Tab Hunter

For the next two weeks we'll be presenting six Hollywood stars who were at their peak in the 50s and 60s and most of them carried on in the 70s and 80s as well. They were all strikingly handsome, they were all gay, and they all had recording careers of sorts, running parallel to their acting careers.

These posts will run on Monday-Wednesday-Friday (or Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday, depending on your time zone). On the days between, as well as in the weekends, we'll go on with our Bob Dylan countdown, as well as with our Sunday statistics. I'll let you know what will come after these two weeks when the time comes.

Today's honored guest is a man who earns testimonies from his fellow actors: Clint Eastwood said “He’s a better man than I am.”

Mother Delores Hart, a former Hollywood colleague who gave up her film career, affirms, “He had an honesty, a simplicity; he had a certain strength of character. He was the kind of boy every mother would want to have marry into her family. He wouldn’t let anybody down.”

Tab Hunter was born Arthur Andrew Kelm in New York City on July 11, 1931. He was the son of Gertrude (née Gelien) and Charles Kelm. His mother, from Hamburg, was a German Catholic immigrant, and his father was Jewish. Hunter's father was an abusive man and within a few years of his birth, his parents divorced and his mother moved with her two sons to California, living in San Francisco, Long Beach and Los Angeles. She reassumed her maiden surname Gelien and changed her sons' name to that, as well.

As a teenager, Hunter was a figure skater, competing in both singles and pairs. He joined the U.S. Coast Guard at the age of 15, lying about his age to enlist. While in the Coast Guard, he gained the nickname "Hollywood" for his penchant for watching movies rather than going to bars while on liberty.

When he sought out a career as a Hollywood actor, he was renamed “Tab Hunter”- a comically bland name to match his blue-eyed blond features which at that time were considered “All-American.” The name-image match-up was devised by Hollywood agent Henry Willson who specialized in pretty boys like Guy Madison (Robert Moseley), Rock Hudson (Roy Scherer), Troy Donahue (Merle Johnson), Chad Everett (Raymon Crampton). If Willson was a glorified pimp, he yet had an uncanny read of the American market, knowing what appealed to women as well as men—plus the special, subconscious allure of delicate masculinity that was particular to gay subculture.

Hunter doesn’t say much about that twilight world, but talks about growing up beautiful, sought-after and “scared of my own shadow.” He confesses his closeted Hollywood life: “I had the ability to live behind this wall.”

His good looks landed him a role in the film Island of Desire (1952) opposite Linda Darnell. However, his co-starring role as young Marine Danny in 1955's World War II drama Battle Cry, in which he has an affair with an older woman, but ends up marrying the girl next door, cemented his position as one of Hollywood's top young romantic leads. His other hit films include The Burning Hills with Natalie Wood, That Kind of Woman with Sophia Loren, Gunman's Walk with Van Heflin, and The Pleasure of His Company with Debbie Reynolds. He went on to star in over 40 major films and became a cult star in the 1980s appearing in Lust in the Dust, Polyester, and Grease 2.

Late in 1956, Randy Wood - the founder and president of Dot Records - met the young, hot star Tab Hunter. Mr. Wood asked Tab if he would like to make a record. Tab confessed that he was not really a singer, but Randy explained that you do not have to be a great singer to make a good record. On Saturday, December 15, 1956 - at Ryder Sound on Santa Monica Blvd. in Hollywood - Tab had his first recording session. Tab explained in his autobiography that Randy hired "some" singers to harmonize with him - those singers turned out to be The Jordanaires - Elvis' backup group. "Man, this was serious stuff. I was starting to feel the pressure." Tab confessed. After a few takes, his nerves settled down and the 11th take was "it". When - later in the week - Tab heard his record on the radio - he himself had to admit that "I'll be damned - Young Love sounded pretty good".

Released in 1957, Young Love was #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart for six weeks and became one of the larger hits of the Rock 'n' Roll era. It sold over one million copies, and was awarded a gold disc by the RIAA. It was also a big UK #1.

Here, Tab Hunter performs Young Love live at The Perry Como Show in 1957. This was the first time he ever sang in public.

For the purists, this is the studio version:

Randy rushed Tab back into the studio to make some additional songs. However, when a Warner Bros. attorney heard Young Love on the radio - which was becoming a smash hit - things hit the fan. Tab Hunter was under contract to Warner Bros. for everything - not only motion pictures. "Jack Warner may have magnanimously declined to pass judgment on my personal life, but if there was a buck to be made - he owned me." By February 2, 1957, while the record was climbing the charts on the way to the top, a deal was cut whereupon Dot had to pay Warner Bros. a hefty compensation for any Tab Hunter record in release. When the studio's lawyers found out that Randy had enough songs for an LP - they barred Dot from releasing anything beyond singles that had already been shipped. "Randy Wood was holding orders for 100,000 albums. He was sitting on a gold mine, but Warner Bros. had no intention of letting him, or me, profit from a singing voice IT owned. At first I brushed it off, like I usually did. I'd been carried away by my enthusiasm and my naivete, resulting in a guileless breach of contract. Big deal. Then, Randy Wood handed me my first Young Love royalty check. I don't recall the total, but I remember precisely the Internal Revenue Service's cut - $56,000. That was just the taxes! I was making WAY more money as a Pop singer than as a contract player at Warner Bros. That was a real eye-opener." In an indirect way, Tab's recording success at Dot was an impetus for Warner Bros. to start their own records label (Warner Bros. Records) - which later on, Tab Hunter wound up recording for (which hopefully made Jack Warner very happy). Young Love had been first recorded by Sonny James on Capitol. In 1966, Lesley Gore recorded her own version of Young Love on Mercury Records which was a moderate hit for her. In 1973, Donny Osmond's version of the song on MGM made #23 in the US and #1 in the UK.

Tab followed that up with Red Sails In The Sunset:

His second biggest hit was Ninety-Nine Ways (1957). It peaked at #11 in the US and at #5 in the UK.

The B-side, Don't Get Around Much Anymore, also made the US Hot 100:

Hunter starred in the 1958 musical film Damn Yankees, in which he played Joe Hardy of Washington DC's American League baseball club. The film had originally been a Broadway show, but Hunter was the only one in the film version who had not appeared in the original cast. Hunter later said the filming was hellish because director George Abbott was only interested in recreating the stage version word for word. Hunter was Warner Bros.' top money-grossing star from 1955 through 1959.

Also in 1958, Tab had a #62 US hit with Jealous Heart:

The follow-up, 1959's (I'll Be With You) In Apple Blossom Time did much better: it peaked at #31:

His last Hot 100 US hit also came in 1959. It was There's No Fool Like A Young Fool.

Tab's first long-term relationship was with Ronnie Robertson, a celebrated male figure skater 6 years younger than Tab, who had won the silver medal at the 1956 Winter Olympics and twice won the silver at the World Figure Skating Championships. Tab had helped fund his amateur career. He retired from skating after the 1956 U.S. Championships and continued working on TV and as a coach.

His next long-term relationship was with fellow Hollywood star Anthony Perkins. The two actors met in 1956, at the pool at the Chateau Marmont. Perkins, brooding and darkly handsome, was doing Friendly Persuasion and was four years away from Psycho. Hunter was a studio player at Warner Brothers: a blond, blue-eyed dreamboat, whom the studio was selling—quite successfully—as the quintessential boy next door.

They kept their relationship secret from even their closest friends. As Hunter recalls in Jeffrey Schwarz’s documentary, Tab Hunter Confidential, he would go out on “dates” with starlets like Debbie Reynolds, arranged by the studio and lapped up by movie magazines; sometimes, he and Perkins would double-date with women and then go home together.

Itching for artistic freedom, Hunter bought himself out of his contract with Warner Brothers, which quickly gave the blond-heartthrob slot to Troy Donahue. The roles dried up, and, when the fifties gave way to the sixties, a distrust toward prepackaged matinée idols made Hunter a relic. Meanwhile, his relationship with Perkins petered out after Hunter appeared in the TV baseball drama Fear Strikes Out, and then Perkins arranged to star in the movie version himself. “We didn’t see much of each other after that,” Hunter said.

For a while, he was stuck doing B-movies and dinner theatre. (“Between the belching and the passing of gas, we’d do the first and second act of a show.”) While on the road in the early eighties, he got a call from John Waters, who wanted to cast him in his new film, Polyester, opposite the drag queen Divine. “He said, ‘One question: How would you feel about kissing a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound transvestite?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m sure I’ve kissed a hell of a lot worse!’ “ His appearance in Polyester and in a second movie with Divine, Lust in the Dust (which is how he met Glaser, one of its producers), occasioned a tongue-in-cheek resurgence, in which he played off his clean-cut image. It also included a celebrated part in Grease 2. But, for the past three decades, he has mostly focussed on his horses.

Allan Glaser has been his life partner since then, in a relationship that has surpassed the 30-year mark and is still going strong.

Hunter is the opposite of Norma Desmond. “He didn’t save a still, a lobby card, a poster,” Glaser said. “He gave his gold record away. He kept nothing.” When his movies come up on TMC, he flips past them. He revealed his long-held secret only when he got word that an unauthorized biography was in the works, and Glaser persuaded him to preëmpt it with his own book, “Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star,” which appeared in 2005. Even after that, the documentary took seven years to make, Glaser said, because of “how reticent he is to talk about some things.” “I was brought up very quietly, very privately,” Hunter said. “My mother was a very strict German, religious, and so you just didn’t discuss things like that.”

Here's Hunter in his own words, in a very interesting reveal of how the Hollywood press machine used to work:

"Unless you're of a certain age, you may not know my name, but you can Google it — I was a pretty big movie star in the 1950s. Oh, and another thing: I was — am — gay. That wasn't the sort of topic that one spoke freely about back then, since it could spell the end of one's career, but it was the sort of topic that people gossiped about, and there were no shortage of gossips back then, either."

"When I came to town, there were fan magazines like Photoplay and Modern Screen, which worked in cahoots with the studios and were entirely about puffing up movie stars and feeding the illusions that readers across America had of Hollywood. There were also a number of other publications that aimed to take readers behind the scenes and paint for them a more realistic portrait of the movie colony — good, bad and ugly — using information fed to them by studio PR departments, independent publicists, agents, waiters and stars themselves, all of whom had an angle. Their coverage never got too ugly, though, because their access to the stars would have been cut off if they ever damaged the studios' merchandise."

"At the time, the trades, The Hollywood Reporter and Variety, were the bibles of Hollywood. Everybody in town had them delivered every morning and would read them over coffee. The first thing that many turned to were the columns that ran right behind those publications' front covers — Mike Connolly's "Rambling Reporter" and Army Archerd's "Just for Variety." Both men were class acts. I really liked Mike, in particular — he was a former publicist who always was very kind to me and never made reference to my sexuality, perhaps because he was closeted, too!"

"The industry catered at least as much to Louella Parsons from the Los Angeles Examiner and Hedda Hopper from the Los Angeles Times — two eccentric women who were old enough to have been my grandmothers — because their readership extended far beyond Hollywood. Louella, a plump and dotty woman who always had a drink in one hand and Jimmy McHugh in the other, was syndicated by the Hearst empire and reached more than 20 million people through 400 newspapers. Hedda, an ex-actress who wore ridiculous hats, reached 32 million people through 85 newspapers. They were the West Coast versions of New York's Walter Winchell and Earl Wilson, who also were showbiz columnists, and they were treated like royalty."

"I remember the first time I read my name in their columns — I was really excited because that, to me, meant that I had made it. Over the years they both wrote plenty about me — we'd do interviews at the Polo Lounge or the Brown Derby, with the studio always picking up the tab. Louella, who popularized the phrase "rumor has it," was mostly nice and I liked her; Hedda, on the other hand, scared me a little bit — she was less predictable and had more of an agenda and an edge to her. Neither would openly discuss my sexuality — they couldn't in those days — but both periodically made subtle references to it in their columns, wondering when I was going to settle down with a nice girl and then, after the studio began pairing me with my dear friend Natalie Wood on faux-dates, asking if I was "the sort of guy" she wanted to end up with."

"Even though Hedda and Louella could be prickly, I read and respected them because their intentions basically were pure — they loved Hollywood and were trying to preserve its decorum and moral order. If they were around today, they would be disgusted by the Hiltons and Kardashians and appalled by the National Enquirers and TMZs."

"The publication that really caused problems back then was Confidential, a "rag" — relegated to the upper shelves of newsstands behind cardboard placards so that kids couldn't see the filth it was peddling — that came along at just about the same time that I did and really got down in the gutter. It didn't observe limits because it didn't desire cooperation from studios and stars; rather, it aimed to embarrass them. Its stories generally started from some grain of truth and then a cockamamie story was built around it. It really shook up the town for a few years until Maureen O'Hara sued them for publishing a story, about her supposedly having an affair, that was demonstrably false."

"In September 1955, just as my career was taking off — I had just starred in one of the biggest box-office hits of the year, Battle Cry — Confidential targeted me. It all came about because Henry Willson, who "discovered" me and many other "pretty boy" actors, was upset when I left him to be represented by another agent. Around the same time, he learned that Confidential was planning to out Rock Hudson, who still was one of his clients, so he cut a deal with them to keep Rock out of their pages, feeding them dirt on me instead. Specifically, he made them aware of the fact that five years earlier, before I was anybody, I had been arrested for disorderly conduct when police raided a party at which I — and a number of other gay people — were in attendance. Confidential then ran the story on its cover and described it as "a pajama party," insinuating that it had been some sort of gay orgy."

"It was all bullshit. I had been invited to the party by a friend and attended it solely for the free food. When I arrived, there happened to be a couple of guys dancing with a couple of guys and a couple of gals dancing with a couple of gals, so I looked and said, "Oh, it's one of those parties," and then proceeded to the refrigerator. Moments later, the cops showed up and arrested all of us. That's exactly how innocent it was. When the Confidential article came out, though, I thought my career was over. Thankfully, at just about the same time, Photoplay, which had a much bigger circulation, came out with an issue featuring me and Natalie Wood on the cover, identifying us as the year's most popular new stars. That probably saved me. After all, in Hollywood, everybody talks, but nothing matters more than the bottom line."

As a closing song, I picked Oh Happy Day from his 1961 LP. He is accompanied by the Billy Vaughn Orchestra.

Tab Hunter has recently stated “I am happy to be forgotten.” Somehow, I don't think this will be happening quite just yet.