Rock Hudson: The Gentle Giant

by David Bret

  On the plus side—the key to his near-100 per cent success rate

  —Willson was a whizz at inventing marketable names that often took precedence over their owner’s acting abilities. Thus Arthur Gelien became Tab Hunter, Francis Durgin became Rory Calhoun, Merle Johnson made an impact as Troy Donahue and Robert Mosely became Guy Madison because of his fondness for

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  Dolly Madison cakes! Other Willson discoveries included John Saxon, Mike Connors, Clint Walker and Dack Rambo—stars who appeared on the surface so naturally wholesome, cute and athletic that girls swooned, whilst impressionable young men across emulated their every gesture—unaware that many of them had only achieved fame after sharing their Svengali’s bed.

  In 1957, thinly disguised as the character Tex Warner, Willson played third lead in the Elvis Presley film, Loving You, portrayed by the closeted gay actor Wendell Corey. In his pursuit of archetypal rebel-hero Deke Rivers (Presley), Warner famously suggests whilst drooling over him, “Maybe a special name, like Rock or Tab.” This, and the film’s wealth of gay innuendo and double-entendre, was scriptwriter and director Hal Kanter’s revenge on Willson for “negotiating” a deal with Confidential magazine (of which more later) in favour of outing Presley’s leading lady in the film, Lizabeth Scott, as a lesbian. Few people at time, though, were aware of Tab Hunter’s or Rock’s sexuality, and such in-jokes would have gone way over the heads of fans, critics and the general public.

  When Ken Hodge learned that his protégé was consulting with Henry Willson behind his back—worse still that Roy was more than willing to allow Willson to have his way with him as often as he liked so long as he achieved his acting goal—he refused to have any more to do with him. Not even bothering to say goodbye, he headed back to Long Beach.

  Roy coped with his “loss” by flinging himself headlong into his new venture. Willson sent him to Lester Luther, one of Hollywood’s top voice coaches: Luther helped rid him of his Midwestern drawl and the stammer which Roy claimed was prominent only when he was feeling nervous—in other words, most of the time—and subjected him to several weeks of “bawling” sessions, where he was ordered to scream non-stop for

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  thirty minutes at a time. This ruptured his vocal chords so that when they healed his voice was half a tone lower and as butch as the rest of him. Roy received drama lessons from Florence Cunningham: he was taught how to stand, sit and walk by Universal’s athletics coach, ex-boxer Frankie Van. Like many people of great height, he had a tendency to stoop. Van corrected this by thumping him in the middle of the back each time he did so. He was enrolled for lessons in horse-riding, fencing, tap-dancing, ballet and deportment, all at considerable expense to Henry Willson whose only immediate recompense was several months exclusivity, or so he believed, of his newest discovery’s sexual favours. One trait which Willson and his training team could not rid Roy of was his acute lack of confidence in his abilities, and an unwillingness to let himself go except within the privacy of his home, a problem which would burden him for the rest of his life. In 1972, Ken Martin, a reporter from the British TV Times, upset him with an only too true observation:

  His manner confirms that he lacks self-confidence. He tries too hard to make a good impression: he times his brief answers to questions as if playing drawing-room comedy. You write down his reply and look up to see that he’s still waiting for you to show appreciation of his wit. If you miss the joke, he takes a studied, disappointed drag at a cigarette, of which he smokes far too many. You can’t help thinking what a great person he would be if he would relax and enjoy—and stop worrying about his image.

  Over the years there have been numerous theories as to how Roy Fitzgerald became Rock Hudson. The most widely-believed is that the “Rock” came from “hard as”, after a leading Hollywood

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  actress grabbed a handful at a reception—the “Hudson” came about when Henry Willson stabbed the telephone directory with a pin. Many years later Rock claimed that his “boner” had been brought about by the attentions of an actor standing nearby, and he often joked with friends, “I wanted to be called Geraldine Fitzgerald, but Hollywood already had one of those!”

  Willson was now faced with the invidious task of trying to place an inexperienced, untalented but devilishly attractive young man into a suitable vehicle. Rock failed five successive screen tests on account of his nervousness and wooden stance. Though never backwards in coming forwards when chatting up prospective bed mates, he was intensely nervous in front of the camera, and even five years later when he was a big star, near-contemporaries James Dean and Montgomery Clift would still be calling him “lumpish”. Then in early 1948, Rock was introduced to renegade director Raoul Walsh.

  Walsh, then in his early sixties, prided himself with the fact that he was the quintessential rebel who had never been officially recognised by the Academy or even the studio system. “He didn’t want to know about such subtleties as psychological nuances and profound probings into character,” said his friend Jesse Lasky Jr., the son of the Hollywood pioneer. “His target was the solar plexus rather than the cerebellum, and his films never missed the mark.”

  Walsh had run away from home when young and after a period as a cabin boy had worked on cattle drives, breaking in horses, before appearing in his first film as an extra in 1909. Six years later he had appeared in D W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, and minor roles had followed before he made his directorial debut in 1928 with Sadie Thompson. He had acquired his trademark eye-patch the next year after losing an eye in a driving mishap when a jack rabbit had jumped through his windscreen, and since 1930

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  he had directed such luminaries as James Cagney, Errol Flynn and Marlene Dietrich. He went on to enjoy a successful career until advancing blindness forced him into retirement in 1964.

  Probably on account of his own contrary nature, Walsh took Rock under his wing, arguing that there must have been something good about him for everyone else to consider him so bad. He is on record as telling Henry Willson, “The kid’s green but he’s juicy. Even if he can’t do anything he’ll make damned pretty scenery!” Subsequently, Walsh offered Rock a small, unbilled role as a Jewish fighter pilot in Warner Bros’ Fighter Squadron (1948), first filmed as The Dawn Patrol in 1930 with Richard Barthelmess and Douglas Fairbanks Jr, and again under the same title with Errol Flynn and David Niven. This new version, inferior to the other two, starred Edmund O’Brien and Robert Stack. Rock appeared in twelve scenes and had around a dozen lines. He recalled:

  I’m often asked by young actors, “How do you approach a scene?” So I tell them, “You just do it!” That was Raoul Walsh’s attitude, you just do it! When he said that to me, it made it so simple in my head. “Don’t try to act,” Raoul said. “Remember, up there on the screen you’re magnified forty times. Be natural. Underplay it and you’ll look great!”

  Rock did not put Walsh’s theory into practice whilst speaking his lines in Fighter Squadron. One—“Pretty soon you’re going to have to get a bigger blackboard!”—a tongue-twister that might have foxed any more experienced actor—required forty takes before it was changed to, “Pretty soon you’ll have to write smaller numbers!” When the feisty head of the studio, Jack Warner, heard about Rock’s “fuck-ups”, he told Walsh to fire the

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  “Midwest hick” the moment the picture wrapped. Walsh, always a law unto himself, refused to do this and Warner exacted his revenge—seizing Rock’s bungled takes, he ensured that these were used in drama classes, teaching hopefuls how not to act!

  What Rock lacked in artistic ability, he more than made up for in charisma, and a feigned innocence which, combined with his raw sex appeal, virtually set the screen alight. Neither did he have any intention in his formative years of becoming a studio pawn. Tyrone Power, Basil Rathbone, Robert Taylor, Charles and countless others, primarily gay, had followed the dictates of the studio moguls by entering into “lavender” marriages, whilst the brav
e ones—rebels like Clift, Flynn and Valentino—had stood up to these tyrants and, though the latter two had married, albeit unsuccessfully, throughout their lives they had more or less slept with anyone they pleased.

  Rock informed Raoul Walsh and several other confidants aware of his sexuality that he would never marry, though within a short time he would have modified this to “Not before I’m thirty”, hoping that by this time he would have progressed to that section of the entertainment world—the theatre—where same-sex relationships were more tolerated, or that by the time he hit thirty, the impossible might have happened: Hollywood might no longer be blighted by double-standards homophobia. Rock certainly struck out against convention when Walsh offered him a one-year trial contract worth $9,000: he refused to appear in another film until he had taken acting lessons, and so that Walsh would not accuse him of not earning the money he was paying him out of his own pocket, Rock spent a whole month decorating and refurbishing the director’s house for nothing!

  Walsh would nurture a lifelong fondness for Rock Hudson, and some years later the film critic Jimmy Hicks (Films In Review, ibid) would quote him as saying:

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  Because he had all the physical requirements for stardom and although he was practically inarticulate, you could sense his deep-rooted desire and self-expression. He seemed so anxious to please and so eager to be accepted and liked. And of course he knew how little he knew about acting, but he was so willing to learn. It’s difficult to define, but there was always a quality about this fellow that made you want him to win.

  Henry Willson, meanwhile, had no intention of ending up with an expensive failure on his hands, albeit a decidedly pretty one. First he approached MGM, hoping that the fearsomely tetchy Louis B Mayer might take him on. Mayer was well aware of Willson’s recruitment tactics, however, and would have nothing to do with an actor who in his eyes was little more than a male prostitute. Neither would Twentieth Century Fox’s David O Selznick, at least for now.

  William Goetz, however—Mayer’s rival son-in-law whose International Studios had recently merged with Universal—was in the midst of his “Stars For Tomorrow” campaign and having already signed up the (then) dubious talents of Tony Curtis, Jeff Chandler and Barbara Rush, decided to give Rock a chance. Reimbursing Willson and Raoul Walsh with the $10,000 they claimed to have spent on Rock above and beyond his contract, Goetz offered him a seven-year contract with a starting salary of $150 a week, and promptly reinvented his past, as had happened earlier with “Irish” Australian Errol Flynn. Movie magazines were duly informed that Universal’s newest recruit was a former Los Angeles postman who had broken into films by writing a letter to a top talent scout, which he had then delivered personally—knocking the man for six with his “looks, charm and tremendous acting skills”. No such thing had happened—not that

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  this prevented these publications from receiving letters from scores of Los Angeles residents who distinctly remembered Rock delivering their mail!

  During this period Rock sanctioned—ordered to do so by Henry Willson, unless he wanted the press to be told the truth about his sexuality, which of course would only have defeated Willson’s objective—every story, fabricated or otherwise about his youth, though he detested anyone so much as suggesting that his had been the classic rags-to-riches story. In 1980 he told John Kobal, the founder of the famous photographic collection who broached the subject during an interview:

  Let’s face it, there’s no such thing as a Cinderella story. Lana Turner discovered sitting on a stool, sipping chocolate soda? Bullshit. Everybody loves the idea that people can be discovered and a lot of other people like to say, “I’m the person who discovered so-and-so.” It’s a fucking ego trip! I always wanted to be an actor. Always!

  Rock celebrated his new contract “windfall” by renting a small house in the fashionable Sherman Oaks, moving there with his new lover, Bob Preble, another Willson discovery who, after breaking away from his clutches, had signed a contract with Twentieth Century Fox, though his career as a movie star would not amount to much. An educated man in his early twenties, Preble later said how appalled he had been by Rock’s lack of refinement—the fact that when they met he had “never ever heard of Mozart”, and “never drunk wine apart from cooking stuff”. He was of course exaggerating and being grossly unfair.

  Since 1985, Preble varied the story of his relationship with Rock. In one interview he declared that, as a straight man, he had

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  initially felt apprehensive about having a gay room-mate. In another he confessed that he and Rock had “done a little experimenting”. In a third he tried to divert attention away from his bisexuality—perhaps understandably so when one considers the vituperative backlash that occurred against the early eighties San Francisco gay community at the dawn of the AIDS epidemic—by telling his interviewer of how he had tried but failed “to turn Rock around a little” by fixing him up on dates with women who were known to be “easy”.

  Between 1950 and 1953 there seems little doubt that Rock and Preble were an item. The Universal and Twentieth Century Fox chiefs knew this and so did the press, who attempted to expose them in a magazine spread headed “Bachelors’ Bedlam”. For this, Rock and Preble were coerced into being photographed pretending to be doing odd jobs about the house and garden, and posing with Rock’s new red convertible. The shot which raised the most eyebrows in the film community was the one of Rock in bed, naked from the waist up, with Preble towering above him with a clock in his hand. The caption read, “Rip Van Hudson Invariably Sleeps Through The Alarm—Which Awakens Bob In The Next Room!”

  Cynics were not slow in pointing out that the house only had one bedroom, and that though there were two single beds in this, these had been pushed together and were covered by one large continental quilt. Hot on the heels of this exposé, another movie magazine named Rock “Hollywood’s Most Eligible Bachelor”, and asked its female readers, “So, you’d like to be Mrs Hudson? Here’s how to handle Hollywood’s Big Rock!” The feature included a “beefcake” shot from the forthcoming Iron Man, one of thirteen B-movies that Rock made in the eighteen months between Fighter Squadron and Bend of the River, the one that would really get him noticed.

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  The order in which these films were made—six were released in 1950 alone—is not known, and Rock’s contributions range from one-liners to third-billing, depending on the director’s whim. In Tomahawk, he was originally given a single line—“Male detail coming!”—which he pronounced at Fort Phil Kearney just as the cavalry were approaching. The take had to be shot so many times on account of Rock cracking up with a fit of the giggles, and director George Sherman was so taken up by him that his part (Corporal Hanna) was enlarged. Had Sherman known that Rock had fallen for Alex Nicol, one of the leads, he might not have been so enthusiastic.

  Nicol showed up again in Air Cadet, directed by Joseph Pevney. “From now on, mister, you’ll only address an upper-classman when you’re asked to,” Rock bellows at an over-enthusiastic raw recruit— though not without offering him a cursory once-over, whilst another cadet (James Best), coyly observes, “You’ve gotta drop anything you’re doing if an upper-classman comes around!” Sadly, both Best and Rock exit the picture way too early and do not get to participate in the homoerotic pool scene which follows. Promoted as a “tense drama” and filmed on location at San Antonio’s Randolph Air Base, much of the tension occurred off-set. Rock was originally given fourth billing, but was demoted to seventh when news of his alleged “indiscretions” with other actors reached the producer’s office and he was politely requested not to report to the set again—hence the sudden, inexplicable disappearance of his character, Rock’s best thus far in his career.

  Rock pleaded with Henry Willson to intervene, unaware that his manager had enough on his plate already dealing with an irate Gail Russell, the female lead. Russell, recovering from a recent suicide attempt, had found out that her husband— Willson
discovery Guy Madison—liked having sex with men, and that he

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  had bedded one of the actors from Air Cadet. Willson suspected that this was almost certainly Rock, and as most of the catfights between Madison and Russell were taking place on the lot when he came to pick her up after shooting, Willson thought it prudent to let his golden boy stew. Russell reacted by hitting the bottle: her marriage crumbled as the suicide bids multiplied, and in 1961 she finally succumbed to an overdose, aged thirty-six.

  Meanwhile, In July 1950, some two years before his big break, Rock was “spotted” by 50-something British journalist Eve Perrick, the film critic with the Daily Express. Perrick had been on holiday in Hollywood when she had dropped in on a publicist friend at Universal who had given her his ticket for the gala premiere of Winchester ’73. The stars were James Stewart and Shelley Winters, but by coincidence Perrick found herself sitting next to one of the bit-parts, “Young Bull”, whose identity she had only become aware of after the screening. She is reported to have uttered, albeit innocuously, the classic Tallulah Bankhead one-liner, “I’m sorry, but I didn’t recognise you with all your clothes on!” Perrick wrote in her column how she would be willing to stake her reputation on Rock having a very successful future, and was unafraid of declaring how “horribly wrong” her Hollywood contemporaries were in suggesting that he would never make it to the top: