All That Heaven Allows

by Mark Griffin

  According to Clark, Kay recalled receiving a letter at one point from a woman in Winnetka claiming to be the mother of Rock’s child. Kay acknowledged that it was within the realm of possibility that the lady was telling the truth. Though some of those closest to Hudson, including his high school buddy, Jim Matteoni, weren’t buying it. “If Roy had a son, I would have been the first to know,” Matteoni said. “He confided in me about everything. I was his best friend. We were inseparable. Roy didn’t have a steady girlfriend in all the time I knew him. We just had platonic friendships with the girls in our bunch.”

  Even so, the tabloid stories kept on coming. Each “shocking exclusive” claimed to offer new details, insisting that when Rock was still Roy and all of nineteen, he had “sired a secret son while he was in the Navy in 1944.” In Clark’s memoir, he wrote that Hudson was aware of the rumors that he may have fathered a child. For a time, he even considered returning to his hometown with a meeting in mind. But the mother was married now. What if this stirred things up for all concerned? Or what if the basis for these stories was only some lonely Rock Hudson fan’s delusional fantasy?

  More than thirty years after his death, the debate over Rock Hudson’s paternity continues. In 2014, a sixty-nine-year-old woman named Susan Dent* filed a lawsuit against Hudson’s estate. Dent sought no financial remuneration but only an order establishing paternity. At one point, DNA testing was conducted and it reportedly revealed a match between Dent and some of Rock’s relatives on both sides of the family. Dent’s suit was initially dismissed, but in 2017 the dismissal was reversed by the California Court of Appeal. Although Dent’s attorneys didn’t submit any DNA results with their initial filing, they planned to include this evidence in a new trial.

  According to Alice Waier, other evidence exists which confirms that young Roy Fitzgerald had fathered a child: “I have a letter that my brother wrote to a friend in November of 1945. He was still in the service at that point but he’d just heard from this girl that he’d gone to school with. It sounds like they had a one time fling. Now he finds out the girl is pregnant and that she plans to give the child up for adoption. In this letter, he tells his friend everything. When I read it, I thought ‘this couldn’t be my brother,’ because it was somewhat cold. But then I have to go back to his age. There was a war going on. He has no way to support this child. He’s got a domineering mother. I can see his predicament . . . and I’m sure Kay handled the whole damn thing because he wasn’t even at home.”

  Once Roy was stateside again, it’s unclear if he made any attempts to contact the young woman who may have given birth to his child. Assuming any responsibility—parental or otherwise—seemed to be the furthest thing from his mind. “After my discharge, I returned to Winnetka. I wanted a vacation,” he would later tell a reporter. “For nearly a year, I just drifted around, drawing down my $20 a week from the government.” At Kay’s urging, he completed a Civil Service examination and accepted a position as a substitute mail carrier. “When Rock worked for me, he was always on the job,” said Winnetka’s postmaster Arthur Kloepfer. “He was a very determined fellow.” Roy’s determination only lasted so long, however. “Delivering the mail was not for me,” he later admitted. “I stood about three months of it and then my feet and back started begging for mercy.”

  During the Christmas season, he landed a temporary position in the gift-wrapping department at Marshall Field’s, Chicago’s biggest department store. While working there, Roy attracted lots of attention—though it wasn’t for his gift-wrapping expertise. Since returning home, his once willowy frame had filled out nicely. Now his striking looks, towering height, and muscular physique started turning heads. And according to one satisfied customer, it was Roy’s abilities off the sales floor that truly impressed.

  Samuel Steward—novelist, DePaul University professor, pulp pornographer—included twenty-one-year-old Roy Fitzgerald in his now notorious “Stud File.” This was Steward’s meticulously detailed cataloging of his homoerotic exploits, from the Turkish baths to Room 111 in the Hotel Medford in Milwaukee. After every tryst, Steward would document the specifics of the encounter as well as his impressions of his sex partners. The entries are unabashedly explicit and often hilarious:

  “Davey, John—1952, Paris . . . Stupid NBC announcer. ‘Imagine—all those letters just because I said ‘Back’ instead of ‘Bach’!”

  “Lt. Wm. Leland Harden—Chicago, 1943—8x Whoosh! Whatta Bitch!”

  By comparison, a future Hollywood legend was let off rather easily after an alleged assignation in a Marshall Field’s freight elevator which Steward had stopped between floors:

  “Fitzgerald, Roy—Chicago, XII-46, 1X . . . Tall ex-sailor. Ami de John Scheele.* Worked in gift wrap dept. Black curly hair. V. gd.-lking.”

  Despite his popularity at Marshall Field’s, Roy found himself idle again after the holidays. Having spent time in exotic locations overseas, Winnetka now seemed rather ordinary. “After I got out of the Navy . . . I thought, ‘This place is not for me. Now is the time to do what I want to do.’ Mind you, I never told anybody.”

  Even if Roy had never revealed to Kay his plan for pursuing an acting career, she must have recognized that her son had reached a crossroads in his life and needed a push. Characteristic of both, Roy dreamed big while Kay did something about it. She decided it was time for them to move. She had attempted to put this in motion a year earlier, but Roy had talked her out of it. Employed as a telephone operator at the Glenview Naval Air Station, Kay had requested a transfer to San Francisco in the hopes that she could persuade Roy to relocate there with her once he was discharged. At the time, Roy preferred to return to Winnetka so that he could regroup and catch up with his buddies.

  Though after a year of drifting, Roy was getting angsty. San Francisco was out of the question in terms of launching an acting career. So it was either Broadway or Hollywood. “I didn’t quite flip a coin,” he remembered. “I did know one person in Los Angeles and I knew nobody in New York.” California eventually won out. For there, not one but two unspoken goals could finally be realized: becoming a screen actor and reuniting with his father. Fifteen years had passed since Roy Scherer had walked out of his son’s life. During that time, they had occasionally corresponded, though there had been relatively few visits. In 1945, while on leave, Roy had spent the holidays with his father, who by that time had relocated to Long Beach and remarried.

  If Roy had been hoping to forge a more meaningful relationship with Scherer, it didn’t happen then. Though maybe, if they were living together, his father might come around. With this in mind, Kay arranged for a job transfer to Pasadena, where she would eventually settle with her third husband, a retired Winnetka civil servant named Joseph Olsen. Roy would temporarily move in with his father while deciding what his next move should be. As Roy quickly discovered, even though they were, at last, under the same roof, the distance between them remained.

  Chapter 3

  A Unique Appeal

  Roy Fitzgerald in the late 1940s.

  They weren’t exactly the closest father and son,” says Rock’s cousin Jerry Scherer. “Rock wanted to be closer to my Uncle Roy, in the same way that he was close to my own dad . . . The reason Rock liked my dad so well is because he was always nice to him, he’d listen to him, he’d go and do things with him. This was the sort of thing he may have been looking for with his own father but it just wasn’t there.”

  Also, Roy would now have to compete for his father’s attention. In 1933, Scherer had married his second wife, Florence Palmer, and they had recently adopted a little girl named Alice, who was not yet a year old. Initially, Roy had intended to enroll at the University of Southern California under the G.I. Bill of Rights. The campus was only a couple of blocks from his father’s house. He would major in dramatics. Already his father wasn’t the least bit impressed. “Not very stable stuff” was Scherer’s blunt assessment. Having finally worked up the courage to tell his father what he really wanted to d
o with his life, Roy’s entire future had been shot down with a few words.

  “First of all, my father was not at all happy with my brother’s career decision and never wanted him to go into show business,” says Rock’s sister, Alice Waier. “My father was totally against it. He wanted my brother to work with him in his business and help him grow it. The acting stuff was not something that my father encouraged. No, none of that went over very well at all.”

  Despite his father’s disapproval, Roy forged ahead. USC proved to be too expensive, so Roy shifted his attention to UCLA. “With the G.I. Bill, everybody was trying to enroll in college,” he remembered. “They couldn’t handle everybody and they had to raise the entrance requirements to a B plus. And, of course, I was a C minus or a D plus, so forget it!”

  Postwar business was steady at Scherer’s electrical-appliance store. Why didn’t Roy give him a hand by selling tank-type vacuums door to door? All too soon, it became clear that this was yet another dead end. “Rock vacuumed for six months and never sold a single vacuum cleaner,” recalled Hudson’s friend, Mark Miller. “He was always talking the customer out of a purchase because he knew the vacuum cleaners were junk. His last line to the lady would be, ‘You don’t want to buy this . . .’ His father fired him and kicked him out of his home.”

  Keeping a close eye on his finances, Roy moved into the “sack suite” of a rooming house. “I had a room but I had to share it with three other guys. You had to hide your valuables, you know—your brass cuff links—or they’d steal them.” Within a few weeks, a friend of Scherer’s helped Roy land a job as a truck driver for Budget Pack. He’d now be earning sixty a week and overtime for hauling packaged macaroni and dried fruit all over East Los Angeles.

  Roy was accustomed to making the best of bad circumstances, but as he made his daily rounds, he wondered if he’d be forever outside looking in. Sure, he was in Hollywood. But what was he doing? Breezing by the major studios in his Budget Pack truck, wasting time delivering shriveled apricots when he should have been signed up and in front of the cameras, winning acclaim as Winnetka’s answer to Cary Grant.

  In Tinseltown terms, he was a complete unknown but that didn’t mean he wasn’t getting noticed. People seemed to constantly comment on how handsome he was. Sometimes it was just like they had read his mind and come to the same conclusion that he had. Roy Fitzgerald belonged on a movie screen. Finally, he found the courage to actually state his ambition out loud: “I thought, ‘I’ll never get anywhere unless I speak my piece. So I said, ‘I want to be an actor’ and nobody laughed at me, which was encouraging. They said, ‘Oh, really? That’s wonderful!’”

  Though, of course, all of this was easier said than done. Where were all of those talent scouts he had heard so much about? Whatever happened to the guy who had discovered Lana Turner while she was downing that milkshake at Schwab’s? Roy decided that it was time that Hollywood took a good, long look. Between deliveries, he would park his truck at the back gates of one of the majors—Columbia or Paramount—and try to look like the working man’s Robert Taylor.

  “In my mind, this has to be one of the most erotic images of Rock that I can imagine,” says Hudson’s friend Ken Maley. “Just think about the young Rock Hudson—this big stud standing up against his truck outside the studio gates. He’d roll up his sleeves and just stand there, like some giant ad for sex, waiting to be noticed day after day.”

  Maybe it was the Budget Pack uniform that was throwing everybody off. How could he ever be taken seriously in that? He bought a tan gabardine suit—though only $55, it still ate up almost an entire week’s wages. Once he was suited up, he stepped up his plan of action. Now he’d park his truck and promenade in front of MGM’s main gates in Culver City. Surely, at some point, Louis B. Mayer would get up from his desk, as gleaming and polished as one of Fred Astaire’s dance floors and go over to the window to survey the entire magic factory over which he reigned supreme. While taking it all in, he would spot Roy Fitzgerald in his new suit.

  The mogul, who knew true star potential when he saw it, would immediately recognize that Roy was a diamond in the rough. He’d then pick up his executive phone and say, “Sign up the kid from Winnetka.” Only it would never happen that way. Nobody noticed.

  * * *

  Toward the end of his life, Rock Hudson would tell an interviewer that his early years in Hollywood were marked by frustrated ambition and loneliness: “It was very difficult for me to make friends out here . . . Then I got to know a guy who was an older brother of a guy that I was overseas with. It was one of those things, ‘If you’re ever in Los Angeles, look me up.’ So I called him.”

  Handsome, viciously witty, and snappily attired, Kenneth Hodge was in his prime when he met the young Roy Fitzgerald in the summer of 1947. At the time their paths crossed, Hodge had already made his mark in broadcasting. Several years earlier, he had served as an assistant producer for two of CBS’s most popular radio programs, Amos ’n’ Andy and Lux Radio Theatre. Though when he was introduced to Roy, Ken was taking a break from radio and managing several Long Beach rental properties for his Aunt Bernadette. Nevertheless, with his industry connections and celebrity contacts, Hodge seemed perfectly positioned to help an aspiring actor get a foothold in the business. And Roy Fitzgerald was keenly aware of this: “I kind of talked to him a little bit, kind of edged in sneakily, that I would like to become an actor and he began inviting me down to his place at Long Beach and we became best friends.” Not to mention lovers. Though this was something of an open secret even among the members of Hodge’s close-knit family. “When I was young, it was not only a big deal that Rock Hudson was gay but that he had been involved with my Uncle Kenneth, who started his whole career,” says Hodge’s niece, Kare Grams. “It was only later that I found out about the romance because none of that was ever discussed in our family. Nothing gay ever was. As far as the family was concerned, that just didn’t exist.”

  Like virtually all of the Rock Hudson partners to follow, Ken Hodge didn’t conform to any gay stereotypes. “You would never guess with Uncle Kenneth, just as you wouldn’t with Roy,” says Grams. “Uncle Kenneth had hemophilia and that was always cited as the reason he never got married.”

  Given the trauma he had endured with both of his fathers—real and adoptive—it’s not surprising that young Roy Fitzgerald would gravitate toward an older man, though over the years, various sources have exaggerated the disparity in their ages in either direction. “He was, I guess, about four or five years older than I, at the most,” Rock Hudson would incorrectly surmise during an interview in 1983. In reality, Hodge was thirty-three years old when he first met Fitzgerald, who was still several months shy of his twenty-second birthday.

  Even though he was only eleven years older than his protégé, Hodge seemed far more sophisticated and worldly. He was also something of a one-man finishing school. “I could definitely see that Uncle Ken would be very influential for Rock in a constructive, positive way,” says Richard Hodge, Ken’s nephew. “He was that way with me. I had this typical 1950s dad. Republican. Baseball. All that kind of stuff. But then I had this amazing Uncle Ken that lived up in Hollywood. He took me to musicals and Buddhist temples. He gave me books to read. He really opened up a big chunk of the world to me and I’m sure he did the same thing for Rock.”

  It was Ken who began smoothing away some of Roy’s rougher edges and smartening up his appearance. Though like Henry Willson after him, Hodge was careful not to ritz up Roy so much that his Midwestern charm and boy-next-door approachability would be sacrificed.

  Shortly after meeting, Ken and Roy began living together at the Chateau Marmont—not the legendary Los Angeles hotel but an apartment building in downtown Long Beach that Hodge managed. They would occupy the penthouse apartment, which Ken had tastefully furnished with many valuable antiques. The Chateau Marmont was in walking distance from the Villa Riviera, a far more luxurious apartment building. Only minutes from the beach, the Villa Riviera attracted
many young gay men and not only for its proximity to the ocean. Even postwar, the Villa Riviera was referred to as the “Home of the Admirals,” as there were so many naval officers in residence, a fact not lost on either Roy Fitzgerald or his benefactor.

  “Kenny liked sailors, and often had them lined up in his living room,” remembered Rock’s friend Mark Miller. “But Rock was the one guy that he really fell for. I’m sure that Kenny did all that he could for Rock. He had some gay connections in Hollywood and he really tried to help him but I think there was only so much that he could do at that time.”

  Herbert Millspaugh befriended both Hodge and Fitzgerald during their Long Beach days. “They were a good team but so different from one another,” Millspaugh remembers. “Ken was very cultured, very polished. Roy was this great, big, gorgeous farm boy. Smart in his own way but not at all sophisticated. Ken was looking for a way to get back into the business in Hollywood and when he met Roy Fitzgerald, he decided that he would be Roy’s agent and they would go back to Hollywood, which they eventually did.”

  In what may have been a concerted effort to get Roy closer to the studios and casting directors, Hodge and Fitzgerald moved into a bungalow in the Hollywood Hills. This was a second residence for Hodge, who referred to the hillside property as his “shack.” According to Hodge’s niece, this time they had company. “At some point, Uncle Kenneth and Roy were living with another friend named Leon Hall, who worked for Technicolor,” says Kare Grams. “He wasn’t really an uncle but we all called him ‘Uncle Leon.’ He was an orphan and he was always in my Uncle Ken’s life. They had been together forever.”

  Friends remember that at one point, Hodge dipped into his savings to host an especially extravagant bash, the sole purpose of which seemed to be the public “unveiling” of his beloved protégé. You Oughta Be in Pictures being the underlying theme of the party. Roy Fitzgerald was introduced to anyone with even the remotest connections to show business that Hodge had managed to corral. Almost certainly, it was at one of Hodge’s soirees that Roy Fitzgerald first encountered his future agent, the infamous Henry Willson. From the moment they met, each saw something they could use in the other.