Poor Sal Mineo.

After a couple of film roles (including one for which he beat out another up-and-coming actor named Clint Eastwood), Sal Mineo was cast as “John ‘Plato’ Crawford” in Rebel Without a Cause alongside James Dean and Natalie Wood. The film earned Sal an Academy Award nomination and made him a household name, cementing his stardom as the quintessential “troubled teen.”

Sal soon found he was being typecast, something he wanted no parts of. He purposely sought out roles that went against the iconic role for which he gained his initial fame. He portrayed a Native American boy in the Disney film Tonka and later embodied drummer Gene Krupa in a biopic. In the epic Exodus, Sal played a Jewish holocaust survivor and earned his second Oscar nomination. He also recorded a couple of albums and released several singles, one of which hit the Top Ten on the Billboard Pop chart.

In the early 60s, rumors of homosexuality were attached to Sal. He blamed this on being turned down for several high-profile film roles. Actually, he was aging out of the “angry youth” roles that were once his bread-and-butter. He appeared briefly in the war drama The Longest Day, but missed out on a part in Lawrence of Arabia. He soon turned to television and appeared on episodes of Combat! and The Patty Duke Show. As the 60s came to a close, he directed the gripping drama Fortune and Men’s Eyes, a play about prison life with a focus on homosexuality.

In 1971, Sal took a small part in the second sequel in the lucrative Planet of the Apes franchise, Escape from the Planet of the Apes. Under heavy, constricting make-up, Sal reluctantly played “Dr. Milo,” a role he admitted doing purely for the money. The character was killed off early in the film, much to Sal’s delight. This would prove to be Sal’s final big-screen role. He continued to take parts in episodic television, including a powerful turn as a Manson-like cult leader in a 1975 episode of S.W.A.T.

Sal’s career began to show signs of a resurgence. He was appearing in Los Angeles in the comedic play P.S. Your Cat is Dead to positive reviews. On February 12, 1976, Sal was returning to his West Hollywood apartment after play rehearsal. After parking his car in the building garage, he was attacked and stabbed to death by a mugger who quickly fled. Sal Mineo was just 37 years old. The second act of his career ended abruptly.

There were rumors of “sexual motivation” regarding the attack, but after career criminal Lionel Ray Williams was arrested and later confessed, it was revealed that Williams didn’t know who Sal was.

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Alma Rubens rose to stardom after her role opposite Douglas Fairbanks in the 1916 film The Half-Breed. She made a run of pictures for Triangle Studios before signing with William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan Productions. Hearst had his publicity team tout Alma as a direct descendant of Flemish Baroque painter Peter Paul Rubens. (She was not.)

Her first three films for Cosmopolitan were hits. But, Alma developed an addiction to heroin. Her drug use made her difficult to work with and unreliable on the set. She managed to complete three more pictures before Hearst let her out of her contract in 1922.

By the late 1920s, Alma’s drug use increased and was out of control. She was in and out of sanitariums. She escaped from a few and attempted to stab a physician at one. But, by 1930, she announced she had kicked her drug habit. She was appearing in a play, but two weeks later, she was arrested for trying to smuggle morphine and cocaine into Mexico. Shortly after her release from jail, she contracted pneumonia and bronchitis and fell into a coma. Alma never regained consciousness. She died on January 21, 1931, just a few days after her 33rd birthday.

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Philip Taylor Kramer joined psychedelic rock group Iron Butterfly in 1974, playing bass on two albums and touring for a few years. After the band’s breakup, he played with founding member Ron Bushy in several off-shoot projects.

Leaving his music career behind, Taylor earned a degree in aerospace engineering. He worked on the MX missile guidance system for a contractor of the US Department of Defense. Later, he concentrated on developments in the fields of fractal compression, facial recognition systems, and advanced communications. In 1990, Taylor founded Total Multimedia, Inc, with his partner Randy Jackson, Michael Jackson‘s younger brother. The company developed data compression techniques for CD-ROMs.

In February 1995, Taylor was supposed to pick up a business associate at LAX. On his way, he called his wife to say that plans had changed. He told her that his business associate (and his wife) would be going directly to a hotel. Taylor and his wife would meet the couple later. However, Taylor still went to to airport and spent forty-five minutes there, as per security camera footage. During his drive to the airport, Taylor made a number of cell phone calls to his wife, to Ron Bushy and to the police. In his frantic call to the police, Taylor said, “I’m going to kill myself. And I want everyone to know O. J. Simpson is innocent. They did it.” Taylor was brought in as an expert, hired to analyze the authenticity of a video tape that the FBI obtained during the O.J. Simpson murder trial. Taylor did not show up at the hotel for the meeting. He was never seen or heard from again.

On May 29, 1999, Taylor’s Ford Aerostar minivan was discovered by two photographers scouting locations for a photo shoot in Decker Canyon in Malibu, California. The minivan contained skeletal remains, later identified as Taylor’s. He was 42. The case still remains unsolved.

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