War & Peace Quote by Tab Hunter

There is a particular strain of old-Hollywood humility that’s really a flex, and Tab Hunter’s memory of “Battle Cry” hits it cleanly. On the surface, he’s just recounting casting trivia: Jimmy Dean tested, Paul Newman tested, and Hunter tested nine times before he landed the part. Underneath, it’s a compact mission statement about how stardom actually worked in the studio era - and how precarious it felt even for the people who “made it.”

Name-dropping Dean and Newman isn’t gossip; it’s calibration. Those two names have become shorthand for a certain postwar masculinity: raw, modern, inevitable. By placing himself in direct competition with them, Hunter quietly repositions his own career as something earned against the strongest possible field. The line “I knew Jimmy Dean” carries another edge: proximity to myth. It suggests a world where icons weren’t icons yet, just ambitious young men in a room, waiting to be judged.

The nine tests are the tell. Screen tests weren’t just auditions; they were manufacturing checks, measuring whether a face could hold a close-up, whether a body read “soldier,” “lover,” “All-American” under harsh lights and studio expectations. Hunter’s insistence on the number makes the process feel grueling and slightly dehumanizing, like the role had to be wrestled from the machine.

It’s also a gentle rebuttal to the idea that he was merely “packaged.” Even in a system built to sell him, he wants you to hear the labor, the persistence, the narrow margin between being cast and being replaced by a future legend.