by Mark Griffin
“It was like night and day with those two,” says Jane Withers, who played Bick’s neighbor Vashti Snythe. “But that shows you how conscientious George Stevens was as a director. The characters Rock and Jimmy played were enemies . . . he knew exactly who to cast.”
Dialogue coach Bob Hinkle, who would spend several months on the picture helping Hudson and others perfect their Texas twang, remembers that the animosity between Hudson and Dean was obvious. “Jimmy was jealous of Rock because Rock had all of the good dialogue,” says Hinkle. “And Rock was jealous of Jimmy because East of Eden had just been released and Jimmy was getting all of the media attention. They never had words, but you could feel the jealousy.”
Dean was annoyed that Hudson—who was not a member of the Actors Studio—had achieved such stature in films. Rock worried that Jimmy was stealing focus—with the press, squealing fans, and their director. “Stevens is throwing the picture to Dean, I know he is,” Rock complained to Phyllis Gates, who paid a visit to Marfa and witnessed the rivalry up close. “Stevens is giving Dean all the close-ups. I’m left out in the cold.”
It’s also been suggested that there was some unresolved business between the two stars. Hudson knew that like himself, Dean had once been kept by an older gay man. Jimmy’s benefactor, Rogers Brackett, was an advertising executive who happened to be friends with Henry Willson. Rock may have had this association in mind when Jimmy turned up on the set of Has Anybody Seen My Gal. Dean’s friend, William Bast, remembered, “It was after his first day of shooting on that picture that Jimmy confided in me his contempt for Mr. Hudson, based on nothing more than Hudson’s hypocritical pose as straight on the set while privately trying to hit on him.”
Carroll Baker, who knew Dean from their days at the Actors Studio, says that there was yet another source of friction between the men: Elizabeth Taylor. A still photographer visiting the set captured a revealing image of Giant’s trio of stars: Taylor, who is in the midst of a conversation with Hudson, is being “lassoed” by Dean—his lariat encircling her neck and hands.
“We were all having a wonderful time and then Jimmy arrived and he stole Elizabeth away from us,” Baker says. “She went off mysteriously each evening with Jimmy and none of us could figure out where they went.” Shrewdly recognizing that Taylor, for all her glamour and movie star trappings, was instinctively drawn to outcasts and misfits, Dean instantly won her over with his lost-boy vulnerability. “I don’t think there was a romance of any kind there. I really don’t,” says Baker. “But I think it was his way of saying, ‘Hey, Rock, I can take Elizabeth away from you. I’m the third character in this film and just like in the film, she’s yours. Well, off screen, she’s not yours. She has my attention.’”
September 30, 1955, marked the 110th day of shooting. The company, now back on the Warners lot in Burbank, had wrapped for the day. George Stevens was screening rushes with some of the cast when he received an urgent call in the projection room. “The lights came up in the theater and George was on the phone and he was absolutely pale,” Carroll Baker remembers. “You just saw all the blood drain out of him and he turned to us and said, ‘Jimmy’s dead.’ I remember we just sat there with the lights up for the longest time. There wasn’t crying. There wasn’t talking. There wasn’t anything, there was just dead silence.”
Dean and his mechanic, Rolf Wütherich, had been traveling to a sports car competition in Salinas when his Porsche collided with a vehicle driven by Donald Turnupseed, a twenty-three-year-old college student. Wütherich and Turnupseed both survived the crash, but Dean sustained massive internal injuries and was pronounced dead on arrival by the time the ambulance reached Paso Robles War Memorial Hospital.
While their relationship had been adversarial and fiercely competitive, Rock reacted to the death of James Dean in a completely unexpected way. “I had never seen him so sorrowful before, and it frightened me,” Phyllis Gates recalled. “His big frame was convulsing in sobs . . . I asked him why the news had shattered him.” Gates said that Hudson responded, “Because I wanted him to die . . . Because I hated him. I was jealous of him because I was afraid he was stealing the picture from me. I’ve been wishing him dead ever since we were in Texas. And now he’s gone.” According to Gates, “It was days before Rock overcame his black depression . . . Rock couldn’t be reached. He was overcome by guilt and shame, almost as though he himself had killed James Dean.”
Although Hudson and Taylor were in no condition to work after learning of the tragic death of their costar, the order came down from Jack Warner himself: The show must go on. Stevens was painfully aware that the picture was thirty-four days overschedule and that shutting down an already over budget production to allow for a grieving period simply wasn’t practical. On October 1, Hudson, Taylor, and Chill Wills began shooting the final scene of the film in which Bick reveals to Leslie that he believes that his entire life has been a failure. It was one of the most demanding, emotionally wrenching scenes in the film, and the fact that it was being shot only a day after Dean’s death made for a very somber atmosphere on the set.
“Elizabeth, the Earth Mother, took Jimmy’s death very hard,” Hudson remembered. “She was grief-stricken and crying and sobbing and George made her work . . . Now, I’m trying to play a scene with a woman who is sobbing. He said, ‘Action. Cut. Print.’ It was merciless . . . He was being—I thought at the time—cruel. He wasn’t. He was trying to get her to stop thinking about it . . . but it didn’t work, not with Elizabeth.”*
Stevens would end up reshooting this entire sequence days later, and once this was completed, principal photography on Giant finally wrapped, nearly four months after it began. On May 22, 1956, the first preview screening of the film was held at the California Theatre in San Diego. Giant ran three hours and thirty-five minutes without an intermission, making it the longest picture ever to be released by Warner Brothers up to that time. Despite the extended running time, 307 of the 383 preview cards rated the film “excellent” and the performances of the three leads were universally praised.
After the first preview and between five others (in San Francisco, Riverside, Bakersfield, Long Beach, and Encino), a steady stream of detailed memos poured forth from Jack Warner’s office . . . Could Stevens possibly excise fifteen minutes of footage without damaging the narrative? (He could.) Could Stevens please remove the scene where Taylor’s character criticized the 27½ percent tax depletion on oil revenue? (He couldn’t.) Could Stevens clarify Dean’s unintelligible dialogue during a climactic drunk scene? (He could and did, by bringing in Dean’s Rebel Without a Cause costar Nick Adams to rerecord thirty lines of Dean’s dialogue for $300).
Then Ben Kalmenson, Warners’ chief distribution executive, got into the act, publicly blasting Stevens for making what he described as “a communist picture” and demanding that the director remove the last scene of the film in which a white baby and a Mexican baby are shown together in the same crib. Stevens shrugged off Kalmenson’s objections and the scene remained.
When Giant opened in theatres in Texas on October 18, the screens were not filled with buckshot and George Stevens was not hung in effigy in the lobby. Instead, the film actually went on to break box office attendance records in the Lone Star State. When the movie went into wide release across the country on November 24, the reviews were, for the most part, outstanding.
“Giant . . . is a strong contender for this year’s top-film award,” Bosley Crowther proclaimed in the New York Times. “Every scene and every moment is a pleasure . . . Such things as the great ranch house standing in the midst of an empty plain . . . or the funeral of a Mexican boy killed in the war are visioned with superlative artistry.” The Hollywood Reporter hailed Giant as “an epic film in a class with the all-time greats” and its leading man was singled out for praise: “Hudson is powerful in perhaps the best portrayal of his career, a real acting job that goes under the skin of the character and gives substance to the most important single role in the picture.”
In the early morning hours of February 19, 1957, the Oscar nominations were announced and Giant received ten nominations, including a nod for Best Picture. As expected, there was a posthumous nomination for James Dean, which the film community roundly applauded. Rock was also in the running for Best Actor, putting him in direct competition with his deceased costar as well as Yul Brynner for The King and I, Laurence Olivier for Richard III, and Kirk Douglas’s acclaimed portrayal of Van Gogh in Lust for Life. While the trades predicted Douglas would go home victorious, a Photoplay magazine poll revealed that fan support was clearly in Hudson’s corner.
As it turned out, both Hudson and Dean lost to Yul Brynner’s bravura turn as the King of Siam. “I think Rock Hudson was robbed that year,” says film critic Kevin Thomas. “He really is the lynchpin of that entire movie. Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean are superb but they are supporting Rock. He is the key to the whole film and if anybody deserved that award, it was him.” George Stevens was named Best Director and his win softened the blow that came after. In a decision that still has Oscar historians scratching their heads, the Academy inexplicably chose style over substance, naming the all-star travelogue Around the World in 80 Days the Best Picture winner over Giant.
The acclaim and attention that Rock Hudson received for his performance in Giant ensured that he would remain one of the most sought-after screen actors of the era. Even as he was preparing to appear in a new picture several years later, Giant was still very much on his mind. In May of 1962, Hudson wrote to Stevens:
Dear George:
I thought you might be interested to know that the old house set in “Giant” has not become something of the past but is very much something of the present. I was in a B-52 bomber in a refueling operation and took off from the SAC base in Roswell, New Mexico. The crew asked me if I would like to experience [an] assimilated bombing attack. I said yes, naturally, and guess what the target was! The bombardier asked me if I would like to make a bomb run and I said yes again . . . scored a bull’s eye on the first try.
Just as the exterior façade of Bick Benedict’s ranch house, Reata, would be left behind after the Giant company headed back to Hollywood, the summer of 1955 seemed to linger in Marfa, Texas. Although Liz, Rock, and Jimmy were only in town for a little over a month, they left an indelible impression. And the movie they made together has not only aged gracefully but continues to cast a very long shadow.*
Chapter 9
Written on the Wind
Mr. and Mrs. Rock Hudson pose with a pair of Korean orphans on the set of Battle Hymn (1957).
(Bettmann/Getty Images)
On November 9, 1955, Rock Hudson and Phyllis Gates were married in a bungalow in the Biltmore Hotel in Santa Barbara. In several ways, the ceremony had a rushed, last-minute feeling about it. For years, Hudson had told persistent interviewers that he would get around to marrying when he was thirty. Now his nuptials seemed to be occurring in the nick of time; only eight days before his thirtieth birthday, in fact.
Notifying the best man that his services were required was left until the eleventh hour. In the middle of the night, Rock phoned Jim Matteoni, his best pal from Winnetka. Could Jim and his wife, Gloria, pack up and get on a plane to California in a matter of hours? Then, on the day of the wedding, Rock was ticketed $27 for speeding on his way to the license bureau in Ventura. The frantic pace had less to do with the fact that the couple were anxious to be wed and more to do with the fact that Hudson’s next picture, Written on the Wind, was scheduled to start production at the end of November. As always, career came first.
At Phyllis’s insistence, a Lutheran minister officiated. Besides Jim and Gloria Matteoni, the only others in attendance were Gates’s friend Pat Devlin and of course, Henry Willson, who was credited with arranging every detail of the wedding, from blood tests to bridal bouquets. He had even remembered to have a three-pound bag of rice at the ready. Although Willson had also meticulously planned the couple’s Jamaican honeymoon, he stopped short of joining the newlyweds in the Caribbean.
After the wedding ceremony, the first calls made were not to relatives of either the bride or the groom but to Hollywood’s high priestesses of dish, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons. Willson knew that if they phoned in the news early enough, both columnists would have time to make the afternoon editions of their respective papers. Once the news broke, everyone everywhere would be talking about Rock Hudson finally tying the knot. What even Henry Willson could not foresee was that people would still be talking about the marriage decades after the couple exchanged vows.
“The question of whether the marriage was real or phony is the central conundrum of Rock Hudson’s life,” writes Sara Davidson in the memoir she authored for Hudson.
“Phyllis Gates and Rock Hudson began to be companionable, and not, so help me, solely for the sake of appearances,” said Hudson’s friend, actor John Carlyle. “Their laughter and giggles . . . in the bedroom, in restaurants, and everywhere else, became constant and nonstop enough to make their friends feel excluded.” The observations of another close friend, director Stockton Briggle, are no less emphatic: “That was an arranged marriage from the get go. It was obviously never going to work. One of the few things he ever said to me about that was that he always resented being manipulated like that and it was a very dark period in his life.” So which interpretation of the Hudson-Gates marriage comes closest to the truth?
Phyllis presents “The Sham” version of events in My Husband, Rock Hudson, published two years after Hudson’s death. After 200 pages of missed signals and red flags, she finally pieces everything together in a chapter entitled “Revelation”: “The whole thing was too nightmarish to comprehend. Was Rock a homosexual? I couldn’t believe that. He had always been the manliest of men . . . Had our marriage been a cover-up for Rock’s true nature? Impossible. I knew that Rock had loved me, during the courtship and in the early stages of our marriage.”
Most people who knew either Rock or Phyllis or both aren’t sold on Gates’s “I was duped” defense. MGM’s head of talent Lucille Ryman Carroll says, “I don’t know how that’s possible. I knew people who knew Rock very well during the time he was married to Phyllis, and he was in and out of every gay singles bar in town. He was notorious.”
Many of Rock’s friends tend to ascribe to “The Arrangement” theory. In this version of the coupling, Henry Willson shrewdly paired off an essentially gay man and an essentially lesbian woman in an arranged marriage where both participants agreed to play house in the name of job security. “What I heard from Rock is that when they were married, they both knew of each other’s sexual proclivities,” says Martin Flaherty, Hudson’s estate manager. “In their relationship, it was agreed that they could both pursue their other interests as long as it wasn’t talked about or brought into the home. Sort of like, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell.’ The problems started when Phyllis wouldn’t give up her harem but she wanted Rock to give up all of his guys. Of course, this was unfair but he went along with it for a while because in his own way, he really did love her.”
Others agree that Gates reneged on her end of the deal. “Phyllis behaved, I think, very badly,” says actor Christopher Riordan. “When I first came to Hollywood, I was very good friends with a couple of ladies who knew her. They told me Henry Willson came to Phyllis and said, ‘We need to do this for Rock and this is what’s going to happen if you’ll agree to go along with it.’ So, Phyllis
knew everything but she didn’t live up to her end of the bargain. Then she wrote a book about their marriage, which annoys me. She could have been more honest about the whole thing and just said, ‘Well, it was a different time and it was something that had to be done . . .’ Everybody knew that Rock was gay and that was fine, but nobody ever discussed things like that in those days. ‘Being gay’ was something that you did after the party was over.”
* * *
If Douglas Sirk had found the relatively tame Magnificent Obsession “a combination of kitsch, and craziness and trashiness,” what must he have thought when he was handed an outline for Written on the Wind? Albert Zugsmith, who would go on to produce everything from Touch of Evil to Sex Kittens Go to College, owned the rights to the novel Written on the Wind, and he believed that the material was ideal for Sirk. And, as improbable as it seems, “this drama of psychic violence” (as Sirk would eventually come to refer to it) had been inspired by actual events.
In 1932, Zachary Smith Reynolds, the twenty-one-year-old heir to the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, and husband of troubled torch singer Libby Holman, died under mysterious circumstances after a party at his North Carolina estate. The ensuing scandal inspired novelist Robert Wilder to write Written on the Wind, which was praised for its “you-can’t-put-it-down readability” when it was published in 1945. In Wilder’s thinly disguised version of the Reynolds tragedy, a few key details were changed and the gothic backdrop shifted from North Carolina to Texas but the similarities to persons living—and dead—was hardly coincidental.
Although the 1935 Jean Harlow vehicle Reckless was loosely based on the Reynolds case, Production Code restrictions kept a franker dramatization off movie screens until the mid-1950s. By that time, Universal figured that the same American public that had devoured the Kinsey Reports was ready for the smorgasbord of degeneracy featured in Written on the Wind. George Zuckerman, who had written Taza, Son of Cochise for Sirk, was hired to adapt Wilder’s bestseller. Despite countless changes mandated by the censors, Zuckerman somehow managed to retain the essence of Wilder’s sordid narrative.
