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done. I saw Divine in a Sam Peckinpah film. To me that was funny; I found
it very amusing. But Paul was a little more effete as a director. We had a
wonderful cast: Divine, Lainie Kazan, Geoffrey Lewis, Cesar Romero, good
people.
(Allan) Ironically,
Polyester
introduced Tab to a whole new audience.
He wasn’t just the ‘fifties star that people forgot about by the 1970s. It was
because of
Polyester
that he got
Grease II
, and that’s when I became aware
of Tab, because of the second round of films. I had heard of Tab Hunter. I
had seen
Grease II
six months before I met him; I had seen
Polyester
three
months before, so I was very aware of who he was at that point because of
those chances that he took.
How did your book,
Tab Hunter Confidential
, come about?
(Allan) I had heard someone else was going to do an unauthorized
biography on Tab and I went in and said to Tab, “You better consider
writing your own book, because if not, it’s just going to be a bunch of
Confidential
magazine headlines on you. You’ve only got one shot on this,
so it better be you taking that shot.”
(Tab) When we were looking for a co-writer, Allan said, “I want you
to read what this writer, Eddie Muller, has written on Evelyn Keyes.”
Muller had written a book called
Dark City Dames,
about the women in
film noir, and one of those women was Evelyn Keyes; she was Suellen
in
Gone With The Wind,
and we knew her well. She was a salty dame.
At one point, she was engaged to Mike Todd, who left her for Elizabeth
Taylor.
(Allan) We remained close to Evelyn, and when she got older, she got
dementia; she had been living off Sunset Boulevard in a condo, but we put
her up at the Peppers [in Montecito], where she died five years ago. Her
last husband was [bandleader] Artie Shaw.
(Tab) I read [Muller’s account of Ms Keyes] and said, “God, it just
captured her magnificently.” We called him up; he read what I had in my
computer and said, “Hey, I’ll work on it with you.”
Conversations:
44
winter
|
spr ing
With Divine in
the cult classic
Polyester
, in 1981