Faith & Spirit Quote by Tab Hunter

Celebrity culture runs on a quiet hustle: you provide a usable version of yourself, and the public agrees to like it. Tab Hunter admits the cruelty baked into that bargain - "the press and people" as a single, faceless jury - and you can hear the exhaustion under the performer's default defense: I'm trying. It's not just sadness; it's the uniquely Hollywood panic that effort should be legible, rewarded, and publicly verified.

Then Geraldine Page delivers the kind of backstage wisdom that never makes it into the glossy profiles. "That's their bad taste" flips the power dynamic with a brisk, almost comic snobbery. It's not a pep talk about self-esteem; it's a refusal to let mass opinion dictate artistic worth. The line works because it allows Hunter to keep his hurt without turning it into self-abasement. If rejection isn't evidence of your failure, you don't have to keep auditioning for strangers' approval.

The context matters: Hunter came up as a 1950s heartthrob, manufactured and policed by studio-era publicity, when "likability" wasn't a bonus trait but an industrial requirement. Add the era's compulsory closeting and the press's appetite for moral narratives, and "they just really hate me" lands as more than bad reviews. Page's retort reads like survival strategy: a small, sharp permission slip to stop treating the audience as a parent you can finally impress. In a culture that confuses visibility with intimacy, it's a reminder that public judgment is often just projection with a byline.