All That Heaven Allows

by Mark Griffin

  The scenes of Hardin gunning down sheriff’s deputies and Texas rangers were contrasted with sequences in which he was presented as a loving husband and responsible father. At one point, Hardin becomes so incensed by the sight of his sixteen-year-old son handling a gun that he backhands the boy. If the complexities of Hardin’s personality didn’t already present enough of an acting challenge, the gunfighter would age from eighteen to forty-two over the course of the story. Considering all of this, could Rock Hudson—who had never carried an entire picture before—deliver the goods? Raoul Walsh, who agreed to direct, thought so.

  Just because the director had faith, didn’t mean that he had patience, too. At one point, Hudson turned to Walsh for guidance regarding how to play the scene in which Hardin reunites with his wife, Rosie, after he’s been imprisoned for sixteen years in the Texas State Penitentiary. By way of response, the famously brusque director told Rock to stop holding up the entire company and to get on with it.

  “He had a wonderful way of directing me,” Hudson later said. “Because I was so busy with acting class and learning the technique and all this junk that you really should just throw out, his attitude was, ‘Don’t bother with that. Just do it.’ That was Raoul Walsh’s attitude. When he said that, he just made it this surmountable problem. Instead of climbing this hurdle, it was like a step down to do. It made it so simple in my head. Great acting lesson, I thought.”

  The Lawless Breed was one of six films that Rock would appear in with fellow contract player Julia Adams, who would soon change her first name to “Julie” and achieve pop culture immortality courtesy of Creature from the Black Lagoon. In the years that they worked together, Adams noticed that the higher the bar was set for Rock, the better the end results would be.

  “You had to give him something meaningful to play,” Adams says. “The Lawless Breed gave Rock a real opportunity to show that he was more than just this handsome hunk . . . I think his great strength as an actor was that he always brought a sense of reality to whatever he was doing. He seemed completely real and many times, you work with actors who are very obviously ‘acting.’ Not Rock. You always had a feeling that the person he was portraying was a real human being, and that was impressive to me . . . I really believe that he was a better actor than he was given credit for.”

  The reviewer for The Hollywood Reporter paid tribute to Hudson’s “absorbing sincerity and conviction” and felt that The Lawless Breed presented Rock with his “best role to date.” Other critics weren’t quite as sold. In his Los Angeles Times review, Phillip K. Scheuer found Hudson’s characterization only “fairly acceptable . . . He’s a likeable-appearing fellow, except that his face isn’t exactly the kind that registers indelibly. I was never quite sure he was he, especially after he sprouted a mustache, till I had looked twice.”

  Even if some of the critics were on the fence about his first legitimate star turn, The Lawless Breed was the picture that would eventually lead to his being cast in the most celebrated role of his career. Still, Hudson didn’t seem to retain any special fondness for The Lawless Breed. Decades after the picture’s initial release, film historian Eric Spilker told Hudson that he was planning to screen the movie for a group of students who had never seen it. Rock’s reply was unsparing: “The best thing you could do with that picture is to burn it.”

  * * *

  “It was a tumultuous affair, which didn’t turn out well,” Mark Miller would say of Rock’s next relationship. “The guy was funny, wonderful to be around . . . His name was Jack Navaar.” The new man in Hudson’s life was a friend of Nader’s and Miller’s. Unlike the quick fling he had with a carhop named Jimmy Dixon, Rock’s affair with Navaar would prove to be of greater consequence.

  Navaar was a twenty-two-year-old Korean War veteran. A willowy, blue-eyed blond, Navaar was bisexual and despite his tender age, well-versed in fielding passes from both men and women. Not surprisingly, Henry Willson was among those who pounced. He eagerly signed Navaar to his agency, bestowing upon the young man one of his favorite uber-macho screen names: Rand Saxon. While remarkably handsome, Jack was sorely lacking in two areas that were essential for Hollywood stardom—ambition and vanity. Nevertheless, Henry enrolled Jack in acting classes; interviews were arranged with casting directors. But before Willson had Navaar playing bellboys and traffic cops in a succession of Universal comedies, Rock claimed the young man for himself.

  Hudson’s long-term roommate, Bob Preble, moved out of their Avenida del Sol house in May of 1953 when he married actress Yvonne Rivero. Almost immediately, Jack Navaar moved in, though at Navaar’s urging, he and Rock would soon relocate to a more spacious home on Grand View Drive in Studio City. Though Jack had a job at Hughes Aircraft, Rock managed to persuade him to give it up, preferring to have his partner all to himself when he was between pictures.

  Apart from dinners with Nader and Miller, Hudson and Navaar kept their socializing to a minimum. And this may have been a self-protective measure on Rock’s part. As he closed in on thirty, what would the press make of the fact that he had recently swapped one male roommate for another? If Bob Preble had been introduced to Hudson’s fans in the pages of Photoplay, Jack Navaar would deliberately be kept out of sight. “We lived a very reclusive life and we were very involved with each other,” Navaar would later say. “Rock made me feel secure and loved.”

  Despite this, friends remember that the relationship was extremely volatile. It seemed that no matter what Hudson did, it set Navaar off. “If he did nice things for me, I was angry, and if he didn’t do nice things and ignored me, I would be angrier. I was an angry young guy,” Navaar admitted. When a totally plastered Rock came home from a party at three in the morning, Jack first kicked him out of bed and then, out of the house. If partying with Joan Crawford until all hours wasn’t bad enough, Hudson then had the audacity to come home and start snoring the moment he hit the sheets.

  As time went by, the shouting got louder and the arguments intensified. One evening, Rock phoned Jack to say that he would be late coming home from the studio. They needed to reshoot a scene. Navaar wasn’t buying it. Surely some good-looking extra or stuntman had caught Hudson’s eye. Starting at annoyed, Navaar quickly moved on to enraged. As it got later, he worked himself into a state of nearly operatic hysteria. When Hudson finally made it home—several hours after he was expected—he could only look on in horror as Navaar tossed his priceless collection of 78 records off the back deck and down the hill.

  * * *

  In June of 1952, Universal announced that it was signing Rock Hudson to a new term contract of one year with a forty-week guarantee. The new deal, which had been negotiated by Henry Willson, included options for six additional years with salary increases. While this was encouraging, Rock was surprised to learn that for the first time since he had joined Universal, he was being loaned out to another studio, in this case RKO. Also, for the first time, he would be shooting a picture in a foreign location, in this case the Channel Islands of Guernsey and Jersey, off the coast of Normandy.

  Hudson’s leading lady would once again be Yvonne De Carlo and his director would once again be Raoul Walsh. Adding to the feeling of déjà vu, Sea Devils had already served as the title of a flag-waving action yarn which had been released sixteen years earlier, albeit with an entirely different plot.

  This version of Sea Devils was set during the Napoleonic era. Rock played Gilliatt, a rugged young Channel Island fisherman-turned-smuggler who meets an alluring but mysterious woman named Drouchette. The seaman agrees to transport Drouchette to the French coast after she reveals that she’s on a mission to rescue her imprisoned brother. As Gilliatt later discovers, Drouchette is actually a British agent, intent on thwarting Napoleon’s threatened invasion of England. Or, put in the very succinct lingo of Universal’s advertising department: “A Man Built for Action! A Woman Born to Kiss! Gripped tight in the dangers of desperate intrigue!”

  Far from Hollywood and the prying eyes of gossip mavens Hedd
a Hopper and Louella Parsons, Rock was not nearly as circumspect as he was back home. When some of his more flamboyant gay friends paid a visit to the location, director Raoul Walsh griped to Yvonne De Carlo: “I don’t like the birds he’s traveling with. You know—birds of a feather?” To her credit, De Carlo didn’t play along. “I had nothing to contribute to Raoul’s comments. I only knew that Rock was Rock . . . and he was a very, very nice guy. Anything beyond that would be conjectural.”

  Another of Rock’s costars, Bryan Forbes, didn’t have to do much speculating. Forbes, who would later transition from actor to director, said that he and Rock became inseparable during the making of Sea Devils. In fact, two years after the film was released, Forbes wrote an article for Picturegoer magazine in which he detailed the intimacies of their friendship.

  In a piece entitled “Rock’s All Right,” Forbes said that after being inundated with Hudson’s early “Beefcake King” publicity, he had expected to be introduced to “six feet four inches of nothing but corn-fed conceit.” Instead, Forbes found that Hudson had “a fine sense of self-deprecation and can take, as well as give, a joke on the set.”

  Forbes recounted how he and his girlfriend “double-dated” with Rock and Sharman Douglas, daughter of the United States Ambassador to Great Britain. After that, Forbes took Hudson to dinner in Soho, to his parents’ home in Essex (where Rock “quickly established a lasting friendship with Grandmother, who insisted on a signed photograph”) and to a tailor, where they ordered Hudson his first Savile Row suit. Conspicuously absent from these reminiscences, though, was the fact that Rock had attempted to take the friendship with Forbes a step further: “I shared rooms with Rock and was somewhat amazed one night when over dinner he confessed he was in love with me. I told him it was very flattering but I did not swing that way, so I suppose I was one of the first to know of his homosexuality.”

  De Carlo remembered that both on the set and off, Rock was in need of guidance—the kind of fatherly support that Raoul Walsh had once provided freely but now seemed to withhold. “I didn’t feel hurt when Walsh would end a take with a grunt rather than an accolade,” De Carlo said. “With Rock, it was more difficult. He was doing well by that stage of his career but he still wasn’t the most secure actor in Hollywood, and he needed direction and personal nudges at times.” Some of the nudges being quite literal. After Sea Devils wrapped, Hudson and De Carlo were sent to Belgium to promote the film. Having made Hotel Sahara in England and Sombrero in Mexico, De Carlo knew all too well how merciless the foreign press could be with American movie stars.

  In an effort to protect Rock from a hardline interrogation, De Carlo devised a plan that she would give him a light kick in the shins if she felt the line of questioning was venturing into dangerous territory. This led to one unusually abrupt interview, as the actress recalled in her autobiography: “As they started to close in on questions about his love life, I let him have it, kicking him so hard he doubled over and said something like, ‘Ooof!’ It may not have been the answer the reporter wanted, but at least it wasn’t something they could quote out of context.”

  In his New York Times review of Sea Devils, Bosley Crowther dismissed the movie as “completely undistinguished” and “a flat and pedestrian walk-through of a lot of adventure-film clichés . . . in which the square-jawed, bare-chested Mr. Hudson and the low-bodiced Miss De Carlo get into and out of scrapes . . . Actually filmed on the coast of France, it could as well have been filmed in a studio tank.”

  After romping around in the open air, it was right back into the studio tank for Hudson. His next picture, The Golden Blade, almost seemed to revel in its own artificiality. Cartoonish and vibrantly Technicolored, this light-hearted Arabian Nights yarn is Ali Baba courtesy of Roy Lichtenstein. The pop art elements of the movie aren’t surprising given that it was directed by Nathan Juran, who was later responsible for the infamous Attack of the 50 Ft. Woman.

  Outfitted like Universal’s best approximation of Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik, Rock is a brave youth from Basra named Harun, who travels to Baghdad to avenge his father’s death. Once there, he meets the ravishing but mischievous Princess Khairuzan (Piper Laurie), “whom trouble follows like a faithful dog.” Harun also discovers the mythical “Sword of Damascus,” * an enchanted weapon that renders its owner invincible. The blade is coveted by the evil vizier Jafar (George Macready, as splendidly villainous here as he was in Gilda).

  There are jousts, scantily clad harem girls, and kooky comic book dialogue like, “By Zeus! I knew I was right . . .” or “Ten thousand devils, no!” More than sixty years after she costarred with Rock in The Golden Blade, Piper Laurie says that her initial impressions of the picture have evolved over time.

  “When we were shooting it, I thought it was really stupid. And initially, when I saw it years ago, I hated it. But I happened to see it recently and I thought it was very funny and spirited. I actually laughed out loud. It was very much a silly fairy tale and they used all the clichés that existed, like pulling the sword out of the column . . . But I thought Rock was really terrific in that movie. He managed to bring some reality to a fairy tale, as he did it with such conviction. And the exteriors on the back lot were so good that years later, when I got married and I went to Morocco on my honeymoon, it was like being right back at Universal again.”

  Rock would eventually classify The Golden Blade and The Desert Hawk as “movies to die by,” films that he’d made early in his career that he’d just as soon forget. “They serve a purpose, though,” Hudson told the New York Daily News. “I can invite friends in, get good and smashed and giggle over them.”

  Another loan-out, this time to Columbia, offered Rock a temporary change of scenery but not much else. Gun Fury, Hudson’s fourth film for director Raoul Walsh, was another routine Western, though it would be shot in picturesque Sedona, Arizona, and in the gimmicky new 3-D process (the illusion of depth not being an effect especially well-suited to a one-eyed director).

  The cinematic equivalent of a dime novel, Gun Fury features Hudson as a heroic Civil War veteran pursuing a gang of notorious desperadoes who have kidnapped his beautiful bride-to-be. Donna Reed was cast as Hudson’s fiancée, future star Lee Marvin would play one of the heavies, and twenty-four-year-old newcomer Roberta Haynes would portray fiery cantina owner Estella Morales.

  “I really didn’t want to make that movie,” says Haynes. “When I went to Columbia, I had been promised the part of the prostitute in From Here to Eternity but they gave that to Donna Reed instead . . . then they put us both in Gun Fury. I thought it was a horrible movie and not only was it a complete waste of time but it was even in 3-D, if you can believe it.”

  Between takes, Haynes befriended some—but not all—of her costars. “Lee Marvin was very protective of me,” says Haynes. “I think he was already an alcoholic but a really nice guy. As for Rock Hudson, I never heard anyone say a bad word about him . . . Sure, people in Hollywood knew that he was gay but the rest of the world didn’t. There were so many people in that sort of predicament in those days. And it wasn’t just actors. There were writers, producers, directors. They were all married. All in the closet. And nobody really cared. It was just the way things were.”

  On the last day of shooting, while riding at full gallop, Hudson suffered an appendicitis attack. Upon returning to Los Angeles, Hudson checked into St. John’s Hospital. The doctor was insistent that an appendectomy be performed immediately. Rock waved him away. The studio was deep into preparations for what was being touted as his breakthrough film—one in which he’d be playing, ironically enough, a physician. Hudson feared that if he were absent from the studio for even a week, Tony Curtis and Jeff Chandler would start to look better and better to the powers that be. It was only after his doctor insisted, that Rock underwent surgery.

  While recovering, Hudson made good use of his time in the hospital. With his upcoming role in mind, he studied how the doctors interacted with patients and staff and he badgered his attendin
g physician with questions concerning surgical procedures. If he was going to be stuck in the hospital, he may as well get some work done.

  Before Rock could be entrusted with that long promised “A” picture, there were a few more routine vehicles to slog through, including Douglas Sirk’s only Western, which was being produced by Ross Hunter. The reteaming of Hudson and Sirk was all part of Hunter’s long-range plan. Before they all moved on to a more ambitious endeavor, he wanted star and director to join forces on a B-picture. “So that they can get to know each other,” Hunter explained. “They can live together. They can feel each other’s thoughts. They can know whether their chemistry is right.”

  Chapter 6

  Double Technicolor

  “A damned crazy story, if ever there was one,” is how director Douglas Sirk described Magnificent Obsession. Part Sunday school lesson, part Harlequin romance, all perfectly insane.

  (Photo courtesy of Photofest)

  It was 118 degrees. War paint was running down his neck. Every time he jumped on a horse, his wig fell off. Each time he flubbed a line, the crew glared at him. After Winchester ’73, he thought he’d never play another Indian and yet, here he was . . . a six-foot-four Apache from Winnetka, Illinois, complete with a Midwestern drawl.

  Although Hudson could scarcely believe it, he was Taza, Son of Cochise. “I looked like Joe College with a long wig and dark make-up. It was ridiculous,” Hudson would later say. As he sweated it out on location in Utah’s Moab Desert, all he could think of was that his friends, Jim Matteoni and Pat McGuire, would have a good laugh at his expense when his latest epic finally turned up at the local movie house back home.