Modern Screen (Dec 1952 - Nov 1953)

a pocketful of dreams {Continued jrom page 57) Because one day, in practically no time at all as time goes, this same Art was chatting intimately with Elizabeth Taylor on her Ivanhoe set, confidently ringing her room at London's Savoy Hotel and hearing her ask him, "When you get back home will you exercise King Charles for me? He's getting too fat." On another day too, he was gliding on the same rink with Sonja Henie, a champion ice skater himself. And on still another a dark-haired, beautiful lady was presenting him with a handsome album of picture stills topped by a great big one of himself embracing that lady, and signed, "Devotedly yours, Linda." He was Linda Darnell'sleading man in the picture, whose title sheet called him Tab Hunter. Maybe things like that could happen in some other place besides Hollywood, California, U.S.A. And maybe they could happen to any imaginative kid whether he believed positively in his dreams or not. But the point is — Art Gelien did, and as a result he's seen them and a lot more come true. Right now Tab is perched rosily on the doorstep of great expectations in Hollywood. He's not rich or really famous yet. He has only three pictures to his new name, none of them sensational. But he's swamped with 1,000 fan letters a week, has plenty more screen jobs coming up and what looks like a steady TV contract, too. Some of this is because Tab's luckily a good looking male animal, with a pleasantly sculptured face, dazzling smile, soft, artistic eyes and a sun -bronzed torso like a Greek god's. Some is because he owns a natural but still unpolished talent. Some more is because Tab has been at the right places at the right times. But mostly it's because of his unconquerable faith in the importance of himself and his future — a faith that didn't flag during some fairly rough going when he was about as unimportant a kid as you could imagine. 'T'ab was born July 11, 1931, at Belleview A Hospital in New York City. Tab Hunter's folks weren't fashionable — they were poor, desperately poor. His mother, Gertrude, was an immigrant from Hamburg, Germany, married to a man named Charles Kelm who made a living, when he made it, as a mechanic. But today Tab prefers to forget that he ever had a father, and where he is today or what he does is of no interest to him whatever. He was wiped out of Tab's life when he was only two. From then on he took his mother's family name, Gelien. Before that Tab remembers only flashes of an anxious babyhood in cramped, cold water flats from which furniture was sometimes moved out on the streets by rough men. He remembers being pulled on a sled to the comer grocery one day when there wasn't any market money, and tumbling off in the snow to come up miraculously with a crumpled five-dollar bill someone had dropped there — which meant a meal that night for the family. In 1933 this insecure nightmare ended for Tab and his brother, Walter, 11 months older. His grandfather, John Gelien, a chef on the Hamburg-American steamers, came into port, and sizing up the intolerably unhappy life in which his daughter was trapped, provided an escape. He bought passage for her and the boys aboard a Grace Line boat bound for San Francisco and staked them to two months' rent on an apartment there. To earn their living, Gertrude took a job aboard the Matson ships. A woman with a natural healing touch, she learned physio-therapy to qualify as a shipboard nurse. But this meant that Tab and Walt had to be staked out around at pay homes and boarding schools, while she sailed between San Francisco and Hawaii and sometimes Australia. At four and five years of age, kids need their mothers, no matter how good the foster care, and sometimes it was good for Tab and Walt, other times bad. If they showed signs of mistreatment, though, or bad food, their mother yanked them out and found another in the four days she had between trips. It was always a desolate day when the ship sailed out the Golden Gate, but when it came back in, Tab remembers, "that was Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter and Fourth of July combined!" Then their mother spent her pay on trim little navy blue suits, white shirts, new shoes and beanies to dress them up, scrubbed them clean, cut their hair and whisked them off to the places they loved to go — out to Golden Gate Park, the zoo, for a swim in Fleishacker plunge, to Fisherman's Wharf. Nothing was too good for her boys when Gertrude Gelien came home, even though each time it seemed she wore the same shabby but clean and well-pressed suit or dress. Even as a kid, Tab sensed that his mother was denying herself everything to give them the very best care in her power, but he didn't know that she got her reward when people When Sidney Skolsky's daughter Steffi e was five, her greatest thrill was attending the races, and she constantly begged to go. Finally, Sidney told her they wouldn't let little girls in. She was satisfied until one day she heard a radio broadcast from the track. "A perfect day for the big race!" enthused the announcer. "A wonderful day for three-year-olds!" Steffie began to sob. "Daddy, you lied to me. You heard what the man said — and I'm older than that!" H. IV. Kellick would stop them on the street and ask to take pictures of "those two darling boys." They were worth anybody's film too. The Gelien boys looked like Dutch twins, both with thick golden hair, big round hazel eyes and the creamy complexions that revealed their German-EnglishFrench ancestry. But underneath they were very different little guys. Walt was stronger, more aggressive and tougher inside than Tab. If you looked close, you could see it in the bonier features, the sturdier body and the eyes that weren't as soft as his little brother's. Walt was a kid of action. Tab was the dreamer. And in the long, lonely stretches between boat departures and arrivals he had plenty of time to dream. "It was usually the sea and ships then," recalls Tab. "I wanted to be a pirate, then I switched to an explorer. But whatever it was, the big idea was to make a fortune and buy everything in the world for my Mom. Guess it still is." Coon after Tab was six he didn't have to ^ rely on lonesome daydreams any more. Gertrude Gelien moved her brood south to Long Beach, and after one or two more trips on the Matson line, stayed on shore for practical nursing and physio -therapy with what patients she could scare up. it made things mighty tough financially for a spell. But for the first time in their lives the Gelien kids knew a real home of their own, with their mother there every night, and even though it was only a tiny apartment behind somebody else's house, it looked like Heaven to them. So did the long stretch of beach at the end of the street, and all the kids to play with at Luther Burbank Elementary, the first public school they'd attended. In Long Beach Tab got a healthy start on the smooth-muscled, six-foot body he owns today. With Walt he played endlessly in the tumbling surf and swam in the salt water plunge on the Pike, although until he learned to paddle he'd have to dive off the high board and calculate the exact spot where he'd come up by the rail. He got new fuel for his dreams, too, although he didn't know it then. He saw his first movie, Robin Hood, with a girl next door, who told him archly, "For you I'll wear my new Easter hat!" What was a lot more important, Tab remembers, her mother bought the tickets. irls and movies played a big part in ^ Tab Hunter's boyhood. He was nuts about them both. "I guess I liked girls better than boys," he admits now, grinning. "I wasn't a sis, or anything, but they seemed to know better what I was talking about." It wasn't much of a problem for Tab to keep what Walt called disgustedly "Art's harem." Smitten misses swarmed around the blond boy like bees around honey, especially when, along about fifth grade, his mother moved them up to Los Angeles, and Tab's field of operations expanded. In the 68th Street Grade School he met his first real heart-throb. "Her name was Beverly Peck," Tab recalls. "A cute little brunette — real sweet. She was supposed to be Walt's girl, but I liked her best. Every Saturday we'd beg a couple of dimes from our Moms and hop a bus downtown. Her mother worked in a restaurant there so we got a free lunch. Then we'd untie Beverly's handkerchief with the dimes wrapped inside and sit through two shows at Loew's State. It was my big thrill of the week. I couldn't say whether that was because of Beverly or the movies, maybe both." Of course, all of Tab Hunter's boyhood wasn't spent making like a junior wolf. At 68th Street, St. John's Military Academy, St. Paul's Parochial School and Mount Vernon Junior High, where he bounced around, he was mixed up in everything. At sports, he didn't shine as much as the more rugged Walt did. When Walt played fullback on the first-string football team, Tab struggled along as second-string guard getting his face shoved into the dirt. But he made the swimming and tennis teams and played trombone in the band, although his arms weren't long enough to push the slide out for the low notes. At St. John's he wound up a cadet lieutenant before that year of private school luxury, which Grandfather Gelien financed, ran out. At St. Paul's he sang in the church choir, until the Christmas he was supposed to solo with "Adeste Fideles" and when he opened his mouth' nothing came out. But it was at Mount Vernon where Tab's yet vague and unrecognized yearnings got their first airing. He had a music teacher named Emily Joost who understood teen-agers and what they liked. She let them pound out boogiewoogie in the classroom and swing a popular tune if they felt like it. Night, she played piano in in a cafe down the street and she'd let the more talented kids express themselves there. Some nights, Tab and a girl named Bobbie Turner, whose black hair tumbled over her eyes and whose low, husky voice carried a strange excitement, would stroll down and try out "My Blue Heaven" or "I'm In The Mood For Love" for the customers. Looking back though, Tab Hunter doesn't remember any infection by the acting bug. "I always felt there was something big and important ahead for me. I believed that," he says, "even as a kid,