by Mark Griffin
Some recently unearthed evidence suggests that even before he was born, Roy Junior had caused some significant problems for his parents; though once he became a Hollywood star, all of the details would be carefully concealed. In an authorized 1956 fanzine entitled Star Stories, writer Jane Ardmore promised her readers Rock Hudson’s “true life told in exciting story form.” Ardmore described the Scherers’ Elm Street residence as their “honeymoon apartment,” one that Roy and Kay had moved into “a year and a half after their wedding.” While this may constitute exciting story form, it bears only a passing resemblance to true life.
Roy and Kay’s long buried marriage certificate is dated March 17, 1925, only eight months prior to Roy Junior’s birth in November. This would suggest that the young couple had to get married—shotgun style—in order to save face. In many ways, Winnetka was a small town and news—especially any containing the slightest hint of scandal—traveled fast. Several years later, Kay’s family would find this out the hard way.
When first married, it seemed as though Roy and Kay were well matched. Not only did they make a handsome couple, but both husband and wife would be remembered as “friendly and fun loving.” Born in 1899, Roy was of average height and pleasant looking, the second eldest in a family of seven. Kay, who was born in 1900, would be described in Photoplay terms as, “a handsome, dark-haired woman with the fun-loving temperament and good humor of the Irish as well as an English reverence for thrift and industry.” Others remembered both Kay and Roy as impulsive risk-takers. “Your father loved the gaming tables and your mother loved the ponies,” publicist Roger Jones once observed in a letter to their famous son.
Both the Scherers and the Woods were working-class families of modest means. Roy Senior’s parents, Theodore and Lena Scherer,* owned a 160-acre farm in the township of Preston, roughly five miles north of downtown Olney. As he grew up, Roy Junior would spend many summers visiting Grandpa Scherer’s farm.
“Rock’s grandfather, Theodore, was a farmer all his life,” says Jerry Scherer, another grandson. “He was the hardest worker you’ve ever seen. He had 152 acres that he made a living on and the other eight acres of his land went to the railroad that went by on the east side. Granddad always used a team of horses to plow. He didn’t have a tractor. He was out there doing everything by himself . . . When people say, ‘How could Rock have worked as hard as he did and make all these movies out in Hollywood?’ That’s because he grew up seeing his grandparents work their own farm. From an early age, he learned what it took to survive.”
Relatives remember that Roy Junior would spend his summers riding the plough horse, chasing after his dog Crystal and attempting to assist with some of the daily chores. “One day, my grandmother asked him to feed the chickens,” says sister Alice Waier. “I don’t know how many chickens they had but I’m sure it was many. So, he went out to the coops and threw down their feed. Much to everyone’s surprise, they all died. Instead of chicken feed, he had thrown down lye. Well, my dad was furious. Not Grandma Scherer. She told everyone not to lay a hand on Junior. It was all a mistake. To say the least, my brother was horrified. But Grandma just took him under her wing. They got more chickens and she showed him how to feed them. She was always looking out for Junior.”
In the latter half of the 1920s, Roy and Kay had managed to scrape by on what Roy took home from the Elm Street garage as well as the occasional handout from Kay’s family, but all of that changed in the fall of 1929. Even an affluent community like Winnetka wasn’t immune to the Depression. Some indication of the family’s precarious financial situation can be found in a census report from 1930. By that time, the Scherers had moved to more affordable lodging at 1027 Elm Street, where they rented rooms for $50 a month. Roy Senior’s twenty-three-year-old brother, Lloyd, “a gas station helper,” was now residing with them.
After Roy lost his job, he, Kay, and five-year-old Roy Junior suddenly found themselves moving out of their Elm Street apartment and in with Kay’s parents. The Woods lived in a modest gray stucco bungalow on Center Street in Winnetka. In addition to the three Scherers, Grandpa and Grandma Wood were already housing their youngest son, John, his wife and their four children. Eleven people, all tightly packed under one roof. There was one bedroom, one bathroom, and no privacy. Although conditions at the Wood home were cramped and often chaotic, these circumstances were hardly unique at a time when eight million Americans were out of work.
Kay’s father, James Wood, had managed to hold on to his job at Winnetka Coal & Lumber. Born in Armitage, England, Grandpa Wood was over six feet tall and powerfully built, though he never played the commanding patriarch. Instead, he let his charismatic wife take control of their overpopulated household. Kay’s mother, Mary Ellen Enright, had been born in Shermerville, Illinois, though her parents were from “the old country”—Ireland.
If the adults in the house were preoccupied with money woes and the unrelentingly grim headlines, young Roy was having the time of his life. The boy with the Buster Brown bob and mischievous smile was clearly Grandma Wood’s favorite. “He got away with murder,” remembered one cousin. This included taking a single bite out of every apple in the ice box and consuming a pound of uncooked bacon. Although it was obvious who was the culprit, Roy allowed his cousins to take the fall for his antics. Whenever another of Roy’s misdeeds was reported to her, Grandma Wood simply looked the other way. Clearly, the woman who enjoyed her dessert before dinner sensed that her disobedient grandson was very much a kindred spirit.
As family lore had it, Kay’s doctor had played phonograph records to soothe her during her torturous delivery, which resulted in Roy Junior’s early and lifelong love of music. When visiting the Scherer farm, he loved to pump the player piano. At Grandma Wood’s, he’d crank up the gramophone and listen to Al Jolson’s recording of “There’s a Rainbow ’Round My Shoulder” over and over again. And even when he wasn’t listening to music, young Roy would still monopolize Grandpa Wood’s radio. Every week, he faithfully tuned in to The Witch’s Tale, listening intently as “Old Nancy, the Witch of Salem,” introduced yet another terrifying episode.
If his son was totally oblivious to the troubled times they were living in, Roy Scherer was all too aware of them. Ever since the Elm Street garage had closed, Roy shuffled through his days, feeling useless. Attempts to find work led straight to nowhere. Moving in with Kay’s parents had been even more humiliating. He felt like a charity case. With each passing day, Roy grew less hopeful. After mulling it over for weeks, he finally decided it was time to leave. He’d go off and make a fresh start somewhere. It was no good talking it over with Kay. This was something he had to do by himself.
As it happened, Roy Junior was away at Grandpa Scherer’s farm in Olney on the afternoon in 1931 that his father walked out. Nearly seventy years after the fact, his cousin Dorothy Kimble remembered Scherer’s departure vividly: “I was home from school sick at the time . . . Uncle Roy came out of their bedroom carrying a suitcase, and gave me a nickel not to tell anyone he was going. I cherished that nickel. I didn’t say a thing. I watched him walk down the street and that’s the last I saw of him.”*
Scherer walked out on everything that day—his wife, his young son, his extended family, and virtually everything he knew. Though he apparently didn’t have any connections on the West Coast, he decided that moving there was his best hope for starting over. But were hard times the real reason Scherer decided to take a walk? Several family members have suggested that something else may have prompted his departure. It was said that it was Roy Junior who was the real cause of his father’s abrupt exit. “There was family gossip that [Kay] was so devoted to Roy [Junior] that she ignored her husband, and that’s why Scherer left,” said Kay’s nephew, Edwin Wood.
While his father’s abandonment was a subject that Rock Hudson never discussed publicly, the editors of a 1950s fan magazine concocted their own version of Roy Senior’s departure. As a result, one of the most painful episodes in the star’s li
fe was reenacted as a sudsy Ross Hunter–produced melodrama. The kind that usually starred Rock Hudson . . .
“You don’t understand, Kay, I can’t face it, I’m going away to make a new start.”
“Oh, but Roy, take me with you. I want to go, too.”
“Kay, you don’t understand, I’m bankrupt. I spent my last nickel on a railroad ticket . . .”
“All aboard. All a . . .”
“Kay, I’ve got to catch the train. I’ll write you. Goodbye, say goodbye to Sonny . . .”
Fanzine writers outdid themselves attempting to turn this desperate act into something glossily cinematic. Though in reality, Scherer’s desertion was anything but a tender love scene. He just left and never came back. In official retellings, The Great Depression would always be blamed for Scherer’s walkout. Though Mark Miller, one of Rock’s closest friends, claimed that Kay told him the real reason for her husband’s abrupt departure.
“I was on an airplane with Rock’s mother, Katherine. After she had a couple of martinis, she said, ‘Mark, there is something I want to tell you . . .’ After another sip, she continued, ‘Roy Scherer was not Roy Junior’s real father. I was having an affair with a very tall boy who pumped gas down on the corner.’ After another sip, she said, ‘I never learned of his name. Then I married Roy not knowing I was pregnant. Roy Junior was actually born seven months after I married Roy. When Roy found out five years later, he deserted us.’”
Truth or martini-fueled fantasy? Roy Junior’s birth certificate lists Scherer as his biological father. In some photographs, there’s an undeniable family resemblance, despite the fact that Mark Miller’s stunned response to Kay’s confession was, “I’ve always wondered why Rock looked nothing like Roy Scherer.” The date of Kay’s marriage certificate corroborates the fact that she was already pregnant when she married Scherer, which lends some credence to her story. As for “the very tall boy who pumped gas down on the corner,” is it credible that in 1920s Winnetka Kay would have had a dalliance with an anonymous lover? And what—if anything—should be made of the fact that Scherer’s younger brother, Lloyd (who lived with Roy Senior and Kay at one point), and Roy Junior’s future stepfather, Wallace Fitzgerald, both worked as gas station attendants?
Regardless of why Scherer left, what must it have been like for a sensitive six-year-old boy to attempt to process the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of his father? Not only had he left without saying goodbye, but nobody seemed to know exactly where he had gone. Although everyone kept telling Roy Junior that his father would be back—in a few months, when business picked up, by next Christmas—he eventually figured it out. His father was gone for good. And no matter what Roy Junior did, or how many questions he asked, or how well behaved he was, his father had not only moved on without him but, if some of the whispers were to be believed, because of him.
Around this time, young Roy entered the first grade at the Horace Mann School. A faded photograph snapped in the schoolroom shows a forlorn, pouty-faced Roy. His expression seems to suggest that he’d rather be back on the Scherer farm in Olney. In later years, Rock Hudson would look back on the days he spent there as some of the happiest of his life. One memory in particular would always stay with him. He came in from playing one afternoon to find Grandpa and Grandma Scherer—who were not usually demonstrative in front of others—sitting on the couch, holding hands, and talking to each other in German.* Even at a young age, he found this touching. Though he also wondered why he’d never seen his own parents behaving so tenderly with each other.
While she was still legally married, Kay was now essentially a single woman with a young son to support. At a time when jobs were scarce, she took work wherever she could find it. At one time or another, she was employed as a waitress, a babysitter, a live-in domestic, a telephone operator, and an organist—providing the musical accompaniment for silent movies. Even on those rare days when she wasn’t working, Kay would return to the theatre as a patron. And Roy Junior was always by her side. “Whatever my mother wanted to see was what I saw, every Saturday,” Rock Hudson would later recall. “The only trouble was, my mother was hopelessly in love with John Boles. I was dragged off to sit through every movie John Boles ever made, when I was dying to see Robin Hood or Fu Manchu or Buck Jones.”
It was most likely that at one of these Saturday matinees Roy had his first notion that he wanted to do what those people up on the screen were doing. Though he kept this a secret. As he explained to an interviewer toward the end of his life: “Back in a small town, I could never freely say, ‘I’m going to be an actor when I grow up,’ because that’s just sissy stuff. You know, ‘Don’t bother with that. You ought to be a policeman or a fireman.’ So, I never said anything. I just kept my mouth shut.”
This was the beginning of Rock Hudson’s life as a covert operation. And it was this phrase—I just kept my mouth shut—that he would repeat over and over again in interviews spanning decades. From an early age, he learned that you could talk about pretty much anything—except what you truly felt and what you really wanted. Like a father. Weeks and then months had passed without any word from Roy Senior. Still, Kay held out hope that he would eventually come back. Convinced that his return was only a matter of the right kind of coaxing, she began setting some money aside. In August of 1932, Kay sent her absentee husband a one-way bus ticket, which Scherer promptly returned, indicating that he had no intention of coming back.
Undaunted, Kay decided that if Scherer wouldn’t come to her, then she and young Roy would go to him. Surely the sight of his own child would snap him out of this—whatever this was. Mother and son boarded a Greyhound bus for California. Kay managed to track Scherer down through the Priscilla Tea Room, a little restaurant in downtown Los Angeles, where he had been receiving his mail. However, when they reached the boarding house in Pasadena where Scherer was last known to be living, they were surprised to discover that he had suddenly vacated his room. When Kay finally caught up with her husband, she asked him to return home with her and Roy. He refused.
Kay and young Roy returned to Winnetka completely defeated. It was time to face facts. The marriage was over. In December, Kay’s attorneys issued a bill of complaint against Scherer. Though he was summoned to appear at the Cook County Courthouse, he was a no-show. The divorce decree that followed spelled everything out:
“The defendant, Roy H. Scherer, wholly and utterly disregarding his marriage vows and obligations . . . willfully deserted and absented himself from the complainant without any reasonable cause . . . It is therefore ordered, that the bonds of matrimony existing between the complainant, Katherine Scherer, and the defendant, Roy H. Scherer, be dissolved . . . It is further decreed that the complainant shall continue to have the sole care, custody and education of the said child, Roy H. Scherer, Jr.”
On March 18, 1933, Roy Junior’s parents were officially divorced. Although Roy was reassured by relatives on both sides that his parents’ divorce had nothing to do with him, he was convinced that he was responsible for the breakup. As the first in a series of lifelong betrayals, his father’s desertion would leave him with a gnawing feeling of incompletion. Kay did her best to compensate. “She was mother, father, and big sister to me,” Rock Hudson would later say. “And I was son and brother to her, regardless of who she was married to.”
WHILE STILL RECOVERING from the collapse of her marriage and struggling to stay afloat, Kay met a handsome, tough-as-nails marine named Wallace Fitzgerald. Originally from Greenland, New Hampshire, Fitzgerald had first enlisted in 1930 when he turned twenty-one. When he and Kay began dating, Fitzgerald was serving as a private at the US Naval Training Station in Great Lakes, Illinois. Friends of the couple recalled that Fitzgerald cut an impressive figure in his military uniform and that Kay was quickly swept off her feet.
Fitzgerald was a powerful presence—the kind of commanding, take-charge type that Kay may have felt she needed to fill the void left by Scherer. What’s more, Kay thought that Roy Junior
should have a strong authority figure to stand in for his absentee father. Kay’s new beau seemed like the perfect candidate. But Wallace Fitzgerald was hardly the clean-cut, all-American hero that he appeared to be. Far from it, in fact.
When Fitzgerald was eighteen, a New Hampshire grand jury charged him with larceny after he was accused of stealing a ring from the home of a Greenland neighbor. He pled not guilty and was released on bail. Three years later, The Portsmouth Herald reported that Fitzgerald and a female companion, Mrs. Myra Cameron, were involved in an alleged assault against another Greenland resident. In October of 1931, Fitzgerald’s commanding officer charged him with desertion after he went missing for twelve days. While on leave, Fitzgerald had gone on an epic bender, winding up behind bars in Yuma, Arizona.
Kay was apparently unaware of Fitzgerald’s criminal history, but all too soon she became aware of his drinking binges. Early in their relationship Kay may have written this off as the curse of an enlisted man, but giving Fitzgerald a pass where his chronic drunkenness was concerned would prove to have dire consequences. Despite the warning signs, Kay decided to take the plunge and on March 17, 1934, she married Wallace Fitzgerald in Waukegan. A year later, the hot-tempered marine adopted nine-year-old Roy.
Almost immediately, Roy’s stepfather exhibited an open hostility toward him. Fitzgerald seemed irrationally jealous of the amount of attention Kay lavished on her only child. Determined to make a man out of him, Fitzgerald cracked the whip. He enrolled Roy in a local Boy Scout troop, confiscated any toys that he considered too childish, and smacked away any behavior that he perceived to be effeminate.
The heterosexualizing of Rock Hudson started long before he landed in Hollywood and met Henry Willson, the agent who reconditioned him into a presumably straight leading man. Even as a pre-adolescent, Roy was forced to conform or there would be hell to pay.
