PhilPaine.com

I was sur­prised at how much I learned about how Hol­ly­wood works from this biog­ra­phy of a star of the 1950’s. Tab Hunter was a “heart-throb”, an actor who was mar­keted for his hand­some­ness. I frankly don’t find his kind of looks very attrac­tive, but many peo­ple do. His auto­bi­og­ra­phy is “co-authored”, prob­a­bly mean­ing that Hunter was exten­sively inter­viewed, pro­vided tape record­ed rem­i­nis­cences, and the “co-author” put it togeth­er in first-per­son voice. It’s a per­fectly valid way for an actor, who doesn’t hap­pen to be an expe­ri­enced writer, to tell his sto­ry. In this case, the result seems to be unusu­ally hon­est. Hunter stum­bled into movie act­ing, and was ini­tially suc­cess­ful because of his looks. He was gay, and went through the com­plex­i­ties, strate­gies, and per­ils that gay actors had to face in the 1950s. What it par­tic­u­larly charm­ing about the nar­ra­tive is the fact that Hunter (real name Arthur Andrew Kelm), who had an impov­er­ished child­hood in a rather dis­func­tional sin­gle-par­ent fam­ily, was in per­son a rather bash­ful, ret­i­cent, and psy­cho­log­i­cally con­ser­v­a­tive per­son, more com­fort­able with hors­es than peo­ple. His whole­some, boy-next-door image was not an act. How­ever, he was able to attract peo­ple like Antho­ny Perkins and Rudolf Nureyev as lovers. He moved eas­ily in sophis­ti­cated cir­cles in the the­atre, and in Europe’s high soci­ety, with­out alter­ing his per­sona. His act­ing career has nev­er been tak­en seri­ously, though he did some fine work on the stage and in tele­vi­sion, and clear­ly cared deeply about his craft. He strug­gled to get roles that didn’t con­sist most­ly of pos­ing shirt­less. But in the end, he was done in by cul­tural shifts that put his image out of fash­ion. His most intel­li­gent career move was to appear in John Waters’ 1980 low bud­get cult film, Poly­ester. That, and pub­licly com­ing out of the clos­et, won him the respect he had nev­er got­ten as a teen idol. The book is not vin­dic­tive, but it gives a very believ­able account of some of the nas­tier things that went on in the film indus­try in the 1950’s and 1960’s.