a
lost soul
by Douglas Messerli
Jeffrey Schwarz (screenwriter,
based on Tab Hunter’s and Edie Muller’s Tab Hunter Confidential: The
Making of a Movie Star, and director) Tab Hunter Confidential /
2015
A bit like the actor
himself, Jeffrey Schwarz’s documentary Tab Hunter Confidential,
based on Hunter’s and Edie’s Muller’s 2005 book, is only interesting primarily
for its surface beauty: its display of photographs and quick snippets of
filmmaking. There is nothing much here of depth, and it represents very few new
revelations. One might almost argue that, like Hunter’s career, this new film
is fairly superficial, despite its affability. Hunter, himself narrating much
of the film, admits from the beginning that he was an extremely shy youth and
is still uncomfortable speaking of his sexuality. “Accepting that I was wired
differently was no cause for celebration, believe me. We all have our various
urges and desires and shouldn’t be made to feel ashamed of them. Being ‘proud’
of your homosexuality, however, was a concept still years away. Not that I’d
ever feel that way. To me, it’s like saying you’re ‘proud’ to be hetero. Why do
you need to wear a badge? You simply are what you are.”
Yet
at age 84, the still handsomely chiseled male beauty, feels he can now speak
out about, at least, some of his own experiences.
Despite
his seeming resistance, however, this work is utterly fascinating for what it
says about the film industry of 1950s, and the difficulties of working as a gay
actor in film even today.
And
what is fascinating is that the former Arthur Kelm (or Gelien, the spellings
vary from source to source), raised by a German-born mother whose husband
abused her and who later suffered from mental illness, had several other
careers. If his acting and singing talents were minor, Hunter was,
nonetheless, a childhood figure skater of some significant talent (his first
lover was champion skater Ronnie Robertson, who may have lost the 1956 Gold
Medal at the Winter Olympics by showing up to the event with Hunter which he’d
been warned not to) and later an award-winning steeple-chasing horseman. And,
most importantly, of course, Hunter was jaw-droppingly beautiful. Even in high
school, gangs of women would hover about him whenever he walked down the school
halls, forcing him, at moments, to escape into empty classrooms.
Hunter
was first “discovered” by the future agent, Dick Clayton, who working on a
shoot spotted the young Kelm as a stableboy. Soon after, the 15-year-old lied
his way into the Coast Guard, spending his leaves in Clayton’s apartment and
attending Greenwich Village parties, sometimes with Cole Porter at the piano.
Clayton, after the young boy was released from the military when his true
age was discovered, introduced Kelm to notorious Hollywood agent Henry Willson.
And that’s where this film’s narrative becomes most interesting.
Willson,
often described as the “Fairy Godfather” of numerous film actors, specialized
in what is often described as “beefcake” boys, handsomely masculine gay and
bi-sexual men including the former Robert Moseley (Guy Madison), Merle
Johnson (Troy Donahue), Francis McCown (Rory Calhoun), Orton Whipple
Hungerford, Jr. (Ty Hardin), Robert Wagner, and, most importantly,
Roy Scherer (Rock
Hudson), often checking them out on the casting couch in order to recommend
them for parts. He would also dress them, straighten their teeth, teach them
how to behave, and even spy on his clients personally in order to protect them.
Few of them—or, for that matter, even Willson’s women clients who included
Natalie Wood, Lana Turner, and Rhonda Fleming—could act (although Wood had been
a child actress before her adult career). As Willson asserted, they were
“stars," not actors, and he arranged for them to take acting classes and
to study their craft by appearing in local theater productions (Hunter starred
in a production of Our Town.) He put their faces regularly into the
popular screen magazines of the day, and promoted them, particularly to
teenagers. Most importantly, he renamed them, openly branding his own sexual
discoveries with the hyper-masculine monikers such as Tab, Rock, Rory, and Ty.
Comedian Kaye Ballard even mockingly offered some further suggestions: “Grid
Iron, Cuff Links, Plate Glass, and Bran Muffin.”
To
clear them from any sexual insinuations, Willson paired them up with his female
clients, so that actors such as Hunter were nightly seen in clubs and
restaurants with young women such as Wood, Debbie Reynolds, and others, most of
whom, such as Reynolds, were happy to play the role of what Hollywood insiders
described as “beards.” As Reynolds noted: “Oh sure, I dated all the boys who
were homosexual, because I liked them better. They weren’t fresh. They were
fun. They were sweet. They didn’t come on to me. All the straight guys were
coming on to me. And I couldn’t stand that. I was seventeen. I was a virgin. I
didn’t want hands all over me.” Natalie Wood and Margaret O’Brien used to play
a “game of trying to figure out which of their dates had slept with Henry.”
Hunter
claims that although Willson tried several times to sexually involve him he
politely refused his body rubbings. “Henry had a magnetic personality, but it
certainly wasn’t strong enough to lure me onto the casting couch.” Others,
however, easily gave in. Rumor has it that Hudson would sleep with nearly
anyone—although Hunter has nothing to say about this. Yet despite the awful
appellations the young actor had to endure—“Sigh Guy,” “All-American Boy,” “Boy
Next Door,” and “The Squeal Appeal Fella,” the careful Tab did have gay affairs
with not only Rudolf Nureyev and Helmut Berger, but a longer relationship with
Anthony Perkins, who lived only a few blocks away, allowing both stars to
easily link up after hours.
According
to Hunter, Perkins was more seriously in love, yet his career mattered more
than anything (and one must admit, Perkins was the better actor), and after
Hunter told Perkins that his studio, Warner Brothers, was about to buy a
property which he already had performed on television, Perkins had his studio
buy the film rights for himself, the relationship gradually faded.
What
becomes apparent in Hunter’s life is that he was forced not only to act on the
screen and television, but to transform his whole life into a fiction. What
sets him apart from some others is that he was evidently completely willing to
perform that role and to knowingly take on the part of the beautiful
bachelor boy next door. Sadly, Hunter seems to have been one of the most
closeted figures of the entire era.
Fortunately—and
fortune seems to be a subtheme of Hunter’s entire career—the moment he took to
the screen he had the accident of being asked to sing what became the most
popular single of the year, “Young Love,” backed up by Elvis Presley’s
background singers. The record was the #1 record for six weeks, becoming one of
the greatest hits of the rock-and-roll era. The voice is thin and frail, but he
sings it and others with the belief of young lovers, and, with his beautiful
blue eyes, conveys a sense of absolute belief that no one can deny. He was a
natural seducer.
Even
the evil Jack Warner was clearly sold on the new wonder boy, especially after
Hunter artfully seduced the married Dorothy Malone figure in Raoul
Walsh’s Battle Cry, one of the most successful movies of 1955. The
studio bought the musical Damn Yankees as a vehicle for him,
while importing most of the rest of the cast—Ray Walston, Gwen Verdon, Shannon
Bolin, Jean Stapleton, and choreographer Bob Fosse—from Broadway. Director
George Abbott, attempting to transform Hunter, yet again, to his stage vision
of the original Broadway star, finally forced the mutable young actor into a
more forceful being, as Hunter demanded that he define the role of Joe Hardy in
his own way. Although he perhaps succeeded in doing that, one must admit that
the final production was not the greatest of musicals to reach the screen (see
my comments on Gwen Verdon and him in my “Shall We Dance” essay in My
Year 2000). Both Abbott and co-director Stanley Donen were appalled by his
lack of talent, Donen later observing: “He couldn’t sing, he couldn’t dance, he
couldn’t act. He was a triple threat.” I’ll always, however, remember the
lovely, late film number, “Two Lost Souls,” where, finally, he and Verdon,
realizing they’re now both utterly failed human beings, temporarily come together
for a charming song and dance. The number might almost be used to describe Tab
Hunter’s entire career, although his 30-year long relationship with producer
Allan Glaser utterly redeems him.
For
his part, Hunter argues that “I wasn’t so much a person now as I was a valuable
commodity. . . . They can put you in the slot they want, and you’re supposed to
stay there, performing your trick on demand.” Once he had begun to define
himself, he was described as difficult to work with and “temperamental.”
At
about the same time, in order to save his major breadwinner, Rock Hudson, from
being outed by the wicked Hedda Hopper and others in the even more evil Confidential magazine,
Hunter’s agent Willson, as some have described it, put him, along with Rory
Calhoun, “under the bus,” revealing Calhoun’s early periods of imprisonment and
Hunter’s arrestment—one must recall this was the worst period of the 1950s—for
simply attending a gay party at a private house. Jack Warner’s response was
heartening: “Today’s headlines, tomorrow’s toilet paper,” but without Willson
(Hunter claiming that Willson left him, as opposed to the industry legend
that Hunter left Willson) the hunky actor’s career took a tailspin as he
was forced again and again to play young sailors, soldiers, and airmen in grade
B movies, few of which allowed him any room to display his acting chops—with
the exception of John Huston’s The Life and Times of Judge Roy
Bean (1972), performing with his former friend Antony Perkins, and,
with Sophia Loren, in Sidney Lumet’s That Kind of Woman.
A
career in television, including his own show, and a long period in dinner
theater, including productions of Bye Bye Birdie, Under the Yum Yum
Tree, and West Side Story (a movie role for which he
had yearned, going instead to Richard Beymer). Hunter seems quite bitter about
his dinner theater years: “The audiences for these shows were married
middle-aged women with grumpy husbands in tow, hoping to relive their youth by
seeing their onetime matinee idol in person.” Given his previous indentured
servitude to thousands of young screaming teen girls, one wonders at his later
dismissal of this theatrically conventional, but apparently lucrative activity.
Nonetheless,
he later slightly redeemed his career with wonderfully campy but
completely committed performances in John Water’s Polyester (1981)
and Paul Bartel’s Lust in the Dust (1985), in which both of
them having on- screen affairs with the drag artist Divine.
In
short, Hunter proves a kind a strange gay icon, a man who was willing to
contort most of his life into Hollywood sexual “bondage,” while claiming to be
absolutely accepting of own “deviance.” While he might almost seem,
particularly in his later years, an advocate and icon of open sexuality, he was
a deeply political conservative, embracing, during the Viet Nam war the viewpoints
of his co-star John Wayne more than those of his own kind, and despite his own
beloved brother’s death in Viet Nam. In the end, Hunter seems to be a victim of
his own age, as he expresses it, caught between an older Hollywood system and a
new politically engaged community which might have freed him from his sexual
and political attitudes, as well as his deep religiosity—he remained
throughout, despite a period of abandonment, a loyal Roman Catholic.
Finally,
what all of this makes apparent is that despite the seemingly easy, open beauty
of Hunter’s aspect and demeanor, there was always a deeper, somewhat
frightening and even sinister world behind that gorgeous face and its
innocently embracing eyes.
Los Angeles, June 12,
2016
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (June 2016).
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