A straightforward account of how a gay actor handled the ’50s—alas, not very differently than closeted gay actors manage...
Warner Brothers’ former boy-next-door tells all.
Tab Hunter’s life would have made a brassy melodrama for Warners, where he reigned in the 1950s. He was born Arthur Gelien in New York City in 1931. Escaping her violent husband, Gelien’s mother took her two sons to San Francisco, where Gelien fled to movie theaters, there first having sex with a man. At 15, Gelien lied about his age to join the Coast Guard. On leave in New York City, Gelien, now a smashing, muscular blond, woke up with a wealthy older man. Not wishing to be a “boy toy,” he went West to make movies. Gelien’s manager turned him into Tab Hunter, who took off his shirt to star in Island of Desire. Eager to draw teens, Warner Bros. cast him in Battle Cry, which he stole when he again doffed his shirt. Then scandal rag Confidential claimed cops arrested Hunter at a gay party. As damage control, Warners paired the actor with “beard” Natalie Wood, but after dates, Hunter pursued an affair with actor Tony Perkins. Eager to be taken seriously as an actor, Hunter bought out his Warners contract, donned his shirt and acted in They Came to Cordura and The Pleasure of His Company. More melodrama ensued when he stood trial, in 1960, for beating his dog. Acquitted, he relentlessly worked the dinner-theater circuit. After a heart attack, a stroke and mixed success as a producer, Hunter settled into a happy life with partner Allan Glaser, who suggested that he write his memoirs to head off the revelations of a projected, unauthorized biography. Whether that volume materializes and tells a different story remains to be seen.
A straightforward account of how a gay actor handled the ’50s—alas, not very differently than closeted gay actors manage their careers today.Pub Date: Oct. 14, 2005
ISBN: 1-56512-466-9
Page Count: 408
Publisher: Algonquin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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