RIP Tab Hunter

I was saddened that Tab Hunter died Sunday at age 86 at his home in Montecito (Santa Barbara), California, of cardiac arrest caused by a clot in his leg that moved to his lung.  All the obituaries on him have it right when they refer to him as the 50's Hollywood heartthrob.  He was indeed that... oh my God, yes.  One said his blond all-American good looks made him a matinee idol and poster boy for the Eisenhower era optimism.  Bingo.  

In the 1950's, he showed up in mainly mediocre movies that girls and some boys never missed and he was never given a lot of credit for his acting skills.  Let me tell you, however, how famous he was.  That face, under a mound of blond mane, with the inviting smile, was on the cover of a slew of movie magazines every month.  Fan clubs started up by the thousands worldwide.  They called him a dreamboat and the sigh guy.  Girls shrieked and cried and fainted at public sightings just as they had done for singers.  He seemed sweet and approachable and decent, he laughed a lot and had that homespun demeanor that was impossible to not notice.  Physically, he seemed to have it all and a movie star was born.

Did I mention his face?

He might have had some thoughts about being in pictures but he'd never done a thing to make it happen. But his love of horses led to a job as a stable boy and that, in turn, led to his discovery.  He was a wholly manufactured product of Hollywood who became the top American male movie star from 1955-59.  They told him where to hit his marks on the sound stage and in many aspects in life.  Sometimes he did as he was told and sometimes he mouthed off.

Born in New York in 1931 as Arthur Kelm, he had an abusive Jewish father and an emotionally-remote German mother.  After their divorce, she changed the family name (including an older son, Walter), to her maiden name of Gelien.  By the end of the thirties, the three of them were living in California, generally in the Hollywood area.

Art was shy and introverted despite his already stunning looks.  He 
sang in church, attended a Catholic military academy, became a competitive figure skater and a lifetime lover and owner of horses and dogs.  His mother largely left her boys to their own devices and Art spent a lot of his time roaming around Hollywood with nearby Griffith Park being a favorite spot.  He could ride his horses there and hike the trails.  He knew he was gay and knew how easy it all was for someone with his looks.  He was shamed by a priest when he confessed his homosexuality and combined with hearing his mother's harangues about loose lips sink ships he quickly slipped into the closet and bolted the door.

Young Art quit school at 15 and after lying about his age, he joined the Coast Guard but was later found out and booted out.  He returned to his favorite stomping grounds and got that stable boy job at Dubrock's Riding Academy on the perimeter of Griffith Park.  

It was there that gay agent Dick Clayton noticed him (well yeah) and gave him the usual line... if you ever want to be in the movies, come see me.  What probably has been lost to history is that he added and if you don't want to be in the movies, come see me anyway.  The stable boy decided he wanted to be in the movies.

Henry Willson was a gay agent whose smarmy operation took on hunky, gorgeous young men, usually also gay, and gave them new, unusual names and did his best to turn them into movie stars.  Willson got his 10% and more.  He would turn Roy into Rock, Robert into Guy, Timothy into Rory and Art into Tab.  Hunter had to wrestle with his new first name and never went by anything other than Art to his closest friends.

Around the beginning of his acting career, Hunter began a serious relationship with famed figure skater, Ronnie Robertson, which lasted a couple of years.

He began his movie career with a tiny role in The Lawless (1950),  a minor noir.  For four years he made fairly forgettable movies.  Even one that wasn't forgettable, Island of Desire (1952), wasn't very good.  But romping around in not much clothing with Linda Darnell (at the twilight of her career) caused a sensation.  It needs to be noted, however, that Hunter had already gathered some fame as a result of his handsome mug adorning those magazine covers.

It wasn't until 1954 that Hunter was in an A movie, the moody western, Track of the Cat.  It is a talky piece with Hunter's role as Robert Mitchum's sulky kid brother who's a little lost in the shuffle over a search for a panther that is killing the family's livestock.  The winter scenes gave the film a harsh look as did the squabbling among the family members.  The cheat for the audience is never getting to see the big cat.  

Hunter's first great notices, all well-deserved, came in 1955's epic war-romance film, Battle Cry.  And how weird that I happened to watch it a mere two days before the announcement of his passing.  Although billed seventh, he, Van Heflin and Aldo Ray were the  stars in a damned good flick that featured strong stories about soldiers' personal lives.  Hunter had Mona Freeman as the sweetheart back home while sexy Dorothy Malone was the older, married widow he played around with.  

He didn't have a lot to do in The Sea Chase (1955), another war film whose attention was on John Wayne and Lana Turner.  It was also not very good.

In the mid 50's while at the famed Chateau Marmont, he met another young actor who'd recently come to Hollywood from New York, Anthony Perkins.  They began a two-year love affair.  They  loved talking about movies and each was attracted to the other, among other reasons, because they liked being personalities that tended to be withdrawn.  They set up housekeeping and life together basically worked well.  Both were deeply closeted so when they went out together to some big affair, they usually were accompanied by pretty starlets acting as beards.  Most of them didn't know the truth either.  But Tony's home studio, Paramount, did know the truth and they ordered their spooked-out minion to end the relationship which he did.

Tony, don't stare.  Is that the paparazzi over there?

In 1955, at the height of his popularity, mainly due to Battle Cry,  the salacious rag of the time, Confidential Magazine, dug up an old police report of Hunter's arrest at a gay pajama party.  It could have spelled the end of his career (he certainly considered it) but around the same time some magazine named him the most popular new male personality and luckily WB paid more attention to that.  They had no intentions of slicing up their cash cow, so they closed ranks and life went on.  

The studio never brought up the Q subject to Hunter although they put out stories and pictures of him romancing Debbie Reynolds, Natalie Wood, Lori Nelson and others in order to counter rumors of his homosexuality.  Most of Hollywood knew of his lifestyle and moved on.  The point was to hoodwink the public although it never much worked for those who lived in Los Angeles, San Francisco or New York.

Wood was also under contract to WB and had just made quite a splash in Rebel Without a Cause (1955) and had a small but key role in The Searchers.  Jack Warner and his cronies decided it was time to not only pair her with Hunter in one movie but two.  Those back-to-back 1956 films, the western The Burning Hills and the military comedy-drama The Girl He Left Behind unfortunately did nothing for either of their careers but they did help snow the public as the pair were interviewed and photographed while plugging them on publicity tours.

On an umpteenth publicity date with Natalie Wood

  

Nonetheless, while her career soared, Hunter's took a bit of a dive.  He began appearing in some television and made a recording of Young Love in 1957 which went to #1 on the pop charts.  Interestingly the same year country crooner Sonny James also had a top hit with the song.  Hunter recorded it for Dot Records so it made no money for Warner.  It was this event that caused the mogul to start up his own record company.

Hunter very much wanted to make the war romance Lafayette Escadrille (1958) about a rebellious American who flees to Paris after a skirmish with the law and joins the Lafayette Flying Corps. He becomes a WWI flying ace and falls in love and marries a French prostitute.  WB cooked up a romance between Hunter and leading lady Etchika Choureau (who? was Bardot busy?) but the film had only a moderate success.  Too bad.  I liked it. 

I liked Gunman's Walk (1958) more.  It is a routine western with Hunter most effective as Van Heflin's rotten son.  The good son was played by James Darren and although he and Hunter looked nothing alike, can you imagine these two in the same film?  Wow.  No wonder I liked it.

Damn Yankees (1958) is likely his most famous film and yet it remains my least favorites of all his films.  Given that it's a musical, that's particularly unusual for me, but like it I didn't.  When WB bought it, fresh from Broadway, they brought the entire cast, including Gwen Verdon and Ray Walston, along, except for the leading man.  That role was given to Hunter who had a difficult time on the film because co-director George Abbott picked at him.

That Kind of Woman (1959), directed by the superb Sidney Lumet, is my favorite Hunter movie.  He and Sophia Loren star as a couple who meet and fall in love on a train during WWII.  He plays a naive soldier and she is the paid mistress of a rich industrialist.  He longed for her something fierce and I longed for them.  I don't think he's ever done better work.  The public largely disregarded it probably due to its subject matter and downer ending.

Hunter, in addition to being a movie star, was a big movie fan.  He was gaga over working with Gary Cooper, Rita Hayworth, Richard Conte and his old pal Heflin, in their third and final pairing, in the western They Came to Cordura (1959).  Despite its illustrious cast, the trek flick that dealt with courage v.s. cowardice was surprisingly lackluster.

He bought out his contract in 1959 because he found it too restrictive and because the movies they offered him were mediocre while loaning him out to other studios and making a small fortune on him.  They may have found nothing particularly suitable for him but I find it telling that Warners hired Troy Donahue and certainly groomed him as Hunter's replacement.  I liked Donahue but he was no Tab Hunter.  

The truth is he didn't find the better work he was seeking after leaving the studio.  Hollywood doesn't like it when actors, who are deemed ingrates, buy their way out of contracts.  

He appeared in a fine television remake of Meet Me in St. Louis, as the boy next door, and was astonishingly top-billed over the likes of Jane Powell, Jeanne Crain, Myrna Loy and Walter Pidgeon.  He also got his own TV show, The Tab Hunter Show, for the 1960-61 TV season and then it was cancelled.

The show may have hit the skids because of some unsavory news coverage about Hunter beating his dog.  In my world I would have said the bogus story came as a result of being gay and living around people who hated that.  Hunter was as well-known around Hollywood for his love of horses and dogs as anything and the story was a well-planned hit on him.  It all eventually went away but I suspect the sordid coverage didn't help his TV show.


The Pleasure of His Company (1961) was the last decent movie he made as I see it.  Based on the Broadway success, it stars Fred Astaire, Debbie Reynolds and Lilli Palmer and concerns a young woman who wants her real father, a pariah to his ex-wife, to give her away at her wedding (to Hunter).  I thought it was great fun although Hunter didn't have as much to do as the others.

It was not the success it might have been had it been made in the 50's.  But 1960's filmgoers were having little of it because it was too wholesome for them... and so was Hunter. The public wanted a little more edge to their stars and Hunter didn't make the cut.  Too bad he didn't change his image and make more dramatic films but they were probably not offered to him.

He thought he'd try some movies that might appeal to teenagers which could be the only possible reason for him starring alongside Frankie Avalon in Operation Bikini (1963) and Fabian in Ride the Wild Surf (1964).  The titles say it all.

Also in 1964 he was thrilled to be starring on Broadway opposite volatile Tallulah Bankhead in one of Tennessee Williams' worst plays, The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore.  It lasted for five performances.

His films for the 1960's and especially the 1970's were simply dreadful.  Most are ones no one has ever heard of or seen.  He supported character actor Claude Akins in one and comedian Soupy Sales in another.  And of course, as is typical, he headed to Italy for a few films never seen in the U.S.  He did manage one all-star film in 1972, The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972), but his role was quite small.  Interestingly, his former lover, Tony Perkins, was also in it.

If his career was on the down slope, so was his personal life in that his beloved brother, father of six children, died in Vietnam and later Hunter had his mother committed to a mental institution.

It seemed there were years without hearing about him or from him. And then one day there were stories that he was making a movie with the court jester of counter-culture, John Waters.  It felt psychedelic hearing Hunter would be lampooning his 50's image in such a campy comedy.  But there he was in Polyester (1981), as Todd Tomorrow, the owner of an art house drive-in who romances unhappy housewife Francine Fishpaw played by Waters' hefty transvestite muse, Divine.  They were a sight to behold.  I was sure he'd never work again.

Hunter had a heart attack in 1981 but recovered and went into Grease2 released the following year.  He played a substitute teacher and got to sing Reproduction.  Seeing him and Connie Stevens together was a blonde vision into the past.  The film has always been derided but might enjoy a teensy bit of cult status today.

He was quite fond of Divine

In 1983 Hunter met producer Allan Glaser and they were in a relationship ever since.  They were among four who produced the western spoof, Lust in the Dust, in 1985.  Perhaps because it again starred Divine, some folks think it was another John Waters production but it wasn't.  Paul Bartel directed.   What it is is absolutely silly but it had its fair share of giggles.

His final four films I have never heard of.  In 1990 he had a stroke and again recovered.  And again he more or less disappeared.  Life with Glaser and the horses and dogs in beautiful Montecito was enough.  He has apparently always been a great friend... he certainly wanted to be.  He spent years watching over actress and neighbor Evelyn Keyes through her uterine cancer and Alzheimer's.

There came a time when he heard that he was going to be outed in a tell-all type biography.  Bolstered perhaps by Richard Chamberlain's 2002 biography, Shattered Love, in which he came out of the closet that most everyone knew he was in, Hunter decided to write his own tell-all... and finally come clean on a lifetime of pesky rumors.  Why not get it from the horse's mouth, he said, instead of some horse's ass after I'm gone?

I thought Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star (2005) was one of the best autobiographies I've ever read.  I think I polished it off over a weekend.  Later that year the still-handsome one appeared at a local book signing.  I enjoyed a brief chat with him.  He was very polite and oh so charming.  I ended up speaking with Glaser as well.

His bio had been turned into a documentary and some friends and I dashed off to a theater to see it and take part in a fun and informative Q&A with him.

Out gay actor Zachary Quinto, involved in a current project based on the romance of Hunter and Perkins, has been quoted as saying that Hunter was a pioneer of self-acceptance who moved through this world with authenticity as his guide. That is lovely but I think the sentiment pertains far more to Quinto himself than it did Hunter.  

He was, in my mind, and per his own admission, a deeply-closeted man.  He said that in his youth he never discussed his sexuality and was in total denial.  He was hardly authentic but if I had been a gay adult in the 50's, I wouldn't have come out either.  It certainly would have ruined a career.  But what about it in later years?  When he appeared in Polyester and Lust in the Dust, what harm would coming out have really caused him... and double that for when he was no longer making movies at all? I always consider all the good it would have done.  How many ships would have been sunk by loose lips?

So if I can't give him the attaboy that Quinto does, it is quite the opposite once his book was published.  What have we heard from Chamberlain since his book or a lot of others since they came out?  It still remains a big deal for gay people to come out but once some famous ones do, they say no more.  For every Neil Patrick Harris, Ricky Martin and Ian McKellan, there are hundreds of other entertainers who keep the closet door open but go back in.

After that book was published and in the five years before the documentary was done and even after that, Hunter raised his authentic voice time and again and I absolutely honor the man for doing it.

He was an important part in my early recognition of who I was... or maybe we could say my coming out to me.  It happened because of all those Tab Hunter photos I saw in all those movie magazines I read for all those years.  I knew what I felt was different, bigger and better than how I felt about Grace Kelly.  I don't have to give him posthumous thanks here because I told him in person.

Glaser said that Hunter didn't place any importance on his movie career or his celebrity and that he wanted to be remembered as a good man.  Mission accomplished, Handsome.



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