by Mark Griffin
In a fascinating post-surgery sequence, the banker’s layers of bandages are removed and he sheds a tear as he gazes at his transformed reflection. Suddenly, it’s Rock Hudson’s face in the mirror—and in more ways than one. Those who worked on Seconds remembered that Rock was intensely focused on what he referred to as “the big reveal” sequence. Had there been an eerily similar moment like this when Roy Fitzgerald, a gay truck driver with an inferiority complex, was remodeled into Rock Hudson?
The carefully constructed star image that he and his keepers had created seemed to live inside of him, part alter ego, part parasite. Jokingly, he had even given it a name: Charlie Movie Star. The similarities between character and actor weren’t lost on Frankenheimer: “If you look at it, he was kind of an invented personality, wasn’t he? And he identified with this guy. If you destroy your past, then you’re nothing. You can’t function. And to become Rock Hudson, he had to destroy a great deal of his past.”
In a party sequence in the latter half of the film, Tony gets drunk and becomes sloppy and unguarded. Rather than waiting around for Hudson to get inspired, Frankenheimer encouraged his star to get bombed. “I came up with the idea but Rock endorsed it,” Frankenheimer revealed. As Tony belts back one after another, bits and pieces of his real identity begin to slip out. When he starts to reveal too much about his former life, other “reborns” in attendance close in and subdue him; the authentic self must never resurface. For in Seconds, as in Hollywood, if reality rears its ugly head, the game is over.
“Something happened to Rock there and it was a breakdown,” says costar Salome Jens. “[Frankenheimer] got him drunk and he went into this crying jag that was very serious and it scared us all because we really didn’t know what was going on. I was told at the end of the day that we would have to re-shoot that scene because none of it was usable . . . I didn’t believe it when people told me he was gay . . . I’m sure that had to be very difficult for him because it was living some lie. The only thing we can’t handle in life is a lie and it was there.”
Playing this sci-fi variation on his own story, Hudson is more authentic than he has ever been on-screen. There are stretches with minimal dialogue where he is called upon to convey a wide range of emotions while suggesting the psychological entrapment of the character’s fragmented self. In a scene in which the mysterious Nora Marcus (Salome Jens, haunting in the role) reads Tony’s tea leaves, Frankenheimer’s camera lingers on his star’s intense, hawklike expression. Actor and character are so aligned that the dividing line between the two is effectively blurred. As Tony reflects on abandoning his former life forever, there suddenly seem to be real thoughts—complicated and uncomfortable—going on behind Hudson’s eyes.
In service to his character, Rock bravely attempts to unlock a more vulnerable side of himself. Considering that several of his confidants—including Mark Miller and George Nader—had advised him not to accept the role, it’s all the more courageous that Rock decided to take the project on.
For Seconds, Frankenheimer wisely surrounded Hudson with a battalion of New York–trained actors, several of whom had been victims of the blacklist. The authenticity of their acting grounds the movie while infusing it with an irresistible air of black comedy. As a result, scenes are both horrifying and savagely funny at the same time. “Assuming that cost is not a decisive factor, death has many advantages,” The Company’s lawyer, Mr. Ruby, announces to a stunned Arthur Hamilton. As this model of diabolical efficiency, Jeff Corey has a field day, graphically describing “the careful obliteration of identifiable parts of the cadaver,” while devouring a succulent chicken dinner.
As the President of The Company, Will Geer oozes all of the wholesome, mild-mannered charm of a country doctor, even as he shamelessly manipulates his client into abandoning his loved ones forever. “Isn’t it easier to go forward when you know you can’t go back?” Geer asks, as he nudges The Company’s next victim to sign on the dotted line.
When Tony first meets Nora, she is outfitted in a dark hood and brooding on the beach, a refugee from Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal. “Frankenheimer told me I was ‘The Essence of Doom,’” Jens says. Rock’s previous high-gloss pairings with Doris Day, Elizabeth Taylor, and Jane Wyman—as dreamy as they may have been—always seemed studio manufactured. In Seconds, Hudson’s chemistry with Jens feels natural and genuinely intimate. Freed from his soundstage constraints, a new Rock Hudson emerges in Seconds and for once, he’s breathing plenty of fresh air.
Frankenheimer wanted to include a scene in Seconds in which the character of Tony Wilson would finally shed any of the lingering inhibitions that he had inherited from his previous incarnation as Arthur Hamilton. He shot a sequence in which Tony joins dozens of naked revelers who are stomping grapes together while crammed into an overcrowded vat. “That was a ritual that I knew about that took place in Santa Barbara every year,” says screenwriter Lewis John Carlino. “A lot of the people in that scene actually participated in that kind of wild bacchanal every year during the grape harvest.”
The proceedings were so wild that Paramount insisted that Frankenheimer delete most of the grape-stomping sequence for the domestic release of the film. In 1966, the idea of a major Hollywood star like Rock Hudson observing a naked bacchanal—let alone having him strip down and join in—was totally unheard of—at least in the movies. Those present remember that Rock had been nervous about shooting a scene that most of his contemporaries would have flatly refused to appear in.
There was another aspect of the role that made Rock uncomfortable. “He had a very difficult time with one scene where they strapped him on a gurney,” remembers Lewis John Carlino. “He became very agitated and Frankenheimer wouldn’t allow them to release Rock. So, what you see in that scene is his real panic of being restrained and not being free to move as he wanted to. That’s real stuff there. He was genuinely terrified.”
In May of 1966, Seconds was screened as the official U.S. entry at the Cannes Film Festival. Rock Hudson’s excursion into existentialism seemed like a natural for a largely European audience, but Lewis John Carlino remembers that Frankenheimer’s thriller elicited a less-than-reverent reaction. “It was actually booed by the French audience,” says Carlino. “There were whistles and cat calls. It was a great shock for all of us because we thought that we had something that the French would really love.” When the audience was alerted to the fact that “Monsieur Rock Hudson” was in the house, the jeers quickly turned into a rapturous ovation.
Paramount’s publicity campaign spoke volumes about how confused the studio was about promoting a film that wasn’t easily categorized. Was it a sci-fi opus? A suspense pic? Could the romantic angle somehow be exploited? Finally, Paramount decided to pitch Frankenheimer’s film as a conventional thriller.
In the end, nothing worked. Seconds grossed only $1.75 million domestically, considered an outright disaster by Rock Hudson standards (by comparison, Send Me No Flowers, released two years earlier, had raked in a then impressive $9 million). Even if the money wasn’t there, Rock assumed that he could console himself with the reviews.
However, during its initial release, Seconds seemed to alternately confound and disturb critics. Time’s reviewer wrote, “Director John Frankenheimer and veteran photographer James Wong Howe manage to give the most implausible doings a look of credible horror. Once Rock appears though, the spell is shattered, and through no fault of his own. Instead of honestly exploring the ordeal of assuming a second identity, the script subsides for nearly an hour into conventional Hollywood fantasy.”
Seconds would finally find its audience—the second time around. In honor of its thirtieth anniversary, Seconds was back in theatres, with its once-controversial grape-stomping sequence reinstated. The following year, the movie was finally released to the home-video market and its cult reputation continued to grow. Rock’s performance was now being hailed as the finest of his career.
“The movie went from failure to classic without ever bei
ng a success,” Frankenheimer would say three decades after the film’s initial release. “When it first came out, those who wanted to see a Rock Hudson picture, didn’t want to see Rock Hudson in this part. And those who wanted to see this kind of movie, didn’t want to see Rock Hudson in it. As a result, that leaves an audience of five or six. This was literally a movie where you could call up the theatre owner and say, ‘What time does Seconds go on?’ and the guy would say, ‘What time can you get here?’ It was a terrible failure when it came out and now it’s considered this great cult picture.”
Mirroring the poignant identity crisis being explored in Seconds was the fact that Hudson was being forced to come to terms with his own box office mortality. After a long and successful reign as the king of Hollywood, there were undeniable signs that he would soon have to abdicate. Audiences had avoided several of his recent pictures; his Oscar nomination for Giant was a decade old. For years now, Rock had felt suffocated by his own screen image. Though when he tried to move in a new direction—as with Seconds—his fan base resisted.
While he was still undeniably photogenic and always exuded his own special brand of star charisma, there were newer, younger actors poised to take his place—Redford, Newman, Beatty. As well as a whole new breed of edgy, rebellious, countercultural icons—Nicholson, Hoffman, De Niro—who broke the typical movie star mold. One didn’t have to look like Rock Hudson to make it in Hollywood anymore. In fact, it probably worked in your favor if you didn’t.
On September 6, 1966, Variety announced that Rock Hudson and Henry Willson had dissolved their eighteen-year professional association. Some say that it was Tom Clark who engineered the long overdue split, while others credit another member of Hudson’s team with steering a new course.
“When Dale Olson took over as Rock’s publicist, he told him the first thing he had to do was lose Henry Willson,” says film critic Kevin Thomas, a close friend of Olson’s. “Dale was incredibly firm about it because he felt that Henry Willson had become too big of a liability to him.”
Over the years, Hudson had become increasingly resentful of Henry taking full credit for “creating” Rock Hudson—as though he were a box of cornflakes. The most egregious example of this being a Look magazine cover story. After interviewing Willson at length, writer Eleanor Harris concluded, “Rock Hudson is completely an invention of his agent. His name, his voice, his personality were all made up for him.” Hudson fumed: “I don’t think anybody has made me do something I didn’t have what it took to do on my own. I must have had the drive, the desire, the brains, the guts—even if they were buried.”
When the axe fell, Willson did not take the news lightly. After being dismissed by his most important client and prized “creation,” the agent reportedly spewed a colorful stream of obscenities and threatened to expose Rock to the tabloids. And that wasn’t even the worst of the threats. As Lee Garlington recalls, “Rock was complaining about Henry Willson one time and I said to him, ‘Why don’t you fire the sonofabitch?’ And he said, ‘I can’t fire him because he threatened to have one of his boys throw acid in my face if I ever fired him, and I knew he would do it.’”
Rock would be spared the disfiguring makeover, even after a full-page ad appeared in The Hollywood Reporter announcing that John Foreman, cofounder of Creative Management Agency was assuming worldwide representation of Rock Hudson. When Foreman later segued into producing, Hudson would be represented by Flo Allen, a tennis pro turned talent agent. Striking-looking and as glamorous as the clients she represented, Allen was often photographed on Rock’s arm. At one point, Movie Mirror reported that Allen was an example of how “Rock’s choice of women is almost fantastically selective.”
AFTER THE BOLD risk-taking of Seconds, it was right back to the kind of derring-do and narrow escapes that most Rock Hudson fans had come to expect. In Tobruk, Hudson’s character is the same brand of strong-jawed commander he had played countless times before. On this crusade, Rock’s stalwart hero would have to contend with hidden minefields, exploding fuel bunkers, and the obligatory web of Nazi spies. One of the film’s early titles, Hot Eye of Hell, gives one a sense of the kind of hard-hitting, suspense-packed thriller that actor-turned-screenwriter Leo Gordon had in mind.
Set in North Africa during World War II, Tobruk was based (albeit very loosely) on an actual 1942 mission known as “Operation Agreement.” A commando squadron comprised of German Jews masquerading as Nazis and British soldiers pretending to be prisoners of war set out for the port city of Tobruk with the intention of destroying the fuel supply of “The Desert Fox,” Field Marshal Erwin Rommel.
While the real-life mission was a miserable failure, the cinematic rendition ended in a blaze of glory, complete with an array of Oscar-nominated special effects. In the film, the convoy is led by Canadian Major Donald Craig (Hudson), German-Jewish Captain Kurt Bergman (George Peppard), and British Colonel John Harker (Nigel Green). Considering that Tobruk was a period piece which involved several remote locations, a large international cast, and the services of no less than fifty-eight stunt men, the film’s $6 million price tag was one of the heftiest in Universal’s history. The movie would prove to be a daunting challenge for director Arthur Hiller, who would later specialize in more intimately scaled, character-driven dramas like Love Story and The Hospital.
Like George Stevens and Douglas Sirk before him, director Hiller found Hudson not only completely cooperative but totally responsive. “Rock was just a pleasure to direct,” Hiller says. “When the picture started, we were talking about his character—the major. I pointed out that to most people, Rock was ‘Mr. Handsome,’ and because of that dreamboat image, they probably thought of him as very soft. In our picture, he had to show great strength. And he did. He came through with the macho stuff and it was very believable. But I also said to him, ‘Even when you’re playing the strong side of the major, don’t lose the caring.’ And he didn’t. Everything I asked for in terms of his performance was there. In fact, he often improved on whatever I had suggested. All of this made me realize that as an actor, Rock was capable of far more. I sensed that there was so much going on beneath the surface that never got used.”
When Tobruk was released, the critics treated Hudson as an afterthought. Howard Thompson of the New York Times felt that George Peppard turned in his “best performance to date,” while he found “the churning, cacophonous finale, excellently directed by Arthur Hiller, the best and least forgettable thing about the movie.” As for the leading man, Thompson managed only a shrug: “Mr. Hudson does well enough in a limber but fairly standard role.”
Tobruk would prove to be Rock Hudson’s swan song as a Universal contract player. It seemed like the perfect time to make the break and leave home. Even if some of his recent films for Universal had earned big money, his most satisfying work experience, in Seconds, had happened at another studio. Uninspired by the majority of scripts that were coming his way, Rock decided it was best to retreat. “I had to make a decision, as expensive as it was, to do nothing,” Hudson told the press. “The last four or five films I made were mediocre. I needed time to reevaluate myself.”
* * *
One day, twenty-three-year-old Jack Coates’s red Corvette broke down in front of The Castle. It was Bick Benedict to the rescue as Rock came strolling out to lend a hand. Suddenly faced with the prospect of having to carry on a conversation with his favorite film star, Jack got scared, slammed the hood shut, got back in his car, and sped off. Despite this, Rock couldn’t get the young man out of his mind. There was just something extraordinary about him. Starting with the obvious.
“Jack was very good-looking,” says his younger sister Cathy Hamblin. “He had been a male model for a high-end men’s store in Phoenix called Desert Squire. That’s about the time my parents started figuring out he was maybe a little bit different but it wasn’t a deal breaker for them. He moved to California kind of early on. He had hooked up with a rich Beverly Hills real estate developer and they were living to
gether. But this wealthy guy was like, ‘You will have a job.’ So, Jack went to work at Standard Oil in his crisp little white uniform. One day, Rock Hudson pulled in and that was it . . . it was a full-service station, so to speak. The next thing I know, my brother was going out with him.”
Though Hudson and Coates were immediately attracted to each other, there were a number of obstacles standing in their way. Jack had been living with the developer for a number of years and he was comfortable. Besides, friends had warned him that Rock would treat him as a sexual plaything and he’d be discarded once the initial thrill was over. And, then, Coates was steadfastly determined to obtain his college degree. At the time he met Rock, Jack was enrolled at UCLA and taking classes in anthropology. Not even a movie star was going to deter him from graduating.
A pattern was quickly established. Rock would pursue. Jack would evade. Rock would pursue. Jack would succumb. Though only temporarily. And on it went. Rock had confided to his closest friends that he thought Jack was really “the one.” Finally, one afternoon over mint juleps, Rock won Jack over. Convinced that Hudson’s feelings for him were genuine, Coates agreed to move into The Castle, stuffed koala in tow.
From the beginning, there was a playful, slapstick quality to Hudson’s relationship with Coates. If some of Rock’s other romances had been too intense or fraught with conflicts, this one was far more Laurel and Hardy. They’d splash around in the pool with Nick the Dumb or one of Hudson’s six other dogs. “Going out” meant root beer floats at Will Wright’s or hot dogs at Pink’s. Both excelled at what a mutual friend described as “conversational Scrabble”—highly competitive word games.
