by Mark Griffin
“I remember the summer we picked Kay up at the Duluth airport,” Muckler says. “The first thing out of her mouth to my mom was, ‘You probably heard that awful rumor about Rock.’ My mother said, ‘Yeah, we’ve heard that bullshit.’ For some reason, people not only believed that Rock Hudson had married Jim Nabors but they also thought they were honeymooning in our cabin. There were all these gawkers wandering around our cabin day and night. We even had people calling us and asking, ‘Are Rock and Jim there?’ It was a very disconcerting time for Kay. I’m pretty sure that Rock being gay kind of killed her in a way. She always tried to hide that fact from us but it would come out in other ways. Once, Kay and my family and I were having dinner at a café and this very effeminate gay guy walked by our table. He was wearing rouge and eye shadow. I recall Kay saying, ‘Do you mean you’ve even got them up here?’ It’s almost like she went out of her way to say that she disapproved.”
Meanwhile, the real man in Hudson’s life, Jack Coates, had come to the painful decision that it was time to move on. Some friends remember that Coates felt that his own identity had been sacrificed the moment he had assumed the role of “Mrs. Rock Hudson.” Others say that Jack had finally had his fill of all of the machinations and manipulation that were part of daily life at The Castle. “I wish I’d been more sophisticated at chess playing because I couldn’t take the intrigue in that house. It was brutal,” Coates recalled.
Jack was also interested in someone new. Dr. Frederick Whitam was an Arizona State University professor. A sociologist who studied homosexuality from a cross-cultural perspective, Whitam had published a number of books on the subject. Here was an accomplished and esteemed professional who didn’t come with all of the baggage that an internationally famous movie star did.
“I was so mad at Jack for a while,” recalls Coates’s sister, Cathy Hamblin. “It was like Rock was breaking up with me. Jack said, ‘No, he really wants me to be happy. He wants this for me.’ Jack had only the kindest thoughts about their time together . . . so who was I to be upset? But I was.”
Chapter 16
McMillan & Wife
The Generation Gap personified: Rock and Susan Saint James drew huge ratings when they starred as McMillan & Wife.
(Courtesy of Photofest)
From Get Smart to Supermarket Sweep, producer Leonard B. Stern was the man responsible for some of the best dumb fun on television. In the late 1960s, Stern had created a string of fondly remembered though not terribly successful sitcoms (The Hero, He & She, The Governor and J.J.). By the early 1970s, Stern was badly in need of a hit. It finally arrived in the form of a script for a television movie entitled Once Upon a Dead Man. Stern and cowriter Chester Krumholz came up with a story that seemed simultaneously classic and contemporary.
Once Upon a Dead Man read like a modern version of MGM’s Thin Man series, which dated back to the 1930s. In Stern’s updating, Stewart McMillan, a San Francisco–based police commissioner, investigates the disappearance of an ancient Egyptian sarcophagus. McMillan cracks the case with the assistance of his impetuous younger wife, Sally. Their snappy repartee seemed closely patterned on that of Nick and Nora Charles, the martini-swilling sleuths who bantered their way through six Thin Man movies.
It may have been derivative, lighthearted fluff but Once Upon a Dead Man also seemed like the ideal vehicle to help facilitate Rock Hudson’s transition from movie to television star (even if he dismissively referred to the tube as “illustrated radio”). The much-publicized two-hour movie would serve as the pilot for a new NBC series called McMillan & Wife.
“Rock and his agent, Flo Allen, liked the idea of a classy TV series,” says producer Paul Mason. “Leonard Stern had pitched it to them as a stylistic Thin Man type mystery program . . . It would take deep pockets for this kind of series. I liked the idea and took it to Sid Sheinberg, who was president of Universal TV and he suggested that we make one two-hour movie and see what kind of reaction we got from the network. NBC bought it after they saw three days of dailies.”
If Commissioner McMillan was the stalwart center of every show, his free-spirited spouse would be a kind of Lucy Ricardo in bell bottoms—forever attempting to get in on the investigative act. The role required an actress who could convincingly play the upscale sophisticate and the wide-eyed kook. Rock’s first choice to play his television wife was his friend, Stefanie Powers. Hudson believed that Powers had the right kind of flair for the role, but by the early 1970s she was committed to a pilot of her own. Leonard Stern then lobbied for Barbara Feldon, best known as Agent 99 on Get Smart, which Stern had executive produced.
Feldon was a strong contender, but as she was closing in on forty, Universal executives pushed for Hudson to be paired with a younger costar. Future Oscar winners Diane Keaton and Jill Clayburgh were among the finalists that Rock and Leonard Stern met with during a succession of lunches. At the last of these meetings, Rock was introduced to a twenty-five-year-old contract player.
If Hudson was known as the most tight-lipped star in Hollywood, Susan Saint James had been dubbed “Instant Mouth” by one of her directors. She was outspoken, opinionated, and a champion of countless progressive causes. Rock, a die-hard chain-smoker who was in the habit of knocking back several Scotches with his steak dinners, suddenly found himself in the company of a health-conscious vegetarian who made her own clothes and soybean soup.
It was immediately clear that they were the Generation Gap personified, though Rock instinctively knew that their polar-opposite personalities would only enhance their on-screen rapport. As producer Paul Mason remembers it, “We presented Rock with a variety of leading ladies, some of whom he knew quite well, but he picked Susie. It turned out to be a very shrewd choice.” What’s more, Saint James had a sterling track record as a Universal contract player. In 1969, she had won an Emmy Award for her role in NBC’s The Name of the Game.
Once Hudson and Saint James were on board, the producers then hired two experienced character actors to round out the principal cast. Pint-sized comedienne Nancy Walker would play the McMillans’ acerbic, boozy housekeeper, Mildred. John Schuck was Stern’s first and only choice to play Sergeant Charles Enright, Commissioner McMillan’s oafish sidekick.
A few weeks before production launched, Schuck happened to spot the show’s leading man wandering around the streets of San Francisco. “I was in North Beach and I look up and there’s Rock Hudson across the street, looking very movie star,” Schuck says. “That was my first impression of him—This man is a movie star. Tall, broad-shouldered, handsome as all get-out and quite animated. He had a big smile on his face and was obviously enjoying the day . . . When we started working together, I discovered that on a surface level, he was always warm and very available. But you could tell there was only so far you could go and he would shut off or shut down . . . So, he was a good friend but at the same time, very private.”
McMillan & Wife would air on The NBC Mystery Movie in a monthly rotation with two other programs produced by Universal Television: Peter Falk’s Columbo and McCloud, which starred Dennis Weaver. When it aired in September of 1971, Hudson’s pilot earned respectable ratings and largely positive reviews (“a nifty blend of cop meller and intrigue,” said Variety). Betting everything on Rock’s drawing power, NBC executives remained hopeful that McMillan & Wife would become a semi-regular series.
“Our first season, we were not particularly successful,” remembers John Schuck. “We rode into the second season on Peter Falk’s coattails as Columbo. It was really in the second season, I think, that our audience found us and we found our audience, which was great.” Now that he was regularly appearing in millions of living rooms, Rock started receiving fan mail from a younger generation of admirers. Many of them hadn’t been around to witness the ascension of Rock Hudson during the Magnificent Obsession era.
“Television brought Rock back to life. It introduced him to a whole new audience,” says publicist Germaine Szal. “Most of the letters he got were from teenaged girls or lonel
y housewives. But some of it was from young men. They either wanted career advice or to take him to bed or both. In some cases, they would send photos of themselves. When I was sorting through all of this, it occurred to me that Rock had this unique magnetism . . . an ability to appeal to just about everyone. Even though he was pushing fifty . . . He still had it.”
Despite the twenty-one-year age difference between them, Hudson and Saint James proved to be a winning combination on-screen. In fact, many fans felt that Rock hadn’t been as well matched with a costar since teaming with Doris Day a decade earlier.
“There was real chemistry on screen. You can’t fake that,” says costar John Schuck. Off camera, Rock was thrown by his costar’s attempts to inject some originality and spontaneity into scripts that sometimes seemed hackneyed.
“She taxed him,” recalled director Bob Finkel. “She would come to a scene with such enthusiasm and such preproduction work—and this was a shock to Rock because now he had to change what was planned. He would have to go to work . . . Susan tried to bring some creativity to the set and Rock couldn’t deal with it. He just liked to do his little number and go right back to the trailer.” As Paul Mason remembers it, “On screen, they were wonderful. Off screen, not too wonderful. Susie fell in love with her make-up man and married him. He did not like Rock. It was strained but we managed to work around it.”
During the six-year run of the show, the McMillans investigated Satanic cults, mob bosses, and gold smugglers. Along the way, an impressive collection of guest stars appeared. The roster included a mix of old pros and promising newcomers, including: Tab Hunter, Roddy McDowall, Joan Van Ark, Keir Dullea, Van Johnson, Tyne Daly, Jackie Coogan, Barry Sullivan, Donna Mills, Shirley Jones, and José Feliciano. Several of Hudson’s former leading ladies also turned up, including Julie Adams, Dana Wynter, and Salome Jens.
Actress Carole Cook, who had a recurring role on McMillan & Wife as society maven Carole Crenshaw, recalls an especially memorable lunch she had with Hudson: “We didn’t go to the commissary. He always had lunch brought to his dressing room . . . I remember Susan Saint James, who is a darling girl, was going through a hippie period and she’d just had a child named Sunshine. Rock and I were sitting together talking and she was back on the set after having had time off for maternity leave. She said, ‘Oh, do you want to see a picture of the baby?’ Rock said, ‘Of course.’ And she whipped out a picture and it was one of the baby still in the birth channel. I’m telling you, Rock fled the fucking scene. I laughed my ass off. I mean, I was screaming with laughter but Mr. Hudson was having none of it. He just left. And I think I made some sort of smart remark like, ‘Well, it looks just like Gabby Hayes.’”
DURING THE EARLY days of McMillan & Wife, Rock developed what members of his entourage had come to refer to as yet another intense infatuation. “I think it was probably around 1972 when we met in Miami,” says Kenneth Griggs. “I was about 24 years old. It was right after the sexual revolution and everything. I mean . . . I was busy.”
In those days, Griggs was working in one of Miami’s showrooms, where interior designers would come to purchase high-end furniture. Virtually all of Griggs’s colleagues were young gay men. “When one of the older showroom owners would have a party, we’d all be invited,” Griggs recalls. “At one of these parties, Rock happened to be there. He was smoking and I remember turning to a friend and I said, ‘Quick, give me a cigarette.’ I went over and asked him for a light . . . That’s how everything got started.”
Griggs seemed to meet all of Rock’s basic requirements—he was blond, butch, and ruggedly handsome. “I do remember us kidding one another that we had matching mustaches,” says Griggs. “I also remember him telling me that I was totally his type.”
At the time, Griggs was in what he describes as “a real back and forth relationship” with a live-in boyfriend, though he continued to see Rock over a period of six months. With Hudson’s commitment to McMillan & Wife keeping him on the West Coast, Griggs realized that the relationship was “just one of those things. I guess a part of me was thinking, ‘This will never go anywhere.’ And once Danny, my on-and-off boyfriend, knew that I had been seeing Rock Hudson, he became a lot nicer to me and we got back together. Years later, when I moved out to L.A., I didn’t even know how to get in touch with Rock as so much time had passed. Looking back, I’m sorry that we didn’t continue a friendship of sorts because we had this great connection for a while.”
While McMillan & Wife consistently ranked high in the Nielsen ratings, Rock’s movie career continued to founder. Hudson’s next film, a character-driven Western entitled Showdown, would do nothing to revive his flagging box office appeal. The buddy picture aspects of Theodore Taylor’s screenplay seemed vaguely reminiscent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.
Originally titled Once Upon a River, Showdown was set in the late 1890s. Chuck Jarvis (Hudson), the sheriff of lonesome Cumbres, New Mexico, finds himself in the awkward position of pursuing his lifelong friend turned outlaw, Billy Massey (Dean Martin), who has been involved in a train robbery. While the two have been pals since childhood, flashbacks reveal that Chuck has always followed the straight and narrow while the more adventurous Billy has evolved from charming con man to wanted outlaw. Over the years, there’s also been an ongoing rivalry for the affections of a feisty café owner named Kate (Susan Clark). While Billy finds her “as pretty to look at as four aces” and does his best to win her over, the pragmatic Kate ultimately marries Chuck.
Showdown would be the final film for sixty-one-year-old George Seaton, who had directed such classics as Miracle on 34th Street and The Proud and the Profane. In sharp contrast to his earlier hits, Seaton’s Showdown is sluggishly paced, saved only by the playful exchanges between Rock and costar Dean Martin. In fact, events that took place during the making of Showdown were far more intriguing than anything that ended up on-screen.
“He wasn’t awfully fond of Rock,” Susan Clark says of Dean Martin, who seemed miserable throughout the location shoot in remote Chama, New Mexico. Martin was so unhappy, in fact, that he walked off the film only twenty-four days after production had started. The desolate location; the death of his favorite film horse, Tops; and his aversion to Hudson all seemed to push Dino over the edge. Universal chief Lew Wasserman ordered the production shut down and the studio filed a $6 million lawsuit against Dean Martin.
Two weeks later, Martin returned to Chama and Universal withdrew its lawsuit. Production resumed but not for long. Several days later, Hudson was filming a scene that required him to be behind the wheel of an antique locomobile. When Rock swerved to avoid a truck, the locomobile overturned. Hudson emerged with a number of broken bones and a concussion.
While Rock recovered, his longtime double, George Robotham, completed some stunts and long-distance shots. Hudson’s colleagues were stunned to find him back before the cameras even though his fractures hadn’t completely healed. Despite everything Rock had endured on Showdown, unkind reviews would be waiting at the finish line. “A tale that . . . simply stresses phlegmatic performances,” said New York Times critic A. H. Weiler. “Unfortunately, the people and problems in Showdown are a letdown.”
BY THE TIME Rock returned for the next season of McMillan & Wife, there was a new man in his life. A graduate of the University of Nebraska and an insurance salesman, Anthony Melia came equipped with chiseled features, enormous charm, and what George Nader once described as “the full movie star aura.” It was Rock’s second favorite pastime that would bring them together.
“There was, at one time, a whole bunch of gay guys in southern California who played bridge on an ongoing basis,” Melia says. “I was in some of those bridge groups and often Roy would be there. Tom Clark and Pete DePalma, who were partners at the time, were also there . . . After I got to know Roy through our bridge playing, we then started to see each other. Then we became lovers.” Unlike some of Rock’s previous partnerships, which he had entered into gradually and cautiously, things
with Melia progressed very quickly.
“I had a house at that time up on Sunset Plaza. He would come up at various times, sometimes practically unannounced and spend a lot of time with me . . . After seeing each other for some time, he asked if I would move in. And so I did.” When he first moved into The Castle, Melia says that Rock was at his carefree, fun-loving best. “He was a terrific gentleman with a wonderful sense of humor and a twinkle of mischief. He was very generous. Very smart. He loved word games. When it came to things like Scrabble, he was just amazing. We had a lot of fun together in the beginning.” Despite a promising start, Melia says that his relationship with Hudson soon deteriorated, almost as quickly as it had begun.
“For one thing, he was delusional in the fact that he felt that no one in the world really knew he was gay. He would warn me not to tell anybody that we were together because he knew that I was out and proud and didn’t care who knew it. I never flaunted the fact that I was gay but I also wasn’t going to spend my life hiding and being in the closet . . . One day, George Cukor, the director, was coming over to the house. Now I knew George and had attended several Sunday afternoon pool parties that he had hosted. I remember Roy saying to me, ‘I have to talk business with George Cukor and you can’t be here.’ I said, ‘Well, I know George.’ He said, ‘I don’t care. I don’t want you here.’ And I was really upset about that. I mean, come on, I’m thirty-nine years old, for God’s sake, and a businessman. I’m not a little child that you send to his room.”
Drinking was another issue for Melia, who describes himself as “a comparative lightweight.” As it happened, Melia’s residency at The Castle coincided with a period in which Hudson’s alcohol intake increased. “I think it was starting to get a bit out of hand then. I remember his maid, Joy, was very devoted to him but she was as much of an alcoholic as he was.”
Melia says that the tipping point came when they decided to spend Thanksgiving with Hudson’s mother. “Kay and I had an incredibly good rapport,” says Melia. “She was from Illinois. I was from Nebraska. We were both sort of non-sophisticated people in our own way. Roy adored his mother and he gave her lots of deference. He did whatever she asked of him and he was very protective of her. When Roy saw his mother and I getting close, he was very jealous of that and felt it was almost an invasion . . . He could be very proprietary about some of the people in his life but especially his mother.”
