All That Heaven Allows

by Mark Griffin

  The only realm that McKuen hadn’t quite conquered by the early 1970s was Hollywood. Which is where Rock Hudson came in. By joining forces with one of the most recognizable stars in the industry, McKuen would gain entry. And by teaming up with McKuen, Hudson would be delivered to the doorstep of the American teenager, a key segment of the movie-going public that he needed to connect with in order to ensure career survival.

  The first film planned by R & R Productions was Chuck, based on a novel that McKuen had published in 1969 under the pseudonym Carl Sterland. While it was critically savaged (Kirkus Reviews called it a “staggeringly awful confessional”), the story of a middle-aged man who discovers that he has an illegitimate son appealed to Rock. In the novel, father and son bond by getting high and visiting Tijuana brothels together. McKuen and Hudson believed that the protagonist’s unconventional parenting skills would have strong countercultural appeal.

  Since McKuen had never directed before, several of Rock’s intimates feared that he was entrusting his film career to a man who, while phenomenally successful in his own right, seemed to be wading in over his head.

  Tom Clark suggested testing the waters with a smaller-scale project first. Why not start with a record album? So, in March of 1970, Rock found himself recording fourteen Rod McKuen songs at Phillips & Chapel Studios in London.* He warbled his way through “Gone With the Cowboys,” “Happy Birthday to Me,” and “Open the Window and See All the Clowns,” among others. Photographer David Nutter was hired to snap images of Hudson and McKuen at work on their first joint effort.

  “It was such a farce because I think Rod was madly in love with Rock,” Nutter says. “When I went to the first session, it was ridiculous because here’s Rod all dewy-eyed and everything and Rock Hudson couldn’t have cared less. Then this good-looking younger man turned up to meet Rock and they left together. Poor Mr. McKuen wanted to commit suicide. He laid down in front of a 60-piece orchestra with his head in his hands and it was just pathetic. After this went on for a while, I dragged Rod down to the nearest pub and tried to talk him out of committing suicide . . . I mean, even on a good day, Rod was quite a drama queen, so you can imagine what this was like.”

  All too accustomed to having members of both sexes instantly fall for him, Rock seemed oblivious to McKuen’s romantic interest. Hudson was single-mindedly determined to prove that he had what it took to realize his ambitions as a song and dance man. However, once all of the tracks of the recording sessions were mixed, the results proved to be decidedly underwhelming. While his voice was pleasant enough, only occasionally did Rock’s vocals border on thoroughly engaging. This was far from the embarrassing fiasco that some had predicted, though the finished album revealed that Hudson wouldn’t be bumping Tony Bennett off the marquee at Caesar’s Palace anytime soon. Nevertheless, Rock remained optimistic that he’d be as popular on turntables as he’d been in the movies.

  “I’m 45 years old and that’s a little bit late to start a singing career,” Hudson admitted to reporter Toni Holt. “But I’d really rather sing than anything.” Not only was Rod McKuen blinded by love but, apparently, he had gone deaf: “Let me put it this way; a lot of people have sung some of these songs and nobody—nobody—ever sang them better than Rock does.”

  Titled Rock, Gently, Hudson’s album came complete with a “Produced and Directed by Rod McKuen” credit, which seemed to suggest that the LP was a kind of precursor to their forthcoming cinematic collaborations. There was even a poster included that featured thirty-five images of Hollywood’s new troubadour mugging it up in the recording studio. Where Rock’s long-playing debut was concerned, everything was in place. Except a major record label.

  Hudson expected that his album would be widely distributed through Warner Bros. Records, which had carried some of McKuen’s own recordings. Instead, Rock, Gently was released through McKuen’s own Stanyan Records label and available exclusively through mail order. With record stores bypassed and radio airplay forfeited, Rock’s dreams of Billboard glory were dashed.

  A year after Hudson’s album was released, columnist Marilyn Beck reported that “thousands of copies of Rock, Gently are gently gathering dust in McKuen’s warehouse . . . If you’re interested in buying a copy, send a check to Rod’s Stanyan Company. I’m sure he’d be delighted to unload some of the stock.” After their first and only collaboration, Rock and Rod would go their separate ways. R & R Productions was immediately disbanded. Chuck was scrapped. Plans for a second feature film based on McKuen’s bestselling poetry collection, In Someone’s Shadow, were cancelled. As Tom Clark remembered, “Rock was about the angriest I ever saw him.” And Hudson, when questioned about the album, flatly stated, “My first and last—it’s awful.”

  * * *

  Rock Hudson was ready to take on the sexual revolution. After appearing in Darling Lili—otherwise known as one of the most antiquated films of his career—Hudson was newly determined to show how cutting edge he could be. Managing a complete 180 from Lili’s gallant Major Larrabee, Rock would swing into the 1970s by playing the ultimate big bad wolf.

  In Pretty Maids All in a Row, he would play Michael “Tiger” McDrew, Oceanfront High School’s assistant principal, football coach, part-time guidance counselor, and full-time Don Juan. When the neon “Testing” light is illuminated over the door of his constantly occupied office, it’s understood that Tiger is busy scoring more than the latest batch of exams.

  Fully dedicated to the student body—especially if it’s ready, willing, and female—Tiger offers afterschool tutorials to the nubile young maids of the title. How strange, then, that so many of Tiger’s students have a habit of turning up dead, with “So Long, Honey” notes pinned to their posteriors. “To me, he’s a very intriguing character,” Rock would say of Tiger McDrew. “A real schizo behind a Mr. Nice Guy façade.”

  In 1968, MGM announced that it was adapting Francis Pollini’s darkly satirical novel, Pretty Maids All in a Row, for the screen. The black-comedy mystery would be directed by James B. Harris, who had produced Lolita for the studio, thereby proving that he had some experience with risqué projects involving underage eroticism. But by 1970, Harris was out and Roger Vadim was occupying the director’s chair. Pretty Maids would mark the American feature debut for the French director. After Vadim showcased his first wife, Brigitte Bardot, as a voluptuous man teaser in And God Created Woman, he went on to present his third wife Jane Fonda, writhing in orgasmic ecstasy in the “Excessive Machine,” in the sci-fi cult favorite Barbarella.

  Now Vadim was prepared to take on the American teenager. “There is only one way to describe the story,” Vadim told the press. “It is insolent, and I love insolence. But in no way am I making a critique of the American lifestyle or Americans. As a French director, I do not have that right.” But critique he did. In Vadim’s vision of southern California suburbia, everyone is simultaneously obsessed with sex and sporting events. Minutes into the investigation of the bizarre murder of a high school cheerleader, Keenan Wynn’s dim-witted police chief seems infinitely more interested in the gridiron than the crime scene. “How do you think the team’s going to do against Valley High?” he asks a student, with a newly discovered corpse lying only inches away.

  Sexually inexperienced seventeen-year-old Ponce de Leon Harper (John David Carson) is constantly on the verge of an erection and overwhelmed by the steady stream of T and A coming at him before, during, and after class. Whether it’s cold showers or completing the multiplication tables in his head, nothing seems to extinguish Ponce’s eternal flame. Coach McDrew takes the young man under his wing and tutors him in the fine art of chick chasing. As though he’s preparing a halfback for a scrimmage game, Tiger tells his protégé, “An animal body needs animal exercise.”

  Initially, Vadim hoped to cast all-American football pro Joe Namath as the lecherous coach. But MGM was insisting on an A-list actor for marquee insurance. Most established Hollywood stars would not relish playing a sleazeball heavy with next to no
redeeming qualities. But after Seconds, Rock was hungry for an acting challenge that would allow him to break free from the confinement that came with being typecast as a romantic lead.

  “It must be hard to switch from Doris Day to Roger Vadim,” journalist Bob Colacello suggested to Hudson when they chatted for Andy Warhol’s Interview. “That’s the fun of it,” Rock responded. “Ideally, I’d like to do a drama, a comedy, a western, a love story, a musical . . . I’ve tried every way I know to diversify.”

  For Pretty Maids, Vadim would surround Rock with an impressive supporting cast: Angie Dickinson played the sexually frustrated substitute teacher whom Tiger enlists to seduce Ponce (she revs things up by reciting Milton’s Paradise Lost); Roddy McDowall portrayed Oceanfront’s eternally befuddled principal (“I don’t understand this,” McDowall’s character says when he encounters the corpse of a murdered student. “We’ve always kept our academic averages so high.”); and two years before he started cracking cases as Kojak, Telly Savalas was the FBI agent intent on catching a homicidal Tiger by the tail.

  Vadim interviewed dozens of young women in an extensive search for his miniskirted maids. Ultimately, only eight actresses were cast, including Diane Sherry Case, whom Vadim and writer-producer Gene Roddenberry spotted while she was on her way to an interview for an entirely different project.

  “Rock Hudson was very sweet but what was really exciting was Roger Vadim,” says Case. “He was fun to work with and it was kind of a wild set . . . I remember that Vadim and Jane Fonda got divorced around that time and it was probably partly because of that film. He had all these eighteen- to twenty-year-olds coming to their house in Malibu—testing—and some of them were disrobing or close to it. I just remember Fonda walking through at one point and I imagine she was rather disgruntled.”

  Barbara Leigh, who played Tiger’s wife, remembered that the libidinous activity depicted in the film was matched by some of the behind-the-scenes goings-on. “Rock and John David Carson were having a little ‘tete’ at the time,” says Leigh. “Everybody on the set knew. John David was bi and very cute. And during the film, I had a very brief affair with Vadim. It was brief mainly because my boyfriend at the time, Jim Aubrey, was the president of MGM and he was watching me like a hawk. In those days, I was very young and naïve and Vadim intrigued me, as I’m sure he did Bardot and Fonda. I liked Vadim and he had a good sense of humor but romantically, it didn’t work for me. I didn’t like his personal cleanliness habits. ‘Hygiene,’ I think is the word I’m looking for.”

  When studio executives screened Vadim’s rough cut of Pretty Maids All in a Row, it was greeted with stunned silence. MGM, which had produced such family-friendly fare as Lassie Come Home and National Velvet in its fabled heyday, was now faced with the prospect of releasing its first X-rated picture. “Louis B. Mayer would have been rolling in his grave if MGM had released a picture with an X-rating,” says publicist Germaine Szal. “Are you kidding? This was the same studio that had made the Andy Hardy series and all those Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy musicals.”

  To escape the Motion Picture Association of America’s dreaded “X,” Pretty Maids (which would eventually be branded as “one of the most politically incorrect films of all time”) was subjected to a rigorous “reevaluation” process and substantial cuts were made. Tom Clark, for one, felt that this irreparably damaged the film: “The re-cutting ruined it and another great movie was sacrificed on the altar of studio politics and greed.”

  “MGM slashed it,” Rock griped to Playgirl. “They became very moralistic, which was bullshit. They just wanted to make it more commercial. So they filmed a new ending, which gave them an R-rating.” The R-rating was nowhere near as damning as an X, but it was still a first for a Rock Hudson movie. Even with some of the more risqué scenes removed, Pretty Maids managed to work some critics into a lather.

  “Roger Vadim’s first American film should have been incinerated before the print was dry,” wrote Rex Reed in his scathing review. “Mostly it’s just incompetent gibberish with scenes that seem to exist for the sole purpose of introducing a parade of Hollywood Deb Stars with overdeveloped mammaries and underdeveloped craniums.” Kathleen Carroll’s New York Daily News review was headlined “Sleazy, Crude, Lecherous Film,” and it was all downhill from there: “As a sex satire-murder mystery, Vadim’s film fails miserably . . . his vision of a grotesque Southern California is grotesque but lifeless.”

  Though two of the more influential critics seemed to have screened a completely different movie. Roger Greenspun of the New York Times found Hudson “remarkably good as the heavy” and he praised Vadim’s satire as an “honorable work, intelligent where least expected and consistently fun to watch.” In the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas* championed Pretty Maids as “a hilarious and outrageous dark satire of American morality with unflaggingly zesty dialogue . . . In a departure even farther out than Seconds, Rock Hudson . . . turns in one of the best performances of his career.”

  Depending on who you talked to, Pretty Maids All in a Row was either “one of the stupidest movies ever made” (according to Andrew Sarris in the Village Voice) or one of the ten best (per director Quentin Tarantino in Sight & Sound). Despite its defenders, Pretty Maids All in a Row bombed during its initial release, though eventually it would attract a devoted cult following.

  * * *

  You are cordially invited to celebrate the wedding of

  Mr. Rock Hudson and Mr. Jim Nabors

  On Saturday afternoon, June 19, 1971

  As practical jokes go, this one seemed harmless enough. Instead of a routine cocktail party, a gay couple in Huntington Beach* decided to gather their friends together for a far more momentous occasion . . . the wedding of two beloved celebrities, who would be joined in “holy matrimony.” Guests were invited to attend the wedding of Rock Hudson and Jim Nabors, the star of the long-running CBS sitcom Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.

  Whether the hosts could claim some sort of insider knowledge concerning the closeted homosexuality of both stars or whether their prank had been inspired purely by gossip, it is unclear. What is clear is that the nuptials were not at all meant to be taken seriously. The tongue-in-cheek tone of the “ceremony” was evident from the beginning, starting with the most obvious joke. Once Rock Hudson married Gomer Pyle, he would officially be known as “Rock Pyle.” With Truman Capote officiating and Liberace providing “musical accompaniment,” this should have been enough of a tip-off that the wedding was a lark, an irreverent gay fantasia.

  “All of this was started by a bunch of silly-assed faggots and I’m allowed to say that because I am a faggot,” says Hudson’s former partner, Tony Melia. “I don’t think they were being vicious. They were just stupid and not realizing what they were doing. I don’t know if whoever printed the fake invitations sent them to people or if somebody knew somebody who got it to the press but they certainly ran with it.”

  What started as a bit of backyard camp would soon become the stuff of urban legend: Rock Hudson married Jim Nabors. Although Hudson and Nabors were friends and Rock had guest-starred on an episode of The Jim Nabors Hour in 1970, the two were never romantically involved. Besides, same-sex marriage was nowhere near a reality in the United States in the early 1970s.

  In the face of all contrary evidence, the marriage rumors refused to die, spreading like wildfire. In November of 1971, the story landed on the front page of the National Examiner. After claiming that “perversion in Hollywood is more rampant than ever,” the Examiner was quick to assure readers, “But Rock Hudson and Jim Nabors are not among those who indulge.” The article also quoted an unidentified “former girlfriend of Hudson’s,” who vouched for his red-blooded heterosexuality: “He’s rugged, really rugged. Believe me, he is all man. There’s nothing queer about Rock.”

  For two decades, Hudson had played it straight to prevent being exposed by the press. Now the press was insisting that the same Rock Hudson that they knew to be gay was actually . . . straight. And the
grandest irony of all—the public debate over Hudson’s sexuality had been prompted not by one of his actual same-sex relationships but by an imaginary one.

  Even though the Hudson-Nabors wedding was pure fantasy, the rumors surrounding it ended up causing some very real damage: CBS canceled The Jim Nabors Hour in 1971. While it’s been suggested that Nabors’s highly rated program fell victim to the network’s “rural purge,” many believe that the backlash from the gay marriage story doomed the show. Then there was the Rock Hudson version of damage control. “I’ll tell you one thing that makes me sad about this, and that’s that Jim Nabors and I are no longer friends. We can’t be seen together,” Hudson told a reporter in the early 1970s. Though even after the rumors had subsided, Hudson chose not to resume his friendship with Nabors.

  “When Roy was finished with a relationship, and that includes the friendship he had with Jim Nabors, he’d have nothing to do with that person,” says Tony Melia. “That was a pattern with him and that’s the way it went with Jim. And believe me, Jim Nabors is just a great, wonderful guy and he never deserved that. It wasn’t Jim’s fault, after all. But that whole scandal really damaged Roy’s public image because people believed it.”

  Even Rock’s mother felt the full impact of the rumors, says Craig Muckler, producer of the cult hit Microwave Massacre. Growing up, Muckler was a surrogate grandson to Kay Olsen. Craig and his family would spend summers at their cabin in Lake Vermilion in Minnesota. And they could always count on an extended visit from Kay.