by Mark Griffin
After their unintentionally hilarious love scene, Laurie later observed Rock playing another with very different results: “One of the few times I got to sit in on the acting workshops, I watched Rock do a love scene with an actress. And I often thought back to this years later. In the physical moment, with the kissing and the touching and all that, there was a quality about it that sort of stunned me. It was a little violent. It was physically energized beyond any love scenes that I’d seen between a man and a woman and I’d seen a lot of movies. Looking back, I wonder if that came out of his real sexuality. I think guys are probably different when they’re with other guys. I don’t want to be a smartass here, but I was aware that there was something special about the way he touched the woman. I’d never seen anything quite like it.”
DOING EVERYTHING HE could to jump-start Hudson’s career at Universal, Henry Willson began feeding the press one publicity item after another. In October of 1949, the Chicago Daily Tribune dutifully announced: “Newest Chicagoland contribution to Hollywood is 24 year old Roc Hudson, New Trier High school and navy graduate who, after a bit part in Fighter Squadron, has been placed under personal contract to Raoul Walsh. He’ll make his starring debut in Universal’s The Big Frame.”* While Walsh and Hudson had already parted company—at least contractually—Willson knew that it didn’t hurt to keep Hudson’s name linked with the director’s in the columns.
For his first U-I assignment, William Castle’s noirish Undertow, Hudson was billed in ninth place and generically credited as “detective.” The real star of the film is Scott Brady, who plays an ex-convict framed for the murder of a mob boss. Enlisting the aid of school teacher Peggy Dow, he rummages through some of Chicago’s shadiest corners in pursuit of the real killer.
Undertow is populated by Castle’s trademark assortment of oddballs—a hulking garage attendant with a hair-trigger temper, an overly inquisitive landlady, a tow-headed simpleton who goes berserk upon spotting Brady’s Nambu. Appearing only once, “Roc” plays a colleague of seasoned detective Bruce Bennett and his dialogue includes such banalities as “No prints on the bullets?” It wasn’t much of a step up from Fighter Squadron, but after a year he was back on the big screen and at least it was a foot in the door at Universal.
The title I Was a Shoplifter proved to be the best thing about Rock’s next film. Mona Freeman stars as a kleptomaniac librarian who is released after her first offense but is forced to sign a confession, which is later used to blackmail her. Hudson appears briefly, at the beginning and end of the picture as a store detective. If Rock barely registers on-screen, Tony Curtis, playing a dim-witted thug, makes a much greater impression, especially when uttering the film’s only memorable line: “Women, horses and steel companies ain’t to be trusted.”
Finally, Rock was assigned to a picture that proved to be a cut above. Winchester ’73 was the first of eight films teaming star James Stewart and director Anthony Mann. Some of Stewart’s postwar pictures (On Our Merry Way, You Gotta Stay Happy) were uninspired, lightweight trifles and the Oscar-winning leading man knew it was time to steer a completely new career course. Stewart started looking around for dramatically compelling projects with an edge.
At first glance, Winchester ’73—which traced the journey of a prized precision firearm as it passes from one owner to another—may have looked like any of the sagebrush sagas that Universal was churning out in the early 1950s. But Winchester ’73 would prove to be anything but typical. Alongside High Noon and Mann’s The Furies, Winchester would usher in an era of “psychological westerns.” This new breed of introspective cowboy movie would elevate the genre by peering into the darkened corners of the American psyche.
In this case, a riveting variation on the Cain and Abel story unfolds as frontiersman Lin McAdam (Stewart) pursues the notorious outlaw Dutch Henry Brown (Stephen McNally) from Kansas to Texas. Dutch is not only the murderous gunslinger who stole the coveted Winchester rifle from McAdam, he also happens to be Lin’s estranged brother. A sibling rivalry in spurs.
Into this fraternal showdown, Universal inserted several of its promising contract players, including Rock Hudson, who would play for the first—though not the last—time in his career an Indian chief. One named Young Bull. Although he was wearing an uncomfortable wig, a prosthetic nose, and Bud Westmore’s best approximation of war paint, Hudson never complained, even though he felt badly betrayed by his director.
“Anthony Mann was a fair action director,” Rock would recall some thirty years later. “He wasn’t a good director as far as acting is concerned. Nor was he a good human being. He took advantage of my stupidity. And he had me doing, in that movie, my own stunts. I was doing these horse falls, full gallop, with a loincloth. I didn’t know that there were stunt men—A; and B, that they wore padding. And this is gravel and rocks. Yuck! And I did it twice, like an ass. I should have just said, ‘No’ looking back on it. But I was eager and he took advantage of that. That’s not a nice man. That’s a prick.”
The sly dialogue exchanges that Borden Chase wrote for Jimmy Stewart and Shelley Winters (“I know how to use it . . .” Winters says with a knowing look when Stewart hands her a really big gun) were more inspired than what Hudson was given to work with. “This is gun I want . . .” is Rock’s most memorable line, delivered in pure Hollywood Comanche.
But was anyone actually paying attention to what Rock Hudson was saying? Outfitted only in an abbreviated loincloth, Hudson’s rangy, muscular physique is on ample display. While his role is almost as brief as his costume, Rock is spotlighted in a couple of scenes that were masterfully composed by Greta Garbo’s cinematographer of choice, William Daniels. In a climactic sequence, Hudson’s Young Bull has fallen from his horse after being killed in battle. As chaos and brutality rage all around the fallen chief, Daniels zeroes in on Young Bull—now obliviously at peace.
“He did a very good job as the Indian chief,” star Jimmy Stewart would say of Hudson some four decades after they both appeared in Winchester ’73. “I didn’t get to talk to him very much but I think everybody realized that he not only knew his job but as it turns out, he knew how to do it very well.” Made for $918,000, Winchester ’73 would ultimately return more than $2 million to Universal. For the first time since Fighter Squadron, Rock Hudson had appeared in a certified hit.
* * *
“The best thing about Rock was that his mother was a wonderful cook,” Vera-Ellen once confided to a friend. If his mother’s culinary skills were all Rock had going for him, what does this say about his supposedly torrid love affair with Vera-Ellen? The one that the fanzines exhaustively explored beneath headlines like “Will Vera and Rock Find Happiness?” or “A Wedding Within the Year.”
Columnists had managed to make one of their first encounters at the Mocambo sound like something out of a fairy tale—this despite the fact that “pert, pixyish” Vera-Ellen had been escorted by another man and Rock, “the gentle giant,” was, as usual, in the company of Henry Willson: “Six feet four inches of manhood went slightly pink under the tan. He strode across the dance floor, tapped Vera’s escort on the shoulder and said, ‘Pardon me . . . may I?’ No one was more surprised than Rock when he found himself holding Vera’s little figure close and light against him . . . they fell in love. Hollywood began to talk.”
Yet most of the industry chatter focused on how shrewd Henry Willson was to pair his relatively unknown client with an established star who was starting to be billed alongside the biggest names in the business. A former Rockette, Vera-Ellen had made her movie debut in Wonder Man opposite Danny Kaye, though it was her magnificent dancing in MGM musicals—teamed with Gene Kelly and Fred Astaire—that would win Vera her greatest acclaim.
“Cuteness incarnate” is how one critic had described Vera-Ellen; her lithe figure and elfin features played well against Rock’s towering height and strapping physique. Henry Willson made sure that they were photographed together at every opportunity—whether they were dancing at Ciro’s or attend
ing the opening of a show at El Capitan. But Willson would score his greatest triumph in October of 1949 at the Flashbulbers Ball, a star-studded benefit for the Hollywood Press Photographers Association.
Enlisting the aid of MGM’s makeup department, Rock and Vera would attend as “Mr. and Mrs. Oscar.” A couple of walking, talking Academy Awards. He would be outfitted in skin-tight latex swim trunks and a skullcap; she would be clad in a simple satin bathing suit. Each would be armed with a gilded broadsword. To complete the effect, both would be slathered in pore-clogging gold paint from head to toe. As Vera recalled, “We went into a paint store for the gold paint and when the salesman wanted to know what we were going to paint, Rock said ‘ourselves.’ I’ll never forget the expression on the man’s face.”
The salesman’s dazed expression was nothing compared to the stunned reaction caused by Rock’s and Vera-Ellen’s grand entrance at the ball. Members of the press corps, who had seen everything in their day, were speechless. Flashbulbs popped. Columnist Louella Parsons summoned the ravishing statuettes over to her microphone for an exclusive interview.
The images of Rock and Vera-Ellen as “Mr. and Mrs. Oscar” would turn up in newspapers all over the country, sparking further interest in them as a couple. Readers of Modern Screen knew that Vera was divorced from fellow dancer Robert Hightower. They also knew that while Rock adored Vera, he was already blissfully wed to his career. Though as any subscriber to Photoplay could tell you, once Hudson had made some legitimate headway in the industry, he and Vera planned to elope. “The minute I get that first big part,” Rock assured his fans.
Some sources say that the stars were involved in a real love affair, while others insist their dates were primarily for show. The mystery surrounding their relationship was compounded by Vera-Ellen herself. She told one choreographer that she planned to marry Hudson. To another friend, she confessed that all was purely platonic; even before their initial meeting, she knew that Rock “didn’t prefer women.”
Vera-Ellen’s biographer, David Soren, believes the connection was a close friendship. “Vera’s family always told me that they were just very good friends,” says Soren. “He was always a gentleman on a date and she liked that about him. Also, he was very sweet and kind and funny. These dates were initially arranged by agents or by the studios and one shouldn’t read too much into them. But clearly, they had a genuine liking for one another.”
Actress Peggy Dow believes that the romance wasn’t only trumped up for the fan magazines. “Rock was absolutely stricken and madly in love with Vera-Ellen,” Dow says. “We double dated and they were just precious together. Then, all of a sudden she became involved with this young guy who just spirited her away from Rock and encouraged her to leave MGM, which was the biggest mistake of her life. I think if this other young man hadn’t come between Rock and Vera-Ellen, they probably would have gotten married. They were just that mad for each other. She married this other young man and Rock, all of a sudden, just went in a different direction, God love him.”
Within a couple of years of their meeting, Rock and Vera-Ellen’s paths would diverge. After she married her second husband, millionaire Victor Rothschild, in 1954, Vera-Ellen would be portrayed as “the girl who got away” in virtually any story printed about Hudson’s ill-fated love life.
* * *
In a Technicolor trifle entitled Peggy, Rock would make his romantic debut as an Ohio State fullback wooing Diana Lynn on his way to the Rose Bowl. Critics dismissed the practically non-existent plot as “nutty as fruitcake,” but Universal took notice of the fact that Hudson’s first screen kiss resulted in his first batch of fan mail. “It was right then that we started to get requests about Rock,” recalled Universal publicist Betty Mitchell. The Desert Hawk was next. This was a quickie remake of Universal’s Persian epic Arabian Nights, which had starred Rock’s boyhood crush, Jon Hall. Outfitted in a stylish keffiyeh and sporting a goatee, Rock is nearly unrecognizable when he briefly appears as Captain Ras. The only thing giving him away is his twangy Midwestern drawl.
And so it went. A line here. A line there. After trooping and trucking his way through one Universal programmer after another, Rock had made no real progress. Any good-looking Moe could hold the door open for the real star or raise a tomahawk and say he made movies. But this wasn’t acting. How would he ever make the transition to more substantial parts? The dramatic coaches at Universal weren’t miracle workers. And yet the drive to succeed was there, always gnawing away at him. If only somebody saw things his way.
In between his undistinguished assignments, Hudson continued to sit in on Sophie Rosenstein’s acting workshops. Periodically, the contract players would put together a production consisting of scenes they had been working on in class. Universal would invite casting directors and producers from all of the major studios to see if any of the young actors piqued their interest. If so, Universal would essentially rent them out for a picture or two.
During one of these productions, “Evening of ’52,” Rock appeared opposite his fellow Winnetkan, Hugh O’Brian, in A Sound of Hunting. While O’Brian may have been the more assured performer, the audience couldn’t take their eyes off Hudson, who managed to capture attention by virtue of his quiet presence and what one reviewer described as his “almost startling masculine beauty.”
Rock would also pair off with a young starlet named Susan Cabot for a scene from The Four Poster. “She was madly in love with him,” recalls actress Kathleen Hughes. “Susan was my best friend at the time and she was always telling me that she wanted to marry him and that Rock even took her home to meet his mother once. Susan was really hoping to end up with him but I had already heard that he was gay, so as gently as possible, I told her, ‘I don’t think it’s going to happen, honey.’”
Apart from the obvious reason that Cabot’s love would remain unrequited, Hudson was too busy bouncing from one picture to the next to even notice that anyone was pining for him. Universal continued to test him out in various small roles, allowing him to gain experience while racking up screen credits. The minuscule parts seemed to be in direct proportion with how Universal’s front office felt about their handsome but seemingly unexceptional contract player.
“In those early years before he got any decent parts to play, he was still playing Indians and overgrown teenagers,” Piper Laurie remembers. “There was a period of time when they were very rough on him. He did like to eat and he would plump up and it wasn’t becoming to him. As he was standing in the commissary, waiting to get a table, I overheard the studio heads evaluating him, as they did all of us . . . they’d talk about you almost like you weren’t human. In his case, they were hard on him about his weight and I know he was very sensitive about it. He really did not have an easy time of it when he was getting started.”
IN 1951, ROCK was introduced to a young actor named Bob Preble. A twenty-three-year-old native of Newton, Massachusetts, and a fellow client of Henry Willson’s, Preble arrived in Hollywood hoping that the stage success he had enjoyed back east would translate to an important film career. While studying drama at the University of Maine, Preble had appeared regularly at the Camden Hills Theatre and won acclaim for his performances in Hamlet and Macbeth.
But after moving to the West Coast and signing with Willson, Preble discovered that innate talent and single-minded determination weren’t quite enough. If Rock Hudson was willing to do whatever it took to ensure his footing in the business, Bob Preble was not. As countless boys fresh off the farm had discovered, the obligatory fling with Henry Willson was almost an industry initiation rite. Preble said that he found the idea of “being nice” to Mr. Willson totally abhorrent: “Henry was a guy that you always wanted to look right in the eye. I don’t think I would have trusted him for a minute behind my back. His behavior was offensive to me.”
If Preble wasn’t willing to give Willson considerably more than his 10 percent, the actor’s uncooperative attitude would result in an unusually short list of screen credit
s. Though he was a contract player at 20th Century-Fox, Preble managed only bit parts in the Bette Davis drama The Star and John Ford’s What Price Glory; he was loaned out to Columbia for the sci-fi thriller It Came from Beneath the Sea.
With his film career at a standstill, Preble found himself working odd jobs and sharing a house in Malibu with four other guys. At the time, Rock was scraping by as the sole occupant of a small apartment on Woodrow Wilson Drive. After all of the hubbub at the studio, Hudson found coming home to an empty nest unnerving. It was Henry Willson who suggested that Hudson and Preble move in together. This arrangement would give Bob some breathing room and Rock some after-hours companionship.
Willson made a point of telling Bob that Rock was gay. According to Preble, “He just tossed that in as part of the conversation. It didn’t surprise me. As it turned out, Rock never bothered me and I never got in his way.” Hudson and Preble moved into a one-bedroom house off Mulholland Drive, the first of four residences they would share. The official reason given for their extended period of cohabitation was economy.
In a 1952 Photoplay layout entitled “Bachelor’s Bedlam,” the magazine ran photos of a shirtless “Rip Van Hudson” lounging in bed as Preble stands over him, attempting to rouse his sleepy housemate after the alarm clock has failed to do so. Although the accompanying article is attributed to Preble, it was almost certainly the work of a Universal publicist, who was careful to note that Bob’s own room was “down the hall” from Rock’s. In fact, the resourceful bachelors had pushed two single beds together to create one large bed spacious enough to accommodate both of them.
Photoplay wanted to know if Rock and Bob ever competed for the same girl. Presumably with tongue in cheek, Preble responded, “We’re never attracted to the same types.” According to several friends, Rock was most attracted to extremely masculine men, preferably those who self-identified as straight or were at least known to go “both ways.” As actress Mamie Van Doren put it, “I think it was a challenge to get a straight guy and see if he could swing him. And I’m sure he did. If anybody could swing a straight guy, Rock could do it.” This was certainly the case with Preble, who admitted to “a little experimenting, on a couple of occasions after we’d had a few drinks . . . I guess he hoped the barriers would come down. The situation did come close to spilling over to something that would have been foreign to my whole being, my whole behavior.”
