Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star by Tab Hunter & Eddie Muller

Author:Tab Hunter & Eddie Muller [Hunter, Tab & Muller, Eddie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1565124669
Amazon: B007PMKSVC
Publisher: Algonquin Books
Published: 2005-10-14T04:00:00+00:00

It was pretty obvious to Tab Hunter’s fans that something was wrong.

20

Don’t Fence Me In

JACK L. WARNER was notorious for being a ruthless, cutthroat studio boss. His legend, however, was nothing compared to Harry Cohn’s. When it came to crude, callous, stubborn, ornery sons of bitches, the boss of Columbia Pictures played second fiddle to no one. He may not have been the most powerful executive in Hollywood, but Harry Cohn knew how to act the part, and relished it. He wore the mantle of the Most Hated Man in Hollywood like a badge of honor. In early October 1957, I got my chance to experience the Cohn charm firsthand.

The studio wanted to borrow me for a western, Gunman’s Walk. The script was suspenseful, loaded with psychological complexity, and best of all, I was up for the part of the heavy. It would completely change my image as an actor, taking me into uncharted territory. Plus Van Heflin had already been cast, and I was thrilled at the prospect of working with him again, this time as his costar, not just a supporting player.

Before the deal could be inked, however, I had to meet with King Cohn—or as writer Ben Hecht called him, White Fang. I was instructed to report to casting director Max Arno late one afternoon in the Columbia offices at the corner of Sunset and Gower. I’d met Arno years earlier, when I was making the rounds, newly minted as Tab Hunter. Back then, he’d been insufferable and insensitive. Now, jumping up to shake hands with a popular young actor and singing star, he couldn’t have been a bigger ass kisser. Arno remembered our earlier meeting, I was certain, but I decided not to mention what a miserable SOB he’d been to an unknown actor.

Arno ushered me upstairs, then down a long hallway. I tried not to think of all the Harry Cohn horror stories Aldo Ray had told me when we were making Battle Cry. Aldo was under contract to Columbia then, and his tales of Cohn’s volcanic temper and his manic manipulation of his minions made my Warner Bros. war stories pale in comparison.

It wasn’t a surprise that Harry Cohn badly wanted to cast Tab Hunter in a picture. Pulling performers away from other studios was one of the ways he’d transformed Columbia from a Poverty Row laughingstock into one of the most profitable studios in town.

In 1928, he put director Frank Capra under long-term contract, which proved to be his master stroke. Capra made some of the best films of the early 1930s, and it was the 1934 Columbia hit It Happened One Night—for which he’d gotten Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert on loan from MGM and Paramount, respectively—that changed the studio’s fortunes forever. Nobody ever snickered at Harry Cohn again. Once Columbia was flying high, his brother, Jack Cohn, who’d gotten him started in the business at Universal, tried to wrangle the studio away from his little brother, leading to a rift that lasted until the day Jack Cohn died in 1956.

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