by David Bret
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engaging skinflint who becomes attached to the Blaisdells, a family who run a drugstore in 1920s New York and who are inadvertently responsible for his becoming a millionaire. Years before the story begins, Sam’s old flame Millicent Blaisdell, subsequently deceased, dumped him, and in a fit of pique he left for the Yukon and struck gold. Thinking that he is close to death, Sam wishes to bequeath his fortune to the Blaisdell’s, but first must determine if they are worthy of the honour. He infiltrates their household as Mr. Smith, their lodger, and for a while feigns poverty and works in the drugstore as a soda jerk. He is trained by Dan, who wants to marry the Blaisdell’s’ daughter, Millie—played by Piper Laurie, who doubled as Rock’s studio-date whilst the film was in production.
Sam watches the Blaisdell’s change from homely people into avaricious snobs when a mysterious benefactor—himself—sends them a cheque for $100,000. Now that they have suddenly moved up in the world, Dan is no longer good enough for their daughter and Millie is affianced to the son of another wealthy family. Then, a disastrous drop in share prices leaves them broke: they return to the drugstore happier than ever now that their lives are back to normal. Dan takes up with Millie again…and Sam wanders off, with no one any the wiser to his true identity.
Has Anybody Seen My Gal? Is an entertaining slice of whimsy, not really a Rock Hudson vehicle, though he handles himself well and when not upstaged by Charles Coburn looks astonishingly sexy in his pushed-back fedora. Today, however, it is remembered mostly for one lengthy, convoluted line which caused the director almost as much of a headache as the one Rock fluffed in Fighter Squadron. Sam Fulton has just learned the ropes from Dan in the drugstore when the studious-looking youth at the end of the counter drawls, “Hey, Gramps, I’ll have a
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choc malt, heavy on the choc, plenty of milk, four spoons of malt, two scoops of vanilla ice, one mixed with the rest and the other floating!” To which Sam responds, “Would you like to come in Wednesday for a fitting?” Listed on the cast-sheet as “Actor 1685”, and making his third bit-part appearance but actually speaking for the first time, this young man was 21-year-old James Dean.
Has Anybody Seen My Gal? also had its deliberate moment of irony, so far as Rock was concerned. In the scene where Sam Fulton takes Dan to the cinema to be reunited with his sweetheart, the actor on the silent-screen is William Haines (1900-73), one of Hollywood’s top money-makers of the pre-talkie era whose career successfully survived the transition to sound—only to be brought to an abrupt end in 1933 when a vice-squad raid discovered him in bed with a sailor in a San Diego YMCA hostel. It always amused Rock that Haines’ final film had been entitled The Marines Are Coming.
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Rock, at twenty, in one of the nude shots commissioned in
1946 by his first serious lover and mentor, Ken Hodge.
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Rock and one of his closest friends, the actor George Nader.
With Piper Laurie in Has Anybody Seen My Gal?
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2: Magnificent Obsession
“Thus the pattern was established from the outset: Henry Willson as the mastermind, calling all the shots, Rock as his consenting Galatea.” Phyllis Gates, wife.
Rock’s next film, his eighteenth in four years, was Horizons West, a tale of sibling rivalry directed by Chicago-born Budd Boetticher, who would achieve great acclaim a few years later for his work with Randolph Scott. Boetticher offered Rock third-billing below Julia Adams, who aside from looking glamorous has little else to do, and Robert Ryan in one of his typically thuggish, uncharismatic roles as big time bigot Dan Hammond, who with his younger brother Neal (Rock) has returned to the family ranch in Texas after a four-year absence fighting in the Civil War. Whilst Neal is only interested in helping his father run the ranch, Dan is preoccupied with trying to seduce the wife of the equally horrid town big-shot, Cord Hardin (Raymond Burr) and rustling cattle from the locals which he and his band of Army deserters sell to Mexican rebels. Suffice to say, good triumphs over evil when Dan kills the marshal, and Neal takes over to track down the criminals and end their reign of terror.
Horizons West was swiftly followed by The Lawless Breed, also with Julia Adams, but a cut above average and directed by Rock’s old friend, Raoul Walsh. Rock played a “victim of circumstance”, an alleged kinsman of the Raymond Burr character in the previous film. “John Wesley Hardin has made the name of Texas stink in the nostrils of justice,” growls a detractor in this saga of gambling, shoot-outs and trial by public opinion. By now, Rock had started to tire of Bob Preble, perhaps for no other reason than there were so many good-looking young men around, more than willing to go to bed with him, and whilst making this film he had several discreet flings with extras though
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apparently nothing too serious. Then in the spring of 1953, he encountered the man he often spoke of to his friends as his perfect lover.
Meeting all the usual physical requirements, 22-year-old Jack Navaar had just returned from military service in Korea and been recruited by Henry Willson. He was practically pushed into Rock’s arms by Mark Miller and George Nader, who had never approved of Preble. It was love at first sight and they began dating, though Navaar made it clear from the outset that he was also sexually interested in women, not that anyone appears to have believed him. Otherwise why date Rock in the first place?
At around this time, Rock’s mother moved to California. Kay had recently married for the fourth time, to a man named Joseph Olsen, and she seemed to have no qualms accepting her son’s relationship with another man. Rock and Navaar spent most Sundays at the Olsen’s home in Arcadia, and every now and then Kay and Olsen stayed at Rock’s new place on Avenida del Sol.
When Bob Preble finally moved out in May 1953 to marry the actress Yvonne Rivero, Navaar was asked to move in, but refused to set foot in the same building—let alone sleep in the same bed—that had been occupied by his predecessor. Navaar, like many of Rock’s lovers, also seems to have been averse to, or certainly wary of his friendship with Miller and Nader—though they always maintained during Rock’s lifetime that they had never been sexually involved with him, it is now known that Nader and he were intimate when they first met.
Rock observed in 1983, “Every new person that’s come along, the first thing he does is try to get rid of Mark and George—and it’s never worked!”
Rock obliged Navaar by renting a larger, two-storey property in Grandview, and he spoiled his new man rotten with expensive gifts, the first of which was an eye-catching cashmere sweater to
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match the buttercup-yellow convertible he had bought for himself. Taking a leaf out of Raoul Walsh’s book, he paid for Navaar to have acting lessons—not that these did much good, for as Rand Saxon he never made the grade as an actor and, according to Mark Miller, the only success he ever enjoyed was in his private role as “movie wife”.
The change of address coincided with an increase in salary. Universal were now paying Rock $200 a week, enough for him to be assigned his first publicist, whose first task was to ensure that those all-important movie magazines were told the “absolute truth” about his “hectic” love life—the scores of marriage proposals he was getting every week, which he was naturally rejecting because he was far too busy forging his career and far too preoccupied with being out on the town with a different girl almost every night to think of settling down. Henry Willson supported the fabrication by organising some of these dates, though even he slipped up from time to time by fixing Rock up with renowned, self-confessed “fag-hags” such as Tallulah Bankhead and Joan Crawford.
Tallulah, never one to mince words, probably helped the Hudson “heterosexual cause” by broadcasting to all and sundry, “This divine young man is hung even better than Gary Cooper—and believe me, darlings, he sure knows how to handle that two-hander of his!”
The comparison with Cooper was also made by the ferociously predatory Crawford, who circulated the story—re
peated in Shaun Considine’s excellent Bette & Joan: The Divine Feud—of how she had defined Rock as a cross between Cooper and Robert Taylor after seeing him in Captain Lightfoot. Subsequently, he had been invited to her Brentwood home for dinner, and afterwards she had persuaded him to strip off and swim in her pool. Considine writes:
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The story told, true or fabled, is that Rock was back in the pool-house taking a shower, when the lights went out. Suddenly he felt the warm, naked body of Joan Crawford beside him. “Sssh, baby,” she whispered. “Close your eyes and pretend I’m Clark Gable.”
Word of Rock’s fondness for exhibitionism got around and he was inevitably asked to remove his shirt and flex his muscles for movie magazine picture spreads. On one such occasion when Photoplay sent along a hunky snapper-journalist, Rock took this routine a step further and stripped naked in the bedroom—purposely leaving the door open so that the other man could get an eyeful—then pulling on a pair of skimpy shorts so that he could be photographed in his den, poring over his extensive record collection. By all accounts the ruse worked: after the shoot, the pair retired to Rock’s boudoir where the young man was able to find out for himself if there had been any truth in Tallulah’s admission—and something else that seemingly every Hudson fan yearned to know, as Rock explained:
I couldn’t understand who could give a damn about my sleeping habits…As a matter of fact, I went through a great deal in learning to sleep in the nude. From my childhood I remember my mother saying, “Well, what if there’s a fire?” And I thought, “Indeed, what if there’s a fire! I’d have to run out naked and people would see my pee-pee! Then when I was 21 I thought, “Hell, if there’s a fire you can just wrap a blanket around you! And I’ve slept in the nude ever since. But who the hell cares!
Universal were intent on getting value for money now that Rock’s star was in its ascendency, for in 1953 alone he appeared
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in five more films. The first was Seminole—referred to by him as “Semolina—directed by Budd Boetticher and co-starring Anthony Quinn and Barbara Hale. The Daily Mirror’s Donald Zec visited the set and interviewed Rock in his dressing-room where he, Hale and James Best were relaxing between takes. The picture accompanying in Zec’s feature was captioned, “The Beefcake And His Buddy Perform—In Front Of The Crew!”
Rock is seated, supposedly singing a folk song and laughing his head off, whilst Best is posed on a stool next to him, pretending to play the guitar and looking suggestively into his eyes. Barbara Hale is seated on Rock’s other side, but when the picture turned up in one of the Hollywood scandal rags, she had been edited out, giving the impression that Rock and Best had been snapped whilst enjoying an intimate moment.
Seminole, a superior “Western with a conscience” set in the Florida of 1835, purports to be the true story of Lance Caldwell, a young US Army lieutenant who, when the film opens, is facing a court-martial for insubordination and murder and if found guilty will face the firing-squad. Hot on the heels of this one was Back To God’s Country, a thought-provoking production co-starring Marcia Henderson. Directed by Joseph Pevney and billed as “A tale of the courage of two men, a woman and a dog”, this was set in Alaska in the wake of the 1872 Gold Rush. Although Rock loved working with Pevney again, he later said that he had achieved the greatest personal satisfaction from two other films he made that year with Raoul Walsh. The first, Gun Fury, was a routine western set immediately after the Civil War: Rock played soldier-turned-pacifist Ben Warren, who only takes up his gun again and re-employs his fists when his fiancée (Donna Reed) is kidnapped by roughnecks.
Much better was Sea Devils. Originally entitled Toilers of the Sea the story was to have been based on Victor Hugo’s novel Les
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Travaileurs de la Mer, and the exteriors were filmed on the Channel Islands where Hugo had been exiled by Napoleon III. However, the final script was actually based on a screenplay by Borden Chase, and has a superb orchestral score by Richard Addinsell. Set on the eve of the Napoleonic wars, the story tells of a voluptuous English spy (Yvonne de Carlo) who, to-ing and fro-ing across the Channel on a mission of national importance encounters the handsome but irascible Captain Gilliatt (Rock). With a wealth of beefcake scenes where he gets to shed his shirt and sport some very sexy designer stubble a love story unfolds that is more convincing and realistically played than in any of Rock’s previous films.
Amongst the privileged few allowed on to the closed set was Donald Zec, this time reporting for the Daily Mail.
“I was engaged once, but that’s all over, now,” volunteered Rock. “No, it wasn’t Miss de Carlo. We’re just good friends!”
He was also interviewed by Picturegoer’s John Neton, who informed his readers of how he had been dreading their meeting because he had been “acutely embarrassed” by the Hudson biography sent out by Universal’s publicity department:
I learned that he was just a “big kick-the-dirt boy” with his own “wind-blown hair-do”, and that his biggest asset was “simply stamina”. After reading it I didn’t know who to feel more sorry for, Mr. Hudson or the picture-going public. I’m happy to be able to report, therefore, that far from being just a hunk of beefcake, Rock Hudson looks, talks and acts like a normal human being.
During a break in shooting, Rock made a lightning visit to London, where he told reporters of his fondness for muffins and tea, but could not understand why the British were so mad about
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cricket, which he considered the most boring sport in the world. He added that as soon as the film wrapped, he would be spending a few days in Paris and Rome—“looking for fun”, as he put it. Such plans were scuppered when he was summoned back to Hollywood to appear in The Golden Blade opposite Piper Laurie—in a role that had already been rejected by Tony Curtis.
Camp does not even begin to describe this Arabian Nights take on the Arthurian legend—the golden blade of the title being the magical Sword of Damascus, which makes it owner invincible—a production packed with so many double-entendres, in the uncut version, to have Rock’s fans howling when it was re-released in the 1970s. He plays Harun of Bazra, a young aristocrat who takes on the wrath of Baghdad after his father is killed in a dispute over land. “By Allah will I depart, my son,” the old man gasps before expiring, having given Harun the medallion he has snatched from the neck of the man who struck the fatal blow. Thus begins Harun’s adventure. After purchasing his mystical sword he meets Princess Khairuzan (Laurie), a political activist who falls foul of the bad guys—Jafar (George Macready), who wants his son Hadi (Gene Evans) to marry the princess so that they can depose her and her caliph father and allow Hadi to usurp the throne. Confined to the harem on account of her soap-box ranting, Khairuzan escapes dressed as a boy and steals Harun’s horse and though he soon works out who she really is, for a while he goes along with her gender-bending. She wants to be his servant, and after she has cupped his pectorals whilst on the back of his horse, he gives her a friendly grope and quips, “You should exercise, boy—you’re soft as a woman!” Then he suggests that they go a-wenching, and when she responds that she is too young for such things, Harun/Rock delivers the film’s plum line, “When I was your age I’d already tasted the nectar that lies in the kiss of a pretty damsel!”
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All ends well during the denouement, when Harun is drugged and his sword stolen—it ends up embedded to the hilt in a stone pillar, and like Excalibur may only be dislodged by one man, the one who will rule the kingdom. Thus Rock swashbuckles almost as well as a Flynn or a Fairbanks, and does his own stunts: kicking down doors, hauling furniture around, swinging from chandeliers and drapes, leaping off balconies and finally retrieving the sword and allowing he and his sweetheart to live happily ever after!
For obvious reasons, Jack Navaar was not allowed on the set of The Golden Blade, and because Rock frequently needed “quick-fix” sex during his working day, he latched on to one of the palace guard extras. News of this was r
elayed to Henry Willson who immediately called a press-conference. Progress on the film was discussed, along with Rock’s future projects. Then the usual questions were asked about his love life, which of course was why Willson had called the meeting in the first place. His star, he reluctantly confessed, was starting to get out of hand—though what could he do? In the past, he added, Rock had never been short of female company, but it had always been one girl at a time. Now, this irrepressible, red-blooded young man was dating three lovelies from the film: Piper Laurie; Kathleen Hughes, who was playing her handmaiden; and bit-part Anita Ekberg, a busty Swede who would go on to bigger things during the next decade.
A few days later, Universal released what they claimed was a still from the film—in effect, a staged pose of Rock, lying upon a trestle of fruit and vegetables, with a laughing lady dangling a bunch of grapes above his face. The caption read, “The Hollywood grapevine reports that, while making The Golden Blade opposite Piper Laurie, Rock began to find that his love-making wasn’t all play-acting!” The serious journalists amongst the gathering swallowed every word, but the less gullible tabloid
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harpies who had seen through Willson’s charade were already sharpening their talons, getting ready to strike.
With The Golden Blade in the can and Sea Devils still awaiting release, Henry Willson pulled the strings for Rock to be tested for the part of Bob Merrick in a remake of The Magnificent Obsession, a big hit for Robert Taylor and Irene Dunne in 1936. The producer, Ross Hunter, had been impressed with Rock’s portrayal of Speed O’ Keefe in Iron Man—more than this, he had fallen in love with him, though the close bond they later formed would remain strictly platonic. Setting aside personal feelings, Hunter followed the studio’s instructions and also tested Jeff Chandler—who dismissed the script as “sloppy” and declared that he was happy the way he was, typecast in action roles. Within two weeks Rock had signed the contract. His love interest in the film, who had approved him after seeing him in The Lawless Breed, was to be Jane Wyman. Yet many critics predicted that even with big names such as Wyman, Agnes Moorehead and Otto Kruger, Rock’s very presence would ensure box-office failure. Picturegoer’s influential Elizabeth Forrest, on the other hand, accused the studios of pointing Rock in the direction of disaster by persistently putting him into the wrong vehicles, declaring, “A star is only judged by his last performance—and so far, the Hudson past performance doesn’t measure up to his big star potential.”
