By Donald H. Harrison

LA JOLLA, Calif— Is Tab Hunter, the actor, Jewish?  That was the question many asked as they filed into the David and Dorothea Garfield Auditorium Tuesday evening, March 21  to hear him speak as part of the "Distinguished Author Series" of the Lawrence Family Jewish Community Center in the San Diego community of La Jolla.

Well, no, he isn't, actually, but his connection to Jews was deemed close enough to include him in a line-up of speakers that also included Susannah Heschel (daughter of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel), mystery writer Faye Kellerman, and Rabbi Elliot Dorff of the University of Judaism, among others.  His autobiography, Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star, was offered for autographing in connection for the event.
Hunter's  father, Charles Kelm, was Jewish and his mother Gertrude Gelien was a Christian  Hunter said that his father was abusive, and that his parents divorced when his older brother, Walter, was 3, and he, then known as  Mayo Kelm, was 2.  The mother whisked her two children to California, where she worked as a nurse aboard the Matson Steam Ship Lines, and sent them to Catholic schools.

His mother decided not to hold the "Mayo," nor the "Kelm" either, so she  renamed her younger son as Art Gelien.  The  future actor never saw his father again, but his older brother did.  Here's how Hunter, 74, whose name was again changed by Hollywood, told the story when prompted by  interviewer Pat Launer of KPBS:

"My brother and my mother got into an argument one day and he said, 'you know, our father probably  wasn't that bad.'  So  my mother said, 'then I think you should go and spend a summer with him in New York.' So she sent him back there and when my brother came back, I said, 'What's our dad like, what's our dad like?'  He said, 'Don't ask, just don't ask.'  So I was fascinated and I had his address on a piece of paper  and when I was 15 1/2 years old— I had lied about my age and I was in the Coast Guard— I was at a training station in Connecticut and I went and saw my first Broadway shows, and I thought, 'I've got to see my father.'  

"It was in December, so I went to this address, I walked up there, knocked on the door, this terrible neighborhood. The door opened about this wide (he gestured to indicate it was a narrow opening), and this woman answered.  She said, 'yes?'  I said, 'Is Charles Kelm there?'  She said, 'No,' and I said, 'well, will you tell him that his son came by?'  She said, 'Yes,' and she slammed the door. And I walked out in the snow for an hour and a half and I was just devastated.  And I never met my father, but, years later when I did a film or a television show, I received a wire, and it said, 'Congratulations on your performance' and it was signed 'Helm'—H, E, L, M, and all my life I thought I wonder if that was 'Kelm.'"

Asked if his brother, Walter, ever told him more about his experiences with their father, Hunter replied, "No, Walt never talked about it."  He added that years later  his mother was having dinner in Santa Fe, New Mexico, with him and there was a big deer head up there, and she said, 'that deer head keeps staring at me, I don't like it.  I said, 'I've named him Charlie, after my father.'  She looks at me and she said, 'and that's where he belongs.'"  

Hunter said he and his life partner, Allen Glaser, were in Washington about 15 years ago when Glaser was doing some genealogical research.. Hunter said Glaser urged him to "do something, look up your family" and I said, 'fine,' and... 'gosh, my father is Jewish?... My father was much older than my mother. He worked in a slaughter house in Brooklyn, and I had two half-sisters, Sarah and Rebecca." Afterwards, Hunter called his mother on the telephone to confirm his discovery.  "Vie do you vant to know zese zings?" he said, imitating his mother's German accent.

"That's what everyone here wanted to know—the Jewish connection," Launer said.

"That's it," replied the actor.  

However, he added, "my mother was a lover of all the religions of the world. She was fascinated. Her closest friends were rabbis, nuns, Buddhists..."

Audience members sought more information on Hunter's Jewish family. He ansered that he never tried to contact his half-sisters, Sarah and Rebecca, who already would have been elderly 15 years ago.  "I didn't want to go there at that point," he explained. "I'm sure they didn't know who I was, and I certainly didn't know who they were."  

But there is another connection, come to think of it.  Glaser, whom he shyly describes as his "friend," is Jewish and "I'm very receptive," Hunter said.  Glaser was the one who urged him to write the autobiography in the first place.  Hunter said he agreed because it's better for the public "to get it from the horse's mouth and not from some horse's ass out there."

He was asked his assessment whether gay actors today would be accepted if they were "out" of the closet—as Hunter never was during the hey day of his career when he was cast opposite such leading ladies as Sophia Loren, Debbie Reynolds, Lana Turner, Rita Hayworth and Natalie Wood. "I don't know. I just really can't respond to that," he said.  "Everyone reacts differently...My mother used to say, 'the masses are asses.'"

The actor's talk was sponsored by the San Diego Center for Jewish Culture in alliance with J*Pride, an organization of Jewish gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transsexuals.  Jane Fantel introduced the program.