All That Heaven Allows

by Mark Griffin

  By the time the final episode of McMillan aired in 1977, Rock had more than had his fill of the network series game. In interviews, the ordinarily reserved Hudson was surprisingly candid about the fact that his interest in the show was largely financial. “I don’t like doing the series at all,” Rock admitted to one reporter. “I’m pleased people like it, but I wish the shows were better. I only do it for the money.”

  Hudson was equally frank about his bosses at NBC, telling one interviewer, “The networks get scared if two people write a letter objecting to something. There would be a big meeting about it. For example, the McMillans had a martini every evening before dinner. They’d sit down and talk about who killed who and there was this ritual of making a martini. Well, suddenly, there was to be no more drinking. So, they wrote a scene where I come through the door and say, ‘Boy, I’m bushed . . . I need a glass of . . . milk.’ What? Mind you, I should have done it but I didn’t. I said, ‘Oh, fuck that, for Christ’s sake. Let’s go over to the bar and I’ll make a fucking martini . . .’ You know, it’s that stupid . . . I’ll never do another series because there is no time to do good work. You have to exist in mediocrity.”

  As Rock was in the midst of the final season of McMillan, it fell to Tom Clark to have an initial meeting with a persistent young man from Dallas named Stockton Briggle, who was determined to direct Hudson in a forthcoming production of pretty much anything. Briggle had already directed stars like Gloria Swanson and Ann Miller in several well-reviewed regional theatre productions, but he had set his cap at working with Rock, one of his boyhood idols.

  Clark met with Briggle and William Ross. The latter was not only the artistic director for the Cape Cod Melody Tent but also the producer of very profitable tours of Fiddler on the Roof and No, No, Nanette. They pitched the idea of Rock as Nathan Detroit in a new staging of Guys and Dolls. Clark’s face fell. Hudson had been invited to tour in that role before and the idea simply didn’t appeal to him. While Rock admired the score, he felt that he wasn’t well suited for the character of the fast-talking gambler.

  Ross then proposed an updating of Camelot, with Rock starring as King Arthur. In director Stockton Briggle’s hands, this would be anything but your typical bus-and-truck tour of Camelot. Feeling that the original Broadway version from 1960 had been “an empty hit,” Briggle was prepared to overhaul what he perceived to be the show’s weakest link—its problematic book. As Briggle told Hudson, he was striving for something more cutting edge and in tune with the swinging 1970s. For the young director, the show was really about a “homoerotic three-person relationship.” King Arthur and Lancelot may both be in love with the alluring Guinevere, but they are also in love with each other. Revisiting the Arthurian legend and giving it some resonance for audiences in the post-Stonewall era would be a daunting task, to say the least. Briggle knew that he and his star would have to work long and hard to make their revisionist Camelot work.

  Befitting the provocative subtext of the show, even the marathon planning sessions that Hudson and Briggle shared were erotically charged. “It was almost a sexual thing,” Briggle later admitted. “Rock emanated such power when he was thinking and working. I’ve always believed a director has to seduce an actor into falling in love with him . . . But with Rock, it was the opposite. I fell in love with him.”

  Hudson had been so thoroughly engrossed in his epic-length conferences with Briggle, he had managed to overlook the fact that he should be terrified. Teaming up with Carol Burnett was one thing, but wouldn’t the critics crucify him for having the unmitigated gall to take on one of the most beloved roles in the American musical theatre? King Arthur had already been indelibly played, both on stage (Richard Burton) and screen (Richard Harris). And what about the demanding score? For their final Broadway collaboration, Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe had written some of their finest songs, including the title tune, which had become an unofficial anthem of the Kennedy administration. Would Rock’s pleasant but largely untrained voice be able to do Lerner and Loewe’s songs justice? Adding to Hudson’s anxiety was the fact that the tour included a stop at New York’s Lincoln Center. His performance as King Arthur would be reviewed by some of the most influential critics in the country.

  “From the beginning, he was very concerned about whether he was delivering,” says actor Robert Ousley, who played Sir Dinadan in the touring company of Rock’s Camelot. “He wanted so much to be good in this particular role. As I’ve done a lot of classical theatre, he would ask me if I would watch his act one closing monologue. He asked me to give him notes and tell him what I thought of his performance. He was someone that wanted to be his best and prove that he was able to do it and that he wasn’t just this handsome movie star. I have the greatest respect for him because he just tried and tried.” Members of Hudson’s Camelot company found that Rock brought a unique quality to his interpretation of King Arthur.

  “I had never really experienced what true star quality was but I experienced it with Rock,” says actor John Leslie Wolfe, who played Sir Castor of Cornwall. “The cast would have a party and he’d walk into the room and literally, the room would just sort of stop . . . And on top of that, he turned out to be the nicest, most genuine person that I ever met that was a star.”

  Michael Licata, who would go on to become a prolific stage director, started his career as an actor. In Camelot, Licata played a page. “That’s French for third tree from the left,” Licata says. “At the time, I was twenty-three and I was kind of intimidated by the whole scene. Rock was always going to be ‘Mr. Hudson’ to me, even though he was very friendly . . . You know, he may not have been the finest King Arthur. He may not have been as highly skilled as some of the other actors that had done the role. He may not have had the best voice . . . but I’ll bet he was the best loved of all of them. There was just something about him that audiences couldn’t get enough of. It was the ‘It’ factor in spades.”

  While the Lincoln Center engagement was canceled (as plans were underway for a Broadway revival to open the following season), Camelot was successfully staged everywhere from Dallas to D.C. Although audiences across the country seemed to love Rock’s quietly commanding King Arthur, Robert Ousley remembers that no matter how beloved Hudson was by the public, one especially cutting critical barb could devastate the star. “It affected him deeply. He wasn’t used to that kind of attack,” says Ousley. “He was quite hurt by some of the viciousness that would be produced by some of these little small-town critics, that had absolutely no right or qualifications for being a critic in the first place. He was a sweet, sweet man and he would take every review—good or bad—very seriously.”

  * * *

  Late one evening in October of 1977, Claire Trevor, who lived only a few doors away from Rock’s mother, called Hudson with some devastating news: “Your mother’s had a stroke.” Although Rock and Tom were both under the influence, they somehow made it to Newport Beach without incident. While they had completed the trip in record time, it was still too late. Kay had died before they arrived. In the last six months of her life, Hudson had refused to see her. He told George and Mark that he preferred to remember his mother as the fiercely independent dynamo she had been in her younger years. Recently, she had been bedridden, battling recurring bouts of the flu and a number of other ailments, including Parkinson’s Disease.

  Just as he had always indulged his mother, Rock made sure that Kay had everything that she needed during her final days. Hudson asked Claire Trevor to check in on her regularly. Every two weeks, Mark Miller would drive in and replenish the groceries and make sure the bills had been paid. Miller became well practiced at inventing excuses when Kay would inevitably ask, “Why won’t my son come?” First it was the final season of McMillan that was keeping Rock away, then it was rehearsals for a new miniseries.

  For as long as either could remember, it had been Rock and Kay against the world. So, how could he accept that his mother, the one constant in his life, was dying? How could
he bear to watch her slip away? He couldn’t. He withdrew to protect himself.

  “Stoic” was the word that friends used to describe Rock in the days following Kay’s death. There were no displays of emotion and he reported to the set of his latest project even though the producers had invited him to take a few days off. “When Katherine died, all of the holidays lost much of their luster for Rock,” Tom Clark remembered. Gone were the lavish Christmas dinners that Hudson had hosted in the past. Gift-giving, which had always been one of Rock’s greatest joys, suddenly didn’t hold quite the same interest for him.

  Unless someone brought Kay up, Rock rarely spoke of her, though she was very much on his mind when he was interviewed by the New York Daily News a year after her death. Ostensibly, the interview was an opportunity for Hudson to promote his latest television project. Instead, he began reminiscing about two of the most important women in his life, Marilyn Maxwell and his mother. Of Kay, he would say, “I was an only child, so I had to be a big brother to my mother. She was Irish and had quite a temper. I remember when I was seventeen years old and wanted to take the car on Saturday nights, I’d have to get her mad first. Then I’d throw both arms around her and hold her so she couldn’t move and say, ‘Now what are you going to do?’ She’d break up laughing and give me the keys to the car.”

  Chapter 17

  Blue Snow

  Rock Bottom: Hudson’s screen career reached its nadir as he battled “six million tons of icy terror” in producer Roger Corman's disaster epic Avalanche (1978).

  (Photo courtesy of the Rock Hudson Estate Collection)

  For a disaster film produced by “The Pope of Pop Cinema,” Roger Corman, and exploitatively promoted as “six million tons of icy terror!” Avalanche would manage to attract some top-drawer talent, both in front of the cameras and behind the scenes.

  Screenwriter Gavin Lambert was hired to write the script. As Lambert had received an Oscar nomination for adapting D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers for the screen, it was hoped that he would bring some literary gravitas to the disaster genre, which was known for shameless overacting, unintentional hilarity, and lining up an assortment of Hollywood stars well past their prime to take on some horrifying apocalypse.

  While it was obvious that Avalanche didn’t aspire to be much more than your typical by-the-numbers disaster film, Lambert felt that it was important to present believable characters that audiences could care about before the inevitable catastrophe struck. As such, his script for Avalanche emphasized the love triangle at the center of the story. Fiercely driven developer David Shelby invites his ex-wife, Caroline Brace, to his new multimillion-dollar Colorado ski resort in the hopes that they can reconcile.

  Once there, Caroline meets eco-friendly photographer Nick Thorne, who has been adamantly opposed to the construction of Shelby’s lodge. Thorne is convinced that Shelby’s reckless development has wreaked havoc with the awesome balance of nature (“Things aren’t normal. There’s a heaviness and it’s growing. I can feel it!”) Meanwhile, Caroline is torn between Shelby’s commanding, take-charge personality and Thorne’s more laid-back free-spiritedness. If Shelby’s complicated love life and the opening of his controversial resort weren’t enough to keep him occupied, one of his planes crashes into a mountain during a snowstorm, setting off a devastating avalanche.

  As it had been modeled after The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno (two all-star productions from “Master of Disaster” producer Irwin Allen), Avalanche was in immediate need of some big-name actors to justify its budget of $6.5 million. Considering this, Corman’s New World Pictures aimed high in terms of casting. Charlton Heston, who had battled a buckling San Andreas fault in 1974’s Earthquake, was first approached to play David Shelby but he declined. Screen legend Ann Sothern was offered the role of Shelby’s vivacious mother, but she passed as well.

  On December 19, 1977, Daily Variety announced a “names only” casting call for the three leads. A week later, The Hollywood Reporter noted that Rock Hudson and William Holden (who years earlier had competed for the role of Bick Benedict in Giant) were “virtually set.” When Holden decided that Avalanche didn’t belong on the same shelf with Sunset Boulevard—or even The Towering Inferno—Robert Forster was cast as the nature-loving photographer. Mia Farrow, still several years away from the career resurgence she’d experience through her collaborations with Woody Allen, agreed to play the romantically challenged Caroline.

  Gavin Lambert’s character-driven screenplay attempted to put people ahead of special effects, but actor-turned-director Corey Allen apparently saw things differently. Lambert told Patricia Goldstone of the Los Angeles Times that Allen “dewrote” his script—quashing most of the character development and making the avalanche itself the star.

  “Sounds awful,” was Tom Clark’s brutally honest reaction when Rock recited the plot of Avalanche. “But he was absolutely determined to do it; feeling that disaster films were hot,” Clark remembered. “I told him that this happened to be a very poor one . . . but he had to do it and he did it, and it was a disaster all right.” As for big, hulking Rock Hudson being teamed with fragile, waiflike Mia Farrow, Clark pronounced their pairing “about as right as Whoopi Goldberg and Charles Boyer.”

  After assembling cast and crew at the Tamarron Resort in scenic Durango, Colorado, in the winter of 1978, “King of the B’s” Roger Corman decided that the budget required some wholesale trimming.* “The only thing that I have to say about Roger Corman is that he would have been an enormous success if he had managed a discount house because he was that kind of frugal,” says actor Jerry Douglas, who played mountie Phil Prentiss. “He was a very nice guy but boy, did he know how to save a dime . . . With both Rock and Mia Farrow, he probably paid them half of what they usually earned but this was a period when they weren’t busy, so they grabbed it.”

  While on location, director Corey Allen was under pressure to bring Avalanche in weeks ahead of schedule. The turbocharged pace of the production didn’t seem to bother Rock, who was accustomed to the breakneck speed involved in turning out McMillan episodes. According to those who worked on Avalanche, Hudson was an unruffled model of professionalism throughout an incredibly brisk shoot. This despite the fact that he was well aware that the movie was essentially the death knell for his feature film career.

  Even though Hudson had found his cinematic nadir in Avalanche, Jerry Douglas says that Rock never seemed anything other than grateful to still be in front of the cameras. “He was a total pro, even though he was a heavy, heavy drinker at that time,” Douglas says. “I remember when we were done for the day, he liked to hang around the bar. He was not a snob star at all. He used to talk to everybody. He really loved people and people loved him . . . He would get a few drinks in him at night and he would get a little flirtatious. After he had three or four scotches, he’d come over to me and say, ‘Well, Jerry, are we going to dance tonight?’ I’d say, ‘You’re a lousy dancer and I know a few guys prettier than you. I’ll see you around.’ And he’d laugh his ass off.”

  The release of Star Wars the year before had introduced moviegoers to state-of-the-art computer-generated imagery. Now audiences would expect a disaster film to feature spectacular and thoroughly convincing special effects. With Avalanche, what viewers got was so amateurish-looking that by comparison, George Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon, released in 1902, looked cutting edge. After Corman objected to the red snow supplied by his effects team, they managed a slightly less offensive blue.

  As journalist Patricia Goldstone noted, “Roger Corman appears to have indulged a pathological urge to cut corners . . . The avalanche scene itself virtually disappeared, so it’s like a disaster film without a disaster.” According to Tom Clark, what remained of the icy cataclysm “looked like it was shot through tapioca pudding.” As Corman’s budget wouldn’t allow for any Industrial Light & Magic wizardry, the Avalanche crew frequently had to conjure up not-so-special effects from whatever raw materials they could find,
which seemed to have been retrieved from the back of a truck.

  As Jerry Douglas remembers: “We had some bad weather in the middle of the shoot and by ‘bad,’ I mean it got warm. Well, we had this scene to do where Rock and I are digging through a snow tunnel, trying to reach his mother, who is trapped inside the resort . . . We’re in this fake tunnel that’s got white crap all over it that’s supposed to look like snow but it wasn’t very convincing . . . Now imagine, Rock and I were laying in this thing for hours face-to-face and only about four inches apart. I said, ‘Rock, if you do what I think you’re thinking of doing, I’m going to kick your ass.’ I said, ‘I don’t like your breath right now. I think you need some mouthwash, so don’t you dare kiss me . . .’ He got a big kick out of it. This was our way of getting through all of this. I always enjoyed his sense of humor . . . He was, without a doubt, one of the most agreeable people I ever worked with.”

  Even before Avalanche was released, some of the key participants began distancing themselves from the movie. “It was so bungled and rewritten by the director that I had my name removed from the credits,” said screenwriter Gavin Lambert.

  In July of 1978—only six months after shooting had commenced—the movie was given a well-publicized world premiere in Denver. Although both Hudson and Farrow attended the festivities, the celebratory mood didn’t last long. The Washington Post capped its devastating, thumbs-down review with: “After theatre managers add up the receipts, Quarantine may seem a more appropriate title for Avalanche, an inept disaster melodrama now at several obliging, unlucky locations. This fizzled brainstorm from New World looks like a cinch for the first supplement to The 50 Worst Films of All Time.”