And the Band Played On

by Randy Shilts

  Later in the afternoon, Dale Olson confirmed that Hudson was being tested “for everything.” Reporters asked if that included AIDS. “Everything,” Olson repeated.

  When Nancy Reagan talked to reporters that evening, she recalled the night that Hudson had joined her and the president for a state dinner in the White House. Hudson had told her he picked up some bug in Israel, she said.

  Wednesday, July 24

  PARIS

  A terse announcement from the American Hospital denied that Hudson had liver cancer and said only that he had been hospitalized for “fatigue and general malaise.”

  Gossip that Hudson was being treated by Dr. Dominique Dormant, who was treating Bill Kraus and most of the other American AIDS patients, sped through the community of AIDS exiles in Paris. As news organizations suddenly became hungry for stories about the miracle drug Hudson had come to Paris to seek, most of the American patients were hounded by reporters who, at last, were interested in the AIDS issue.

  “Sorry we haven’t done much on this before now,” a Washington Post reporter told Bill Kraus as they started an interview. “We just haven’t been able to find a handle that would make the story interesting to the general population.”

  It took all of Bill’s self-control to keep from throwing the reporter out his window into the Seine.

  That afternoon, Rock Hudson took a call from an old Hollywood friend.

  “President Reagan wished him well and let him know that he and Mrs. Reagan were keeping him in their thoughts and prayers,” said a White House spokesperson.

  Dale Olson denied that the liver cancer story was a ruse to conceal the fact that Hudson had AIDS and said the hospital was being “wishy-washy” in denying the cancer diagnosis.

  Just the possibility that Rock Hudson had AIDS, however, electrified the nation. Suddenly, all the newscasts and newspapers were running stories about the disease. In Washington, CBS producers called Representative Waxman to ask him to appear on “Face the Nation” that Sunday with Secretary Heckler to discuss federal AIDS policy. Waxman was delighted with the idea, especially since it marked the first time any major network show would devote significant time to discussing the federal government’s role in the epidemic.

  “Of course, if it turns out that Rock Hudson doesn’t have AIDS,” the producer said, “we’re going to cancel this show.”

  In New York, Dr. Mathilde Krim, besieged with interview requests, was privately disgusted that President Reagan was shedding “crocodile tears” over Hudson. Where was his concern for the thousands of others who had been dying all these years? she wondered.

  At the Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Director Richard Dunne saw the explosion of interest in the epidemic as an opportunity to finally put the squeeze on Mayor Koch’s administration. After a few well-placed calls alluding to the sudden interest of the press in all AIDS-related topics, Dunne learned that Koch had abruptly acknowledged the public-health merits in increasing funds for local AIDS projects.

  The major problem most news organizations confronted with the Hudson story was in explaining how the actor got AIDS. Of course, virtually everyone in the Hollywood film community had known for decades that Hudson was gay. Homosexuality, however, was an issue about which the media still felt much more comfortable lying than telling the truth. Consequently, the news stories about Hudson’s health hedged the issue, alluding only to the CDC’s standard list of risk groups.

  Gay groups and AIDS organizations largely preferred it this way, eager to prove to the world once and for all that “AIDS is not a gay disease.” This desire to conceal the truth sometimes went to absurd lengths. A press spokesperson for the San Francisco AIDS Foundation, for example, said that Hudson was proving to the world that “AIDS is not a gay white male disease,” as though Hudson were something other than a gay white male. When pressed on Hudson’s risk group status, Bill Meisenheimer, executive director of the AIDS Project-Los Angeles, refused to speculate on the actor’s sexuality and instead talked about the transfusions Hudson had undergone during his heart surgery.

  The embargo, however, broke late Wednesday night when the bulldog editions of the San Francisco Chronicle hit the streets with a story describing Hudson’s years of personal conflict about remaining in the closet. With on-the-record quotes from a circle of Hudson’s longtime friends in San Francisco, the story discussed the torment of a man who had for years struggled with the question of whether he might do some good by acknowledging his sexuality. In an unusual display of what editors considered good taste, the Chronicle had decided to play the story off its front page, on page seven. Other papers, however, demonstrated no such restraint, and by Thursday morning, newspapers and newscasts around the country were reporting the Chronicle’s disclosure of Hudson’s homosexuality.

  Thursday, July 25

  By now, officials at American Hospital had learned that Hudson had AIDS, and they wanted the actor out of their facility. They did not want the hospital’s good name associated with a gay disease, fearing they would lose both prestige and patients. Nurses were anxious about treating Hudson.

  Dr. Dominique Dormant pleaded with hospital officials to let him see his patient, but the hospital did not even want the AIDS expert to set foot in their building. When Dormant finally did see the actor, he was amazed at how deteriorated Hudson’s condition was. Further HPA-23 treatments, he saw, would do no good.

  There was also the question of what to tell the press. The hospital bluntly told Hudson’s entourage that if they did not explain the actor’s condition, the hospital would. A Parisian publicist, who had been enlisted to handle the local press, met with Hudson and gained his approval for the brief statement. At 2 P.M., Yannou Collart told reporters, “Mr. Hudson has Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.”

  Collart’s explanation, however, tended to complicate the situation further, because she insisted that the actor was “totally cured.” When asked how the actor may have contracted the disease, she said, “He doesn’t have any idea how he contracted AIDS. Nobody around him has AIDS.”

  In San Francisco, Marc Conant heard that Hudson had been Michael Gottlieb’s patient.

  “That’s pretty courageous of him to admit that he had AIDS,” Conant said to Gottlieb in a phone conversation.

  “Courageous, hell,” said Gottlieb. “He collapsed in a hotel lobby.”

  Still, Conant was thrilled with anything that brought the media spotlight to the epidemic. “Now there is a new risk group for AIDS,” he told a reporter. “The rich and famous.”

  Friday, July 26

  The revelation that Hudson had felt obliged to leave the United States for AIDS treatment cast the international spotlight on the Pasteur Institute. Much of what emerged was less than flattering to the Pasteur’s American counterparts.

  The Pasteur director, Dr. Raymond Dedonder, made a long-scheduled appearance in San Francisco before the French-American Chamber of Commerce. Dedonder explained how the French had applied for their patent on the LAV virus in December 1983, while Dr. Gallo had applied for the NCI patent on HTLV-III in early 1984. Dr. Gallo’s patent was approved immediately; the Pasteur Institute patent still had not been approved. Without a patent, the Pasteur could not market its blood test in the United States or enjoy the substantial royalties that would accrue from LAV blood tests. The Pasteur would sue, Dedonder warned.

  Bit by bit, the story of the fierce scientific warfare between the French and the Americans began to be assembled. The Hudson episode and its attendant publicity rapidly turned into a major embarrassment for American science in general and the federal government in particular.

  In Paris, Dr. David Klatzmann of the Pasteur Institute exclaimed that, at last, “we are out of the desert.”

  Sunday, July 28

  AIDS was on the front page of virtually every Sunday morning paper in the United States. Any local angle was pursued with a vengeance, and entertainment sections were crowded with retrospectives on Rock Hudson’s career. There was something ab
out Hudson’s diagnosis that seemed to strike an archetypal chord in the American consciousness. For decades, Hudson had been among the handful of screen actors who personified wholesome American masculinity; now, in one stroke, he was revealed as both gay and suffering from the affliction of pariahs. Doctors involved in AIDS research called the Hudson announcement the single most important event in the history of the epidemic, and few knowledgeable people argued.

  In Los Angeles, a huge crowd turned out for an AIDS Walkathon for the AIDS Project-Los Angeles. The event raised $630,000 in one afternoon, a record for an AIDS fund-raiser, and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley joined a host of movie celebrities praising Hudson’s disclosure as a crucial reason for the day’s success.

  In Washington, Secretary Margaret Heckler abruptly canceled her appearance on “Face the Nation” with Representative Henry Waxman. Acting Assistant Secretary for Health James Mason took Heckler’s place, assuring viewers that in recent years, “Money has not in any way incapacitated or slowed us down in moving ahead…. We’ve been working ever since the disease was first identified in 1981, and it is our first priority.”

  As proof of the administration’s commitment, Mason pointed to the increase in AIDS funding announced just that week. Mason didn’t mention the threat of the congressional subpoena.

  In the suburbs of San Francisco, Rick Walsh grew angrier with each passing day of the Rock Hudson revelations. Big deal, he thought. One guy named Rock Hudson gets AIDS and everybody starts paying attention. When one guy named Gary Walsh died a slow, excruciating death, nobody cared. To the end, Rick knew that his Uncle Gary had believed there might be a reprieve, a cure. But it never came because nobody cared, and now Gary was dead, and thousands more like him were dead. Nobody gave a damn about any of them, just this guy named Rock Hudson. It had never crossed Rick Walsh’s mind that politics might have something to do with medicine. Now he knew better.

  Monday, July 29

  PHILIP BURTON MEMORIAL FEDERAL BUILDING, SAN FRANCISCO

  The Mobilization Against AIDS held a press conference to plead again with Ronald Reagan to say something, anything, about the epidemic, now that he, like the gay men of San Francisco, had a friend who was dying of AIDS. “The president’s silence on AIDS is deafening,” said the group’s director, Paul Boneberg. “Still, he has not said one word about the disease.”

  A White House press spokesperson said that the president would have no comment on either the press conference or the AIDS epidemic.

  Both Times and Newsweek hit the newsstands with huge stories about Rock Hudson and the AIDS epidemic. Every major news organization in the country was gearing up to do investigative series on the epidemic. As calls flooded the AIDS Activities Office at the Centers for Disease Control, all available staffers were diverted to handling press inquiries. Dr. Harold Jaffe, who had worked on the epidemic since the day Sandra Ford had first alerted the CDC to the mysterious pentamidine orders, wanted to scream into his phone: “Where have you been for the last four years?”

  As Don Francis watched the drama unfold, he thought back to one day he had had after beating back the virulent outbreak of Ebola Fever virus in Africa. He and the other scientists from the World Health Organization had thwarted the spread of a horribly deadly disease, risking their lives in the process. When the plane carrying them back to Europe had landed, thousands were waiting on the runway to greet them. The crowds, however, were not on hand for the weary WHO doctors but for a basketball team that had just won an international championship. A bunch of damn athletes, Francis had thought.

  To Francis, the Hudson episode was not a celebration of one man’s courage but an indictment of our era. A lot of good, decent Americans had perished in this epidemic, but it was the diagnosis of one movie star, who had demonstrated no previous inclination to disclose his plight, that was going to make all the difference.

  That afternoon in Atlanta, the CDC released new figures showing that in the past week the number of AIDS cases in the United States had surpassed 12,000. As of that morning, 12,067 Americans were diagnosed with AIDS, of whom 6,079 had died.

  In Beijing that day, health authorities reported the first case of AIDS to be detected in the People’s Republic of China.

  July 30

  PARIS

  Two minutes before midnight, a chartered Boeing 747 Air France jet, bearing only Rock Hudson and six medical attendants, taxied onto the runway of Orly International Airport. Hudson had wanted to be transferred from the American Hospital to Percy Hospital, where he could undergo HPA-23 treatments, but Dr. Dormant had dissuaded him, informing the actor that he would die soon. Nothing more could be done. When Dormant learned that Hudson had paid $250,000 to rent the jumbo airliner for his return trip, he was dumbstruck. Hudson could have traveled on a commercial jetliner, Dormant knew. The charter was totally unnecessary.

  “Two hundred fifty thousand dollars is more than my budget for four years of AIDS research,” Dormant groaned.

  The plane landed in Los Angeles International Airport at 2:30 A.M. Pacific time. Hundreds of newspeople had gathered for a glimpse of the actor as he was transferred from the plane to a helicopter. Television cameras with telescopic lenses cluttered the airport’s rooftops, and photographers jostled for the moment when the world would get the first glimpse of Hudson since his AIDS disclosure. Momentarily, the cameras caught the gaunt form clad in a white hospital gown and covered by a white sheet, as the gurney was wheeled to the helicopter.

  In Hawaii, Cleve Jones wanted to put his fist through the television set as he watched the grotesque spectacle of news choppers vying for exclusive footage of the world’s newest celebrity AIDS patient. The television stations could afford helicopters to record fifteen seconds of Rock Hudson on a stretcher, but they had never afforded the time to note the passing of the thousands who had gone before him. Cleve recalled the line of pale, anxious faces stretching down the stairs from the one-room office of the KS Foundation on Castro Street in the summer of 1982. All those boys were dead now, and they had died unlamented and unremarked by the media. This is what it took, Cleve thought, some famous closet case to collapse in a hotel lobby.

  A few days before, Cleve had heard a new report that scientists had isolated the AIDS virus in the tears of AIDS patients. This discovery and the Hudson spectacle melded into one thought as Cleve watched his television set. “Okay,” he said to himself, “I’m not going to cry anymore. I’m going to fight you bastards.”

  Cleve Jones had come to Hawaii broken and weak. He had found sobriety now and had reclaimed his confidence. He was strong enough to make a difference once again. He would return to Castro Street. It was where he belonged and where he was needed. He would return to Castro Street, and he would not leave again.

  From the plate glass windows on the tenth floor of the UCLA Medical Center in Westwood, Michael Gottlieb watched Rock Hudson’s helicopter land on the hospital helipad. Bright lights from the television news helicopters overhead bathed the scene in a surreal, even macabre glow. Gottlieb had offered to go to Paris and accompany his patient back to Los Angeles, but Dr. Dormant assured him that Hudson was well in hand. When Gottlieb later examined Hudson, he could tell that the patient was deathly ill, barely cognizant of what was going on around him.

  Throughout the night, the medical center continued to be bombarded with media requests on the patient’s status. Gottlieb was aware that, as of yet, no physician had confirmed Hudson’s diagnosis. The only statement had been Yannou Collart’s garbled announcement in Paris. Gottlieb felt he needed to set the record straight if the media siege was ever to lift.

  In the morning, he prepared a simple statement and read it to Hudson.

  “Sure,” Hudson said. “Go ahead.”

  It was four years, one month, and twenty-five days since Gottlieb’s first report on the five unexplained cases of Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia had appeared in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. Since then, he had treated 200 AIDS patients, most of whom wer
e dead by now. Gottlieb felt numbed with grief and weariness. After all his years of warnings and pleas, he was aggravated that it had taken this, the diagnosis of a movie star, to awaken the nation. He was troubled by what this said about America and the nation’s much-vaunted regard for the sanctity of human life. Nevertheless, Gottlieb could see that Rock Hudson’s diagnosis had irrevocably changed everything for the AIDS epidemic. After such a burst of attention, AIDS would never again be relegated to the obscurity to which it had long been assigned.

  The UCLA media relations staff informed the news media of an impending announcement, and Gottlieb returned to his dilapidated office to gather his laboratory staff. They had shared the years of frustration and despair, and together they would share the moment that would transform the epidemic.

  As he strode to the podium, Gottlieb could see his staff, lined up expectantly in the rear of the crowded auditorium. The chattering of the reporters faded as Gottlieb adjusted the microphone, and there was silence.

  Gottlieb paused.

  He looked from one side of the auditorium to the other. Gottlieb knew that he needed to be deliberate in every word he spoke. More than anything else, he did not want to sound embarrassed. That, he knew, was what had been the problem all along with this infernal epidemic: It was about sex, and it was about homosexuals. Taken altogether, it had simply embarrassed people—the politicians, the reporters, the scientists. AIDS had embarrassed everyone, he knew, and tens of thousands of Americans would die because of that. It was time for people to stop being embarrassed, Gottlieb decided, if our society was ever to beat this horrible enemy.