All That Heaven Allows

by Mark Griffin

  Garlington says that at least during the period they were together, Rock did his best to avoid crowds and social gatherings. “We were not around very many gay boys, as I remember. We didn’t have gay parties. For the sake of his career, he felt obligated to have one or two parties a year and invite all these Hollywood people and he hated it.”

  Usually, the world’s most glamorous movie star could be found at home, outfitted in dungarees and a well-worn pair of Thom McAn moccasins. Rock and Lee would watch the news together or they would screen one of the movies Hudson had in his private collection. “I usually requested a western,” Garlington says. Whenever Hudson’s work schedule allowed, the quiet evenings at home alternated with road trips to secluded locations. “We took a trip to Puerto Vallarta,” Garlington says. “It was just the two of us and it was one of our best times . . . There was this great house on the beach that Elizabeth Taylor always used whenever she was staying there. At that point in his career, Rock needed that kind of escape from all of the pressures he was under. I mean, it’s a wonder that he didn’t break more often than he did.”

  After an extended tour of Canada, Hudson and Garlington returned home and learned that a bizarre incident had taken place while they were away. “When we came back from a trip to Lake Louise, we discovered that a woman* had broken into his house and slept in his bed,” Garlington recalls. Dorothy Jean Strashinsky, a thirty-two-year-old housewife from Anaheim, brought her five-year-old daughter, Deborah, along when she spent the night in Hudson’s home. Strashinsky said that she was in love with Rock and admitted to sampling some of his liquor as well as helping herself to a few “souvenirs.” Police found Hudson’s passport, address books, and personal photos in her car. Although she had made a clean sweep of it, Strashinsky had somehow overlooked the motherlode.

  “Inside a drawer in his bedside table, he kept all of these pictures of me without a shirt on,” says Garlington. “In some of the shots, I may have had even less on. But she never found them. Just imagine if she had gotten a hold of those photos. That could have ended everything for him right there.”

  Despite the fact that Hudson would later refer to Lee as his “one true love,” Garlington eventually decided to end his relationship with Rock, though they would remain friends into the early 1970s. Reflecting on their split, Garlington admits, “I am a very independent kind of guy and the fault was more mine than his . . . Before things came apart, I remember he went all the way to Atlanta and met my family. Rock particularly liked my father. He was always looking for a father figure and so was I. That was part of our problem. At least in the beginning, I thought that Rock was the only one that was big enough and strong enough to be the father image for me that my own father had not been. It turns out that he wasn’t.”

  When Hudson found out that Garlington had started seeing other people, he was extremely upset. George Nader said that in all the years that he had known Rock, he had never seen him so distraught over a breakup. Fifty years after they went their separate ways, Lee says he didn’t realize how much Rock had invested in their relationship: “He had a lot of boyfriends before me, and of course, a lot of boyfriends after me. I didn’t necessarily think that I was just one of the mill but Rock was an actor. He was more than capable of acting like he was in love. At the time, I just took it all with a grain of salt . . . Rock never said what his feelings really were. If I had known how much he really cared, things might have been different for us. I’m not sure.”

  IT WASN’T ONLY obsessed fans who turned up at The Castle. Rising star Lee Majors occasionally visited. Hudson and Majors had met a few years earlier and quickly formed what columnists would term a “mysterious friendship.” In fact, their association was shrouded in such mystery, that Majors’s publicist, Paul Bloch, once denied that the two actors even knew each other. Shown photographic evidence to the contrary, Bloch resorted to the cornered publicist’s default response: “No comment.”

  After Majors became a regular on the ABC series The Big Valley, one intrepid journalist was tasked with finding out how “the luckiest of blond young Hollywood gods” had risen through the show business ranks so swiftly. After all, just a couple of years before, Majors had been working for the Los Angeles County Parks & Recreation Department. “The truth of the matter is that Lee was first ‘discovered’ and helped along to sudden stardom by none other than Rock Hudson,” a fan magazine reported in 1966.

  Majors had grown up as Harvey Lee Yeary in Middleboro, Kentucky. According to one magazine profile, “Handsome, blond Lee, six feet tall and a football star, strolls into a restaurant in Richmond. A friend greets Lee. And with the friend is . . . Rock Hudson.” Even while reporting this, the author of the profile admitted that it sounded like quintessential “Hollywood hyperbole.”

  In a more plausible account, a mutual friend—described as “a professor at Eastern State”—introduced Hudson and Yeary at a party. “That’s basically the same story I heard,” says Lee Garlington. “Rock occasionally visited some friend’s house in Kentucky. After a few of these visits, he suddenly became a big fan of the Eastern Kentucky football team. Rock supposedly partied with some of the guys on the team . . . and Lee Majors was one of them.”

  Regardless of how Hudson and Yeary connected, once they had, Rock couldn’t have been more attentive. Close friends believe that he was infatuated with Harvey Lee, who appealed not only to Rock’s physical aesthetic but also to his sense of obligation. Yeary had lost both of his parents in separate accidents before the age of two. While playing college football, he suffered a spinal injury resulting in temporary paralysis. With his dreams of gridiron glory shattered, Harvey Lee turned his attention to the dramatic arts.

  The help Hudson provided may have included financing Yeary’s acting classes at the Pioneer Playhouse in Danville. Even if he didn’t help Yeary financially, Rock regularly corresponded with the theatre’s founder, Colonel Eben C. Henson, who provided glowing reports of Harvey Lee’s progress: “I would say that your faith in him will be rewarded, for I predict if given the breaks he could achieve a claim in the movie industry.”

  For a photogenic newcomer like Harvey Lee, relocating to the West Coast was essential. After all, star-struck hopefuls boarded buses bound for Los Angeles every day. Though they didn’t usually have a family in tow. Harvey Lee not only had a pretty young wife named Kathy Robinson but at the tender age of twenty-three, the former football star had become a father for the first time. All three Yearys would become Rock’s houseguests for a while. Rock’s secretary would often babysit while Rock took Harvey Lee and Kathy out on the town. Lois Rupert remembered them as “an idyllic couple and so incredibly in love.”

  During this period, Hudson bankrolled Harvey Lee’s appointments with doctors, dentists, and acting coaches. Hudson’s old friend, the agent Dick Clayton, took the young man on as a client and before too long, it was goodbye, Harvey Lee Yeary. Hello, Lee Majors. At the time, Majors made no attempts to hide the fact that Rock Hudson was his mentor. In a magazine layout from early in Lee’s career, one image shows him completing some household chores. Prominently displayed on the wall behind him is a framed photograph of Rock.

  Shortly after Majors’s Hollywood career was launched, rumors began circulating that Lee and Kathy, the most delightful couple to hit town in years, were getting ready to split. As Lois Rupert recalled, “Rock asked me one day, ‘Do you think Hollywood will spoil their marriage?’” The question proved to be prescient. As Rupert recalled, “After Harvey Lee became Lee Majors, he and Kathy were divorced.”

  None of the domestic drama impeded Lee’s progress, however. Within a few years, Majors would be headlining his own hit series, The Six Million Dollar Man. In 1973, Lee wed Farrah Fawcett, resulting in a marriage made in pop culture heaven. By this time, any association with Rock may have started to feel too close for comfort. By the mid-1980s, Majors was still maintaining a high profile via another hit series, The Fall Guy, but he was conspicuously absent from Hudson’s life at
a time when his former benefactor could have really used some support. This was not lost on one columnist with an especially long memory:

  “Rock Hudson put Lee Majors on the road to fame and fortune . . . but as the AIDS-stricken actor fought for his life, Majors was not among the celebrities—including Liz Taylor, Roddy McDowall and Nancy Walker—who were rushing to his bedside. As the superstar lay dying, his protégé was nowhere to be seen.”

  * * *

  For once, Universal was in violation of its own “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” policy. The winning formula that had turned Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back into gigantic hits for the studio would be tampered with for the third and final Rock Hudson and Doris Day teaming.

  Send Me No Flowers, which started shooting in December of 1963, was based on a Broadway fizzle of the same name by Norman Barasch and Carroll Moore. The stage version mustered only forty performances and garnered tepid reviews: “Send Me No Flowers is one of those popular comedies that hang a lot of baby jests around a papa joke, and that drive a rachitic bit of plot literally to the graveyard,” said Time.

  Despite the obvious red flags, Send Me No Flowers was judged the ideal vehicle to bring Hudson, Day, and Tony Randall back before the cameras. Norman Jewison had recently directed Day in The Thrill of It All, which had turned a tidy profit for Universal. As a thank-you, the studio entrusted him with their top stars for Send Me No Flowers.

  Unlike Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back, which took place in a chic and glittering Manhattan, Send Me No Flowers is set in deepest suburbia, where the milkman keeps track of which customers are about to divorce. George Kimball, an electronics executive, is a highly neurotic hypochondriac who frequently mistakes indigestion for cardiac arrest. “Do you ever read the obituary page?” Kimball asks his long-suffering wife, Judy. “It’s enough to scare you to death.”

  One afternoon, Kimball overhears his overburdened physician discussing another patient’s terminal prognosis and assumes the bad news concerns his own defective ticker. Believing that he’s only weeks away from his own expiration date, Kimball enlists the aid of his best friend in finding an able-bodied substitute husband for his wife: “I want a man who can afford to give Judy all the things I went into debt for.”

  When Kimball suddenly starts encouraging his wife to spend time with other men, a dismayed Judy suspects that he’s having an affair. In another sharp detour from the previous Rock-Doris vehicles, Send Me No Flowers begins with the eternal bachelor and the perennial virgin already hitched. If much of the fun of the first two outings had been concerned with their game of cat and mouse, death hovers over the third installment from start to finish.

  “Send Me No Flowers is so much weaker than the other two films they made together,” says film historian Thomas Santopietro. “There is no chase. And all of Doris’s great energy is gone. She simply has no task. She’s just the helpmate listening to Rock, this guy we’ve always liked, who this time out spends two hours whining about his health. So, the underpinnings of the movie are all wrong, both in terms of what we’ve come to expect from them and for their personae.”

  About the only thing that works in Send Me No Flowers are the satellite characters orbiting about the weary leads. Clint Walker, the massive star of the Western series Cheyenne, appears midway through as Judy’s college sweetheart, Bert Power. In one of the film’s best sight gags, the six-foot-six Walker extricates himself from a sports car that redefines compact.

  Paul Lynde is a hoot as Mr. Akins, the funeral director at Green Hills Mortuary (“Truly a Home Away from Home”). In their scenes together, Rock Hudson and Paul Lynde embody the flip sides of the homosexual male circa 1964. Hudson, the straightest acting gay man in the history of cinema, stands in sharp contrast to Lynde, the effeminate cream puff. In essence, both have their own drag show going on—Hudson as uber-butch Apollo, Lynde as snappy swish. Straight clone or sexless pansy. Take your pick, boys.

  If Pillow Talk had introduced audiences to one of the great screen teams while hinting at even better things to come, Lover Come Back more than made good on that promise. Alas, Send Me No Flowers single-handedly broke the spell. While intermittently amusing, it loses steam long before the end credits appear. “For Rock Hudson and Doris Day, the third time is no charm,” wrote the critic for Cosmopolitan. “Send Me No Flowers is very warmed over yesterday’s mashed potatoes . . . the glamorous, highly paid box office bombshells can’t even fall back on their much-vaunted physical charms in this film. He looks bored and flabby, and she has a genuine right to shoot her hairdresser and cameraman.”

  The reviews may not have been glowing, and while Rock made no bones about what he considered to be a distasteful comedy about death, this didn’t seem to matter a wit to the ticket-buying public, who turned Send Me No Flowers into an even bigger hit than Lover Come Back.

  AS COME SEPTEMBER had raked in millions for Universal, the studio wasted no time in reteaming Rock and Gina Lollobrigida in Strange Bedfellows, a comedy written, produced, and directed by Melvin Frank. With The Reformer and the Redhead and The Facts of Life to their credit, Frank and writing partner Norman Panama cornered the market writing lightweight, battle-of-the-sexes comedies featuring Hollywood’s top stars.

  Rock was cast as Carter Harrison, an American sales manager for the British division of Inter-Allied Petroleum Products. On his first day in London, Harrison is accidentally assaulted by Toni Vincente (Lollobrigida), part-time painter and full-time protestor. The couple impulsively marries but soon discovers that they are largely incompatible. They agree to go their separate ways and after a seven-year estrangement, they finally decide to divorce.

  When Carter and Toni reunite in their divorce lawyer’s office, sparks are rekindled and this leads to a passionate reconciliation. The afterglow quickly fades, and the couple is suddenly reminded that their marriage fell apart because they “agreed on nothing—politics, polygamy, peanut butter, Pushkin—you name it.” Besides, Toni has a new man and fellow activist in her life, the free-thinking bohemian Harry Jones (Edward Judd). Both are charter members of the International Society for Freedom of Artistic Expression.

  Strange Bedfellows is the kind of innocuous, old-fashioned romp in which characters still initiate a chase by hollering, “Follow that cab!” While it’s the wispiest kind of fluff, the picture does offer a few fleeting compensations. In a sequence that reportedly cost $85,000, Lollobrigida paraded through Soho Square as Lady Godiva. Attempting to stop the exhibitionistic spectacle, Rock incites a riot. “Yankee Doodle Flips His Noodle,” reads the resulting headline.

  In another jaw-dropping scene (at least for 1965), Rock’s character and Harry Jones wind up in bed together. Although played for laughs, actor Edward Judd is as masculine as Hudson is. When Rock and prissy Tony Randall end up in bed together in Send Me No Flowers, it’s sitcom cute. When Hudson and another he-man hit the sheets, one wonders how they ever sneaked the sequence past the eagle-eyed Production Code.

  Character actor Joseph Sirola, who was cast as the expressionist sculptor Petracini, recalls that on his first day of shooting, there was a gift basket and several bottles of vodka waiting for him in his dressing room.

  “There was a note attached,” remembers Sirola. “It said, ‘Welcome aboard! What a pleasure to be working with a Broadway actor. I hope you will have as much fun as I know I will. Best Regards, Rock.’ . . . When we shot our first scene together, Rock said to me, ‘Joe, listen, when you turn toward me, I’m blocking your light. So, step out so that you get the full light on you during your close-up.’ Can you imagine? I mean, most stars like the fact that you’ve been left in the dark. The man was a class act in every way.”

  In sharp contrast, Sirola found that the film’s leading lady lived up to her reputation as a temperamental beauty. When questioned by reporters about Lollobrigida’s rumored peevishness, Hudson did his best to defend her: “We did two films . . . the second one was made away from her home in a foreign country. She speaks English quite w
ell but she doesn’t have a mastery . . . So, it was not as pleasant. She was uncomfortable here. But Come September was fun.”

  Almost unanimously, the critics concurred. Things weren’t quite as wonderful the second time around. The New York Times dismissed Strange Bedfellows as a “generally labored and witless film . . . Gina Lollobrigida can’t do much without a script. Mr. Hudson is likewise disadvantaged, but he seems to need direction more than lines. It’s not easy to stand up there bravely and take pizzas, paint, and hot air in the face.”

  * * *

  In 1964, Rock was introduced to Tom Clark, the man who would prove to be the most significant of all of his significant others. Within a few short years, Clark would become the most important individual in Hudson’s life—personally and professionally. When the two first met, however, it didn’t feel like an especially momentous occasion. As Clark later reported: “Rock Hudson . . . did not send icy fingers up and down my spine.”

  While there are bluer, bawdier accounts of how Rock and Tom first connected, the official version is a model of Ladies’ Home Journal respectability. Publicist Pat Fitzgerald needed a fourth for bridge, so she called Clark. Midway through the game, Rock appeared unexpectedly. He had remained close to Fitzgerald and her partner, Lynn Bowers, since their sailing days in Newport Beach.

  At first glance, the thirty-four-year-old Oklahoma native seemed the least likely candidate to fill the coveted position of Rock Hudson’s longtime companion. Clark—though tall and pleasant-looking—was far from Rock’s favorite flavor of blond Adonis. If Hudson’s previous lovers had been rugged, outdoorsy types, Clark’s natural habitat seemed to be the recreation deck of the Queen Elizabeth II, where he could be found sipping chilled martinis.