by Mark Griffin
Reviewing a reissue in the Chicago Reader, Dave Kehr raved about both the movie and its star: “Douglas Sirk took a vacation from Ross Hunter and Technicolor for this production, though he retained Rock Hudson, who turns in an astonishingly good performance as a journalist . . . The film betters the book in every way, from the quality of the characterization to the development of the dark, searing imagery.”
So, is The Tarnished Angels a masterpiece or a misfire? The truth may lie somewhere in between. For every Sirkian masterstroke, there is a misstep. In an early scene in Devlin’s apartment, when LaVerne recalls leaving her native Iowa after seeing a liberty bond poster with Roger’s heroic image on it, this feels like Exposition 101, with backstory and character motivations doled out like heaps of lumpy mashed potatoes.
Yet, moments later, Sirk is at his most eloquent, though not a word is uttered. After LaVerne has fired up Devlin’s imagination with tales of her flying and romantic exploits, Sirk captures his agonized expression in the shadowy half-light. The earthbound reporter is all too aware of everything he’s been left out of, whether up in the air or in the bedroom. In the film’s most brilliantly constructed sequence, Schumann takes to the skies in what will prove to be his final flight. On the ground, son Jack takes a spin in a “flying machine” carnival ride. Editor Russell Schoengarth’s cuts come fast and furious as we see Schumann’s plane spiraling out of control, the reactions of LaVerne and other horrified onlookers, and Jack, trapped inside his ride, helplessly watching his father’s plane plummet toward the ocean.
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“I was with a bunch of Explorer scouts in a bus heading to New Mexico to Philmont Scout ranch,” remembers writer Armistead Maupin. “We stayed every night at army bases including Fort Campbell in Kentucky. Aside from the fact that I was constantly in a state of lust over the younger soldiers that were helping us out, I remember very distinctly going to the base movie that night and seeing Twilight for the Gods with Rock and Miss Cyd Charisse. The trailer for the movie was one of the campiest you’ve ever seen in your life . . . ‘He was a man with a dark secret, she was a woman with thwarted love . . .’ And boy, do I remember Rock. I recall in one scene that his body was smeared with some kind of oil. Let’s just say that it was a very impressionable moment and this was long before I ever met Rock in person.” If only the movie had made that kind of indelible impression on everyone.
When Universal notified Hudson that his next picture would be an adaptation of the popular Ernest K. Gann novel Twilight for the Gods, his reaction was anything but enthusiastic. “I didn’t think the story—that of a sea captain plagued by a past mistake, slowly going insane with bells in his head and all that jazz—was any world-beater,” Rock later admitted. “But it was on the bestseller list . . . The script turned out worse than I feared.”
Gann had adapted his novel for the screen and the all-too-familiar story, which concerned a boozy, court-martialed captain transporting a boatload of misfits from the South Sea Islands to Honolulu, seemed a bit too reminiscent of Strange Cargo, Lifeboat, and Gann’s own earlier effort, The High and the Mighty—in that one, the most John Wayne had to contend with was an imperiled airliner. For Twilight for the Gods, Gann upped the ante by having Hudson’s Captain David Bell grapple with a leaky brigantine, a mutinous crew, a conniving first mate, flashbacks to an earlier sea disaster, alcoholic binges, and the unrelenting advances of a tough-talking call girl on the lam. To lend some semblance of authenticity, most of Twilight for the Gods would be shot on location in Maui, where Mrs. Rock Hudson would join the company.
Universal’s old standby, Joseph Pevney, was tapped to direct. Like Rock, Pevney immediately expressed his concerns that Hudson was too young to play the graying captain. Universal stood firm. “They just wanted Rock Hudson,” Pevney recalled. “They didn’t give a damn what movie he was in.” Pevney surrounded Hudson with a first-rate supporting cast including Arthur Kennedy as the devious First Mate Ramsay, Leif Erickson as a theatrical agent, and Judith Evelyn (who had appeared as Elizabeth Taylor’s mother in Giant) as Miss Ethel Peacock, a neurotic, past-her-prime opera singer.
A refugee from such MGM musicals as The Band Wagon and Brigadoon, Cyd Charisse is totally out of her element in Twilight for the Gods. The statuesque dancer that Fred Astaire dubbed “beautiful dynamite” is woefully miscast as Inez Leidstrom, the hard-as-nails “proven harlot” who finally conquers Captain Bell by giving him an erotically charged haircut. Whether she’s pursuing the captain or fending off predatory deckhands, Charisse vogues her way through the film, at times almost en pointe, as though she’s about to pirouette into a Ziegfeld Follies production number.
Hudson fares better as the beleaguered Captain Bell. In scenes that seem to encourage over the top histrionics, Rock is admirably restrained. He manages to be believable even as he delivers an impromptu sermon from the deck of the leaking Cannibal: “For peace of mind, there’s no place like being at sea. You’re just about as close as you can get to God out here. It’s quite a church and the view from the front pew is pretty satisfying.”
While he was contractually obligated to appear in any film the studio mandated, Hudson was correct to object to his own casting. As written, Captain David Bell is something of a second cousin to Humphrey Bogart’s grizzled, gin-swilling Charlie Allnut in The African Queen. “It might have been perfect as an Edward G. Robinson role but not for me,” Rock later commented. “It even presumed that I was a full-fledged captain at the age of 24, which was absurd. I didn’t care about the character and apparently no one else did either.”
Writing off Twilight for the Gods as “the absolute worst” movie of her career, Charisse blamed director Pevney for the film’s failure. “He took a good book—a best-seller—and did not seem to know what to do with it.” Charisse did acknowledge that the problems plaguing Twilight for the Gods weren’t only confined to the director’s chair. “Rock was then married to Phyllis Gates. All of us had a great time for a while. But one day Phyllis told me she was going home and, as it turned out, that was when she and Rock separated. That kind of put a pall on things.”*
Thirty years after the fact, Gates remembered, “Whenever Rock had time off from the location, he went scuba diving instead of spending time with me. A couple of times, I asked him about seeing [a psychiatrist], and he cut me off immediately. I couldn’t breach the barrier. He seemed depressed and yet he laughed much of the time, that deep laugh that entranced everyone. Only I could tell that it was hollow.”
After the unhappy couple returned from Hawaii, Gates—feeling that she was having “one-sided conversations” with her increasingly remote husband—resumed therapy with her own psychiatrist. One afternoon, Phyllis returned home from an appointment to find a note from Rock—I’m going to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Let’s keep it quiet.
The very next morning, Louella Parsons broke the silence by announcing the separation on the front page of the Los Angeles Examiner: “One of the biggest surprises to hit Hollywood in a long time came yesterday when Rock Hudson moved into The Beverly Hills Hotel under an assumed name. His wife remained at the family home. Neither intends to make an official statement, but there can be no denial of the fact that the Hudsons’ marriage has hit a snag.”
Of course, Parsons was not at all surprised by the news but at least she played along in print. Whereas Parsons’s rival, Hedda Hopper, couldn’t have been more brutally matter-of-fact. Wasting no time, she pitched an exclusive to Jack Podell, the editor of Motion Picture magazine: “Do you want me to do a special story for you on Phyllis Hudson? She won’t give it to anybody else. Of course, she won’t say he is a fag and name his lover, but we can hint at that.”
If Parsons was prepared to hint, Gates was not. “That would only harm Rock’s career, and I’m not going to do that,” Phyllis told her high-powered divorce attorney, Jerry Geisler. But she wasn’t above secretly recording her estranged husband. “I needed some answers, and only Rock could give them,” Gates says in her 1987 memo
ir. Although Phyllis informs readers that she summoned Hudson to their home to talk over their problems, she omits a crucial detail. While Gates invited Rock to bare his soul, an operative in the employ of private detective Fred Otash was not only listening in but taping every word of what would later be described as “Rock Hudson’s Gay Confession.” As Otash eventually revealed, “I was hired by his wife to get the goods on him to enhance her pending divorce negotiations.”
Throughout the conversation, Phyllis coaxes one revelation after another out of an unsuspecting Hudson . . .
PHYLLIS: How long after we were married did you have your first homosexual affair?
ROCK: Oh, I don’t know. The next day.
PHYLLIS: You told me you had an affair with your agent. How long did that last?
ROCK: No time at all. Do you think I would enjoy having an affair with him?
PHYLLIS: But you did it. Why?
ROCK: Because of naiveté, I guess.
PHYLLIS: Do you know how they refer to him in Palm Springs? As a bitch in heat.
ROCK: I feel a sense of loyalty to him, but I don’t approve of his activities.
PHYLLIS: Who did you have an affair with in Italy?
ROCK: I saw Jean at the racquet club and she told me she had heard about some Italian actor I had an affair with in Italy and then brought him back here. It’s the biggest lie, for God’s sake.
PHYLLIS: Can you deny that your pattern is that of a homosexual?
ROCK (CRYING): No, I can’t deny it. But I never felt we were together on anything. I never felt you loved me.
Three months after the emotionally charged exchange was surreptitiously recorded, Gates filed for divorce, citing “extreme mental cruelty.” On August 13, 1958, Rock and Phyllis attended the divorce hearing at the Santa Monica Superior Courthouse. Columnists noted that Henry Willson was also present, which was no surprise as he was the one who had tipped off the papers that he would be there. In addition to his customary self-promoting, Willson was regularly feeding the press stories about the divorce, doing everything possible to keep public sympathy firmly rooted in Rock’s corner.
Gates told Judge Edward Brand that the Rock Hudson beloved by millions was terribly moody, seldom home, and uninterested in accompanying her to social events, unless they were business related. Gates testified that even after Hudson knew that she had been hospitalized with a bout of hepatitis, he had remained in Italy, continuing to work on A Farewell to Arms. Phyllis also told the judge that Rock had struck her twice, both times after he had been drinking heavily.
Judge Brand granted the divorce. In addition to $250 a week in alimony, Gates was awarded the Warbler Way house (worth an estimated $35,000), a Ford Thunderbird, virtually all of the couple’s wedding presents, and 5 percent interest in Rock’s production company, 7 Pictures Corporation. Phyllis would later say that she considered the settlement “paltry.” Largely siding with Rock, the press criticized Gates for demanding more than her fair share. Radie Harris took the ex–Mrs. Hudson to task in Photoplay: “What has Phyllis contributed in her brief marriage that should penalize Rock with such a heavy financial responsibility to her, when she can’t even fall back on the time-worn cliché, ‘I’ve given you the best years of my life . . .’?” Despite the public reprimand, Gates returned to court and requested an increase in her alimony payments. Ultimately, Phyllis agreed to accept a cash settlement of $130,000.
But the payouts didn’t end there. Contained in the archives of the Rock Hudson Estate Collection are a vast collection of receipts from pharmacies, gas stations, and department stores that Phyllis continued to forward along to Rock into the late 1960s—more than a decade after their divorce. Along with the receipts, Gates often enclosed brief notes—the most cryptic and possibly incriminating message reading: “Hi Hon—All’s I need you for is $ $ $ $ and $ex $ex $ex Love, Phyl (Wifey).”
A number of Rock’s friends and surviving partners have questioned whether Gates may have been extorting Hudson for money. Presumably, Phyllis would have had access to the recordings that Fred Otash’s operative had made in January of 1958 in which Rock confessed to having had several gay affairs. And was it Phyllis that gossip columnist Liz Smith was referring to when she recalled helping Rock rid himself of an extortionist? “I was briefly involved in helping him ward off being blackmailed by a woman who swore she was going to the supermarket tabloids with her tales,” Smith revealed in 2000.
At the time of his divorce, Rock would temporarily reside at The Voltaire, a luxury apartment in West Hollywood. But before moving into one of the units in this seven-story “chateau,” Hudson would have the apartment swept for electronic listening devices. Rock also bought a three-bedroom house on stilts in Malibu, where he could retreat to whenever he wasn’t working in Los Angeles.
In Malibu, Rock spent time with his longtime stuntman, George Robotham, who lived nearby. He went sailing and scuba diving with MGM contract player Don Burnett and his wife, actress Gia Scala. He believed that overexposure from his divorce would derail his career, even though his name still appeared at the top of exhibitor’s polls and Universal had no less than five films in development with his name attached. It wasn’t long before his days as a beachcomber abruptly ended; Rock was being summoned back to work.
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More than two decades before the primetime soap Falcon Crest blew the lid off that hotbed of scandal and intrigue known as Napa Valley’s wine-making country, there was This Earth Is Mine. Henry King, who had directed Stella Dallas and The Song of Bernadette, would oversee this CinemaScope adaptation of Alice Tisdale Hobart’s novel, The Cup and the Sword, which had climbed to the top of the bestseller list in 1942.
As Universal was quick to point out in a steady stream of press releases they issued, the studio spared no expense in mounting an elaborate production that would be shot in dozens of vineyards and estates throughout California, including wineries owned by Paul Masson, Christian Brothers, and the Italian Swiss Colony.
Set in 1931, the story focused on the intertwining relationships of two very different generations of vintners. Heading an impressive cast, Rock would star as John Rambeau, the brash, power-obsessed manager of his family’s vineyard, which has struggled through twelve years of Prohibition. While the young Rambeau thinks nothing of linking the family business to bootleggers and gangsters, his European-born grandfather Philippe (Claude Rains) worships the grape as “a holy fruit.”
As this overripe saga begins, Philippe welcomes his granddaughter, a young Englishwoman named Elizabeth (Jean Simmons) to Napa Valley. Without Elizabeth’s knowledge, Philippe has arranged for her to marry her cousin, Andre Swann (Francis Bethencourt), the heir to the rival Stag’s Leap vineyard. If Elizabeth and Andre wed, Philippe will control all of the wineries in the Valley (“The grafting of vines is like a marriage,” the young couple are repeatedly told.). The patriarch’s plans are hindered by the fact that Elizabeth falls in love with another cousin—John, who brings the transplanted English rose up to speed on the family’s complicated back history. This includes the fact that John’s Uncle Francis (Kent Smith) is really his father—an important part of the novel that is awkwardly introduced in the movie.
After a heated argument with Elizabeth, John temporarily turns his attentions to Buz Dietrick, a flirtatious vineyard worker. Later, Buz claims that she is pregnant with John’s child and the announcement threatens to destroy the entire Rambeau dynasty. Billed as “Cindy Robbins,” actress Cynthia Chenault made a memorable debut as “Buz” in This Earth Is Mine and she had Universal’s top star to thank.
“Rock Hudson discovered me,” says Chenault. “We were friends and he told me about this movie that was coming up and he thought I’d be good for it and he arranged to have me test with Henry King. It was a very emotional test. I cried. I laughed. It was probably the best acting that I’ve ever done. Afterwards, it turned out that Rock had been hiding underneath the camera. So, he had watched the whole thing and I had no idea that he was there
. When it was over, he jumped up and he seemed so thrilled. I guess he felt responsible since he had suggested me. I did the movie with him and he was just fabulous.”
Although Chenault says she considered herself Hudson’s platonic “sidekick,” the fan magazines had a very different take on their relationship. “In all the magazines in those days, they would mention my name and it would be followed by ‘The Next Mrs. Rock Hudson . . .’ He would get so upset about that. Though I was thinking, ‘Gee, I don’t mind if people say that . . .’ And Rock would say, ‘Well, I don’t want people to think that you got this part only because you know me.’”
Chenault says that Hudson thoughtfully mentored her throughout the location shoot for This Earth Is Mine. “Rock got after me once. I was supposed to be packing grapes in a scene and he came over to me and said, ‘Cindy, you get in there and you learn how to pack those grapes!’ He wanted me to look like I really knew what I was doing. He made me work like a dog for a couple of hours before we ever did the scene but he was right. It needed to look believable.”
All of that hard work would pay off. In reviewing This Earth Is Mine, the New York Times found only Cindy Robbins’s performance, the cinematography, and the art direction worthy of praise. The overloaded narrative was faulted for its confusing and contradictory plot developments. As for the leading man, Variety’s critic noted, “Rock Hudson gives a sympathetic portrayal, but not a satisfying one because his characterization is riddled by inconsistencies.”
