by Mark Griffin
“Tom had this very ‘Thurston Howell the Third’ type personality,” says friend Marty Flaherty. “Very grandiose. He would correct my speech, he would correct how I sat. Like if I was sitting with my legs too wide open . . . I remember Tom would say things like, ‘Honestly, Martin, what are we going to do with you?’ Then he would turn to Rock and say, ‘We’ve really got to primp this bitch.’”
Equipped with a take-charge personality and take-no-prisoners directness, Clark wasn’t known for holding his tongue, but in those rare instances when he did, he still managed to get his point across. “Uncle Tom’s philosophy was . . . there’s really nothing you can’t say to someone, it’s all in the way you say it,” says niece Cindy Clark. “Once he said to me, ‘Cindy, you must take after the Green’s side of the family with your body structure.’ That was his way of saying I was eating too much.”
Tom’s nephew, Ray Clark, remembers his uncle as “very stern and in a strange way, cruel with his words. He would hold nothing back to correct you.” Though Ray also says that his uncle was “the backbone of the Clark family. I always felt that he was somewhat embarrassed by us, but I also knew that he loved us . . . He was the guy who got things done and kept track of everything. That’s the way he was with us and after they got together, that’s the way he was with Rock.”
As Hudson and Clark got to know each other, they realized they had far more in common than either might have expected. Both had grown up during the Depression. Both had been in the service, though Clark’s career in the Air Force was abruptly cut short when his superiors discovered that he was gay. Explicit letters that Clark had received from fellow officers and sergeants were confiscated and he was subjected to a humiliating psychiatric evaluation while stationed at Ellington Air Force Base.* After agreeing to an undesirable discharge, Clark was forced out of the Air Force in 1953. At one point, Clark, like Hudson, had caved to societal pressures and married.
More than anything else, Hudson and Clark shared an all-encompassing obsession with show business. Unlike Rock, Tom actually enjoyed some early success as an amateur thespian, winning a Maskers Award for his role in his senior class play. “He could have gone to the top,” said Maybelle Conger, Clark’s high school drama coach. However, once he was enrolled at the University of Oklahoma, Clark would shift his attention to literary pursuits, determining that “One day, I would write a novel that would sweep the world off its feet . . . the Great International Novel, never mind just American.”
Like Hudson, Clark also had a penchant for self-invention. In his memoir, he claims that he graduated from the University of Oklahoma. In reality, he flunked out after a couple of years. Though after this, Clark did manage to land a writing job. But from the moment he started working as a rookie in the public relations department of the Union Oil Company in Houston, he felt trapped. Having spent the day waxing rhapsodic about the octane content of gasoline, the last thing Clark wanted to do was go home and pound out a novel. Bored and frustrated, Tom was relieved when his job was transferred to the West Coast. Hollywood—which had once seemed as unreachable as Oz—was now right in his own backyard.
Realizing that he wasn’t destined for stardom, Clark settled for the next best thing. After swapping Union Oil for MGM, Tom diligently worked his way up from office boy to senior publicist. Whether he was escorting a legend like Greer Garson to a preview of The Singing Nun or ballyhooing a new discovery like Chad Everett, Clark was exactly where he wanted to be—among the beautiful people. “Stars—he loved the stars,” recalled Clark’s fellow publicist, Matthew West.
And now, on a rare evening off, Tom found himself shuffling the deck for the biggest star of them all—Rock Hudson. Everybody made a fuss over Rock. Clark would distinguish himself by playing it cool. As Tom knew, showing a star that you weren’t the slightest bit interested in them was sometimes the surest way to get their attention. And despite his simulated disinterest, Clark was interested in Hudson—very interested.
Tom had heard all about Rock’s steady diet of blond, blue-eyed stunners and how Hudson tended to devour them like potato chips. Gorgeous boys were a dime a dozen in L.A. and they didn’t bother Tom as much as the fact that Hudson occasionally slipped and made reference to “Lee,” who sounded neither like a quick fling nor a colleague in the industry. Was Rock living with someone? And then there was Clark’s own domestic situation to consider—he also had a partner, a banking executive by the name of Pete DePalma.*
For the moment, Hudson was nothing more than Clark’s bridge partner. Though if anyone knew how to turn a handshake into a contractual commitment, it was Tom. The fine print could all be worked out in time. Although Rock Hudson didn’t know it yet, he had met his match in Tom Clark.
* * *
After hitting the sheets with virtually the entire cast of Strange Bedfellows, Rock found himself right back in bed for yet another Universal sex comedy scripted by Stanley Shapiro. At this point, the studio’s production team had the Pillow Talk formula down pat: Cast Hudson as an insatiable ladykiller who tangles with the modern-day equivalent of a vestal virgin. Make his prey undeniably attractive though frigid (the sort of uptight career woman who’s been spending too much time in the boardroom and not enough in the bedroom). Then, in an effort to seduce the recalcitrant young lady, have an unquestionably virile Rock masquerade as a sexually defective nebbish in immediate need of fixing. Add a finicky Tony Randall type to the mix as the virgin’s totally unsuitable suitor. Liberally sprinkle with one-liners and sight gags and then sit back and start tallying up the box office receipts.
In A Very Special Favor, Leslie Caron would play the kind of character Doris Day had practically patented. Caron’s Dr. Lauren Boullard is a hypercritical psychotherapist whose mother-dominated, apron-wearing fiancé is a former hairdresser named Arnold Plum (Dick Shawn, assuming the Tony Randall role). Boullard’s attorney father, Michel (Charles Boyer) begs his playboy pal Paul Chadwick (Hudson) to “save” his daughter from her forthcoming marriage to her effeminate intended. “Try the Red Cross . . . she sounds like a disaster area” is Chadwick’s reply.
Eventually, Chadwick relents and becomes Caron’s most demanding client. Describing himself as a “love toy,” Chadwick reveals that he is wholly irresistible to sex-crazed women. It’s to the point where he must barricade himself inside his apartment. “Hiding in closets isn’t going to cure you,” the good doctor tells Chadwick. “Your anxieties about women are reaching the psychotic stage.” Within days, Chadwick has transitioned from his analyst’s couch to her penthouse.
Playing to Lauren’s savior complex, Chadwick attempts to reel her in by posing as a homosexual. Dr. Boullard will now have to “save” her patient from a motel rendezvous with his “boyfriend,” who is really a female switchboard operator in drag.
What could Rock have possibly thought about these scenes while he was shooting them? The conflicts that he grappled with daily and the deadening silence he had to endure in order to maintain his position as Hollywood’s most popular leading man were, in a sense, being played for laughs in A Very Special Favor. As inconceivable as it seems, Hudson’s personal life had now been cannibalized by his own studio; his torment over his predicament had become the ultimate Hollywood in-joke. As Vito Russo noted in The Celluloid Closet, his landmark study of gays in movies: “[Rock’s] masculinity is on trial throughout the film, its authenticity under constant scrutiny.”
Throughout production, leading lady Leslie Caron was all too aware of Hudson’s dilemma: “He offered a totally smooth surface, so that his sexual inclination couldn’t be detected,” Caron says. “The fact that he chain-smoked was indicative of the incredible stress caused by this dissimulation . . . he rubbed his thumbnails constantly, so that they were completely deformed, as if smashed by a hammer. He felt embarrassed, as if these nails could reveal his true leanings. He was grateful when I suggested that he glue on false ones for filming.”
Before A Very Special Favor was released in the summer of 196
5, Hudson asked director Michael Gordon to delete some of the racier sequences. This included one scene in which his swinging bachelor phones two girls simultaneously, promising both that he’ll be over later. These antics prompt Charles Boyer’s character to remark, “Even Napoleon wouldn’t have attempted two invasions at once . . . you must have some French blood in you.” The scene stayed and Rock wasn’t happy. “What bothers me is that kids will see this movie,” Hudson told the New York Daily News. “The idea of 11 and 12-year-olds sitting through two hours of bedroom talk doesn’t appeal to me.”
According to the New York Times, Rock had nothing to worry about: “It is hard to imagine who else could make a movie about sin and seduction that is as incredibly sexless and apple-pie moral as A Very Special Favor,” wrote Richard F. Shepard in his mixed review. “A most contrived plot is not for children but is rather mild for grown-ups. As a sexy frolic, this one’s about as debauched as an old Andy Hardy episode.”
Even though A Very Special Favor opened strong and garnered its share of encouraging reviews, the picture left a sour aftertaste for its star: “The things I had to do to Leslie Caron were cruel. They weren’t funny.” Thankfully, Hudson’s next picture offered a welcome change of pace from his string of sex comedies.
Thanks largely to the tremendous success of its 1964 Audrey Hepburn–Cary Grant caper film, Charade, Universal would release a spate of stylish 1960s thrillers that featured sinister goings-on, narrow escapes, and one word titles: Mirage, Gambit, Arabesque, Blindfold. The last of these being reserved for Rock Hudson, whom the studio decided, would look especially debonair in a spy spoof. As with the other Universal suspense films it closely resembled, Blindfold was Hitchcock Lite in tone. And like its predecessors, Blindfold featured an especially convoluted plot.
Dr. Bartholomew Snow, a Manhattan-based psychologist, is recruited by the CIA to assist in a top-secret military operation. While blindfolded, Snow is taken to “Base X,” where he is asked to counsel neurotic scientist Arthur Vincenti (Alejandro Rey), keeper of state secrets. After discovering that his contacts are actually enemy agents, Snow sets out to rescue Vincenti. While fending off counterintelligence operatives and slinking through alligator-infested swamps, Snow is aided by Vincenti’s sister, a “ballet dancer” employed at Le Go Go.
Tunisian beauty Claudia Cardinale was cast as Rock’s fiery love interest, Vicki Vincenti. Before Blindfold, Cardinale had shared scenes with several Hollywood stars appearing in European productions, including Burt Lancaster, John Wayne, and David Niven. While Cardinale enjoyed appearing alongside all of them, Rock Hudson would emerge as her favorite leading man.
“From the first day I met him, I knew we were going to be great friends,” Cardinale says. “For me, Rock was just a fantastic man. Very sweet. Very intelligent. I did two movies with him and even when we weren’t working, we were always together. When we did Blindfold, I had a house in California and he was always there. We’d have lunch or dinner together. Just the two of us. Talking and laughing. He really became one of my best friends . . . in so many ways, this was a man to treasure.”
As Blindfold bounced between New York and central Florida, Hudson and Cardinale found plenty of time to bond during lengthy location shoots. While filming in Ocala’s swamp region, Rock’s leading lady attempted to get chummy with another of her costars—a thirteen-foot alligator that weighed over a thousand pounds. “I’m a bit crazy, huh? We were shooting the scene in the river and they were getting this big caiman ready to follow us. I bent down to kiss him and Rock went wild. He was really afraid and he pulled me aside and said, ‘Claudia, are you out of your mind . . . what the hell are you doing?’ But I like danger. When I made Circus World, I kissed all of the lions.”
Like Vera-Ellen and Marilyn Maxwell before her, Cardinale would be touted as a potential “Mrs. Rock Hudson.” Almost from the very moment they were introduced, the press started counting the days until a wedding date was set. Cardinale acknowledges that her relationship with Hudson was strictly platonic, though in the name of keeping up appearances and furthering Rock’s career, she obediently assumed the role of La Beard.
“Of course, he was gay and during that period in America, that was just poison,” Cardinale says. “We were always together as friends anyway, so we would just make believe that we were involved. I did it for him, to keep him going, because at that time, for a movie star to be gay, it was this really big scandal. Ridiculous. Today, it’s a different world but at that time, it was a terrible thing for him to have to deal with. I know it really weighed on him.”
As usual, none of the strain showed on-screen. As a sort of second cousin to Cary Grant’s Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest, Rock’s Bartholomew Snow is thoroughly engaging. While Hudson handles the lightning fast changes from drama to comedy with great dexterity, several critics, like Robert Alden of the New York Times, were thrown by Blindfold’s frequent mood swings: “The team who fashioned this nominally suspenseful caper was technically knowledgeable but not quite certain whether it wanted to be mysterious or funny. Unfortunately, it never quite succeeds either way.”
Chapter 14
Seconds
“He identified with this guy,” director John Frankenheimer said of Rock’s reconstructed character in Seconds (1966). Here, Richard Anderson, Will Geer, and Hudson prepare for the big reveal.
(Photo courtesy of Photofest)
We just don’t know what to do with it,” Paramount’s publicity chief, Bob Goodfried, would say of Seconds. “It’s a very interesting movie but the Rock Hudson in this movie isn’t the Rock Hudson the public is used to seeing, or wants to see.”
Following The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964), Seconds was the third and final installment in director John Frankenheimer’s so called “paranoia trilogy,” a genuinely unsettling trio of films that were released during a period when political assassinations and government cover-ups seemed to be occurring with alarming frequency.
Seconds started life as a novel by David Ely, whose work has been described as unusually prescient. “I would hesitate to characterize Seconds in terms of how our culture has proceeded in the last fifty years,” Ely says. “Although I’ve written a lot of things as fiction that unfortunately, turned out to be true in political and social life.” Ely’s gripping narrative concerns a mysterious organization known only as The Company, which provides a unique service to graying, discontented clients eager to shed the skins of their unfulfilling lives: a stage-managed death, followed by a complete physical overhaul. Arthur Hamilton, a paunchy, conservative banker trapped in a soul-deadening existence in Scarsdale, signs on with The Company and is reborn as Antiochus—or Tony—Wilson, a playboy painter with a luxurious studio and a free-spirited mistress in Malibu.
With its highly original premise, Seconds caught Frankenheimer’s eye. “He was fascinated by the book,” recalled Evans Frankenheimer, the director’s wife. “The story said that no matter what you do, you can’t just go and be another person. You can’t escape and start all over again.” At the height of his Seconds obsession, Frankenheimer attended the theatre one evening in 1963. Before the performance was over, he knew that he had found a gifted writer capable of adapting David Ely’s acclaimed novel into a film.
As screenwriter Lewis John Carlino recalls, “I had a play off-Broadway with Shelley Winters and Jack Warden, which dealt with identity. It was called Epiphany. Frankenheimer came to see this play, which is about a man who seeks to project his masculinity and control his wife. In a sudden reversal at the end of the play, he symbolically reveals himself as a homosexual. In a sense, I think the subject matter also led to the selection of Rock Hudson for Seconds.”
However, the star of Pillow Talk was hardly anybody’s first choice for such a dark dystopian exercise. Kirk Douglas had optioned the property through his Bryna Productions after Frankenheimer encouraged him to secure the rights. For Douglas, taking on a challenging dual role as a bottled-up banker and his repurp
osed younger self probably seemed like a direct route to his fourth Best Actor Oscar nomination. Though with The Heroes of Telemark and Cast a Giant Shadow waiting in the wings, Douglas’s plate proved to be too full. Paramount Pictures then acquired the rights to Seconds.
As Frankenheimer and producer Edward Lewis originally conceived it, the same actor would be playing both the “before” and “after” versions of the character. Such a dramatic stretch would require the services of a highly skilled virtuoso. Someone like Laurence Olivier.* After Frankenheimer and Lewis flew to London and convinced Olivier that he was the only living actor who could effectively play both sides of the character, Paramount then decided that they needed a more bankable box office star to headline such a risky venture . . . somebody like Rock Hudson.
“Rock’s performance in Seconds is really a credit to John Frankenheimer, who coerced him into taking the role,” says Lewis John Carlino. “It was very dangerous for Rock to try that kind of role because there was such an audience identification with what he was and what he projected. Also, his fans had certain expectations about the kind of movies he usually appeared in.”
Hudson convinced Frankenheimer that using two different performers would result in an even more startling contrast. To play the uptight banker in the first half of the film, Frankenheimer cast actor John Randolph, whose jowly, hangdog appearance is a complete 360 from Hudson’s matinee idol suavity. To make the transition from one actor to another more believable, Hudson’s hair was grayed and he was made up to look haggard and facially disfigured. “We wanted to beat him up as badly as possible, so that he didn’t look too pretty” John Frankenheimer recalled. “To have Rock Hudson look badly at that time in his life was one of the great achievements in cinema, let me tell you.”
