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Beyond the Lens
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Hollywood Confidential
There’s a lot more to Tab Hunter than the idea of a gay actor forced to stay in the closet during Tinseltown’s Golden Age. But he felt he needed to set the record straight rather than leave it open to posthumous plundering.
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
By Daniel Robert Epstein
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Lester Cohen/Wireimage.com
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Hunter at Broadway opening of Hairspray
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In a few months, former Hollywood golden boy Tab Hunter will turn 75. Although his last movie credit is the distant 1992 family drama Dark Horse, for which he provided the original story and a small on-screen appearance, the former actor remains busy writing scripts in Santa Barbara with Betty Marvin, widow of actor Lee.
“I do a lot of writing with Betty and by myself,” he reveals during a recent interview with FilmStew. “But it’s all a toss of the dice whether it’s ever going to be done or not.”
“The one Betty and I wrote is about a young girl coming down to Hollywood from Seattle,” he adds. “It’s a coming of age story of a young girl in Hollywood in the ‘70s. I have another project called The Road Rise Up. It is probably the best love story I’ve ever read. It is about an Irish folk hero and it is just beautiful.”
Of course, these days, the script everyone wants to talk to Hunter about is the one that was never written back in his Golden Age heyday: that of a closeted gay actor working as a teen heartthrob in Tinseltown during the 1950s. Although the New York native feels that this part of his life has been needlessly magnified and seized upon by the contemporary media, he admits he felt it was important for him to write his current book, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star, before someone else tried to.
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Algonquin Books
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A solid read
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“I had to get it out because I didn’t want some schmuck writing about me after I was dead and gone,” he suggests. “After you’re dead, they can put any kind of spin they want on your life. I’m here to just do my thing and that’s it, and let it be known the way it was.”
“I never talked about my private life and I still don’t talk about things like that very much,” Hunter continues. “But I wrote about it in the book because I felt I had to. Particularly after I heard somebody else was going to be doing a book on me. I’m a very private person. I always have been. I was brought up that way.”
Hunter first discovered Santa Barbara back in the 1950s, when he used to travel north from Los Angeles to show horses. He found the animals to be the touch of reality that counterbalanced the craziness of Hollywood, and ever since then they’ve been a major influence in his life. Although he no longer competes or judges at horse shows, he owns one show horse that boards every winter in New Mexico and has others that have done everything from won the Cleveland Grand Prix to competed in the Summer Olympics on behalf of Mexico.
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Warner Brothers
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Opposite Gwen Verdon in Damn Yankees!
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The aforementioned Hollywood craziness really started for Hunter in 1955 when, after several years of working around town as a freelance actor, he landed a coveted role in Raoul Walsh’s adaptation of Leon Uris’ World War II drama Battle Cry. The actor did nine separate screen tests for the part of Private Corporal Dan Forrester, after Merv Griffin of all people first pointed Hunter to the source novel and suggested he go after the project.
“Warner Brothers went back to New York and tested Jimmie Dean, Paul Newman and a lot of other people,” Hunter recalls. “[Then] they came back and said, ‘Well, we’ll give you one more try,’ and had me sign something saying that if they decided to exercise an option, they would put me under contract.”
“Then Bill Wellman saw me on the screen and wanted me for Track of the Cat with Bob Mitchum, Teresa Wright and Beulah Bondi,” he continues. “Afterwards, I did two [more] pictures, and Warner felt I was getting popular, so they exercised the option of putting me under contract. The first picture I did under contract was a piece of nothing called The Sea Chase with John Wayne and Lana Turner.”
“I was really disappointed because I had nothing to do in the film. I wanted to be an actor. I wanted to learn this whole business because it was all new to me. Here I was with my new name and all this nonsense,” exclaims the man born Arthur Andrew Kelm. “I wanted to learn my craft.”
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Warner Brothers
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Alongside Wood in The Burning Hills
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By the time Hunter landed feet first into the studio system, it was on the wane. And although most people point to the 1958 Broadway musical adaptation Damn Yankees! as the actor’s landmark Golden Age effort, a film that playwright and co-director George Abbott originally wanted to star only the theatrical cast, Hunter mentions another picture as his personal favorite.
“When they didn’t have work for you, they loaned you out,” he explains. “So I was loaned out to Columbia for one of the best films I ever did, Gunman’s Walk, with Van Heflin.”
Things soon dried up for Hunter, so much so that he eventually decided to buy out his Warner Brothers contract for $100,000. Several decades later, in the mid-to-late 1970s, he was making do with appearances on TV shows such as McMillan and Wife, The Love Boat and Charlie’s Angeles. That’s when a most unlikely suitor came calling – Baltimore’s subversive son, John Waters – with an offer to star in something called Polyester.
“I was dead in Hollywood; I was one of the pioneers of dinner theater,” Hunter admits. “John called me when I was doing a play that was just closing in Indianapolis. He asked me if I would want to do a picture with him. I told him to send me the script because I only had two weeks until I was starting another play.”
“He sent me the script and I read it,” he continues. “I told John that I liked and he said, ‘How would you feel about kissing a 350-pound transvestite?’ I said, ‘I’ve probably kissed a hell of a lot worse.’ John was wonderful. It was because of John that I was introduced to a whole audience who didn’t know what the hell Tab Hunter was.”
Looking back on his career, Hunter also thinks that it was live television in New York, rather than recorded films in Hollywood that offered him his best opportunities overall as an actor. Once again, thanks to studio loan-outs, he was able to work on programs such as Playhouse 90 and Hallmark Hall of Fame for directors like Sidney Lumet, John Frankenheimer and Arthur Penn.
Today, Hunter views the tabloid press with the same disdain that he did back in his movie star and singing sensation glory days, with one big difference. In the old days, backed by the power of the Hollywood studios, there were no Internet blogs and loud public whispers about a star’s sexual orientation. An actor confronted with a troublesome remark or question could simply glance over at his or her studio chaperone, and the offending reporter would be shown the door. No questions asked.
| Going out on public dates with Natalie Wood and others to promote movies was all part of the job for Hunter. And just like it is today, having the right agent was an all-important aspect of the early career. Hunter was initially represented by Henry Wilson, the agent for Wood, Rock Hudson and others, before then moving over to Famous Artists and the legendary Dick Clayton. It was Clayton who really helped Hunter get started in the business, becoming in the process one of the actor’s closest friends.
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Asked once more about the pressures of keeping his true sexual orientation away from the hordes of teenyboppers humming along to his number one hit song “Young Love,” Hunter remains wistful. “The word ‘gay’ wasn’t around in those days, and I would never want anything like that out there because it was nobody’s damn business,” he declares. “The first line in my book is, ‘I hate labels.’”,/p>
“People always want to label people. I’m a human being. You’re a human being. That’s what’s important. The important thing is, what kind of a human being are you?”
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