All That Heaven Allows

by Mark Griffin

  Of course, something more serious did follow. One morning, Rock walked Phyllis through a two-bedroom Pennsylvania Dutch–style cottage, which he called “the house of my dreams.” It was located in an exclusive neighborhood in the Hollywood Hills, nestled between Beverly Hills and Sunset Plaza. The area was known for its “Bird Streets”—Blue Jay Way and Skylark and Oriole Lane; the house Hudson had fallen for was on Warbler Place. Surrounded by pine trees and Scotch bloom, the barn-red house seemed like a cabin tucked away in the mountains, even though it was only a fifteen-minute drive to Universal. Hudson surprised Gates by asking her to move in with him, an invitation she initially rejected. “I was thunderstruck,” Phyllis recalled. “Nothing Rock had said or done had prepared me for this. He had never said he loved me.”

  Hudson still hadn’t uttered those all-important words when he showed up at Henry Willson’s office one afternoon and handed Gates a diamond ring. He was up-front about the fact that he had received the ring as compensation for appearing on a television show. But was it actually intended to be an engagement ring? Gates wasn’t sure. Rock muttered what seemed to Phyllis to be only an indifferent “You can have it . . .” as he offered it to her. Phyllis felt that Rock remained coolly detached throughout the proposal—if that’s, in fact, what it actually was.

  To some, it seemed totally appropriate that Rock Hudson and Phyllis Gates got engaged—or something like it—in the office of the agent who had brought them together. To those in Rock’s inner circle who believed that his romantic interest in Phyllis Gates was his best acting job to date, the dispassionate betrothal seemed to prove them right. According to the future Mrs. Hudson, it exhibited all of the warmth and tenderness of a corporate merger. And more than a few people believed that’s exactly what it was.

  * * *

  If Captain Lightfoot had afforded Hudson an opportunity to play a different kind of character and temporarily stray beyond the Universal backlot, his next assignment represented a return to form as well as the confines of the studio.

  As produced by Ross Hunter, One Desire* seems like a calculated blending of Rock’s two most successful genres, the Western and the romantic melodrama. Key elements of the story seemed reminiscent of previous films. The character of Clint Saunders, described as “an empty pockets, unrespectable lug,” was sort of a variation on the cardsharp that Hudson had played in Bend of the River. Restless and independent, Saunders is determined to find a better way of life beyond his existence as a dealer at the White Palace, a bustling dance hall that’s equal parts casino and bordello.

  The same day Clint loses his job at the betting table, his runaway kid brother Nugget (Barry Curtis) turns up in dire need of some surrogate parenting and a safe place to call home. Lucky for Clint, the White Palace comes complete with a whore with a heart of gold who happens to be crazy about him and likes kids. When Oscar-winner Anne Baxter makes her first appearance as Tacey Cromwell, she’s wearing a dress so brazenly red that she’s practically a walking scarlet letter (“Men gave her everything . . . but a good name!” is how the film’s tag line put it.). But beneath Tacey’s feathers and tough talk, there’s a loving woman longing for some respectability. “I got a yen to wear clothes that don’t scream at you for a change and go to ladies’ tea parties,” she confesses to her infatuated pimp.

  Tacey’s prayers are answered when Clint suggests that they pack up and, with Nugget in tow, move to a booming Colorado mining town and start over. Once they land in Randsberg, Tacey becomes a model housewife and a citizen so upstanding that she takes in orphaned ragamuffin Seely Dowden (seventeen-year-old Natalie Wood) and raises her as her own.

  Clint, on the other hand, sets new standards for bold-faced ambition. Within minutes of hitting town, he charms a senator and his daughter, Judith (the inevitable Julie Adams). Unlike Tacey, the ruthless and possessive Judith doesn’t believe in sharing any of her holdings. “When I was a young girl, I would never share my pony with my cousins,” Judith tells Clint. “If I can’t have something that’s all my own, I just don’t want it.” This includes Clint, who fast-talks his way into a job at the bank Judith’s family owns.

  Determined that Clint will remain hers exclusively, Judith hires a private investigator and learns all about Tacey’s tawdry past. In the film’s most dramatically satisfying scene, Tacey tearfully pleads with a stone-faced judge to allow her to keep Nugget and Seely after the court threatens to take them away. Unmoved, the judge not only brands Tacey morally unfit, he turns the kids over to Judith for safe-keeping.

  Although Rock received second billing for One Desire, he has relatively little to do in the picture besides periodically scan the horizon in search of a brighter future. Baxter and Adams have the showier roles, and they managed to upstage Hudson—not only on-screen but off.

  “I take full credit for almost burning down one of Universal’s biggest sound stages,” Julie Adams says. For a climactic sequence—in which a drunken Judith sets her bedroom ablaze—things didn’t go exactly as planned. As Adams recalls, “I remember I threw this candlestick just as we had rehearsed it but this time the flames shot up to the top of this long curtain and kept right on going into the rafters . . . I started to move away but the assistant director began yelling, ‘Julie, get back in there! What are you doing? We have to get this shot in the can today . . .’ The fire then set off all of the sprinklers and we were drenched.”*

  Anne Baxter had caused her own costly production delays because of “meticulous attention to her hairdressing and makeup.” After a meeting was called with Baxter’s agent, Russell Birdwell, Baxter picked up the pace considerably. If director Joseph L. Mankiewicz had cast Baxter in All About Eve because of her “bitch virtuosity,” Jerry Hopper makes the most of her warmhearted vulnerability in One Desire, a fact not lost on the critics. It’s too bad the rest of the movie wasn’t as well reviewed as Baxter. “One Desire is nothing more than a plodding, old-fashioned soap opera,” said the critic for the New York Times. “Some spectators may find themselves tuning in, eyes closed, to the familiar train of events, dialogue and musical effects.”

  In the midst of bouncing from one production to the next, Rock did something he would almost never do during his long tenure as a Universal contract player—he made a request. According to a studio memo from November of 1954: “Rock Hudson had requested that sleeping accommodations be placed in his dressing room so that he could remain at the studio overnight during this period when he is under pressure of two pictures.” Universal’s executive committee turned him down.

  READERS IN UNIVERSAL’S story department had been scouring the shelves in search of a suitable property that would readily lend itself to a reteaming of Rock Hudson and Jane Wyman. After the tremendous success of Magnificent Obsession, the studio had received hundreds of letters—not only from members of Rock’s poodle-skirted fan base but from theatre exhibitors across the country. Everyone, it seemed, was demanding an immediate follow-up.

  As it focused on a May-December romance uncannily reminiscent of Magnificent Obsession, Edna and Harry Lee’s 1952 novel, All That Heaven Allows, seemed to provide the best excuse for Hudson and Wyman to be “rapturously reunited” (as the ads put it) in another Ross Hunter–produced tearjerker.

  “In spite of a poor story—a nothing of a story, really, I got interested in that film,” director Douglas Sirk would say some two decades after being assigned to All That Heaven Allows. “Beyond what I had been doing in Magnificent Obsession, I put a lot of my own handwriting into that film. For the first time, I put in my mirrors, my symbols, my statues, my literary knowledge . . . I was trying to give that cheap stuff a meaning, you know.”

  While reviewers at the time tended to dismiss Sirk’s movies as nothing more than Technicolored histrionics, by the 1970s his work would undergo a thorough reevaluation. The same Douglas Sirk who had once been written off as a studio hack would find long-delayed acclaim for turning that “cheap stuff” into his own unique brand of high art. And All That Heav
en Allows would eventually be considered a prime example of Sirk at his subversive best.

  On the surface, the story was the quintessential “women’s picture.” Cary Scott has recently been widowed after twenty years of marriage. Tucked away in the family homestead in an idyllic New England suburb, Cary is well-off, yet cast adrift. With her two adult children, Ned (William Reynolds) and Kay (Gloria Talbott) away at college, fortyish Cary suddenly finds herself alone with “nothing but time.”

  In terms of regular companionship, Cary is constantly reminded that her only viable options appear to be submitting to a sexless union with a “remarkably civilized” graying hypochondriac (Conrad Nagel) or getting herself a new television set—which a well-meaning friend describes as “the last refuge for lonely women.” Both alternatives seem designed to lull the widow Scott into a state of stupefied semiconsciousness until death can officially take over. Which doesn’t sound all that different from daughter Kay’s studies of ancient Egypt, where in the days of the pharaohs, there was a time-honored tradition of “walling up the widow alive in the funeral chamber of her dead husband along with all of his possessions.”

  Salvation arrives in the form of Cary’s ruggedly handsome tree surgeon, Ron Kirby, who is fifteen years her junior. The picture of robust, red-blooded health and clean living, Ron seems to have emerged directly from the pages of a vintage L.L.Bean catalog. A self-reliant disciple of Thoreau, Ron is so attuned to nature that wild deer obediently eat out of his hands, and he gets misty-eyed while extolling the virtues of a silver-tipped spruce. After Cary tours a rickety old mill that Ron dreams of refurbishing, love blooms.

  While the happy couple couldn’t be more content spending time together, their Lady Chatterley–style romance sparks outrage and fierce opposition from everyone in Cary’s world. Ron is . . . too young, too working class, too earthy. And unlike Cary’s geriatric suitor, he practically oozes testosterone. “That tan . . . I suppose that’s from working outdoors. Of course, I’m sure he’s handy indoors, too,” snarls the town gossip.

  More than anything else, the fact that their widowed mother still maintains a healthy sexual appetite seems to rankle her children (“How long must she be a widow . . . Before she can be a Woman again?” was the all-important question posed in the film’s ads.). “I think all you see is a good-looking set of muscles,” an indignant Ned tells Cary. An Oedipus complex in argyles, her only son then threatens to stop visiting her if she follows through on her plans to marry Ron.

  The emotional blackmailing doesn’t end there. Daughter Kay discourages Cary’s interest in Ron after she’s harassed at school about her mother’s new companion. The gang at the country club turns smug and spiteful. Before a lynch mob appears, Cary calls off her engagement to Ron. Not long after, a television set is wheeled into the widow’s living room.

  As Magnificent Obsession had been so popular with audiences, Universal executives wondered if their follow-up would be as warmly received. Rock Hudson, for one, seemed to prefer All That Heaven Allows to his previous pairing with Wyman. “I found it a rich experience because it was, I felt, a much more playable story,” Hudson reflected decades later. “All That Heaven Allows was very playable, and a hell of a good role and rather daring. There was a woman with a young gardener and she’s not well-to-do but comfortable. In those days, it simply wasn’t done. So, it’s a little bit naughty.”

  Geoffrey Shurlock, chief executive censor at the Motion Picture Association of America, found All That Heaven Allows more than a little bit naughty. In a letter to Universal’s William Gordon, Shurlock voiced his concerns that even after reading a revised version of the screenplay, “We still feel the relationship between Cary and Ron includes an unacceptable treatment of illicit sex . . . We are particularly concerned with the dawn scene in which the couple is shown lying down . . . with the scene concluding on a very intimate embrace.”

  Five films into their eight-picture collaboration, Hudson had become extremely comfortable working with Sirk (something that other actors on the Universal lot considered an impressive achievement in its own right). Their working relationship was so simpatico that Sirk’s direction of Hudson had become almost telegraphic.

  “Scared puppy . . .” were the only words Sirk said to Rock before they shot a scene in which, after a period of estrangement, Ron encounters Cary as she’s shopping for a Christmas tree. When he saw the rushes, Sirk called Hudson to express his approval. It was a gesture that Rock would never forget, telling an interviewer years later: “You know, when you’re scared and new and you’re trying to figure out this picture business and suddenly, an older man reaches out to you and says, ‘There, there, it’s okay . . .’ That makes all the difference. That was Douglas Sirk.”

  Cast as Wyman’s son, William Reynolds had last appeared with Rock in Has Anybody Seen My Gal. In the interim, Hudson had changed says Reynolds: “Rock had matured as an actor . . . I also attribute the change to the fact that he was now a star. When you’re a star, people pay attention to you. You say something and it has meaning. All of a sudden, his own values became ascendant by virtue of his stardom. Thankfully, he had not changed as a person. He was quite a guy and I liked him a lot.”

  With two of his favorite actors assuming the lead roles and his signature very much evident throughout, Sirk turns the film into a tour de force and, by far, his most personal statement. As a result, All That Heaven Allows emerges as the director’s masterpiece—an intriguing mix of German expressionism, high Hollywood gloss, and Freudian angst. Beneath the Ross Hunter syrup and Day-Glo colors, there lurks a sharp-eyed indictment of 1950s conformism. Wyman’s widow is practically burned at the stake for stepping outside of societal bounds and associating with a green-thumbed iconoclast.

  In 1954, the year that All That Heaven Allows was in preproduction, Red-baiting and government-sanctioned efforts to winnow out any behavior that smacked of radicalism were still front-page news. Nicholas Ray’s bizarro Western Johnny Guitar, released the same year, is often cited for its veiled references to the McCarthy witch hunts. Nevertheless, Sirk’s melodrama has an even sharper edge, as its witch-hunting isn’t removed to some windswept no-man’s-land but centered right in the heart of small-town America.

  Within the framework of a “women’s picture,” Sirk also explores gender roles and finds that if postwar society isn’t insisting that a woman’s place is in the kitchen, it might be in the living room. In a sequence that’s pure and quintessentially Sirkian, Cary breaks down on Christmas Eve and admits to a newly engaged Kay that she’s given up Ron for all the wrong reasons. As she’s pouring her heart out, Ned wheels in a Christmas gift for his mother . . . a television set. As her own forlorn expression is reflected back in the screen, the TV salesman tells Cary that with this easy-to-operate model, “You have all the company you want . . . life’s parade at your fingertips.”

  And who better to star in a movie about the consequences of partnering with a socially unacceptable lover than Rock Hudson? Just as Sirk’s movie appears to be one thing on the surface (a routine weepie) and something quite different underneath (a damning social critique) so, too, is Hudson a walking anomaly. At first glance, he’s a generous slice of all-American virility, but behind the flannel-shirted exterior lies the only thing more threatening to postwar conformism than a card-carrying pinko or a racially integrated school system: a deceptively macho homosexual who could easily pass for straight.

  “In All That Heaven Allows, Sirk is quite brilliant in terms of how he uses Rock Hudson,” says actress and film historian Illeana Douglas. “The character Rock is playing is a kind of deviant. He represents the outsider point of view in this upper middle-class environment, not only because he’s the gardener but because he represents something that is dangerous—this kind of unleashed sexuality. It could be said that there’s this undercurrent of homosexuality in the artistic nature of Hudson’s character, who is living this bohemian life that is unencumbered by capitalistic values. Not only is Jane Wyman p
unished for enjoying a relationship which is outside the norm but the gardener is punished for introducing sexuality to this world that is very cloistered. Add to the equation that Rock Hudson was asked to portray the ultimate heterosexual throughout the 1950s and, underneath that, he’s infusing it with the emotions of a gay man and all those layers become very interesting.”

  While All That Heaven Allows wasn’t quite the blockbuster that Magnificent Obsession had been, it was still one of the highest-grossing films of 1955 (earning over $3 million in its initial release). As with the first Hudson-Wyman teaming, the reviews were mixed. “As laboriously predictable as it is fatuously unreal,” declared the Monthly Film Bulletin. Though in The Hollywood Reporter, Jack Moffitt wrote that the rematch had been “produced with smartness and good taste . . . Hudson is excellent in a well-written part that could have easily gone sour in the hands of the wrong actor. With no obvious actors’ tricks, he completely sells the idea that this man is a free spirit . . . It’s the most exacting role he’s played in some months and he demonstrates his increasing maturity as an actor in his handling of it.”

  In the Saturday Review of Literature, Hollis Alpert delivered the most entertaining review, which took the form of an open letter to Rock’s alma mater: “Dear Universal Pictures Corporation: I am writing this letter on behalf of my Aunt Henrietta, who went with me to see your new picture, All That Heaven Allows. She wishes me to thank you for giving her the kind of heartfelt emotional experience she so rarely gets from movies these days . . . The end of the picture was real dramatic, with Rock falling off the snow embankment and getting himself a brain concussion. And then, when he opened his eyes and Jane said, ‘I’ve come home, darling,’ the lump in my throat was as big as a goose egg. I don’t mind telling you, I cried.”

  NEVER A STUDIO to tamper with a winning formula, Universal immediately cast Hudson in yet another turgid melodrama. Never Say Goodbye looks and sometimes feels like a Douglas Sirk movie, which is understandable given that he made uncredited contributions to it.* However, as the bulk of the film was directed by Jerry Hopper, it is missing the subversiveness and ironic commentary of Sirk’s best work. What’s left is pure potboiler.