by Mark Griffin
“I once asked my stepfather if I could have drama lessons,” the adult Rock Hudson recalled. “The old man said, ‘Why?’ When I said I wanted to be an actor . . . Crack! And that was that.”
The more Fitzgerald drank, the more violent he became—lashing out at both Kay and Roy. Rock’s cousin Edwin Wood didn’t mince words: “He was a drunk . . . He used to beat Roy and Katherine.” Another cousin, Helen Wood Folkers, claimed to have seen evidence of this. “We used to see Roy covered with bruises . . . One day, Auntie Kay showed up with two black eyes.” A once cheerful, free-spirited Roy suddenly became sullen and withdrawn. First nail-biting became a problem, then bed-wetting. Ultimately, Roy began staying away from home as much as possible.
Just as the local movie theatre had been a refuge for Kay after Scherer walked out, it now provided the same kind of sanctuary for her son. One picture that completely captivated Roy was The Hurricane. Directed by John Ford, this South Seas melodrama was pure escapist fantasy, intended to give Depression-era audiences a much-needed lift. In the case of one wide-eyed audience member, it more than achieved its purpose. For a couple of hours, Roy was free to roam around the island of Manukura, his own tropical paradise.
The eye candy wasn’t only confined to the breathtaking location photography. Bare-chested and outfitted only in an abbreviated sarong for most of the movie, leading man Jon Hall would become young Roy’s first man crush. Watching Hall execute a masterful swan dive from a crow’s nest into a shimmering lagoon, Roy was transfixed.* Sitting in the dark and hypnotized by the flickering images, he thought to himself . . . Well, that cinches it, doesn’t it? I’ve got to go to Tahiti. The only way to do that is to become an actor.
Beyond any homoerotic longings that Hall’s Polynesian sailor inspired, The Hurricane also touched upon another area of Roy’s life that he couldn’t share with anyone. It’s not too much of a stretch to imagine an abused twelve-year-old closely identifying with Hall’s unjustly imprisoned native, who is whipped and beaten after being sentenced to hard labor by a sadistic governor. Abandoned by one father and abused by another, Roy felt betrayed by virtually everyone in his immediate family—even Kay. How could she have subjected him to a monster like his stepfather? If most of the time she was an over-controlling, even manipulative force in Roy’s life, at other times was he basically left to fend for himself?
In a surprisingly candid interview with Modern Screen in 1955, Kay described her first two marriages as “horrible nightmares.” When asked about her second husband, Kay claimed that she was unaware that Fitzgerald was regularly pummeling her son while she was away at work: “He used to beat Roy savagely and the boy never told me about it until after I was divorced. Then he told me everything. I feel very sorry for that man if he ever crosses Roy’s path.”
During this bleak period of his life, Roy had few trusted friends. “Skokie Junior High. That is where we met,” remembered Suzanne Guyot. “I think he worked hard to be happy and always, there was this shadow and he was so shy. He was really a loner. I was his best friend and he was mine. For a while, I was his best girl and that was nice until I threw him over for someone else.” Guyot remembered hearing “horror stories” concerning Fitzgerald’s extreme cruelty to Roy: “It wasn’t a happy childhood, that’s for sure.”
Instead of hardening Roy, his stepfather’s abuse seemed to make him even more compassionate when he encountered others being bullied. “We were in the same class,” Edward Jenner recalled. “I was the poor little rich kid, driven to public school by the chauffeur each morning. There were a bunch of hoodlum types going to the school, and they would tease and bully me. But Roy stuck up for me and told them to lay off. After Roy intervened, the others accepted me. When things were tough, he was the only friend I had.”
As a reward for Roy’s gallantry, Jenner’s mother paid to have him enrolled in Alicia Pratt’s dance classes at the Winnetka Women’s Club, where Ed was already a student. Wallace Fitzgerald was outraged that his stepson was now waltzing away his afternoons, though Kay was thrilled that Roy was associating with one of Winnetka’s wealthiest families.
“We used to sleep over at each other’s houses,” Jenner said. “When he came to my house, he was overwhelmed—we had a swimming pool, and our house was like a country club without the dues.” For several reasons, Jenner remembered that staying over at Roy’s house wasn’t nearly as agreeable: “His house had just two little bedrooms, and was tiny.” By this time, Roy had also become a chronic bed-wetter. One evening, when Roy and Ed were preparing to bunk together, Kay instructed Jenner to wrap a towel around himself so that he wouldn’t get soaked in the middle of the night. Roy was understandably humiliated.
Jenner also remembered being aware of some of the simmering tensions at his friend’s house. “At that time, the stepfather was quite a drinker, and when he went on his little toots, he’d beat up Roy and his mother. That tore Roy apart.” Neighbors of the Fitzgeralds became accustomed to calling the police to intervene in what were politely described as “family quarrels.” During her seven years of marriage to Fitzgerald, a terrified Kay would frequently turn up at her mother’s house, where she would display her latest bruises and scratches. Sometimes she would be alone, but very often Roy was with her.
“I remember when Roy was having some terrible problems with his stepfather, he’d spend quite a bit of time at our house,” remembers Robert Willett, whose sister, Louise, became one of Roy’s trusted confidantes. “He was looking for some help and support during a difficult period and my sister was a very compassionate and understanding girl. Another reason they were compatible is height. That may sound strange, but Roy had been this very scrawny kid. Suddenly, he had a growth spurt and just grew like crazy. Louise was the tallest girl in her class. Height is very important to kids, so that connected them. But the real reason is he needed someone to talk to when his parents were having all of these difficulties.”
As Fitzgerald’s drunken tirades became worse, Kay’s friends began asking her the obvious question—why stay? In the Midwest in the early 1940s, being a single mother with a pair of divorces was practically unheard of. In fact, an especially devout sister-in-law already refused to associate with Kay because she was a divorcee. And back in 1937, a messy divorce had figured in a very public scandal involving Kay’s younger brother.* In a small town like Winnetka, this was shocking stuff and a great embarrassment to the family. All of this may have factored into Kay’s decision to stick it out with Fitzgerald as long as she could. Though, finally, in the spring of 1941, two particularly disturbing episodes prompted Kay to head back to the Cook County Superior Court.
In her divorce complaint, Kay charged Fitzgerald with “extreme and repeated cruelty.” She described the first incident as “a severe beating . . . He came home from work intoxicated and he struck me very severely . . . He choked me, which resulted in calling a doctor.” Two months later, there was a second assault that again involved choking and that also required medical attention. Kay’s neighbor Catherine M. Dahl testified that throughout his marriage to Kay, Fitzgerald had been “cruel” and “generally abusive.”
On July 22, 1941, Judge Charles A. Williams ruled in Kay’s favor and granted her a divorce. “It is further ordered that the plaintiff, Katherine Fitzgerald, have the care and custody of the minor child, Roy Scherer Fitzgerald, now aged fifteen years. It is further ordered that the defendant, Wallace Fitzgerald, pay to the plaintiff the sum of $2,000 in semi-monthly installments of $32.50 in full settlement of plaintiff’s claim for alimony and support money.”* Fitzgerald was also ordered to surrender his 1937 Dodge sedan to his wife.
Chapter 2
Green Gin
Roy Fitzgerald’s Navy induction photo, 1944.
In June of 1939, Roy had enrolled in a summer school program at New Trier High School, one of the finest high schools in the country in terms of scholastic achievement. Though Roy Fitzgerald would ultimately emerge as one of New Trier’s most famous graduates—alongside
Charlton Heston and Ann-Margret—he was never one of the school’s most distinguished scholars.
“At New Trier, Roy sat behind me in Latin class,” recalls classmate Bill Markus. “He really struggled with the subject. He asked me for help once in a while, which I was able to give him. I remember him as a very shy, soft spoken person. He was still growing and filling out in those days and he may have felt awkward about that. I remember that he kept to himself and he didn’t participate much in school activities.”
Although New Trier’s varsity track team, The Triermen, regularly won suburban league meets and the dramatics department staged ambitious productions like The Yeomen of the Guard, Roy Fitzgerald was far too busy to participate. “Why was he not in activities at school? You have to remember that Roy worked,” says classmate Philip “Bud” Davis. “When I knew him, he had a job at White’s Drug Store, just a couple of blocks west of New Trier. So, when classes were over, he didn’t have time to fool around. The guy had work to do. Though I don’t think it was generally known that he did work. All of a sudden, Roy would just disappear after school.”
Unlike the majority of his classmates, who were from some of Winnetka’s wealthiest families, teenage Roy was already in a position of having to support himself. In addition to managing a full course load, Roy held down a number of part-time jobs. If he wasn’t stocking groceries at the Jewel Tea Store or serving up Green Rivers as a soda jerk at Hammond’s Ice Cream Parlor, he was caddying at Skokie Playfield. Roy was also an usher at the Teatro del Lago movie theatre, where he had an opportunity to see his heroes, Spencer Tracy and Tyrone Power, for free. “There were very few movie stars I didn’t like,” he’d later say. “One was Errol Flynn. It was a silly thing. He reminded me of my stepfather, whom I didn’t like at all.” Little did Roy know that one day, after becoming Hollywood’s new romantic idol, his portrait would grace the theatre’s lobby.
While most of Roy’s surviving classmates remember him as a loner, he did have two close friends in high school: Jim Matteoni and Pat McGuire. In 1952, after Roy Fitzgerald had morphed into Rock Hudson and he was being honored on This Is Your Life, the one guest he was clearly most excited to see was Matteoni. And why did they hit it off so well? “We laughed all the time,” Matteoni said. “We had some great times together back in high school. You know, most people take one lunch period. Well, that wasn’t enough for us. We took three.”
Occasionally, all three boys—Roy, Jim, and Pat—would venture to the south side of Chicago. Matteoni remembered that they scoured secondhand shops looking for blues records. One jazz disc in particular—the haunting “Green Gin” by Ernie Andrews—would elude Roy for years. In fact, he couldn’t afford to obtain a copy until after he became famous. According to Pat McGuire, there was an ulterior motive connected to some of their musical pursuits: “If we could get near a dance floor someplace, we’d go looking for dancing girls. And just generally look for women. All three of us were single, so that was our main occupation.”
According to his best friends, in those days Roy seemed as interested in female companionship as they were. “He chased girls with great care and perseverance,” Matteoni recalled. And Pat McGuire remembered that there were “no overtures or insinuations” during sleepovers at Roy’s house: “If we had been out late, I would flop at his house. We had no kind of sexual relationship. I’m not gay and I was shocked to find out later that he was.”
“When I knew him and he was in high school, he never exhibited to anyone in any way that he was gay,” says Bud Davis. “I guess the only way you could say he did is the fact that he did not date very much. Perhaps he was aware of his sexuality then and who knows, maybe confused by it.” And, as Roy himself pointed out so often, even if he was starting to feel attracted to other men, he knew enough to keep his mouth shut. Long before he landed in Hollywood, he understood that if he wanted to be accepted, the very essence of who he was would have to be edited out of the frame.
For a small-town boy to admit that he had theatrical ambitions was equivalent to announcing that he wanted to be a prima ballerina. The closest Roy came to revealing his secret longing was when he talked Matteoni and McGuire into joining him in assisting the Threshold Players, Winnetka’s community theatre group. They would serve the troupe as prop boys and scene changers. In this way, Roy would get as close as possible to acting without actually going all the way. “Roy was more taken by the whole thing than either me or Pat,” Jim Matteoni admitted. “The glamour lasted in him longer than it lasted in us . . . I think one of the reasons Roy became so enamored of the movies and the stage was as a way to escape the pressures and hardships at home.”
Even with his stepfather out of his life, Roy still had to contend with an overprotective and domineering mother. Pat McGuire recalls that Kay didn’t think that her son should be spending so much time with him. “She and I were enemies,” McGuire says. “She didn’t like me and I didn’t like her. Kay was bound and determined that Roy should associate with wealthy people. My family was not wealthy. Far from it. So, I was considered a waste of time for Roy. I remember that Kay had a rather sharp mouth on her. Sometimes that would cause a few little arguments. Although I have to say that Roy always defended her if there were any battles going on. They had been through so much together and Roy was protective of her. I mean, a better guy you couldn’t find.”
In both the 1943 and 1944 New Trier yearbooks, Roy Fitzgerald is listed as a senior.* Pat McGuire remembers that he and Roy were forced to repeat a semester. “We both had a little problem with absence from school and bad grades. So we didn’t have the necessary credits to graduate on time,” McGuire says. “I mean, what the hell did we know in those days? We were just a couple of dumb kids.”
On January 29, 1944, Roy Fitzgerald voluntarily enlisted in the U.S. Navy as an Apprentice Seaman. His induction photo says it all: Somebody please help me. Though he would later pose for thousands of pictures as one of the most photographed actors of his generation, this has to be the saddest image ever captured of him. The expression is both deeply wounded and grimly determined. Active duty was yet another ordeal he had to overcome. And it was one more thing standing in the way of his dreams. His boot camp training took place at the Great Lakes Naval Base in Lake County, about thirteen miles from Winnetka. The same location where his stepfather had once been stationed.
In October of 1945, Roy was transferred to the U.S. Naval Air Base in Samar, a mountainous island in the Philippines. According to legend, as Roy shipped out, the new Doris Day hit “Sentimental Journey” came pouring over the loudspeakers, leaving all of the young servicemen, including Day’s future Hollywood costar, in tears. Once on base in Samar, Roy was assigned to an aviation repair and overhaul unit, his chief duty as a technician being the unloading of naval planes from carriers.
Roy’s service in the Philippines was undistinguished, but in later years he found a way to make it sound noteworthy. For years, he told people that while checking the multiengine bombers on a B-26 Marauder, he made the mistake of revving up two motors on the same side first. Before he could apply the brakes, the plane “sliced a Piper Cub into kindling wood.” In 1952, when Roy was spotlighted on This Is Your Life, he recounted this embarrassing episode, delighting a captive audience. Host Ralph Edwards inquired, “For this exploit, you were rewarded in what way, sir?” “I was transferred to the laundry,” Roy replied. Great story. Even if it wasn’t true. “People wanted exciting anecdotes and I didn’t have any,” he later admitted.
According to Roy’s military file, he was involved in two different disciplinary matters during his term of service. In April of 1944, he was declared a straggler when he failed to return to base in a timely manner. While on leave, he had contracted pleurisy and Kay brought him to the military hospital at Great Lakes. Due to a clerical oversight, Roy was tagged AWOL and the Shore Patrol was dispatched. When they finally discovered Roy recovering in a hospital bed, the case against Seaman Fitzgerald was officially closed.
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bsp; Then, on July 8, 1944, Roy attended a department party with other enlisted men in the Norwood Park neighborhood of Chicago. A few weeks later, he was interviewed concerning his social interactions at the party and the loss of his liberty identification card, which was never recovered. It’s unclear why this episode warranted such scrutiny, though it’s been suggested that while he was in the service, Roy started having sex with other men. “He told me that he’d had a couple of experiences in the Navy, since he couldn’t get to a female anywhere,” said Bob Preble, Roy’s roommate in the early 1950s. “And he didn’t find the experiences he had with males in the Navy all that unenjoyable. So, it was probably something that he had an underlying need for anyway.”
On May 14, 1946, Roy was honorably discharged at Camp Shoemaker in Pleasanton, California. Once home in Winnetka, he completed a “Questionnaire Covering Individual War Service.” Line 19 of the form inquired about “Number of children, if any, as of this date,” to which Roy responded, “None.” To this day, many people question whether this was the correct answer.
After his death, articles with sensationalistic titles like “The Search for Rock Hudson’s Secret Son” began turning up in tabloids such as the National Enquirer and Star magazine. The scandal sheets launched investigations into what they termed “a baffling mystery.” While rumors had circulated for years that Rock Hudson’s “love child” was roaming the streets of Winnetka, the story didn’t become tabloid fodder until two of the people closest to Rock started talking. Allegedly, Kay told Hudson’s longtime companion, Tom Clark, that while Rock was in the Navy, he had come home on leave and had a weekend fling (“a quickie,” in Star parlance) with the mother of a New Trier classmate.
