Iconic 1950s movie star Tab Hunter dies
Former teen idol felt ‘painfully isolated’ hiding homosexuality
Tab Hunter, the actor and singer who was a heartthrob for millions of teenagers in the 1950s and received new attention decades later when he revealed he was gay, has died at 86.
Tab Hunter, the tall, blond, blue-eyed movie star who as a teenage idol in the 1950s was one of the last products of the Hollywood studio system — and who made an unlikely comeback in a very un-Hollywood film when he was almost 50 — died Sunday in Santa Barbara, Calif. He was 86.
His death was confirmed by his spouse, Allan Glaser, who said the cause was cardiac arrest after a blood clot moved from Hunter’s leg to his lung.
Hunter was born Arthur Andrew Kelm in Manhattan on July 11, 1931, to a forbidding German immigrant mother and a father who welcomed his birth by tossing a nickel candy bar on his wife’s hospital bed and leaving her to carry the baby home to their tenement in a borrowed blanket.
Kelm was 17 when agent Henry Willson gave him a new name and added him to a roster of clients that included Rock Hudson, Robert Wagner and Rory Calhoun. “Acting skill,” Hunter said in his 2005 autobiography, “Tab Hunter Confidential” (written with Eddie Muller), “was secondary to chiseled features and a fine physique.”
He might not have had the skill, at least not yet, but he had the look; he was the epitome of the sunny all-American boy enshrined in decades of Hollywood films. His first audition for “Island of Desire” (1952) consisted of taking off his shirt. The screen test came later. On the basis of that movie, in which he played a brash Marine corporal marooned with Linda Darnell on a South Seas island, the readers of Photoplay magazine voted him the year’s No. 1 new male star.
His breakthrough movie was “Battle Cry” (1955), in which he played another Marine, at the beginning of World War II, who has a girlfriend back home and a steamy love affair with a married USO volunteer (Dorothy Malone) in San Diego. Its success led to a seven-year contract with Warner Bros.
It was not until 50 years after “Battle Cry,” when he wrote his autobiography, that Hunter publicly discussed his homosexuality; his love affair with actor Anthony Perkins; the rage and wrath of his parish priest when, as a 14-year-old boy, he haltingly confessed what had happened in the dark of a movie theater; and years of being “painfully isolated, stranded between the casual homophobia of most ‘normal’ people and the flagrantly gay Hollywood subculture — where I was even less comfortable and less accepted.”
He was most comfortable on horseback, a lifelong passion.
Determined to turn himself into a real actor, Hunter sought out live television. He played a murderer on “Playhouse 90” and Jimmy Piersall, the Major League Baseball player who came back from a nervous breakdown, in a well-reviewed adaptation of the book “Fear Strikes Out” on the series “Climax.” But Warner Bros. refused to buy the movie rights to “Fear Strikes Out” for its teenage idol, and the film was made by Paramount, with Hunter’s sometime companion Anthony Perkins in the lead role.
Frustrated, Hunter bought himself out of his Warner Bros. contract in 1959.
Leaving Warner Bros. proved to be a mistake.
“I was a product of Hollywood,” Hunter told the New York Times in 1981. “And one morning, I woke up and couldn’t get arrested.”
He never stopped working, but he would not return to the spotlight until maverick filmmaker John Waters cast him in his quirky comedy “Polyester” and made him hip for a new generation.
“Polyester,” released in 1981, was an unexpected success, with critics as well as at the box office. It was both Waters’ first mainstream hit and Hunter’s ticket out of dinner theater.
In 1988, Hunter’s comeback ended — by choice. He spent his last years living in Montecito, Calif., near Santa Barbara, with his dogs, his horses and Glaser, his business and personal partner since 1983. They married shortly after same-sex marriage became legal in California, Glaser said.
Hunter leaves no other immediate survivors.