’50s Hollywood heartthrob with a secret

Tab Hunter, a tousle-haired actor who established himself as an all-American golden boy in the 1950s, reaching No. 1 at the box office and pop music charts while anxiously hiding his gay identity — a secret that threatened to end his career — died Sunday at a hospital near his home in Santa Barbara, Calif. He would have turned 87 on Wednesday.

The cause was cardiac arrest triggered by a blood clot in his leg, said his husband, producer Allan Glaser.

Hunter became a Hollywood heartthrob through movies such as the World War II drama Battle Cry (1955) and the baseball musical Damn Yankees (1958), which featured him alongside the original Broadway cast. He also scored a chart-topping pop hit in 1957 with “Young Love.”

While posters of Hunter were pasted in the bedrooms of teenage girls across America, he maintained closeted relationships with men such as

Psycho star Anthony Perkins at a time when performers were forced to keep their sexuality secret for fear of losing their careers and livelihoods.

He confirmed he was gay only in a 2005 memoir, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star, which served as the basis of a 2015 documentary.

“I believed, wholeheartedly — still do — that a person’s happiness depends on being true to themselves,” he wrote. “The dilemma, of course, was that being true to myself — and I’m talking sexually now — was impossible in 1953.”

When he was nearly 50, Hunter made an unlikely comeback in a very un-Hollywood film when filmmaker John Waters cast him in his quirky comedy Polyester (1981) and made him hip for a new generation. The film 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.

Arthur Andrew Kelm was born 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.

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.