by David Bret
Though Rock and Henry Willson had dreaded his name cropping
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up in the trash-mags, there had been slight solace in the fact that by late 1955 their stories had become so convoluted and outrageous that most of their victims, with the aid of a good lawyer, rarely had much difficulty proving that the editors had made them up. Life, however, with its 8-million-plus weekly circulation figures worldwide, was a highly respected institution that did not risk attracting libel suits unless absolutely sure of its facts. And its editor was certain of one thing: reading between the lines, it was obvious that there was much more he could have divulged to his readers, even if he had made a lame attempt at defending Rock’s bachelor status by adding the coda, “Hardly anyone has noticed that Rock has been so busy making movies that he has barely had time to get a haircut, let alone a wife.”
The Life feature spurred Confidential’s Robert Harrison into immediate action, but when he dug out the old Jack Navaar story, vowing to publish it with a few recently acquired “scandalous topless photographs” of Rock and George Nader—in effect, nothing more innocuous than the pair water-skiing and relaxing on the deck of Nader’s boat—Henry Willson bought him off again by trading an exposé of Tab Hunter, currently involved with Anthony Perkins, and put his foot down. Dating Phyllis Gates would no longer be deemed sufficient. From now on they would have to be seen “co-habiting”.
Phyllis moved into Rock’s house on 30 September 1955, the day James Dean died. Though his love life had always been in turmoil, Jimmy’s real passion over the last few months had been his Porsche Spyder, top speed 170 mph, which Warner Brothers had prohibited him from driving on account of his recklessness. Jimmy had been scheduled to race professionally at Salinas a few days after completing Giant. He had already won a number of trophies, and ironically his last celluloid appearance had been on television for a road safety commercial, commissioned by the
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National Highway Committee. “Take it easy driving,” he told the actor Gig Young. “The life you might save might be mine!”
During the early evening Jimmy and a driver-mechanic friend, Rolf Wutherich, set off for Salinas in the silver Spyder, whose colour and minuscule size made it almost inconspicuous in the fading light. Near the intersection of Highways 466 and 41 near Chalome, over the speed-limit and with his headlights not yet turned on, Jimmy crashed into another car and died almost instantly. He was just twenty-four and his death, three days before the premiere of Rebel Without A Cause, opened the gates to the most intense, but in this case wholly unprecedented, wave of grief since that of Valentino, three decades previously.
Jimmy’s death profoundly affected everyone who had known him, personally and professionally, even those who had not liked him much. Elizabeth Taylor was so overcome with shock that she had to be admitted to hospital and kept under sedation. Montgomery Clift, who had carried a torch for Jimmy but never got around to having an actual affair with him, is reported to have “thrown up over his satin bedsheets”. Phyllis Gates claimed to have discovered Rock sobbing like a child because, he told her, he felt guilty for wishing Jimmy dead throughout the shooting of Giant, peeved because Jimmy had been stealing his thunder. Again, she is being cruel and heartless. There may be no doubting that Rock wept upon hearing the news—indeed, many would have probably considered him hard-bitten had he not reacted in such a manner. Regardless of whether or not he and Jimmy had been lovers, Rock’s surviving friends ceaselessly proclaimed that with his fun-loving, live-and-let-live outlook on life he was never a malevolent man, not even to his real enemies. The cast however was allowed little time for mourning. Not one of them attended Jimmy’s funeral in his home town of Fairmont, Indiana—not through lack of respect, but because their presence,
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certainly that of Elizabeth Taylor, would have turned the event into a media circus when Jimmy’s family had wanted the ceremony to be as low-key as possible.
Meanwhile, the charade continued. At the end of October the press were informed that Rock had proposed to Phyllis. What they were not told was that the ceremony, off the coast of Nassau on a boat owned by one of Henry Willson’s friends, had been booked some time before. In her book, Phyllis claims to have objected to this, stating that she had her heart set on a Lutheran church wedding, and that Rock had therefore asked her to give him twenty-four hours “to sort it”. In fact she had known and approved until someone—almost certainly a savvy reporter—had worked out that a wedding at sea would be deemed invalid, but convenient for Rock, who in the event of them separating would be spared the expense of paying alimony. Rock and Willson pretended not to have known this, and the next day it was announced that, so as not to disappoint Phyllis, the ceremony had been rescheduled to take place at Santa Barbara’s Bilton Hotel on 9 November. Phyllis subsequently claimed to have had no say in the arrangement: the Lutheran minister, the guest list, the cake and flowers, the honeymoon in Jamaica were all arranged by Rock and Willson, she said, though she was allowed to select her own wedding dress so long as Rock was allowed to choose the colour—brown. The best man was Jim Matteoni, a “childhood pal” from Winnetka, whom she had never met. The reason for the hurry, Rock told the press—some of whom suspected that Phyllis might have been pregnant—was that he had to be back in Hollywood by 28 November to begin work on his few film, Written On The Wind. This much was true.
In her book, Phyllis has reservations about the nature of Rock’s friendship with Jim Matteoni, as well as some other aspects of her intended’s past:
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Later I thought how unusual it was that [Rock] had never mentioned Jim Matteoni to me…Jim had obviously been an important figure in Rock’s early years, yet Rock had never talked about him. But then, Rock never discussed his life before becoming an actor…He seemed bent on eliminating Roy Fitzgerald from his memory. His life began when he became Rock Hudson.
Matteoni only learned about the wedding eight hours before it was due to take place: Rock and Phyllis picked him and his wife up at the airport, but a delay collecting the marriage licence from the Los Angeles County Court resulted in Rock putting his foot down on the accelerator, and he was stopped by traffic cops near Santa Barbara and booked for speeding. Otherwise, everything went according to plan. The ceremony lasted just fifteen minutes, and the other guests at the Bilton Hotel were told that a Mr. and Mrs. Charles Roy were tying the knot. Neither Rock’s mother nor Phyllis’ parents were told about the wedding—the only person in on the secret was Phyllis’ best friend, Pat Devlin, who was matron of honour. Within minutes of Rock placing the ring on his bride’s finger, Henry Willson called Universal’s publicist, Jack Diamond, who alerted the press. It was only after the story had been “leaked” to Louella Parsons that Rock and Phyllis were allowed to contact their families—reading from the script that Willson had prepared and typed out to ensure that they both told the same story.
The honeymoon got off to a bad start during the stop-over in Miami, en route to Jamaica. Henry Willson had reserved the couple a suite at the Saxony Hotel: this had been double-booked and they were offered a cheaper room at the back of the building. Afraid of being recognised, though by now pictures of the wedding had been circulated everywhere, Rock asked his wife to
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bawl out the desk clerk, and the problem was resolved. The next morning, the couple flew to Montego Bay, where they checked in at the Half Moon Hotel, this time as Mr. and Mrs. Hudson.
From this point, according to Phyllis, Rock’s Jekyll-and-Hyde personality surfaced. She writes how he risked them getting arrested by encouraging her to have sex on the beach. Afterwards he would lapse into a period of intense melancholy which saw him rejecting her advances and screaming to be left alone. “I had known these black moods before, but I had never expected it to happen on my honeymoon,” she writes, adding that it had not taken him long to locate the island’s hidden gay hang-outs, She forgest that she has already told her reader how she never worked out Rock was
gay until long after they were married!
Rock on the other hand was almost certainly being truthful when he observed of the change in his wife:
Phyllis was unbeatable. She had the greatest sense of humour in the world…it wouldn’t quit. She loved games and she had to win. We had a ball together until we got married. From that day, it was all over. The white piece of paper changed everything. She became the Movie Star’s wife.
Rock avowed that Phyllis had changed from a “warm-hearted, sensitive girl” into a “possessive spendthrift who cared for no one but herself”. He told his journalist friend Joan Mac Trevor, of whom more later, “All my life, everybody I’ve met has squeezed me like a lemon—none more than my wife.”
Yet for all the speculation and stories about the couple and their lavender marriage, Rock is believed to have genuinely cared for Phyllis as a companion and friend, until things started to turn sour between them.
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Rock and Phyllis Gates.
With Elizabeth Taylor, on the set of Giant.
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4: Gentleman Prefers Blonds!
“Rock could be unspeakably vulgar. He cheated on me all the time and sometimes treated me like shit. Would I go through all that again? You bet!” Massimo, Rock’s Italian lover.
Rock began shooting Written On The Wind for Universal less than twenty-four hours after returning from his honeymoon, and at once ran into a behind-the-scenes cat-fight. One of his co-stars, Robert Stack (1919-2003), had headed the credits in Fighter Squadron and though he would eventually count himself amongst Rock’s closest friends, at this time he was vociferously opposed to appearing as a support to a “two-bit ham” who had been incapable of pronouncing just one line without innumerable takes. Stack, famed for his unsmiling, tough-guy roles—some years later he portrayed Eliot Ness in television’s The Untouchables—was also peeved to learn, after the contracts had been signed, that Henry Willson had tried to persuade the studio to fire Stack and give Rock his part, an act that caused such a furore with all concerned that Universal’s publicity chief, David Lipton, felt compelled to issue a press statement:
Rock Hudson would very much like to play the rich drunk, but his fans won’t accept his doing anything shoddy. They like him because he’s what they want their daughters to marry, or their children’s father to be like, or because he reminds them of their childhood sweetheart. If we let him out of that sort of character, they’d howl.
In the long run, Stack would have the last laugh by being nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (losing to Anthony Quinn) for a performance which, critics agreed, was not
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a patch on Rock’s. According to Edith Piaf, who visited the set and socialised with him, Rock and Lauren Bacall, Stack was also homophobic—a front for his bisexuality and the fact that at the time he was “amorously interested” in, if not actually involved, with one of her musicians.
The script for Written On The Wind was a controversial one, based on the tempestuous on-off love affair between Montgomery Clift and torch singer Libby Holman. Five years Rock’s senior, Monty was so hung up on his homosexuality—much less ashamed of sleeping with men than of having to remain tight-lipped about it for the sake of his career—that he forced himself into relationships with women in a futile attempt to determine upon which side of the fence he truly belonged, when the answer was of course clear cut.
Holman, who had known Monty since 1942, was an attractive, olive-skinned doe-eyed tigress with a penchant for drink and drugs benders, black women, and neurasthenic bisexuals such as Monty and her two husbands. The first of these had been Zachary Smith Reynolds, the 20-year-old heir to the Camel tobacco emporium who had been found dead of a gunshot wound early in 1932. Reynolds’ family had subsequently attempted to trump up a murder charge, accusing Holman of pulling the trigger—but it had emerged during the trial that Reynolds, a notorious drunk, had killed himself because he had been virtually impotent with his wife and terrified of this becoming public knowledge. Holman had inherited his fortune and, two months after the trial had given birth to a son, Christopher, who had died in a climbing accident in 1950, aged just eighteen.
The Holman-Reynolds story, a woeful pastiche of self-loathing considerably tamed down by Hollywood with each re-telling—had first hit the screen in 1935 as Reckless, with Jean Harlow and William Powell. In this new version, with a gay subplot that
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went over the heads of most cinemagoers, the protagonists are Lucy and Kyle Hadley (Bacall and Stack), with Rock playing the Clift-like go between Mitch Wayne. The action begins as it ends, with a speeding car, howling winds, swirling autumn leaves—and a fatally wounded man stumbling into the night. Then, a sudden gust whips back the pages of a desk-diary to the previous year when the drama began.
Written On The Wind was a huge commercial success, and forty years after its release the critics were still raving about it. Writing for Time Out on the occasion of its inclusion in the BBC’s Top 100 Films of All Time, Tony Rayns called it, “One of the quintessential films of the fifties, a conspicuously fierce critique of the disintegrating middle class. It’s not an old film, it’s a film of the future.” Rock was never keen on it. Lauren Bacall loathed it, growling at Irish television critic Mark Cousins when he called it a masterpiece and mocking its tag-line, “‘What a man tells a woman and a woman tells a man should be written on the wind!’ Soap opera beyond soap opera, a masterpiece of suds!” Bacall added that she had never understood the logic behind Douglas Sirk’s cult status, that producer Albert Zugsmith had been a moron—that she had only made the film because she had been desperate to work with Rock.
When shooting wrapped, Rock announced that he would be taking several weeks off before his next project, Battle Hymn, whether the studio approved or not. For two months, Universal’s publicity department, in collusion with Henry Willson, had made nuisances of themselves with their persistent demands for insights into the Hudsons’ home life, and they were sick of the intrusion. Whenever he was not working, and trying to relax, there would be a journalist or photographer lurking around his property. He was snapped mowing the lawn whilst Phyllis was tending to the weeding—or “relaxing” on his double-length sofa,
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with his head on her lap whilst she pored over the latest recipe book, deciding what she would be making him for lunch. Alternatively they would be photographed at the barbecue eating one of Rock’s infamous steaks—prepared earlier by Phyllis, for according to his friends Rock never barbecued anything edible. She recalled, “They had us do everything but pose in bed. And Rock, slave of the media that he was, might have consented if the photographer had asked.”
Henry Willson had tried to make up for selling the George Nader exclusive to Confidential by fixing him up with a studio date and sending them on a picnic with the Hudsons so that Movie Life could dispatch one of its hacks and report back with the headline, “George, The Happy Bachelor Who Dates Pretty Girls And Never Loses His Heart—Or His Head!” Rock did allow himself to be photographed with his friend, but the caption could not have been more catty: “There’s a good reason why George Nader and Rock Hudson have become such fast friends. In a madhouse town where battiness is practically a vogue, these two guys are terrifically, sensationally normal!”
Throwing a few belongings into the back of their station wagon, Rock and Phyllis drove all the way to Acapulco—an exhausting five-day journey which at least offered them a little privacy. But then disaster struck and Rock became ill with food poisoning, an episode which cost Universal dearly: far too unwell to drive, he had to be flown home and the driver who was hired to return Rock’s station wagon to Hollywood then had to be flown back to Mexico. After less than a week’s recuperation, Rock began shooting Battle Hymn with Douglas Sirk, who despite his affection for Rock had not wanted such an affable man portraying staid preacher and war hero Colonel Dean Hess: he would have preferred a less personable actor such as Robert Stack, as the director observ
ed in his autobiography:
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Rock’s talent made him cut out for an immovable role, but here I had to cast him in the part of a split character. An actor like Stack would have been much more fitting as I was unable to bend Rock’s talent to this type of broken personage—the first being his straight goodness of heart and uncomplicated directness. Before the camera you just cannot cheat…
Rock’s co-stars were Martha Hyer—currently “dating” George Nader to keep Confidential quiet—and Dan Duryea, both of whom were acted into the ground by Anna Kashfi, about to be married to Marlon Brando, and Philip Ahn, the actor son of a Korean diplomat who had died in a Japanese POW camp. Ahn was a veteran of dozens of films, but will probably be best remembered as the old man in the Kung Fu television series.
Battle Hymn tells the story, not without a customary sprinkling of Hollywood invention, of how Dean Hess valiantly made amends for his fatal error during World War II when, on account of a faulty undercarriage mechanism on his plane, he accidentally bombed a German orphanage, killing thirty-seven German children. “A crime so despicable that even Hell won’t have its perpetrator…His hands will be stained for ever with the innocent blood of those harmless innocents,” the German radio announcer rants, breaking the news to a shocked nation and obviously forgetting the horrors that his compatriots are wreaking on Europe. Hess makes amends for his error by becoming a preacher and re-enlisting with the Air Force to fight in the Korean War, whence he becomes a hero by saving another orphanage from being bombed.
The film brought about a furious argument between the Hudsons when, according to Phyllis, Rock exclaimed to her how much he loved war, regardless of the innocent lives inadvertently
