Remembering Tab Hunter, Actor and Gay Icon https://www.vanityfair.co...unter-obit

One of my all-time fav musicals is Damn Yankees (1958) starring Tab Hunter, Gwen Verdon and Ray Walston about Baseball and deal with the devil. It was directed by Stanley Donen and the cheorgraphy was all Bob Fosse The soundtrack was amazing and I loved the song Tab and Gwen performed in the film called Two Lost Souls. Tab was soooo great in this film and I will watch it today to remember what a great talent we lost.

[Edited 7/9/18 20:18pm]

Tab Hunter Appreciation: A Star Who Survived Both the Studio System and Hollywood Homophobia https://www.thetelegraph....060925.php

The actor moved from mainstream hits like "Damn Yankees!" to cult indies like "Lust in the Dust" -- and outlived all the gossip columnists who...

“To ask ‘Whatever happened to Tab Hunter?'” a reporter for The New York Times once wrote, “is to ask ‘Whatever happened to America?'”

As we remember Hunter — the Hollywood heartthrob who died this week a few days shy of his 87th birthday — it’s clear that his own career and personal path follows America’s (and Hollywood’s) arc of understanding homosexuality in the post-WWII era. A performer who was once deeply closeted in the industry could, in his later years, make two outrageous comedies in which his romantic co-lead was played by legendary drag queen Divine.

Born Arthur Gelien, Tab Hunter was one of a stable of performers (including Rock Hudson, with whom he had a thing or two in common) groomed for stardom by agent Henry Willson, who gave the neophyte performer his name and his first forays onto the big screen.

Hunter made his big-screen debut in 1950 and would become one of the decade’s biggest stars, both as an actor and as a pop singer, working alongside performers like Sophia Loren (“That Kind of Woman”) and Natalie Wood (“The Burning Hills”) and great filmmakers, including Raoul Walsh (“Battle Cry”), Stanley Donen (“Damn Yankees!”) and William Wellman (“Lafayette Escadrille”).

Also Read: Tab Hunter Remembered by Elton John, Zachary Quinto and More: 'Most Handsome and Special Man'

A darling of the fan magazines, where he was often photographed stepping out with Wood and other ingénues of the era, Hunter had a big secret — he was gay in an era when polite society never spoke of such things, where public acknowledgment would have been a career-ending scandal in almost any profession, but especially for a movie star. (After posing for the cameras with his studio-arranged dates, Hunter would often meet up with “Psycho” star Anthony Perkins, with whom he had a relationship for several years. Their tempestuous pairing is the subject of the upcoming film “Tab & Tony.”)

Hunter’s career had its ups and downs, with years of work in television and dinner theater followed by his audacious, career-redefining role in John Waters’ 1981 indie “Polyester,” an experience that prompted Hunter to reteam with co-star Divine in the Western spoof “Lust in the Dust” four years later.

It was on that latter film that he got to know producer Allan Glaser, who became Hunter’s romantic and professional partner for the rest of the actor’s life. (Glaser is currently producing “Tab & Tony” alongside Zachary Quinto and J.J. Abrams.)

Also Read: Tab Hunter, Actor and '50s Hollywood Golden Boy, Dies at 86

On screen, Hunter had the good fortune to have a career that spanned from the golden age of the studio system to the independent-film explosion. And off screen, he knew joy and tragedy and love and heartbreak, all of which he has shared eloquently in his riveting memoir “Tab Hunter Confidential,” which was later adapted into Jeffrey Schwarz’s fascinating documentary of the same name.

Fame as a teen idol is always fleeting, but Tab Hunter has left behind a fascinating array of film roles, along with an exemplary off-screen life, one that saw him hearty, healthy and riding his beloved horses well into his 80s.

The gossip columnists who once hounded him are now long gone; Hunter, by living well, has enjoyed the best revenge.

Tab Hunter “Had Every Right to Become Bitter and Resentful and Didn’t," Recalls Pal Robert Wagner https://www.hollywoodrepo...er-1125863

The 'Damn Yankees!' star and gay icon, who died July  8 at 86, is remembered by his friend and fellow studio player: "He was a big star — the top one in Hollywood, for a while — but he was also a very special human being"

I took a friend to the airport early this morning, and when I came home, my wife, Jill [St. John, the actress], was in tears. She told me about Tab, who was a wonderful friend of mine for so many years.

Tab and I both started out in the early ’50s during the last days of the studio system, and we more or less grew up together. Everyone — colleagues and fans alike — loved Tab not only because he was so handsome and talented, but because he had a kind of purity about him back then that he managed to retain for the rest of his life. He was a big star — the top one in Hollywood, for a while — but he was also a very special human being, a genuinely kind and loving person.

I guess that, even years ago, we all knew that Tab was gay, but it wasn’t something that we talked about. All that mattered was that he was our friend. Natalie [Wood, the actress to whom Wagner was previously married] also adored him. They made a couple of pictures that were very successful — The Burning Hills and The Girl He Left Behind — and they hung out together quite a lot. In those days, they had the fan magazines and all of that, so people always reported that they were a couple. The truth is they were the best of friends.

I imagine that was a very difficult time for young men who were gay, and it certainly couldn’t have been easy for Tab. After all that he had to deal with, he had every right to become a bitter and resentful guy, and yet he didn’t — he was one of the most sunny and positive people I ever knew.

When I think of Tab, I’ll think of him in movies like Damn Yankees!; him and his wonderful partner, Allan Glaser, with whom he had a marvelous personal and professional relationship spanning decades; him and his beloved horses, which he rode until the very end; and how kind he was to me, Natalie, Jill and our daughters [whom he and Allan put in one of their films] and just about everyone he met.

I had the greatest respect and affection for him — he was a first-rate, wonderful person — and I’ll miss him and his smile terribly.

Tab Hunter: how Hollywood's boy next door became a gay icon https://www.theguardian.c...a-gay-icon

The actor, who died on Sunday at the age of 86, kept his sexuality a secret at a time when the industry wasn’t ready for an openly gay heartthrob

American actor Tab Hunter on a beach, circa 1955. Photograph: Archive Photos/Getty Images

Hollywood heartthrob Tab Hunter, the beloved boy-next-door of 1950s Warner Brothers classics like Battle Cry, The Burning Hills and Damn Yankees, died on Sunday at the age of 86. A blonde, square-jawed and wholesome symbol of mid-century American masculinity, Hunter, born in 1931 as Arthur Gelien, was gay but kept his sexuality a secret for the bulk of his career, until coming out in his 2005 autobiography Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star.

“Tab passed away tonight three days shy of his 87th birthday,” read a post on the late actor’s Facebook page early Monday morning. “Please honor his memory by saying a prayer on his behalf. He would have liked that.”

A product of an era that was famously inhospitable to gay entertainers, Hunter kept up secret romances with film star Anthony Perkins and figure skater Ronnie Robertson as movie studios trotted him out alongside screen sirens Natalie Wood and Debbie Reynolds, with whom he’d go on pretend dates. Before the LGBT rights movement broke open in the late 60s, Hunter’s sexual orientation, like that of his contemporary Rock Hudson, was handled with innuendo by journalists covering the revolving door of romances among Tinseltown’s top brass.

Natalie Wood and Tab Hunter pose with trophies at the Audience Awards in Los Angeles on 6 December 1955. Photograph: AP

The gossip columns of the day, penned by Louella Parsons and Hedda Hopper, “made subtle references” to his sexuality, as Hunter wrote in the Hollywood Reporter in 2015, “wondering when I was going to settle down with a nice girl and then, after the studio began pairing me with my dear friend Natalie Woodon faux-dates, asking if I was ‘the sort of guy’ she wanted to end up with”.

Ultimately, Hunter would end up with producer Allan Glaser, his partner of 36 years. But not before an article in Confidential, the bimonthly gossip rag from which Hunter’s memoir borrows its name, reported on the then 24-year-old’s involvement in an arrest at a “limp-wristed pajama party” where other gay males were in attendance. The article, Hunter felt, insinuated he’d been party to a “gay orgy”, a rumor that might have torpedoed his career given the contemporaneous moral panic around homosexuality and the “lavender scare” that led to mass firings.

“When the Confidential article came out,” he recalled, “I thought my career was over.”

But Hunter, who by the late 50s felt “the publicity had exceeded the product”, was actually entering the most prolific stretch of his career. In 1956, he starred opposite Wood in The Burning Hills, a Western revenge tale about a pair of young lovers. The two teamed up again two years later in the 1958 romantic comedy The Girl He Left Behind. A year before that, Hunter’s version of the song Young Love charted at number one on the Billboard Top 100, introducing the world to his dreamy baritone. And, in 1958, he proved his musical bona fides yet again starring in Damn Yankees, an All-American movie musical that cemented Hunter’s status as the comely golden boy opposite James Dean’s rebel without a cause.

Bosley Crowther, reviewing the film adaptation of the 1955 musical in the New York Times, said Hunter was in possession of “the clean, naive look of a lad breaking into the big leagues and into the magical company of a first-rate star”.

That star, however, would begin to dim in the early 1960s, when Hunter bought himself out of his contract with Warner Bros for $100,000 and was replaced by Troy Donahue. He’d continue to make movies and appear on television – most notably in the short-lived Tab Hunter Show – but found himself mostly in B pictures like Operation Bikini while working the dinner theatre circuit in shows like Bye, Bye Birdie and The Tender Trap. As the studio era ended, the movie business changed inalterably; Hunter, as he says in his memoir, had to bite the hand that fed him stardom.

Tab Hunter, who died on Sunday at the age of 86, with his horse on 3 April 1967. Photograph: AP

“In my professional life, I longed to be more than the sigh guy,” he wrote in Tab Hunter Confidential, which was made into a documentary of the same name in 2015. “In my personal life, I was quite a different Boy Next Door than the one Mr and Mrs Middle America imagined me to be.”

Through the 60s and 70s, Hunter decamped to Europe, where he spent time in Capri, Monte Carlo, and Rome liaising with Luchino Visconti and Etchika Choureau while carrying on an affair with the Soviet dancer Rudolf Nureyev. What he really wanted, though, was to “chuck the whole rat race and move to Virginia’s horse country”. So, in 1973, he began leasing farms in rural getaways like Oregon and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, paying the bills by touring with a dinner theatre troupe.

In 1977, Hunter attempted a comeback when he replaced Philip Burns as George Shumway in the late-night series Forever Fernwood. But what would revitalize his career in earnest was a phone call from John Waters, the transgressive gay film-maker whose campy sensibility hadn’t yet been fully embraced beyond midnight moviegoers. Waters had called to cast Hunter in Polyester, opposite drag queen and Waters muse Divine.

“How would you feel about kissing a 350-pound transvestite?” Waters supposedly asked Hunter. “Well, I’m sure I’ve kissed a hell of a lot worse!” he replied. The film would become a resounding success, Waters’ first in the mainstream, and the unlikely pairing that was Hunter and Divine would be reprised in the 1985 comic western Lust in the Dust. It was on the set of that film where Hunter met Glaser, the producer with whom he’d spend the next three and a half decades.

It was not until 2005, though, that Hunter came out publicly, using his memoir (co-written by Eddie Muller) to pre-empt another tell-all that was also in the works. Its opening words – “I hate labels” – reflect Hunter’s discomfort with an industry hellbent on typecasting him as the Sigh Guy, the Boy Next Door and “the even more ludicrous Swoon Bait”. But, in its Inside Baseball approach to revealing the inner workings of Hollywood before, during and after the studio era, it is a remarkably insightful, confident account of and by one of Hollywood’s first gay movie stars, a label by which the famously self-effacing Hunter would surely be chagrined. In death, though, Tab Hunter’s legend won’t fade. The 2015 documentary adapted from his memoir, which can be seen on Netflix, helped usher in a wave of discourse about the ills of the studio era – homophobia, misogyny and abuse among them – a topic that was revisited last year in Feud, the fictitious television recounting of the rivalry between Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. And, just last month, JJ Abrams, Zachary Quinto, and Glaser announced they’d be producing a film called Tab & Tony, about the secret years-long dalliance between Hunter and Perkins.

Hunter, at any rate, preferred solitude and privacy to having his dirty laundry aired, the same way he preferred horses to humans. But there is a kind of poetic justice in that a man who spent much of his life in the shadows lived long enough to see his forbidden romance developed as a movie, one produced, as it ought to be, by two openly gay men.

[Edited 7/10/18 20:52pm]

TCM‏Verified account @tcm 9h9 hours ago

[Edited 7/10/18 20:58pm]

Barbara Eden‏Verified account @Barbara_Eden 7h7 hours ago

I almost forgot Tab was also in Grease 2 (1982) as Mr. Stuart, I love this number Reproduction

Michelle May‏ @MichelleAMay87 Jul 9

[Edited 7/10/18 20:33pm]

The Life And Times Of Tab Hunter https://www.npr.org/secti...d-amicably

The peak of Tab Hunter’s career was brief. The 50s icon’s stardom barely outlasted the decade in which it shot forth. His resume is slim when it comes to quality work. He never won any major awards. He was an idol, but like many idols, he was not taken seriously.

My mother and her friends loved him when I was growing up in the '60s.

Pic of Tab Hunter with James Dean on the set of Rebel Without a Cause (1955). I read that he won the role in Battle Cry (1955) over Dean and Paul Newman.

Also Tab appeared in one of my all-time fav episodes of The Fall Guy, in Season 2 (1982) called "P.S I Love You."