Hollywood heart-throb whose sexuality was kept under wraps for years
During his life, actor Tab Hunter was the definitive posterboy for the fiction of Hollywood’s golden age: adored by millions of women around the world, he was, in his private life a gay man, and known to the world as Tab Hunter, he was in fact born Arthur Andrew Kelm.
The film star and recording artist, who has died aged 86, came to Hollywood in the early
1950s when actors were housed in studio stables, their names chosen by talent agents and their private lives crafted for public consumption by studio publicity departments.
At the time he was known as Arthur Gelien – during his teenage years he used his mother’s maiden name – and knocked on the door of one of
Hollywood’s legendary agents, Henry
Willson.
Willson, whose client roster included Rock Hudson, Robert Wagner, Troy Donahue and Rory Calhoun, was once described wryly as having a knack for "discovering and renaming young actors whose visual appeal transcended any lack of ability’’.
Willson notably turned Roy Scherer into Rock Hudson, Orison Whipple Hungerford Jr into Ty Hardin and Arthur Gelien into Tab Hunter.
After a handful of small roles, Hunter secured a contract with Warner Bros and was cast in The Sea Chase, with John Wayne and Lana Turner, and later Battle Cry, with Van Heflin and Anne Francis.
Hunter also starred in two films with actress Natalie Wood: The Burning Hills and The Girl He Left Behind.
Those two films framed Hunter in one of Hollywood’s oldest lies: a false romance with Wood, intended to create a protective smoke screen in front of his homosexuality.
In fact, as his star was soaring in Hollywood, Hunter was involved romantically with actor Anthony Perkins and champion figure skater Ronnie Robertson.
His private life – specifically, an arrest in
1950 for disorderly conduct – was also bartered by Willson (along with another story, about actor Rory Calhoun’s prison record) to the tabloid magazine Confidential in exchange for the scuttling of another story, about Rock Hudson’s homosexuality.
Even in a more permissive era, such backroom deals remain a form of hard currency between stars, their minders and tabloid publications.
Writing in his memoir, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star, which was published in 2005, Hunter spoke openly of his struggle with his public and private lives.
‘‘I believed, wholeheartedly – still do – that a person’s happiness depends on being true to themselves,’’ he said. ‘‘The dilemma, of course, was that being true to myself, and I’m talking sexually now, was impossible in 1953.’’
Hunter also starred in the
1958 musical film Damn Yankees, his own television series, The Tab Hunter Show, and The Pleasure of His Company, opposite Debbie Reynolds, with whom the studio crafted for him another fictitious real-life romance.
One of the first Hollywood stars to cross over into pop music, Hunter recored a song in 1957, Young Love, which shot to No 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart; it went on to sell more than one million copies.
Though Hunter’s blond hair and bare torso would become enmeshed with the ‘‘beach party’’ genre, he in fact only ever made one of them: Ride the Wild Surf, which was filmed on location in Hawaii and co-starred Fabian, Barbara Eden and James Mitchum.
Though his fame soared in the 1950s and
1960s, Hunter later faded from sight, returning in the 1980s to a second act of a sort as the star of cult films, notably John Waters’ Polyester
(1981) and Paul Bartel’s Lust in the Dust (1985); Hunter also starred in Grease 2. During the early 1980s, Hunter also met the man who would become his partner of now more than 35 years’ standing, producer Allan Glaser.
Glaser and Hunter coproduced Lust in the Dust ,in which Hunter played a gunslinger who becomes involved with dance-hall girl Rosie Velez (Divine) and saloon owner Marguerita Ventura (Lainie Kazan) in pursuit of a missing treasure.
The pair also co-produced Dark Horse in 1992, about a young girl who, with her beloved horse, is injured and must find the courage to ride again; the film starred Hunter, Ed Begley Jr, Mimi Rogers and Natalie Wood’s daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner.
And Hollywood, in that strangely serendipitous way, has one final act of Hunter’s life to replay: a month ago the studio Paramount announced it was developing a film, titled Tab & Tony about Hunter’s relationship with Perkins.
‘‘I believed, wholeheartedly – still do – that a person’s happiness depends on being true to themselves.’’