a lost soul
by
Douglas Messerli
Jeffrey
Schwarz (writer, 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.
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 Dack, 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.”
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.
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—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 [see My Year 2004]). 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 indenturement 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 which he had on screen affairs with the drag artist Divine.
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, someone frightening and even sinister world behind
that gorgeous face and its innocently embracing eyes.
Los Angeles, June
12, 2016
can't post on fb since I have been blocked by them for my trump posts anyway I did love this blonde beauty when I was a young kid in the 50's. Funny story back in the early 70's I was waiting for a bus on 6th ave in the 20's when anthony perkins rode by on his bike, he slowed down and stopped giving me a cruise, I was thrown for a loop and didn't return the cruise, hell there was no way I was going to do it with norman bates.
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