Tab Hunter Confidential *** (2015, Tab Hunter) – Classic Movie Review 12,450

Tab Hunter and Debbie Reynolds on the set of Tab Hunter Confidential.

Tab tells all in the 2015 documentary feature film Tab Hunter Confidential.

Tab Hunter began a relationship in 1983 with young American film producer Allan Glaser and they remained together as long as they could, and got married in 2013. Tab and Allan were a highly successful couple. They formed Fox Run Productions and produced the 1985 film Lust in the Dust starring Hunter, Divine and Lainie Kazan

In 2005 Allan Glaser talked Tab Hunter into writing his autobiography, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star, in which he officially came out as gay, confirming the rumours. It became a New York Times bestseller and a paperback hit. Glaser then persuaded Hunter to help turn the book into a critically acclaimed documentary feature film in 2015, also entitled Tab Hunter Confidential, directed by Jeffrey Schwarz.

The main body of the film is a series of extensive interviews with Hunter, but also with his contemporaries and associates, including notably John Waters, Robert Wagner, Clint Eastwood, George Takei, Lainie Kazan and Debbie Reynolds.

Tab Hunter must have been around 83 or 84 at the time, and it was a good time to reflect. He still looks great, but has a haunted, unsettled look about him, as though the soul searching was a difficult, painful process. Or maybe it was just life that was a difficult, painful process. It looks like his eyes hurt. Though seeming still understandably a bit guarded, he tries to be desperately honest, after a lifetime of keeping his inner thoughts and passions to himself. It is a sincere, earnest, candid statement of a life that seems well led but was extremely difficult. His being gay came to haunt him and came back to haunt him at a time when it was illegal and unthinkable to share it with others, certainly in the movie biz, where it would have been career suicide.

The team for Tab Hunter Confidential (2015),

Talking career suicide, Tab Hunter committed just that at the end of the Fifties, when he bought himself out of his Warner Bros contract. Jack Warner liked Hunter. He made a lot of money for him. He was willing to turn a blind eye to his homosexuality, and had the power to persuade the press to do the same. Jack Warner charged Hunter $100,000 to buy his freedom, and then replaced him with a clone, Troy Donahue, a name that Hunter, then Arthur Gelien, nearly got landed with before he was instead renamed Tab Hunter.

Arthur Gelien’s freedom cost him a lot more than money. As a freelance, he was suddenly out of work, or at least decent work. His career limped along in various ways thereafter, small and larger, but he never had a proper career resurgence in the way that his friend and lover Anthony Perkins achieved. It’s a shame that Hitchcock didn’t employ Hunter. He might have been rather good in Psycho. He did eventually do a horror movie, Sweet Kill (1973), the first movie from director Curtis Hanson, but he looks very uncomfortable, both in the clip and talking about it.

But his private life was much happier. Tab Hunter began a relationship in 1983 with young American film producer Allan Glaser and they remained together for the next 35 years until Hunter’s sudden, unexpected death of a heart attack in July 2018. They were married in 2013.

Tab Hunter gives the impression of being a very nice, sincere, thoughtful, honest individual, and his qualities as a human being must have helped to keep him grounded at the height of his fame, and cope with some of the difficult times, both during fame and after. It looks like he achieved peace and solace, though the deaths of his brother and mother haunted him always, along perhaps with what he saw as his betrayal by his friend and lover, Anthony Perkins. He found happiness with Allan Glaser, and with his passion for riding and horses, and was lovely with a still adoring public. Tab was special, not doubt of that.

Hunter’s brother Walter Gelien, who was killed in Vietnam on 28 October 1965.

Hunter was a long-standing avid horse owner. His last film role was in the horse-themed family film Dark Horse (1992). Hunter wrote the story and co-produced the film with Allan Glaser.

Anthony Perkins (left) and Tab Hunter (right) on the TV show Juke Box Jury (1957).

Hunter had a long-term relationship with actor Anthony Perkins after meeting him at the Chateau Marmont during filming of Friendly Persuasion in 1956. He remembered Perkins as a ‘special part of my journey. He wanted to be a movie star more than anything. I wanted that too, but not with the same kind of drive he had. We were such opposites, but then maybe that was the attraction.’

Reports on Hunter’s supposed romances with close friends Debbie Reynolds and Natalie Wood were the invention of studio publicity departments. While Wood and Hunter had a well-publicised fake romance, insiders invented their own headline: ‘Natalie Wood and Tab Wouldn’t.

It followed Hunter’s participation in Jeffrey Schwarz’s 2013 documentary I Am Divine about Baltimore drag queen Divine, with whom Hunter had appeared in the films Polyester and Lust in the Dust.

Tab Hunter Confidential premiered at South by Southwest (SXSW) in 2015 and played in more than 100 film festivals and at independent screenings. It had a cinema release in October 2015, premiering in New York at The Village East and in Los Angeles at the Nuart Theater, and then played in more than 50 cities.

Filming of interviews with Hunter and associates took place between 2011 and 2015 in Los Angeles, New York, Paris and Santa Barbara.

The participants in the film include Tab Hunter, Clint Eastwood, Debbie Reynolds, Portia De Rossi, Noah Wyle, George Takei, Robert Wagner, Dolores Hart, Lainie Kazan, John Waters, Connie Stevens, Marilyn Erskine, Allan Glaser, Terry Moore, Liz Torres, Robert Osborne, Don Murray, Darryl Hickman, Rae Allen, Rex Reed, Shannon Bolin, Rona Barrett, Eddie Muller, Gary Giddins, Neal Noorlag, Tamara Asseyev, Etchika Choureau and Earl Holliman.

Hollywood stars appearing in archive footage include Natalie Wood, Paul Newman, James Dean, Rock Hudson, Anthony Perkins, Perry Como, Steve Allen, Pat Boone, and Art Linkletter.

© Derek Winnert 2023 – Classic Movie Review 12,450

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Hunter with Natalie Wood at the 28th Academy Awards in 1956.