– Tab Hunter is frank about why he wrote – with Eddie Muller – “Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star” (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 408 pages, $24.95, illustrated and indexed): He says: "Better to get it from the horse's mouth, I decided, and not from some horse's ass."
It's an excellent turn of phrase, considering that Tab Hunter is an accomplished horseman, competing in California and in the Virginia hunt country when he was younger.
In fact the name young Arthur Gelien (born Arthur Kelm) chose was based on types of show horses. He gave the studio – Warner Brothers -- a choice between “hunter” and “jumper”! The name Tab Hunter was chosen by Henry Willson, the agent who named Rock Hudson, Rory Calhoun and many other straight and gay male sex symbols in Tinseltown.
Not until Page 351 do we learn that Tab Hunter's father, Charles Kelm, was Jewish. Hunter had failed to find his father or information about him in his hometown of New York; years later, while Glaser was researching his own family, Hunter succeeded in learning that his dad was much older than his mother and had fathered two daughters with a previous wife. Wikipedia says both Charles Kelm and Gertrude Gelien Kelm were Jewish, but Hunter says she was Roman Catholic, the religion he practices today at the age of 74. He lives in the Santa Barbara suburb of Montecito with his companion of many years, Allan Glaser, a film producer like Hunter himself.
This is a rousing, good-humored tell-all book that's a good introduction to the lifestyles of the gays and straights in Hollywood. Hunter and his good friend — and sometime lover – Anthony Perkins would double date with starlets chosen by them or by the studio. Studios and aspiring actors worked hard to conceal homosexuality in their marquee stars.
Teen-age star Natalie Wood (1938-1981) was a favorite with Hunter, who truly enjoyed the company of a sprightly and intelligent woman seven years his junior. Another frequent date, was Debbie Reynolds, an actress a year younger than Hunter. In a twist of fate only Hollywood could produce, Hunter appeared in “Dark Horse,” the 1992 movie he wrote and produced with Glaser, with Natalie's daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner, who very much resembled her mother.
Hunter describes in considerable detail his complex relationship with an older woman, Joan Cohn, widow of Harry “King” Cohn of Columbia Pictures. She was also friendly with and was married briefly to Laurence Harvey, the A-list British actor who starred in “The Manchurian Candidate,” “Butterfield 8,” and “Room at the Top.” Harvey comes across as a bit of a rotter in Hunter's telling – living in real time the character he played in the latter two movies.
Gertrude, Art and Walt Gelien left New York City for a life in California, where Art became interested in horses and ice skating. He became a teen idol as the studios were being battered by television. He and his contemporaries and younger stars like Troy Donahue and Pat Boone (born in 1934) were contract players often loaned out to other studios – to the great profit of the studio.
After a more than respectible early career with movies like “Battle Cry,” ”The Burning Hills” and “Damn Yankees” – a recording of a hit song “Young Love” in 1957 that outsold Elvis and an appearance with Charlton Heston and Charles Bickford on the very first episode of TV's live “Playhouse 90” in October 1956 – he began a downward slide. Before he was 30, his career was virtually over as an actor in a town that chews them up quickly. Troy Donahue (1936-2001) became the next Tab Hunter, only to be chewed up and spat out the same way.
He made movies in Europe, including several “spaghetti westerns,” and became a star to a new generation with roles in movies by Baltimore indie director John Waters: “Lust in the Dust” and “Polyester”, both co-starring transvestite actor Divine (born Harris Glen Milstead), a high school classmate of Waters. In the 1970s and 1980s he was a frequent guest star on TV shows like “CHiPs” and “McMillan and Wife”; he was also a regular on the dinner theater circuit throughout the nation.
Hunter is frank about his mother's mental illness that may have been exacerbated by a marriage to an abusive husband. Walt Gelien enlisted in the navy and died in a helicopter crash in Vietnam in 1965. Gertrude Gelien underwent electroshock therapy and was supported until her death by Hunter, who himself suffered both a heart attack and a stroke.
Hunter and his co-author have written a book that belongs on the shelves of anyone interested in Hollywood in the waning days of the studio system. It has many anecdotes about the actors and actresses Hunter worked with or new, including James Dean, Sal Mineo, John Wayne, Gary Cooper, Linda Darnell, Angie Dickinson, Van Heflin (a favorite of Hunter's because of his consummate professionalism); Tallulah Bankhead and Fred Astaire, among many others.
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