Tab Hunter Confidential

The legendary movie star's revelatory memoir is "a mesmerizing account of his Candide-like journey through Hollywood" (The New York Times Book Review).

National Bestseller

In 1950, at the end of Hollywood's Golden Age, a remarkably handsome young boy, still a teenager, gets "discovered" by a big-time movie agent. The boy's name was Tab Hunter—a true Hollywood product, a movie star created from a stable boy, a shy kid made even more so by the way his schoolmates—both girls and boys—reacted to his beauty, by a mother who provided for him in every way except emotionally, and by a secret that both tormented him and propelled him forward.

In Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star, he reveals what it was like to be treated like a commodity, to be told what to do, how to behave, whom to be seen with, what to wear. He speaks also about what it was like to be gay, at first confused by his own fears and misgivings, then as an actor trapped by an image of boy-next-door innocence. And when he dared to be difficult, to complain to the studio about the string of mostly mediocre movies that were assigned to him, he learned that just like any manufactured product, he was disposable—disposable and replaceable.

This is Tab's story of survival—of the giddy highs of stardom, and the soul-destroying lows when phone calls begin to go unreturned; of the need to be loved, and the fear of being consumed; of the hope of an innocent boy, and the rueful summation of a man who did it all, and who lived to tell it all.