Inside the Dreamboat Factory [The Fairy Godfather of Hollywood]
Gregory Morrow
JUICY gossip in this excellent article...click on the link below to get the
show - bizzy and sometimes lascivious illustrations that accompany the
article.]
http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/51/dreamboat.htm
Inside the Dreamboat Factory
The Fairy Godfather of Hollywood
"He won't be gay when I get through with him!"
By Robert Keser
"His business card read: "If you're interested in getting into the movies, I
can help you. Henry Willson. Agent." And he could. Most famously, he took
the gangly young Roy Scherer, got his teeth fixed, dubbed him "Rock Hudson,"
and used his clout to provoke a major studio build-up for the ex-mailman
from Winnetka, Illinois. He steered actresses through Hollywood's career
hoops too, like Lana Turner, Rhonda Fleming, and Gena Rowlands, but Willson
earned his sobriquet of "fairy godfather of Hollywood" through his
single-minded focus on newly arrived young hunks on the Sunset Strip, with
whispered enticements like, "You could be a star.. You're better looking
than any movie actor here." Moving closer, to advance the intimacy, he would
confide: "You are a star. Now it's up to me to let Hollywood know." What
red-blooded college quarterback or figure skater or sailor on leave could
resist such a pitch?
Certainly not the 1950s dreamboats who ended up with names like Guy Madison,
Rory Calhoun, Tab Hunter, and Troy Donahue. The tender attentions of
Willson, including his role in shaping gay or bisexual actors into
ostensibly straight-arrow silver-screen idols, were no secret in the
business but jealously kept under wraps from the audiences who bought
tickets for the fantasy played out in fan magazines. Willson was the face of
a cynical system, supported by an unseen infrastructure of fixers and studio
connections who enabled the mythmaking. Now, almost simultaneously, two
books have surfaced that scrape off the frosting for a look at how Hollywood
's confection was constructed: Robert Hofler's _The Man Who Invented Rock
Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson_ [1] is bursting
with impressive research and remarkably frank interviews with surviving
veterans of the dreamboat factory, while _Tab Hunter Confidential: The
Making of a Movie Star_ by Tab Hunter (with film noir historian Eddie
Muller)[2] gives a unique inside glimpse at the dilemmas of living a double
life, straight leading man by day yet conducting a lively after-hours affair
with rival idol Anthony Perkins under the very flashbulbs of the publicity
machine.
Both books remind us of how far - yet how little - the culture has
progressed in half a century. Excellent earlier works like Hal Volley's
_Mike Connolly and the Manly Art of Hollywood Gossip_ and Charles Winecoff's
_Split Image: The Life of Anthony Perkins_ built on the foundation of David
Ehrenstein's groundbreaking study _Open Secret: Gay Hollywood 1928-2000_,
which shone a spotlight on this hidden sociocultural history of the American
studio system just before it ruptured in the early 1960s. At that time,
coming out was akin to career hara-kiri, and prosecutable to boot (not just
among actors, of course). Lest we smile at yesterday's unenlightened
practices, it is instructive to ask how many gay actors were hired to star
in _Brokeback Mountain_. (Ironically, even the straight stars of Ang Lee's
award-magnet drama of gay sheepherders found it wise to carefully protect
their images by taking strategic counter-roles, Jake Gyllenhaal playing with
guns as a butch marine in _Jarhead_ and Heath Ledger bedhopping as history's
most notorious heterosexual in _Casanova_). While certain high-profile
producers and directors are now out and presumably proud, more than a few
gay actors and their handlers are still saddled with problems that Willson
would recognize.
In the early 1950s, as TV antennas sprouted on the nation's rooftops, the
studio system flailed helplessly before the ruinous competition from this
techno-upstart, first trying 3-D and widescreen novelties to lure audiences
back, and then scrambling to attract new teen consumers by co-opting rock
and roll. Manufacturing male pin-ups like Guy Madison (right) was part of a
fresh marketing opportunity, an attempt to rescue the business by selling to
the newly identified youth market, first called "bobbysoxers," then
"teentimers," and finally "teenagers."
With the Great Dreamboat Deception, Hollywood appeased one of America's
waves of conservatism [3] by constructing an American mythology that modeled
a tamed young adult male, a randier version of the pre-war Andy Hardy good
boy, adding some military assertiveness to pose a deliberate alternative to
rebellious bad boys like Marlon Brando and James Dean. Embodying the
buttoned-down prejudices and repressions of the McCarthy era (upheld by
closeted gay figures like Roy Cohn and J. Edgar Hoover, now seen as traitors
to their sexuality), the charade played out a dream of middle-class
"normality," depicting only hetero-normal sex among white people, and even
that almost entirely offscreen.
Transmitted in America by well-funded fan rags like _Photoplay_ and _Modern
Screen_, and by powerful gossip columnists like Hedda Hopper and Louella
Parsons, this was a pop culture world of dubiously wholesome frolics as
starlets and studlets lobbed volleyballs on the beach, roasted wienies
beside the backyard pool, and double-dated to publicize studio productions.
In the parlance of the "greatest generation," these Adonises were "free,
white, and 21," typically stragglers from the postwar parade of homecoming
GIs, the ones who didn't care to return to the farm or the family hardware
store.
Henry Willson made himself a key player by implementing the business model
of agent and career coach, investing thousands in living expenses, cosmetic
makeovers, fashion guidance, and acting lessons for his hopeful wannabes.
(Hofler quotes a callow Rock Hudson marveling to _Look_ magazine that in his
acting class "we used to do whole scenes from plays and scripts." Whole
scenes.)
Willson's distinctive (and enduring) contribution was concocting catchy
names for his beefcake stable, often with a comically hypermasculine ring, a
sense of trying too hard or insisting too strongly. Thus, he changed Orton
Whipple Hungerford III into the suggestively phallic "Ty Hardin," and Navy
boy Robert Moseley morphed into "Guy Madison," constructed from the generic
"guy" plus inspiration from a nearby Dolly Madison Bakery, while the man
born Francis Durgin became "Frank McCown" and then "Troy Donahue" until
Willson finally settled on "Rory Calhoun." Later, Merle Johnson Jr.
inherited the "Troy Donahue" moniker, freely admitting that "Troy Donahue
was a star's name. Merle sounded like I ought to go out in the farmyard and
do the chores." This name game became a form of branding that Willson
enjoyed since "everyone knew that I had named them," never mind the
widespread mockery. The ever irreverent Hofler digs up some choice
suggestions from comedian Kaye Ballard: "Grid Iron, Cuff Links, Plate Glass,
and Bran Muffin."
His father a Columbia Records executive, Willson was raised on prosperous
Long Island, got started by supplying gossip for Variety, then moved west in
1933, at the height of conservative protests against the film industry's
perceived immorality (resulting in enforcement of the Production Code a year
later, arguably the price of repealing Prohibition), and just in time to
witness a homophobic campaign waged by _The Hollywood Reporter_.
Canny mega-producer David O. Selznick trusted Willson's eye to scout out
male talent, but Henry could not persuade his boss to sign Montgomery Clift
or openly gay director James Whale, let alone the Italian maestro Roberto
Rossellini. He did succeed, however, as Selznick's pimp, trawling "local
beauty contests and photo shoots for underwear catalogues" as well as the
halls of Hollywood High. According to Hofler, during the shooting of 1944's
homefront tearjerker _Since You Went Away_, Selznick "tried to bed all three
headliners": Claudette Colbert, Jennifer Jones (whom he would later wed),
and even bobbysoxer Shirley Temple.
When Willson opened his own agency in 1953, Hofler waggishly remarks that
"Many were called . . . and many were chosen." At peak operation, Henry
opened and personally answered "9000 letters per year from hopefuls." Among
those who passed through Willson's office, if not necessarily his hands,
were Robert Wagner (right, with Willson), James Darren, John Saxon, Dack
Rambo, and the patrician future ambassador to Mexico (and second lead in
_Psycho_), John Gavin (Henry "knew not to hit on John Gavin"). Of all the
postwar heartthrobs, Farley Granger (whose forthcoming autobiography should
shine additional light into the shadowy corners of Hollywood history) stands
almost alone in escaping Henry Willson's management.
The heart of the make-believe was the straight date, preferably to attend a
studio premiere, so Willson cultivated a harem of beards to facilitate photo
ops. Savvy Terry Moore (_Mighty Joe Young_) understood exactly what she was
doing and "even advised her escorts that they need not tire themselves with
making conversation, because it was enough to move their lips and go,
'Blablablablablabla'." Debbie Reynolds, who used to hang out with Tab Hunter
at the (gay) New Follies Burlesque, tells Hofler,
"Oh sure, I dated all the boys who were homosexual, because I liked them
better. They weren't fresh. They were fun. They were sweet. They didn't come
on to me. All the straight guys were coming on to me. And I couldn't stand
that. I was seventeen. I was a virgin. I didn't want hands all over me." [4]
Stepping deeper into conscious bearding, Natalie Wood and Margaret O'Brien
used to play a "game of trying to figure out which of their dates had slept
with Henry."
Too seasoned a Hollywood observer to construct any nostalgic valentine,
Hofler instead draws us into this cut-throat business of users, where sexual
pleasure is given and taken as a consequence of power. One major Hollywood
power broker, Lew Wasserman, said, "When I became a talent agent for MCA,
the word 'agent' was synonymous with 'pimp'." According to the author, Henry
"often advised his clients to sleep with an executive or influential
director" and not only gay clients. One reporter observed, "It was amazing
what some heterosexual men would do to get a career in Hollywood. Many
thought nothing of sleeping with another man, if it got them a job."
Envious rivals groused that Willson had "elevated cruising to a full-time,
lucrative career" and indeed he would remind reluctant wannabes that "Tab
and Rock and Guy have cared for me personally, you understand?," though Rory
Calhoun (right, with Guy Madison) seemed every bit as compliant. Henry's
longtime assistant Pat Colby told Hofler that "Everyone wanted to sleep with
Rock. No one wanted to sleep with Henry." Yet the star was surprisingly more
accessible than the agent: "Henry had his standards, but Rock would sleep
with anybody."
Willson's full service to his clients also involved spying on them, driving
in the wee hours of the morning to monitor any unfamiliar cars parked in his
boys' driveways. In fact, the book's most spectacular scene stars Rory
Calhoun and Guy Madison found in flagrante delicto in a Jaguar, rocking the
auto on its tires while a bedraggled Henry watched outside in a rainstorm.
[5]
Of Lana Turner, Willson famously instructed one studio functionary: "I didn'
t say she could act. I said she could be a movie star!" In the Hollywood
firmament, Hofler sagely comments that "Sex appeal meant more than talent.
Maybe sex was talent." For the unlucky, whose shining hour never shone in
towering dimensions on the silver screen, sex might still function as a
hook. If nothing else, the gay underground beckoned with jobs for "models"
in burgeoning musclemags like _Physique Pictorial_, an ethos lovingly
recreated in Thom Fitzgerald's 1999 film _Beefcake_. They could also try to
improve their luck by hanging out at Henry Willson's regular weekend pool
parties, attended by key studio players like gossip columnist Mike Connolly,
bodybuilder Steve Reeves (_Hercules_), crooner Johnnie Ray (_There's No
Business Like Show Business_), producer Lester Persky (_Equus_), and Jaik
Rosenstein, Hedda Hopper's leg man.
Notwithstanding his hunk-friendly reputation, insiders described Willson
(far right, with Selznick and Bud Lesser) as "all pit bull and no poodle." A
Beverly Hills detective tells Hofler that "You didn't mess with Henry
Willson," considering his established ties with enforcers and scandal
containers. At his service was an entire infrastructure of fixers: no one
wanted to mess with Fred Otash, for instance, a "leg breaker for the LAPD,"
or shadowy lawyer Harry Weiss, useful for "massaging the arrests of
homosexuals in the city of Los Angeles," though his preternaturally speedy
arrival at the station house aroused suspicions of his collusion in the
arrests, especially since he and partner Lud Gerber owned gay clubs, steam
baths, and even an escort service.
The big guns were reserved for serious damage control. If an underemployed
Hollywood layabout tried petty blackmail, Willson might get the would-be
actor his own TV series so he would have "his own career to protect from the
whispers of a homosexual affair," although Hofler uncovers a case where a
lover who had taken sexually explicit photographs of Rock Hudson got his
nose broken by a private eye and one witness said "you could hear ribs
crack." Protecting his investments in this private underworld of secrets and
extortion, with the IRS auditing Rock, somebody bugging Henry's telephone,
and whispers of an FBI dossier, Henry turned paranoid enough to purchase a
pistol.
Any account of Henry Willson must inevitably keep tilting back to Rock
Hudson and to the agent's sacrifice of Rory Calhoun and Tab Hunter to
preserve a looming public exposure of Hudson in the widely-read scandal mag
_Confidential_, and both books here take different angles on this central
incident. The granddaddy of tell-all tabloids, _Confidential_ magazine
constituted the biggest threat to the dreamboat myth. Although Robert
Mitchum's (right) 1949 arrest and jail time for marijuana possession had
prophesied the end of his nascent film career, his unflappable public
response ("Booze, broads, it's all true . Make up more if you want")
actually increased his popularity, but no one was willing to risk
revelations of man-on-man activity. Hofler notes that "reports have always
circulated that _Confidential_ was essentially an extortion operation that
collected hush money from the studios." And it undeniably was peopled by
McCarthy-era blacklisters, including Willson's pal Mike Connolly, who may
have fed sub-rosa scandal stories to the rag.
Evidence seems to point to Willson himself offering up the reputations of
Rory Calhoun (exposed as a veteran of stints in several federal pens,
including maximum security at San Quentin) and Tab Hunter (revealed as an
arrestee when police raided an all-male party in 1950) in a bargain move to
save Rock Hudson from the predations of _Confidential_ (in any event, the
relatively second-tier careers of both men survived while Hudson burgeoned
to superstardom).
Was it a coincidence that Tab Hunter left Willson's agency at that time?
In his book, Hunter admits that "rumors persisted that it was Henry Willson
who had 'given up' two of his former clients to _Confidential_," but
concludes that "I don't know if it's true, but I wouldn't be surprised." He
also turns the tables on Willson's account of their separation: instead of
the actor firing his agent, the way Hunter tells it, "Henry Willson left my
life."
After the _Confidential_ scare, Henry understood that dating beards was not
providing sufficient cover. Even the fact that Ed Muhl, the General Manager
of Universal-International Pictures, was in love with Rock couldn't
guarantee his remaining among the nation's top box office attractions,
especially when the Luce publishing empire jumped into the fray with a
_Life_ magazine story of disingenuous gaybaiting: "Fans are urging
twenty-nine-year-old Rock Hudson to get married - or explain why not."
In a panic, Willson forced the faux marriage of Rock Hudson to Henry's
secretary, Phyllis Gates. While she consistently denied any play-for-pay
aspect to their short-lived union, one knowledgeable friend said, "Phyllis
was too smart not to know what she was getting into." [6] When the strategy
seemed to succeed, Hudson dared to tread on mighty thin ice in _Pillow
Talk_, where he pretends to be a straight character pretending to be gay,
eliciting guffaws from 1959's audiences but postmodern frissons today.
While Hofler nimbly sifts the evidence of his subject's shady connections
and personal betrayals, Willson emerges as no queer icon. As public cover
for himself, Henry fabricated protracted but blatantly faux engagements with
tolerant women, including the acerbic Diana Lynn ("whose tongue could
puncture asphalt"). If nothing else, Hofler notes that "Henry Willson had no
professional use for effeminate homosexuals, since they had no value in the
movie marketplace."
Like most biographies, this one does not end well. When a new lover prompted
Rock to dissociate from Henry (Hofler quotes the star's complaint: "Every
time Henry Willson sucks some c*ck, I get blamed for it"), the fairy
godfather lost his footing and slid downhill from a drunk driving arrest to
electroshock treatment in a psych ward. By 1972, only the housekeeper True
Delight, a white disciple of cult preacher Father Divine, remained in Henry
Willson's employ. "Instead of giving her a weekly salary, he spent his days
bartering with her to cook and clean in exchange for pieces of his valuable
antiques and silverware."
Despite loans from John Saxon and Lucille Ball and even Rock Hudson, he lost
his house and entered the Motion Picture Country Home as a charity case,
where cirrhosis of the liver finally finished him off in 1978. At the
funeral, Rory Calhoun served as a pallbearer at the funeral, but Rock only
sent flowers and Tab Hunter skipped the event.
A million golden boys passed through Hollywood, but none looked more golden
than Tab Hunter and few enjoyed more luck. The first time he set foot in a
recording studio, he came out with the #1 hit record in the country for five
weeks, "Young Love" (helped by the background harmonizing of Elvis Presley's
backup singers). With no help from Willson, his own agent, he stumbled into
a star-making lead in only his second movie, 1951's Jamaica-shot
desert-island shipwreck drama, _Island of Desire_, handsomely showcased
opposite the long-lashed brunette warmth of established beauty Linda
Darnell.
His athletic but still callow presence asserted a kind of pectoral tension
that reliably pressed hot buttons in the audience, whether youthful or
youth-seeking. Good-naturedly, Hunter (right, with Tuesday Weld) reports the
unfavorable critical reaction ("quite inadequate as an actor; his
performance is wooden"), but the film turned into big box-office, with the
hapless young actor's mailbox suddenly flooded with a thousand fan letters
weekly.
In Hollywood, he soon found himself giving Geraldine Page driving lessons,
playing poker with Gary Cooper and Rita Hayworth, touring with the Everly
Brothers, reassuring an insecure Fred Astaire about his acting, and spilling
champagne on Princess Grace. All that and he survived the _Confidential_
scandal too: not bad for a poor boy with a high school diploma from an
acting school.
The postwar pin-up prototype was the now forgotten Guy Madison, but Tab
Hunter was smarter than Guy, as Willson freely admitted. Laden with
embarrassing appellations like Sigh Guy, All-American Boy, Boy Next Door,
not to mention "The Squeal Appeal Fella," Tab could hardly avoid realizing
that he was being packaged for straight teenaged girls:
In order for lustful adolescent urges to have the culture's seal of
approval, every feature story, every interview, had to conclude with the
actor's wistful admission that, beneath the glitz and glamour, all he truly
craved was a simple life of wedded bliss.[7]
Hunter reports that he first satisfied his own lustful urges at - where
else? - a movie theatre ("This guy knew exactly what he was doing. I let him
do it"). And why not play his sigh guy role willingly for the nation,
considering that his "door-opening looks" provided him that one-in-a-million
chance at stardom? He understood that "I wasn't so much a person now as I
was a valuable commodity. . . . They can put you in the slot they want, and
you're supposed to stay there, performing your trick on demand."
Unlike Hollywood autobiographies filled with rhinestone profundities, Hunter
's memoir, lavishly illustrated with many unfamiliar photos, paints a vivid
picture of life on the business end of the camera lens during the last
throes of the big studio system. Admirably straightforward, if not exactly
unsparing about himself, Tab settles a few scores (though he got along with
co-stars John Wayne and Lana Turner in The Sea Chase, not so with director
John Farrow: "I can't stand hypocrites, and that's how Farrow came off.
Plus, he was just generally creepy, with beady eyes like a pair of piss
holes in the snow").
Dick Clayton, future agent and "the most important person in my life,"
spotted a twelve-year-old stablehand named Arthur Gelien (not yet "Tab
Hunter") at a riding academy in LA. At fifteen the blue-eyed lad with
unnerving good looks lied his way into the Coast Guard, but spent his leaves
at Clayton's Manhattan apartment, attending sophisticated Greenwich Village
parties (with Cole Porter himself at the piano), so it's no surprise that "I
woke up one morning in the swank Park Avenue apartment of an older
gentleman."
Trying his luck in Hollywood meant a few years of pumping gas, soda jerking
at Rexall Drugs, and ushering at the Warner Bros. Theater (with Carol
Burnett), until Clayton introduced the blond hopeful to his influential
colleague Henry Willson. While he knew the stakes - "If you were invited
back to his place for drinks, it wasn't to admire the fabulous, wall-to-wall
carpeting in his den. Well, maybe it was. In a way" - he says he resisted:
"Henry had a magnetic personality, but it certainly wasn't strong enough to
lure me onto the casting couch."
By 1955, in one of his numerous roles as a soldier or sailor, Hunter
dominated _Battle Cry_ in that film's steamiest episode, a wartime tryst
between a young marine and a straying wife, played by a brunette Dorothy
Malone. The year's number-three hit, it proved his potential and won him one
of Hollywood's last seven-year studio contracts (which he would soon live to
regret when he later paid $100,000 to release himself).
It was just at this brink of stardom that _Confidential_ magazine went
public with his 1950 arrest (lawyer Harry Weiss had turned up to spring
everyone immediately, and the original charges of lewd behavior shrank to
"disturbing the peace," resulting in a fifty-dollar fine and a routine year'
s probation). Hunter's (right, with actor John Bromfield) involvement with
the _Confidential_ fracas was less a crisis for him than for Willson, even
though he was called to testify in an all-star libel suit brought by Maureen
O'Hara, Dorothy Dandridge, and Liberace, among others. The difference was
Warner Bros.' attitude toward their newly minted dreamboat: as long as he
played the publicity game, studio boss Jack Warner's attitude was: "Today's
headlines, tomorrow's toilet paper."
Nor did the studio insist on a faux marriage for Hunter:
"[I]t was an industry axiom that "Bachelors make better box office." Didn't
matter to them whether I preferred women, men, or chimps - as long as I didn
't flaunt it publicly." [8]
Still, a later long-term friendship with Joan Cohn, powerful and wealthy
widow of Columbia Pictures mogul Harry Cohn, resulted in one marriage
proposal - from her. When challenged about keeping company with men who
were, at best, bisexual, her rejoinder was, "He won't be gay when I get
through with him." Nevertheless, this proved an idle threat with Hunter, who
says, "I loved Joan but didn't feel the need to qualify, or consummate, our
relationship." Nor did he wish to triangulate into her ongoing affair with
actor Laurence Harvey.
In the very midst of the _Confidential_ scandal, Warner bought the hit
Broadway musical _Damn Yankees_ as a property for Tab, "a serious display of
commitment by the studio," but the filming of _Damn Yankees_ soon became the
arena for widely reported friction between the young star and the Broadway
director George Abbott. Co-star Gwen Verdon (understandably not quoted in
this book) said, "I don't know what George Abbott wanted from Tab, but
whatever it was, Tab did not agree," while the film's co-director Stanley
Donen spared nothing: "He couldn't sing, he couldn't dance, he couldn't act.
He was a triple threat." [9] Admitting to flares of temperament, Hunter
still justifies them as integrity: "Once I decided to lead my own life, as
an individual, not a packaged product - I was immediately tagged with other
labels: 'difficult' and 'temperamental'."
Hunter himself indicts an emphysema-wracked Tallulah Bankhead for a
"complete lack of professionalism" when they co-starred in an ill-fated
revival of Tennessee Williams' _The Milk Train Doesn't Stop Here Anymore_
(lasting only four performances on Broadway), for "shamelessly playing to
the crowd [of] screaming queens. . . . A gay man flaunting her kind of
cavalier lifestyle would have been deported." But then what to make of the
following lesson in the haphazard nature of the movie business? Arriving in
Spain to shoot a western, Tab ran into Jeffrey Hunter (above) who was about
to start a thriller. For a prank, they figured: "The producers won't know
Jeffrey Hunter from Tab Hunter. Let's switch movies! And we did. Jeff did
the western. I did the thriller. No one was the wiser." What price
professionalism?
Having spent most of his career in the dreamboat closet, Hunter presents
certain drawbacks as a gay icon, though not as many as Willson. His
livelihood long depended on concealing the love that Hedda Hopper dared not
name (though William Hopper, her own son, and Tab's co-star in Track of the
Cat, more familiar opposite Raymond Burr in TV's _Perry Mason_, was gay).
Still, whether Hunter's philosophy seems reasonable or evasive depends on
the reader:
"Accepting that I was wired differently was no cause for celebration,
believe me. We all have our various urges and desires and shouldn't be made
to feel ashamed of them. Being "proud" of your homosexuality, however, was a
concept still years away. Not that I'd ever feel that way. To me, it's like
saying you're "proud" to be hetero. Why do you need to wear a badge? You
simply are what you are." [10]
Though he's too gentlemanly to furnish details, Hunter documents dalliances
with figure skater Ronnie Robertson, ballet superstar Rudolf Nureyev
(right), and Visconti protégé Helmut Berger.[11] But the persistent figure
dogging his footsteps here is Anthony Perkins: both were rising stars,
living only blocks from each other, but conducted their liaisons either
publicly, with suitable feminine "dates," or privately, using separate cars
and never arriving together: "He was afraid of getting the same smear job
Confidential had given me." Put in a nutshell, "nothing came between Tony
and his career." When Perkins gloated that Paramount had bought _Fear
Strikes Out_ for him, a role Hunter had created on television, "from then on
we weren't nearly as close." They later shared supporting roles in John
Huston's _The Life and Times of Judge Roy Bean (1972)_, but the book doesn't
mention that Perkins again stepped into his shoes, this time from screen to
stage, when he played the baseball star in a summer stock production of
_Damn Yankees_.[12]
Unlike Perkins, Tab Hunter was limited by his lightweight persona, with few
opportunities to transcend it. Seeking out spikier villain roles, Tab found
them only on TV or in B-pictures (in Columbia's -Gunman's Walk_ he played "a
sort of Aryan youth on the American frontier"). For a few heady years, the
films that teamed him with Natalie Wood - _The Burning Hills_ and _The Girl
He Left Behind_ - sold plenty of tickets but have now evaporated from the
public consciousness, leaving no residue. Even higher-profile titles like
_Battle Cry_ and _Damn Yankees_ are little cherished today, let alone
pop-cultural debris like _Operation Bikini_, _Timber Tramps-, and
_Grotesque_, although pioneering dreamboat observer Jack Stalnaker would
argue otherwise: For
"Here's another performer whose very name stands for an entire era of
American movies, and yet you won't find even one Tab Hunter movie on that
American Film Institute list of the "100 Most Tedious Movies Nobody in Their
Right Mind Wants to See Again." [13]
Arguably his career flourished more on television, as he starred in the
premiere broadcast of _Playhouse 90_, the prestigious dramatic centerpiece
of TV's Golden Age, danced and skated in the musical _Hans Brinker or the
Silver Skates-, and enacted the swinging bachelor in his short-lived TV
sitcom _The Tab Hunter Show (right)_. In the long years between more
respectable film projects, Hunter weathered the dislocations of the campus
revolt/hippie era by playing dinner theater, yet he paints a surprisingly
ungallant picture of his supporters: "The audiences for these shows were
married middle-aged women with grumpy husbands in tow, hoping to relive
their youth by seeing their onetime matinee idol in person." What's wrong
with that? Who did he think would come?
Turning starchy as times changed and the Vietnam War raged, Hunter sided
with the kneejerk patriotism of his old co-star John Wayne:
'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.14'
Notwithstanding that his brother was later killed in Vietnam, the star seems
oblivious to the incineration of innocent Vietnamese civilians and deaf to
the irony of the lucrative expatriate lifestyle he enjoyed during those same
war years, knocking around Corfu and the Côte d'Azur to avoid U.S. taxes:
"The temptation to abandon the United States forever was surprisingly
strong." Didn't he want to support the war with his tax dollars? Didn't he
"like this country"?
As Rock Hudson updated his waning credibility in John Frankenheimer's
_Seconds (1966, right, with Salome Jens)_, Tab engaged a new generation as
the definitive dreamboat Todd Tomorrow romancing Divine in John Waters'
_Polyester (1981)_, even as he pursued new career avenues producing
television dramas and documentaries. [14] Yet there's no reason to dispute
Hunter's (and co-author Muller's) shrewd overall evaluation of the star's
career:
"I was on the set for the last roars of so many old lions - Walsh, Wellman,
Heisler, Tourneur - as well as for the first forays of young turks who'd
inspire a whole new style of filmmaking: Frankenheimer, Lumet, Penn. My
career fell smack in the middle of the changing of the guard." [16]
Nor can we argue with his choice of favorite performance in Sidney Lumet's
unheralded but haunting wartime romance _That Kind of Woman (1959)-, the
third and in many ways most grownup version of _Shopworn Angel._ Again
playing a smitten GI, Tab made a significantly more credible consort for
Sophia Loren ("a talented and guileless woman") than Tony Perkins had in
_Desire Under the Elms_ the year before, and benefits particularly from the
director's screen-filling close-ups that showcase his all-American chiseled
jaw, cleft chin, and boyishly yearning eyes.
Like most autobiographies, this one ends happily, with pleasures savored and
lessons learned, friends acknowledged and a lifelong partner found. If
Hunter brought the culture several giant steps closer to today's Abercrombie
and Fitch glamour boys, he was part of a legacy that stretched back as far
as the silent era, where Ramon Novarro and George O'Brien (star of John Ford
's The Iron Horse and Murnau's Sunrise, giving fans an eyeful, right) paved
the path for later studio-promoted sex symbols like Clark Gable, Gary
Cooper, and Tyrone Power, while Errol Flynn stood as a flagpole for
polysexual debauchery.
Beauty makes its own rules, of course. Judging from Hunter's recent personal
appearances, instead of looking like a fossil after his stroke and heart
attack, the seventy-something-year-old has apparently abstained from
surgical relief for nature's character lines and wrinkles, yet the one-time
teen god retains the toothpaste smile, enviable bone structure, and
pleasingly natural musculature [17] that furthered his career as a toy in
babeland.
Although gay liberation tore down the walls of the dreamboat factory, and
_Confidential_ was driven out of business by ruinous lawsuits[18], it's by
no means crystal clear that today's situation is such an improvement. In a
newer, crasser conservative economy, the gay population's hefty disposable
income talks loudly, pushing male sexuality to the fore as a commodity. But
is the "Sexiest Man Alive" title really much of an advance on the 1950s
heartthrobs? _Confidential's_ trash torch passed to supermarket tabloids and
celebrity gossip TV, yet where's the progress when gay actors who aspire to
leading roles are still forced to wear hetero halos?"
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Notes:
1. Robert Hofler, The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and
Dirty Deals of Henry Willson. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005. The quotes in
the opening paragraph come from page 112.
2. Tab Hunter with Eddie Muller, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a
Movie Star. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2005.
3. The McCarthy hearings coincided with pressure on President Eisenhower
from religio-patriots to add "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance in
1954. A year later Congress decreed printing "In God We Trust" on U.S.
currency.
4. Hofler, 209.
5. Consult Hofler, 149, for more details.
6. Since this book's publication, Phyllis Gates has died, and Hofler
revealed to Michael Musto at the Village Voice that Gates tried to blackmail
Rock following their divorce but was thwarted when frank photos of her in
lesbian sexual activity surfaced. See "Web Exclusive" here.
7. Hunter and Muller, 74.
8. Ibid, 122.
9. Stephen M. Silverman, Dancing On the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His
Movies. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996. Both quotes from page 254.
10. Hunter and Muller, 126.
11. Hunter reports one unforgotten slight and unburied hatchet: Henry
Willson's neglecting to mention that Visconti wanted Tab as the lead in
Senso (1954). The Italian maestro, no mean judge of male glamour, tried
again, offering the lead in Vaghe Stelle dell'Orsa (1965), but financial
backers supposedly insisted on Michael Craig. Still, Hunter allows that
"merely shooting tests with Luchino was more fulfilling than making entire
features with other directors."
12. Charles Winecoff, Split Image: The Life of Anthony Perkins. New York:
Dutton, 1996, 215.
13. Stalnaker's research can be enjoyed here.
14. Hunter and Muller, 269.
15. Producing the movie Dark Horse revealed a new, stripped-down Hollywood:
"more film stock was used shooting tests for Battle Cry than we now had to
shoot our entire feature."
16. Hunter and Muller, 266.
17. Compare Hunter's pre-gym-culture physique with Arnold Schwarzenegger's
inflated anatomy, memorably described by Clive James as "a condom full of
walnuts."
18. "Confidential's managing editor . . . had been a research director for
Senator Joe McCarthy and was obsessed with exposing 'subversives' in
Hollywood [though later] he shot and killed his wife, and then himself, in a
New York City taxi." (Hunter and Muller, 184).
February 2006 | Issue 51
Copyright © 2006 by Robert Keser