'50s idol Tab Hunter had a secret. He's gay. And he wrote about it.
Edward Guthmann, Chronicle Staff Writer

Monday, November 7, 2005

At the peak of his fame in 1956, when fan magazines were calling him "The Sigh Guy" and extolling his "Squeal Appeal," Tab Hunter received 62,000 Valentines from girls around the world. Manufactured by fan mags, packaged by Warner Bros., Hunter was probably the least equipped of Hollywood superstars.

Born Arthur Kelm, he became Art Gelien when his mother reclaimed her maiden name. He grew up nomadically without a father, scraping by on his mother's scant paycheck. Untrained, he fell into acting after a teenage stint with the Coast Guard and became a star with his role in the World War II drama "Battle Cry."

Overwhelmed by the Hollywood publicity machine, he struggled to keep secret the fact that he was gay.

Tough work for an intensely private, devoutly Catholic boy. "I was scared of my own shadow as a kid," Hunter says, during lunch at an Indian restaurant in the Castro. "You'd say hello to me, and I'd turn beet red and drop my eyes down to the ground. That's how shy I was."

Hunter, who had a comeback in the early '80s when John Waters cast him opposite transvestite actor Divine in "Polyester," is the author of a new memoir. "Tab Hunter Confidential," co-written with Bay Area author Eddie Muller, is a page-turner -- the colorful saga of a man whom Hollywood never took seriously, but who somehow prevailed. Unlike so many of his contemporaries, whose spirits crashed when their careers ended, who turned into drunks or addicts or psychotic recluses, Hunter remained psychically intact.

Even today, at 74, there's a big, gaping disconnect between Hunter and the notion of "movie star." There's nothing slick about this guy, who dresses like a logger and offers a big grin and an extra-firm handshake to a stranger. Nothing calculated or cynical -- just an aw-shucks, Huck Finn kind of enthusiasm. Everything but the straw between the teeth.

The title of his book refers in part to Confidential magazine, a smut-seeking scandal sheet that outed gay celebrities in the '50s and exposed Hunter as one of the partygoers at "a limp-wristed pajama party." Like Rock Hudson, who also lived a double life as a gay man and highly desired matinee idol, Hunter was constantly in fear of losing his career.

"Finding out who I was, sexually, was one thing," he writes. "Admitting it was something else entirely, since any evidence could have destroyed my livelihood (or so I thought)." Hunter had a two-year relationship with "Psycho" star Anthony Perkins and a fling with ballet star Rudolf Nureyev, but found his greatest solace in riding and training horses.

Hunter learned to compartmentalize, he writes, "to separate my life into two distinct halves: public life and private life. It left me 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."

If Hunter had followed his first instinct, "Tab Hunter Confidential" wouldn't delve as deeply as it does into his sexuality and the dilemma of the celluloid closet. It was Muller, an author and film noir expert ("Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir," "Dark City Dames"), who pushed.

"There were certain areas that Tab was very reticent to talk about," Muller says. Foremost was his sexuality. "It was a balancing act because I respected Tab's belief in someone's right to privacy. But by the same token, I understand what people expect in a book. ... I told him, 'You have to understand that's why they're publishing the book in the first place: Because you're gay.' "

Reared by a conservative, demanding German mother, Hunter says he grew up when homosexuality was taboo -- as a practice and as conversational topic. "No one ever discussed those things. I mean, the word 'gay' wasn't around. The word 'closeted' was not around."

Even among the small coterie of successful gay actors, Hunter insists, the subject stayed off-limits. "I might've discussed it with Rock Hudson. But never in depth. He might say a little something here, or I might say a little something there. Or Roddy McDowall, perhaps.

"People were too much gentlemen then. They weren't in your face. Everything has to be blecccch!" -- he makes a sputtering sound -- "out there today."

And so, during the two-year period when Muller worked with Hunter on the book -- sometimes on the phone, sometimes during extended powwows at Hunter's home in Montecito or at Muller's home -- Muller pushed and prodded the reluctant Hunter.

"Eddie would call and say, 'C'mon, Tab, you've gotta be more forthcoming than that,' " Hunter says. "And I'd say, 'It's really difficult for me.' "

Talking about Hunter's sexuality was tricky, Muller says, but "the hardest thing about this book and dealing with Tab -- and this is the absolute truth -- is that Tab does not like to speak ill of anyone. That is just not his way. So, beyond his personal affairs, I really had to convince him that it was OK to dish some of the people he worked with."

Tallulah Bankhead, who co-starred with Hunter in Tennessee Williams' "The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore" on Broadway, gets her share of blows. Also Paul Bartel, whose direction of the ribald Western spoof, "Lust in the Dust," was too "effete" for Hunter's taste.

The toughest stuff to write, Hunter says, were family memories: "The committing of my mother to a mental institution and the death of my brother in Vietnam." His brother, Walt, a year older and the father of seven children, was the one who introduced Hunter to horses ("the love of my life") and helped him come out of his shell.

When Walt died, Hunter writes, "I prayed for all the soldiers serving our country. When I saw on television the growing hordes of young people protesting the war in the streets, burning our flag, my blood boiled. If they didn't like this country, they could all get the hell out."

The book, Hunter and Muller both say, was collaborative. "I had a ton of stuff in my computer," Hunter recalls. "I'd send a chapter or so to him. He'd rework it and send it to me. I'd make my changes and send that back to him. It was a wonderful marriage, it really was."

"What I really did," Muller adds, "was structural in terms of how to make it work as a story."

In the last chapter of the book, "Happy To Be Forgotten," Hunter says it's a relief to be out of the public eye. He shares a home in Montecito with his partner of 23 years, film producer Allan Glaser, is still devoted to his horses and took care of his mother ("an amazing woman") until her death two years ago at 92.

Hunter says he's thrilled with the book -- he tends to speak in italics and exclamation points -- and feels gratified by the good reviews and positive attention from the press. That's a surprise given how brutal the press was during his stardom years.

"I had to get the book out there," he explains. "I didn't want some schmuck writing about me after I'd died and gone." But the acting, the industry functions, the hoopla -- he couldn't care less.

"I don't care about that other stuff," he says. "It's just not my comfort zone."

Now one has to wonder about Polyester. I recall that John mentions Tab's "straightness". Actaully now the whole commentary on TAb puts things in a new light.

http://images.google.com/...safe%3Doff

i thought he came out publicly quite awhile back.

anyway, loved him in "Grease 2" -- would like to check out the book.

There was always speculation about his preference...

Good for him.