Isn’t that ironic? [Laughs] But he was very quiet and really a gentleman. And I had been warned by other people in the business, “Well, you know what happens if you’re gonna audition for him, you know, they want some favors.” I thought, “Really?” And at that point, those people who were saying it, I was engaged to be married — to a woman — and they were sort of, “You better be careful,” and I’m thinkin’, “Realllly? Okay, I’ll be really careful.” [Laughs]
“He had a slight fetish about navels … I guess my navel passed.”
But when I saw him I didn’t have any feeling of attraction, physically — boy, did that change. As I say, his hair was very long … But he was such a gentleman at the audition. We worked on — I did what I’d been asked to do and then he spoke to me a while and then I made an adjustment that he asked me for and then he said, “Well, do you have any scars or parts missing? Because you are gonna have to be in the nude.” And I said, “No,” and I thought, “Here it comes, I’m gonna have to take off all my clothes.” He said, “No, would you just lift your shirt so I can see your torso?” So I said, “Sure.” Little did I know that that was also because he had a slight fetish about navels … I guess my navel passed. I hope it wasn’t just my navel! But anyway, so, from there, it was, you know, I ended up being hired for that and I went out to San Francisco; it worked out we didn't go to Toronto because John Herbert had fled—because of the Vietnam War—had fled the country and gone to Canada so he couldn't be drafted and they said that's not right because he could actually interfere with the production. So as long as he was stuck up in Canada we were fine, so we ended up opening in San Francisco.