All That Heaven Allows

by Mark Griffin

  Harmon says that among the stars present was a clean-cut heartthrob who had married America’s sweetheart just a few years earlier, a leading man with “supernaturally” blue eyes, and a lanky dancer who had appeared opposite Debbie Reynolds in a few lesser MGM musicals.

  “The lights were turned off and when they were, I decided to make a hasty retreat,” Harmon recalls. “But I picked the wrong door and ended up in the bathroom. I shut the door and then leaned my head against it. I was trying to regain my composure when I was groped. I had no idea that anybody else was in the bathroom. I was fumbling for the light switch when I realized I was in there with Rock Hudson.”

  While his friend became much better acquainted with the trio of stars in the living room, Harmon was granted a private audience with Hudson. “The bathroom had another door to it, which led to a bedroom that was apparently just for him. Everything about this set-up said that he was the king. I remember he put his hands behind his head as he leaned against the headboard and even that made me think, ‘Here he is . . . the King of Hollywood.’ The first thing we did was talk and the last thing we did was talk. The sexual portion was brief, not even memorable. I just trembled through it because I was so whacked-out being in his presence.”

  Even as the activity in the living room reached a fever pitch, Hudson and Harmon remained in the bedroom. “At one point, he got up and locked the door. We cuddled for a long time without it being sexual at all. I know that sounds pretty weird, but that’s just the truth. We discovered that we actually had a few things in common. We were both born in Illinois, we both had the same initials and we both knew a lot about movies. There are a lot of actors who are in the business and yet they know nothing about movies but he did. We played this game called ‘Who Am I?’ where you have to figure out who a celebrity is based on clues. To this day, I remember he gave me Jessie Royce Landis. After I guessed her, he said, ‘Oh my god, where else can I do this?’ He was impressed by what I knew . . . he said he was excited about going to Italy and making a movie with Gina Lollobrigida and Sandra Dee. In the relatively short time that we spent together, I thought he was wonderful in a thousand ways.”

  * * *

  “We were Pillow Talk—but with an Italian accent” is how actor Joel Grey would describe Come September more than fifty years after appearing in it. The frothy sex farce would be shot in CinemaScope and largely on location in picturesque Santa Margherita Ligure, a seaside resort along the Italian Riviera. Instead of the all-American Doris Day, Rock’s costar this time would be the voluptuous beauty Gina Lollobrigida, described in Universal’s publicity as “indispensably Italian as the Colosseum, as mouthwatering as spaghetti carbonara.”

  In his first screen teaming with “La Lollo,” Rock would play Robert Talbot, an American tycoon so wrapped up in his business interests that he can only find time to visit his opulent Italian villa one month out of the year. Every September, the overworked executive unwinds in his hideaway while rekindling his romance with Roman girlfriend Lisa Fellini.

  When he arrives unannounced two months ahead of schedule, Talbot discovers that members of his domestic staff have been renting out rooms in his home, which they have transformed into the hotel La Dolce Vista. The master of the house is unamused: “How would you feel if you find out Brutus was your majordomo, Lucrezia Borgia your cook and Benedict Arnold your upstairs maid?”

  Talbot’s uninvited guests include a group of rambunctious teenagers. Crooner Bobby Darin plays a medical student who breaks into song whenever he’s not busy admiring Sandra Dee’s “well-developed patellas.” The casting of teeny-bopper icons Darin and Dee was a calculated move on the part of Universal.

  Although Rock Hudson still reigned supreme as the studio’s most important asset, he was now thirty-five years old. True, his name topped the exhibitor lists of the most popular stars in the world and, as more than one critic noted after seeing Hudson shirtless in Come September, he was remarkably well preserved. But even so, Elvis, Fabian, and Troy Donahue were now claiming more space on magazine covers and in high school lockers. To the sock-hop crowd, Rock was starting to seem like an old-timer. Sure, his name could still fill seats but, just to play it safe, Universal execs knew that it was time to unleash the kids.

  Anyone as career conscious as Hudson must have been unnerved by the fact that some of the younger heartthrobs were gaining on him. Even so, Come September made light of this. After Hudson’s character wows Dee and her girlfriends with a killer mambo, Darin reassures his buddies, “Remember, the night is young and he’s not . . . No man his age can defy the laws of medical science.” Playing one of Darin’s sidekicks was future Oscar-winner Joel Grey. Despite an immediate rapport with Rock, Grey says that their mutual confinement in the closet was never acknowledged, even when there was no one listening in.

  “What’s very interesting, looking back on it now, is that we went out to dinner without ever discussing anything having to do with what we knew about each other,” says Grey. “There was this unspoken familiarity and trust and amusement that bonded us. Rock was this bright, playful, easygoing guy who had worked his way into this very powerful position. I really felt for him because I knew he was living that double life that was so scary at that time . . . I always had great sympathy and empathy for him but again, none of this was ever spoken aloud. That was just the way it was.”

  At least according to the film’s leading lady, Hudson may have had nothing to hide. “I don’t think he was gay then,” says Gina Lollobrigida. “People can change. When we did our love scenes, he was quite . . . normal. He liked me very much. I felt something. It was more than a kiss.” Whether this was the Rock Hudson version of Method acting or an authentic impulse, critics applauded the new screen team. Lollobrigida was hailed as “a superb comedienne” by the New York Times while Variety said that “Hudson comes through with an especially jovial performance, perhaps his best to date.”

  While audiences heartily approved of Hudson and Lollobrigida as a new screen couple, Universal had been inundated with requests for a reteaming of Rock and Doris Day. As 1961 came to a close, moviegoers got exactly what they wanted. In Lover Come Back, Hudson and Day play rival advertising executives squabbling over an account for a nonexistent product named “VIP.” After a Nobel Prize–winning scientist is bribed to concoct something—anything—named VIP, he cooks up what he describes as “a triumph of advanced biochemistry,” a flavorful mint laced with a hidden agenda—each sweet is the equivalent of a triple martini.

  In a sense, VIP was manufactured from the same winning formula that made the Hudson-Day couplings so enormously popular. An irresistible bonbon done up in a glitzy Eastmancolor wrapper, VIP offers consumers “a good ten cent drunk” and “the kind of unspeakable fun your mother always warned you about.” Like Lover Come Back itself, VIP is candy-coated sex.

  As with Pillow Talk, Rock’s character in Lover Come Back comes equipped with a sissified alter ego. In an attempt to seduce Day’s straitlaced Carol Templeton, Rock’s ne’er-do-well Jerry Webster poses as a presumably gay man. This time, he’s Dr. Linus Tyler, a Greenwich Village–based scientist and “a confirmed woman hater.” Try as she might, Day’s character can’t seem to bring Linus around. “Forget me, Carol,” the antisocial doctor implores. “You deserve a man and not a mass of neurotic doubts.” The self-parodying aspects of Rock’s conflicted character meld perfectly with a storyline milking laughs from the consequences of false advertising.

  “Lover Come Back is very sharp,” says film historian Thomas Santopietro, who considers the picture the finest of the three Hudson-Day pairings. “We all know that the advertising world is built on deception and the act of deception is hugely important to their trio of films. Especially in those first two movies, Rock is always trying to deceive Doris . . . You also have this idea of a gay actor playing a straight man impersonating a possibly gay man, so it’s like this house of mirrors. Also, in Lover Come Back, there’s an ease in the way Rock and Doris play with each ot
her. I think their rhythms are sharper. Because they are so comfortable together, the audience can just relax into the movie.”

  Rock and Tony Randall agreed that Lover Come Back was the most successful of their three vehicles. “Pillow Talk was such a success that we set out a year later to make it again,” Randall said. “Practically the same script. Some of the lines were the same. Different director [Delbert Mann]. But believe it or not, the second time around, it turned out funnier.”

  The critics concurred. Even the notoriously difficult to please Bosley Crowther gave Lover Come Back a rave review in the New York Times: “A springy and spirited surprise, which is one of the brightest, most delightful satiric comedies since It Happened One Night.” What’s more, Lover Come Back clearly demonstrated why Vanity Fair critic James Wolcott pronounced Hudson and Day, “the best romantic-comedy team ever . . . the first couple of American pop.”

  * * *

  “A strange romance” is how Photoplay would describe Rock’s relationship with actress Marilyn Maxwell. Strange or not, the magazine’s editors were so convinced that wedding bells were about to chime, they started hedging their bets in print: “Right now, five will get you ten in Hollywood that Rock Hudson and Marilyn Maxwell are about to get married. Right now, three will get you five that they will elope within the next six weeks.”

  After Rock and Marilyn attended a dinner for President Kennedy at The Beverly Hills Hotel in March of 1962, Maxwell was hounded by the press. Syndicated columnists and fanzine reporters demanded to know when she intended to march down the aisle with Rock. Sounding like several ladies before her who had been tagged “The Next Mrs. Hudson,” Maxwell did her best to explain: “He’s the very, very best friend I ever had. I adore him and he adores me. But it’s just a friendship.”

  Maxwell was accustomed to being the subject of gossip and innuendo. The singer that the columnists had dubbed “The Darling Diva,” was not only beautiful and talented but she had been romantically linked with stars Bob Hope and Frank Sinatra. “She’s one of those girls who set a guy’s pulse to racing by the merest glance in his direction,” writer Damon Runyon once said of Maxwell.

  A native of Clarinda, Iowa, Maxwell was only eighteen when she became a vocalist with the Buddy Rogers band and toured throughout the Midwest. At twenty, she was studying acting at the Pasadena Playhouse. By the following year, Maxwell was under contract to MGM. When she made her feature film debut in the wartime drama, Stand by for Action, the voluptuous Maxwell was proclaimed “one of the best sweater fillers in the country.”

  In 1949, Marilyn was working on the romantic comedy Key to the City with Clark Gable, when she was introduced to a struggling twenty-four-year-old actor named Rock Hudson. While there was an instant rapport, Maxwell was about to marry her second husband. Although that union proved to be short-lived, it wasn’t until Maxwell was married to her third husband, writer-producer Jerry Davis, that she resumed her friendship with Rock, who was now at the top of his game in Hollywood.

  Davis remembered that upon returning home from work, he would inevitably encounter “this handsome, six-foot-whatever man who was absolutely in tune with my wife. I felt a little like Woody Allen—‘Hi, honey, I’m home . . .’” While Davis was aware of Rock’s gay proclivities, at one point he felt compelled to question his wife about her closeness with Hudson. Davis found that “She would get quite defensive. She used to say, ‘Are you paranoid? Do you actually think this man has any interest in me?’”

  When Maxwell and Davis separated, Dorothy Kilgallen told readers of her syndicated column, “Marilyn Maxwell’s estranged husband, screenwriter Jerry Davis, has been getting his kicks by telling friends he expects Marilyn to waltz down the aisle with Rock Hudson as soon as she gets the divorce . . . Marilyn says she has no such plans, she and Rock are just good friends, and she wishes Jerry would stop being such a wise guy with his wedding flashes.”

  However, when Maxwell and Davis divorced in 1960, her already close relationship with Rock only intensified. “She was in love with him,” says Maxwell’s longtime secretary Jean Greenberg. “She said he always told her he loved her but he wasn’t in love with her . . . Though I know for a fact they were having an affair. Marilyn confided everything in me, and she talked about it in detail. They even talked marriage and about having children but Marilyn knew he would always be seeing other men . . . They continued to be lovers on and off and devoted friends.”

  “When you’d see pictures of Rock escorting all of these beautiful women to events, much of that was studio motivated,” says Marilyn Maxwell’s son, Matt Davis. “With my mom, I can honestly say that they truly loved each other but being with a woman wasn’t really part of his true persuasion. I think they even talked about it and she said, ‘I just can’t deal with the boys running around.’ She just couldn’t cross that line. That was the only block to it. I really think they would have gotten married if it weren’t for that. Though in every other way, they were as close as could be.”

  Sometimes the closeness turned clinging. According to Hudson’s secretary, Lois Rupert, Maxwell often phoned her in desperation. “I could never count the times I answered the phone and heard, ‘Where is he, Lois?’ Never a ‘Hello’ or ‘This is Max.’ And thank God, for Rock’s sake, I did know where he was, why he was late, or why he hadn’t called her! Then she would gentle down, accept what I told her—which was the truth—and our conversation would end up much more pleasant than it had begun.”

  If Hudson was riding high as the king of the box office in the early 1960s, Maxwell’s once-promising career had flatlined. At one point, the former star of MGM musicals was reduced to performing a “satiric striptease” in a New York burlesque house. Although Marilyn landed a supporting role on the television drama Bus Stop, this wasn’t exactly the triumphant comeback she had envisioned. Dropping out of the series after appearing in only thirteen episodes, Maxwell cracked, “There was nothing for me to do but pour a second cup of coffee and point the way to the men’s room.”

  By the early 1970s, the actress once proclaimed “the big new star of tomorrow” was making occasional guest appearances on television and supplementing her income by selling household cleaning products. Maxwell turned to Hudson for support—financial as well as emotional.

  “My mom went through a period that a lot of actresses in the industry do,” says Matt Davis. “You hit forty and all of a sudden, you find yourself saying, ‘Where’s the work?’ After she had me, she gained a lot of weight and had trouble coming back. At one point, things were really tight and Rock helped her through it. She owed him money and he just forgave the debt. He said, ‘Just don’t worry about it.’ And that was very much who Rock was. He helped my mom through some of her toughest times.”

  As she closed in on fifty, Marilyn was not only overwhelmed by career pressures but she was plagued by health problems—high blood pressure, pulmonary ailments, and myopia. Finally, in the spring of 1972, there was a glimmer of hope. Maxwell was offered a nightclub engagement at the Regency Hotel in Chicago. It was while preparing for this that she suffered a fatal heart attack. Matt Davis, only fifteen at the time, discovered his mother’s body.

  “When I came home and found my mother dead in the closet, I just went into shock,” Davis remembers. “Thank God, my mother’s secretary called Rock and he rushed over. Then he took me up to his own house for a couple of days. My father was away in Acapulco at the time and it was going to take him awhile to get back . . . Once again, Rock stepped in and took care of everything for us.”

  * * *

  A frightening spectre comes staggering out of the jungle. His clothes are shredded. His beard is matted and overgrown. He is wild-eyed and looks totally deranged. Suddenly, he catches sight of the first human being he has seen in months. Startled, he repeatedly shoots at the stranger until he realizes he’s firing at his own reflection in a murky river . . .

  After reading this sequence from the screenplay of The Spiral Road, Rock was confident that he ha
d found his most compelling project since Giant. In this adaptation of Jan de Hartog’s 1957 novel, Hudson would play Anton Drager, an atheistic intern who journeys into the jungles of Java and battles leprosy, a gin-soaked predecessor, a menacing witch doctor, and above all, his own lack of faith.

  Taking his cue from the earnest tone of the story, Hudson told a reporter that his portrayal of the spiritually bereft physician would be one of his “most crucial” characterizations. “To me, it’s like a screen test for a new actor. It’s my most serious part. The deepest. This calls for a different type of concentration.” When asked to compare The Spiral Road with some of his earlier efforts, Rock was positive that this picture would tower above them all: “Magnificent Obsession was a serious picture, but I now feel it was a surface one.” He wrote off A Farewell to Arms as “just a love story.” Although he didn’t share his feelings with the press, Hudson told friends that The Spiral Road presented him with such an acting stretch, it virtually guaranteed him an Oscar nomination. Provided he survived the shoot.

  In June of 1961, Hudson, actor Burl Ives, director Robert Mulligan, and a second unit crew flew to Paramaribo, Surinam. In a press release, Universal described the exotic location as one of the most dangerous ever visited by a film company and for once, no exaggeration was necessary.

  As the primary location was only five degrees north of the equator, Hudson and company endured suffocating humidity, torrential rain, crocodiles, and a constant swarm of fungus-carrying mosquitoes. Though he managed to soldier on without complaint, Rock would ultimately be undone not by the extreme local color but by the film itself—the dramatic highpoints of which were swamped by a rambling narrative and a heavy-handed approach to the protagonist’s God problem. Though Hudson couldn’t see it, the redemptive theme of The Spiral Road was essentially a long-winded variation on Magnificent Obsession, minus Douglas Sirk, Jane Wyman, and any sense of proportion.