|
|
Whitop
|
 |
Toe is in the water |
Location: USA
Registered: June 2005
Messages: 73
|
|
|
Thank you, Timmy. I'm new here, so I don't know if you've had this one before, but I doubt you've had this picture. Here goes.
-
Attachment: Old Tab.jpg
(Size: 11.27KB, Downloaded 311 times)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
timmy
|
 |
Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
|
|
|
It looks like Kelsey Grammer's father!
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Whitop
|
|
Toe is in the water |
Location: USA
Registered: June 2005
Messages: 73
|
|
|
Nope, but American.
Next month his autobiography, “.... [no acronym] Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star” comes out. Tomorrow an earlier picture.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
timmy
|
|
Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
|
|
|
I'm rather afraid your clue gave me Tab Hunter, someone I have heard of but had never noticed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tab_Hunter is surprisingly sparse with information about him
If I'm right I'll post a new one after you confirm it
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
timmy
|
|
Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
|
|
|
Please paste the NY TEoimes artcile. We need a login to get in to read it
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Whitop
|
|
Toe is in the water |
Location: USA
Registered: June 2005
Messages: 73
|
|
|
I tried to attach it but don't see it in the preview. It's in your hotmail inbox; maybe you know what you're doing.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
timmy
|
|
Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
|
|
|
it's cool. If you simply visit the web site and highlight the text on it and copy it form there and paste it to here, that will work fine 
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
timmy
|
|
Has no life at all |
Location: UK, in Devon
Registered: February 2003
Messages: 13796
|
|
|
By WILLIAM L. HAMILTON
Published: September 18, 2005
MONTECITO, Calif.
TO ask, "Whatever happened to Tab Hunter?" is to ask, "Whatever happened to America?" - the America before the Kennedys were shot; before Vietnam, where Mr. Hunter's own brother died; Watergate; and later, Sept. 11 and the war on terror.
Skip to next paragraph
Stephanie Diani for The New York Times
Tab Hunter, 74, at home in Montecito, Calif., with his whippet Olivia. Inset, with Natalie Wood, his co-star and, in the world of studio publicists, love interest.
In 1954 Mr. Hunter, 23, blond-haired and blue-eyed, the perfect product of a popular imagination as free from cynicism and care as a sky can be cloudless and clear, was No. 1 at the box office with "Battle Cry." By 1957 he was also No. 1 on the pop-music charts with "Young Love," toppling Elvis Presley.
Invented by Hollywood and its press after being discovered shoveling manure in a stable in Los Angeles, Mr. Hunter, whose name at birth was Arthur Gelien, ruled the country's obsession with celebrity, and especially teenage America, which became, with stars like Mr. Hunter and his most famous co-star, Natalie Wood, the audience that the entertainment industry would fight over to this day. He was as beautiful to look at as he was virtuous to dream about, the pinup prototype for every male idol who was to come after, from Ricky Nelson to Brad Pitt.
By 1959 his reign was ending. Troy Donahue appeared, Hollywood's next version of Tab Hunter, and Mr. Hunter, old at 28, began a 46-year descent through an actor's circles of hell: spaghetti westerns "that were short on meat sauce," as he described them, television guest shots, dinner theater and infomercials. There were still movies: a co-starring role in "Won Ton Ton, the Dog Who Saved Hollywood."
Mr. Donahue, once asked about the confusion about the two men and their careers, replied, "I'm the straight one."
Next month "Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star," an autobiography written with Eddie Muller, in which Mr. Hunter chronicles his life in public as America's golden boy and his life in private as a gay man, will be published by Algonquin Books. As Mr. Hunter stepped out with starlets like Ms. Wood in movies, magazines and Hollywood night spots, he pursued relationships with actors like Anthony Perkins, who eventually stopped seeing him, married and later died of AIDS.
Mr. Hunter, like many celebrities who become international obsessions, is fairly simple in person. At 74, he says he prefers horses to people. He can swear with the best of them. He has lived quietly in a small cottage in this small town outside Santa Barbara for 12 years with his partner of 23 years, Allan Glaser, a producer. Oprah Winfrey has a place down the hill, 42 acres that she paid $55 million for, but that's entertainment. Nicely kept 230SL's buzz among the old-growth olive-grove roads like hornets. No one pretends that Montecito is Middle America.
There's more to life than success, Mr. Hunter said last week, sitting in his garden with Mr. Glaser, talking about being Tab Hunter. One of their two whippets, Olivia, chewed on an acorn by his chair. Mr. Hunter has an actor's habit of holding one's eye with consequence as he answers questions, as if it were a camera.
"Rock? No," he said, asked if he had had sex with Rock Hudson, one of Hollywood's other A-list homosexuals in the 1950's. "Not my type." Mr. Hudson and Mr. Hunter shared an agent, Henry Willson, who was known as the gay Svengali for the beefcake stars he created.
"If it was up to Tab, it would be a book about horses, with about three pages of Hollywood in it," Mr. Glaser said. In his bedroom Mr. Glaser, who collects movie memorabilia and who met Mr. Hunter, then 52, when he was 23, has a large poster of Mr. Hunter, shirtless as he inevitably was, embracing Natalie Wood, his co-star in "The Burning Hills." In Mr. Hunter's bedroom, by the bed, is a collection of santos.
"You walk from my room, and in two steps you're 200 years earlier, from the 1940's to the 1740's," Mr. Glaser said. In Mr. Glaser's bathroom are photographs signed to him by Kim Novak, Elizabeth Taylor and Janet Leigh.
The Tab Hunter story is a movie in the making. People in the business would say it's got everything. A father who throws a candy bar down on the New York hospital bed where his mother has just delivered him, and disappears. In Los Angeles a school choirmaster who molests him. The Coast Guard at 14. New York again at 15: parties where Cole Porter is playing the piano, Park Avenue, an older man in a Sulka robe and freshly squeezed orange juice for breakfast. Hollywood at 16. Stardom by 20.
Then the chutes after the ladders, a thrill ride to the bottom set in Rome, Monte Carlo and Capri, as Mr. Hunter encountered Visconti and Nureyev, Princess Grace's personal secretary and the young shah of Iran, the tycoons, yachts, models, trust-fund babies, kings and queens, Champagne and caviar in the sunset of his beauty, what Mr. Hunter calls "the dessert course that never ends."
And then the death of his only brother, Walt, a Navy medic killed in action two months after arriving in Vietnam. Movies with Vincent Price and Judy the Chimp. Then, in the 1980's, after a long voyage through dinner theater, which he described as "a sea of blue hair," and a heart attack, rediscovery, by John Waters, the underground filmmaker.
Mr. Waters cast Mr. Hunter, who had worked with John Wayne as well as Ms. Wood, Sophia Loren and a roster of beauties, opposite Divine, his drag star, in "Polyester" in 1981. As Mr. Hunter decided, after the movie, which reinvented him as an ironic comment on his own Hollywood iconography, "I'd kissed a lot worse."
It was also a way of coming out.
"Making out with Divine, that's beyond the bravery of coming out," Mr. Waters said on Monday in a telephone conversation. "He was hassled about being gay. You couldn't come out. It was illegal. But he had a sense of humor about the glamour he was caught in. He's a great sport, and a great star." At his peak Mr. Hunter was a player with Warner Brothers under a seven-year contract. He said he thought the old-school Hollywood studio system, which had a substantial investment in its stable of stars, had protected him against bad publicity, including several insinuating stories by magazines like Confidential, and from being exposed as gay, despite an arrest at a gay party early in his career.
As Ms. Wood and Mr. Hunter embarked on a well-publicized and groundless romance, promoting his apparent heterosexuality while promoting their movies, insiders developed their own headline for the item: "Natalie Wood and Tab Wouldn't."
Mr. Hunter said that Hollywood in the 1950's had its version of "Don't ask, don't tell," which was "Don't complain, don't explain." Or, let the studio take care of you, and let the public draw its conclusions.
"There was a lot written about my sexuality, and the press was pretty darn cruel, but people believe what they want to believe," he said. What moviegoers wanted to hold in their hearts were the boy-next-door marines, cowboys and swoon-bait sweethearts he portrayed.
Mr. Waters agreed, adding that America couldn't come to terms with something it knew little or nothing about.
"The public didn't know Tab was gay," he said. "The public didn't know what gay was. Newspapers wouldn't print the rumors. Liberace sued a newspaper, and won." Despite the acceptance of gay characters in television today and big-release movies like Ang Lee's "Brokeback Mountain," a cowboys-in-love story starring Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal, which opens on Dec. 9, Mr. Waters said he thought Hollywood is more heterosexual than ever.
"I never thought Tom Cruise was gay," he said, discounting the rumors. "The A-list?" he said. "I don't think any of them are." And teenage audiences, the same demographic group that Mr. Hunter appealed to, are not as open to the issue as is assumed, Mr. Waters said.
"In rich-kid schools, gay's cool," he said. "In poor-kid schools, it's not cool."
Mr. Glaser, a producer and a pragmatist, said he thought it was business as usual in Hollywood, that private mores do not dictate public ones even in an industry that tells America what to fantasize about. "What Hollywood wants to project is what will make money," he said. "It's still the boy-girl thing that's going to generate that kind of money."
The bigger problem for Mr. Hunter, as it turned out, was wanting to be an actor and not an idol. His increasing ambition to play important roles recalls the tale of Pinocchio, the wooden puppet who wanted to be a real boy. A product of Hollywood, as he describes himself, Mr. Hunter watched Mr. Perkins succeed as an actor, the product of New York stage training, and leave him behind, uncomfortable with his good looks and lack of résumé.
James Dean, a casual friend and another New York actor, became "the next Brando" in Hollywood's estimation in three pictures. Then he died, the surest way to end a career in Hollywood well. As Dean prepared for "East of Eden," Mr. Hunter shot "Track of the Cat" with Robert Mitchum. "What picture are we shooting today?" Mitchum would joke on the set.
There have obviously been rewards, as Mr. Hunter calls them, and they kept him in the game, even after "Timber Tramps," a stroke and quadruple bypass surgery. A fountain splashed peacefully at the back of his manicured yard. His newest horse, Harlow, named for her flaxen mane, is being raised in New Mexico for show.
But to sit with Mr. Hunter, a handsome man who hugged himself protectively, as if he were still fighting old ghosts, is to feel that anything he has has been hard earned.
"People will just take you, chew you up, spit you out, dump you on the side and go on to the next, and it's kind of tragic," he said of his profession. But his voice rose in heat as he spoke, as if he realized as he studied the part that it was really just Tab Hunter he was talking about.
Author of Queer Me! Halfway Between Flying and Crying - the true story of life for a gay boy in the Swinging Sixties in a British all male Public School
|
|
|
|
|
Goto Forum:
|
] 
A Place of Safety
Search
Help
Register
Login
Home
