All That Heaven Allows

by Mark Griffin

  Chapter 18

  Christian

  Taller, blonder, sexier. “Marc Christian was Rock Hudson’s dream man,” says Hudson’s friend Ken Maley. “Well . . . at least in the beginning he was.”

  (Photo courtesy of the Associated Press; Photographer: Lennox McLendon)

  By the fall of 1983, Tom Clark had vacated The Castle and a new man, thirty-year-old Marc Christian,* was suddenly on the scene. From the moment Rock first encountered Marc he was hooked. “Physically, he fit Rock’s type perfectly,” says Hudson’s friend Ken Maley. “It was like a paper doll cut-out. You couldn’t have found a taller, blonder, sexier guy. In every way, this was Rock’s dream man. Well, at least in the beginning he was.”

  If Christian’s physical attributes weren’t already enough to win him scores of admirers, this beauty also came equipped with brains. Marc could converse intelligently about politics, sports, history, the arts. During their initial meeting, Marc told Rock about Decades, a proposed radio documentary that he hoped to produce. The project sounded both ambitious and vague. It involved “putting together a history of popular music from the time the phonograph was invented.”

  This segued into a discussion concerning Rock’s vast collection of 78 RPM records. According to Christian, Hudson expressed interest in having the discs transferred to tape, with scratches and crackles minimized. A self-described “musicologist,” Marc assured Rock that one of his specialties was sound restoration. Christian gave Hudson his number. Not long after, Rock hired Marc. “To start doing his records,” as Christian put it.

  As for how he morphed from Rock Hudson’s sound engineer to his bedmate, Christian described this as “a very slow and evolutionary thing.” In fact, by Marc’s estimation, he met with Rock seventy to eighty times before any sort of sexual intimacy occurred. But according to one of Hudson’s closest friends, a physical relationship began not long after the two met. “They got right down to business,” Mark Miller said. “They didn’t go steady or talk it over for a few months.”

  After enduring more than a decade of Tom Clark as ruler of the roost, some staffers at The Castle felt that the coolly detached Christian was a breath of fresh air. Though, in time, things would deteriorate so dramatically that George Nader would eventually say of Christian: “Like a snake enters the garden, that young man entered this house.” According to some of Rock’s former employees, there were signs of trouble almost from the moment that Marc moved in.

  “Rock was going out of town to do The Ambassador with Robert Mitchum in Tel Aviv,” remembers estate manager Marty Flaherty. “I’m there with Rock the night before. Christian’s supposed to be there but he isn’t. Rock and I are having cocktails, getting drunk. It’s getting later and Christian still hasn’t shown up. I ended up spending the night at Rock’s house and Christian never came home. That was one of the only times I ever saw Rock cry. When the limo came to pick him up, I could see that Rock was upset but he gave me this big hug before he took off. Right after the limo pulls away, Christian shows up. Only he’s not alone. He’s having a party with all of his friends. They’d been up all night. It was obvious that the last thing that Christian had on his mind was saying goodbye to Rock.”

  * * *

  In 1975, Israeli mini-moguls Menahem Golan and Yoran Globus, who specialized in producing low-budget exploitation films, acquired the screen rights to Fifty-Two Pickup, a suspense novel set in Detroit by the master of crime fiction, Elmore Leonard. Nearly a decade would pass before cameras actually rolled. Retitled The Ambassador, the script that Golan and Globus green-lighted bore only the vaguest resemblance to the plotline of Leonard’s novel.

  In terms of the setting, Detroit was out and Tel Aviv was in. Leonard’s protagonist, manufacturing executive Harry Mitchell had been transformed into Peter Hacker, the U.S. Ambassador to Israel, who is attempting to bring peace to the Middle East during the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Fifty-Two Pickup, the married Harry Mitchell finds himself negotiating with blackmailers who have filmed him having sex with his twenty-one-year-old mistress. In The Ambassador, the diplomat’s wife has a steamy tryst with a P.L.O. leader that is secretly filmed by the Israeli Intelligence Agency. They want $1 million for the negative. Unable to pay, the ambassador orders his security advisor to retrieve the incriminating footage, no matter what.

  From the beginning, several of Rock’s closest confidants did their best to dissuade him from appearing in The Ambassador. Tom Clark went first. Although they were no longer living together, Rock still turned to Tom for professional advice regarding which of the scripts submitted to him looked promising. The Ambassador did not. “Rock, I read that and it’s a dreadful script,” Clark told Hudson. “I rejected it for you a couple of years ago . . . Don’t do that one. It’s a bomb waiting to go off.”

  But Rock was so desperate to appear in a theatrical feature that he was willing to accept third billing as well as a role that Telly Savalas had backed out of at the last minute. Filling in for Lieutenant Kojak and playing the supporting part of the security advisor may have been humbling enough, but what really smarted was that for the first time in decades Hudson was not playing the lead.

  While veteran director J. Lee Thompson was happy to have Rock Hudson in his movie, he, too, tried to talk Hudson out of it. “I didn’t think the part was really big enough for him. It was a subsidiary part,” Thompson said. “Right from the start, he implied we would have to do something with the part, to make it stronger and better. We did our best, which was unfortunately, not really good enough.” If Hudson’s role was far from satisfactory, at least he would be in some fine company, with Robert Mitchum assuming the title role and Oscar-winner Ellen Burstyn playing the diplomat’s adulterous wife.

  Back in L.A., Rock had wanted nothing more than to go back to work. But once he arrived on location in Israel, he sank into what his director described as “a very great depression.” Everything seemed wrong. Gone were the days when Rock Hudson occupied the plushest bungalow on the Universal lot. He had now been relegated to a fly-infested trailer in the Negev Desert. Although he didn’t complain, it was obvious that he was miserable. The heat was unbearable, the food wretched, the movie subpar.

  While shooting in the occupied West Bank, cast and crew were watched over by armed patrols meant to ward off terrorist attacks. Their presence made an already anxious Hudson even more agitated. In fact, the only thing that distracted Rock from his assortment of agonies was smoking—something he did constantly even though it had been forbidden by his doctors.

  If Rock had hoped to bond with the film’s leading man—whose legendary career predated his own—he was disappointed. “I don’t think Mitchum cared for him, or he for Mitchum,” Thompson remembered. While The Ambassador’s director did everything possible to make Rock feel welcome, Hudson couldn’t help but think of himself as a third wheel. After all, Mitchum and Thompson had already collaborated on two earlier films. They had developed a closeness and a shorthand style of working together.

  Producer Menahem Golan was respectful and obliging of Hudson throughout production. In the few scenes she shared with Rock, Ellen Burstyn did her best to be encouraging and supportive. Nevertheless, it seemed as though nothing could bring Hudson out of his depressive funk. Even when the entire company surprised Rock with a cake in honor of his fifty-eighth birthday, it required some serious effort on his part to look overjoyed. What the hell was there to celebrate anyway? Try as he might, he couldn’t shake the feeling that his movie career—which meant more to him than anything else—was essentially over. If the size of his role didn’t confirm this, the size of his trailer certainly did.

  WITH HIS WORK completed on The Ambassador, Rock returned to Los Angeles in early January of 1984. Marc Christian welcomed Hudson home by meeting him at the airport. From the moment they reunited, Marc noticed that Rock’s physical appearance had changed considerably in just the two months that he had been out of the country. “When I moved into the house, he was about ten pound
s overweight,” Christian recalled. “When he got back, he was about ten pounds lighter. He told me that he took the weight off because he didn’t like the food.” Hudson’s once radiant complexion had turned to a dull, ashen gray.

  Back at The Castle, Hudson’s changed appearance was mentioned by others but not dwelled upon. After all, this was supposed to be a happy homecoming. Christmas was Rock’s favorite time of year, and shortly before his return, Christian had hosted a tree-decorating party. Hudson was moved by the pictures and holiday messages that Marc and his friends had displayed amid the ornaments. So began what Christian would later refer to as a “golden period” in his relationship with Rock.

  Those who cast a cynical eye toward Christian’s association with Hudson say that the only reason Marc recalled the months following Rock’s return with such fondness was because he was treated royally. “At the beginning of the relationship, it was basically shopping sprees for Marc Christian,” says Hudson’s estate manager, Marty Flaherty. “Marc wanted to get into acting, so he was given acting lessons by the best coaches. Marc wanted a new portfolio, so he was sent to the top photographers, who took head shots. He wanted a Mercedes Benz. He wanted new ski outfits. He wanted presents bought for him and his friends. Rock was so giddy and smitten over him, that he just did it. Rock was getting older and now he had scored this hot, young trophy boyfriend. But for Rock, it was even more than that. He really thought he was in love. And he thought that this was the person.”

  Whenever he was accused of being an overindulged boy toy, Marc Christian stood firm. People had simply gotten the wrong impression. True, Rock may have added Marc to the Mammoth Films payroll at $400 a month, but that was only so Christian could receive health insurance. Besides, Marc claimed that three of the four hundred he was handed each month was immediately turned over to his parents. If Hudson chose to foot the bill for Christian’s dental work, gym membership, and personal trainer, he had done so voluntarily. The full-scale restoration of a 1959 Chevy Nomad belonging to Christian’s father, which totaled $20,000—was something Rock took it upon himself to arrange. Miles MacGinnis was dying of lung cancer and Hudson hoped that seeing his car returned to its original splendor would boost his spirits.

  Even though he had been outfitted with the ultimate Beverly Hills accessory—a celebrity drama coach, Christian didn’t display a fraction of the ambition that the young Rock Hudson had in terms of pursuing his career. Among the staff at The Castle, Marc was known as “The Sleeping Prince.” As they recalled, he tended to awaken midmorning. After visiting the gym, he would forgo meeting with casting directors and instead return home to catch up on Days of our Lives. Who had time to brush up on Stanislavski when your schedule might include meetings with Michael Jackson or dinners at Spago with Belinda Carlisle? Not to mention frequent excursions to San Francisco and Santa Barbara.

  While Rock’s houseman, John Dobbs, took to Christian (“I liked Marc. He was intelligent and he treated me as an equal”), most of Hudson’s friends did not. “I was afraid for Rock when I met him,” says actress Florence Lacey. “From the beginning, it was awkward because I had been such good friends with Rock and Tom as a couple. I tried to be social with the new guy. I tried to like him. But I have to say it was very uncomfortable.”

  “I met Marc Christian a couple of times and he was certainly not as attractive as Jack Coates had been, nor anywhere near as fun and engaging,” says Rock’s friend Ken Jillson. “He was just very quiet. I didn’t think that he had much going on.”

  Rock’s Camelot director, Stockton Briggle, also found it challenging to warm up to Hudson’s new companion: “Marc Christian—I don’t think, in my own personal opinion, ever cared anything about Rock any more than the fact that he was a big movie star . . . I tried hard to like him, but I found him cold and calculating. Nobody knew his real past.”

  According to some of Hudson’s intimates, it was sordid tales of Christian’s past that finally turned the tide in the relationship. While Rock had been out of the country, stories had started to circulate among staffers at The Castle that Christian “was very well known around town”—the implication being that Marc had worked as a paid escort. Mark Miller claimed that just after Rock returned from Israel, Christian came clean, allegedly telling Hudson: “I want you to know that I have taken money for sex from men . . . when I was down and out, and only when I did not have a bartending job. I did not do it all the time, but I don’t want you to hear it from your rich friends.”

  There were also rumors concerning Marc’s relationship with his closest confidante. At the time he met Hudson, Christian had been sharing a one-bedroom apartment in Hollywood with a former studio publicist named Liberty Martin. Christian would typically refer to her as his “best friend,” unbothered by the fact that Martin was more than thirty years older than he was. “Liberty Martin was a wild character,” says attorney Robert Parker Mills. “She was Gloria Swanson straight out of Sunset Boulevard. She was extremely theatrical and had the whole 1930s Hollywood thing going on. She wore these big, wide-brimmed hats, which not only gave her this grand aura, but also hid the ravages of time.”

  Even in the freewheeling 1970s, Marc Christian and Liberty Martin’s long-term cohabitation raised eyebrows. As Liberty put it, “We don’t understand ourselves. How could anyone else?” Christian frequently found himself attempting to explain his unorthodox relationship with Martin. “I asked him about her at one point,” recalls Rock’s friend, Gunther Fraulob. “Marc said, ‘She is my mentor and best friend.’ So then I asked him, ‘Are you two sexually together or something?’ And he said, ‘No, she’s more like my mom.’ Though I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he was getting money out of her.”

  In several later interviews, Christian denied that he had ever been paid for sex. As for confessing to Rock that he had been forced into a life of prostitution, Marc insisted that conversation never took place. Nevertheless, within a couple of months of Hudson’s return to The Castle, it became obvious that his relationship with Christian had changed. Rock’s friends believe that after Marc revealed that he had been a hustler, Hudson knew that he could never again be seen with Christian publicly. What if one of Marc’s clients spotted Hudson and Christian together somewhere? This would make Rock more vulnerable than ever. If the tabloids got wind of his affair with a male “courtesan” (as Mark Miller referred to Christian), it would be even worse than Confidential’s insinuations, more damaging than the Jim Nabors rumors. Rock Hudson would be over.

  In only a matter of months, Marc Christian had gone from golden boy to damaged goods. There was an uncomfortable distance between Hudson and Christian when they visited Nader and Miller in Palm Springs. “You’d have thought they were two strangers stranded together for the weekend,” Nader observed. Rock’s butler, James Wright, noted that “there was no warmth or caring” between the two once they returned from the desert. By the end of March, Wright noticed that in Hudson’s bedroom, there was a mattress on the floor, to the right side of the bed. Mark Miller would later recall that not long after this, Christian was deported to “Tijuana,” as the six-shades-of-red guest room was known.

  Only a few months earlier, Hudson had gushed about Christian to his On the Twentieth Century costar, Dean Dittman. Now Rock found himself venting all of his miseries. “You’ve got to get rid of him because you’re suffering,” Dittman told Hudson. “Does he have something on you? Is that why he’s still in the house?” While Rock waved away Dittman’s concerns, there were four “letters of affection” that he had sent to Christian while he was in Israel. If the letters somehow fell into the wrong hands, the loving sentiments expressed therein could now be used to expose him.

  Rock’s publicist, Rupert Allan, didn’t mince words in describing Hudson’s relationship with Christian, characterizing it as “A brief affair turned vicious. Rock was terrified of him because Marc Christian had told him that he knew the heads of the Enquirer and that they had offered him a lot of money for a story that Christia
n could give them about Rock being a homosexual and therefore Rock would never work again as a lead in a film and Rock was terrified of that.”

  By the spring of 1984, Hudson seemed to want only one thing from Christian—distance. Which doesn’t mean that they parted company. Characteristically, Rock did not order Marc out of the house or even suggest that he should start packing his bags. Instead, Hudson resorted to passive-aggressive tactics that had achieved the desired results in the past. It may have taken years to disentangle himself from Tom Clark, but once Rock decided that their time together was over, he simply froze Tom out. The silent treatment had also worked with Tony Melia and countless others. But Marc Christian was different from all the others. He did not leave. After consulting with a high-profile attorney, he decided to stay put. Eventually, Marc would move out of the main part of Hudson’s home and into the screening room.

  Around the same time that Hudson’s relationship with Christian began unraveling, problems also started to surface regarding Rock’s most significant partnership. In February of 1984, the editors of two British tabloids, the Daily Express and the Daily Star, contacted Mark Miller. Was there any truth to the rumors that a disgruntled Tom Clark planned to file a multimillion-dollar palimony suit against Hudson?

  “The fat hit the fire,” George Nader noted in his diary. Hudson instructed Miller to get in touch with Emily Torchia. Widely regarded as one of the most resourceful publicists in Hollywood, Torchia worked for Rock’s P.R. man, Rupert Allan. Torchia went to work. Calls were made, strings were pulled, and the rumor was squelched. “I’m not the suing type,” Clark announced to the relief of everyone involved. Besides, Tom still held out hope that he and Hudson would eventually reconcile—this despite the fact that Marc Christian was still in residence at The Castle.