Rock Hudson: The Gentle Giant

by David Bret

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  lost in any conflict. When she challenged him over the statement, she writes that his response was, “Oh, I don’t think about that. I just love war!” Her reaction to this was that Rock was a movie star whose word was the law, and that absolutely no one dared contradict him, not even the studio moguls. Because she did not share his views, she adds she was not allowed to accompany him to Nogales, Arizona, where the battle scenes were shot. And of course, this left Rock free to engage in several not very discreet one-night stands with some of the extras.

  Whilst filming Battle Hymn, Rock found himself on the receiving end of an angry call from Libby Holman. She and Montgomery Clift had watched the rushes for Written On The Wind and were far from pleased—indeed, Monty had sworn to “kick the fuck out of that big lump of wood”. In fact, the two men became instant friends when they met courtesy of Elizabeth Taylor—who had chosen Monty to star opposite her in Raintree County at a time when the studios were reluctant to employ him on account of his unpredictable behaviour, heavy drinking and opiate addiction.

  Raintree County went into production in the spring of 1956, by which time the Taylor-Wilding marriage had reached crisis point, not much helped by a feature in Confidential which declared that Elizabeth had recently had a fling with Victor Mature. During this time, Monty and the Hudsons frequently found themselves caught up in the crossfire between the feuding couple, though the dinner party at their Coldwater Canyon home on the evening of 12 May was a muted affair. Wilding was assigned to the couch suffering from an acute attack of lumbago, Monty was sulking because the director of the new film had forbidden him to drink until shooting wrapped—therefore it was left to the Hudsons and Monty’s friend, actor Kevin McCarthy, to enliven the proceedings by cracking jokes and swapping witty

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  anecdotes. This did not work, and at around 10.30 Monty announced that he was leaving. Because he had been cautioned by the police on account of his reckless driving, he had not been behind the wheel of his car for months, and the studio had provided him with a chauffeur. Tonight however was the chauffeur’s night off and Monty had driven himself to the Wildings’ house and, wary of tackling the steep, poorly lit road down to Sunset Boulevard, it was agreed that Kevin McCarthy should lead the way by driving in front of him.

  On the way down, Monty suffered a blackout and crashed into a telegraph pole, suffering the most horrendous facial injuries: severe lacerations, two fractures to the jaw, a smashed nose and an almost severed lip. The ambulance took more than half an hour to reach the scene, though newspaper photographers tipped off by the emergency services—as often happened with celebrity mishaps—were there within minutes, as were Rock, Phyllis and Elizabeth who, in no uncertain terms, threatened what would happen should anyone take so much as a single shot. Then, whilst Rock tried to force open the front door of the car—a total write-off—Elizabeth crawled through the rear window to find Monty choking on two dislodged front teeth. In pushing her fingers down his throat and extracting these, she saved his life and, her beautiful white dress drenched in blood, she cradled Monty’s head in her lap all the way to the hospital. In the subsequent series of operations, Monty’s face and teeth would be reconstructed completely, and only his closest friends allowed to see him. He refused to drop out of Raintree County, and this was completed with his profile filmed mostly from the right—the other side of his face would remain frozen due to the severed nerve in his cheek—and the actor once hailed as the most beautiful man in America would never be the same again.

  Phyllis had also accompanied Monty in the ambulance, and she

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  and Elizabeth had sat by his bedside throughout the night. She later confessed how this had caused an almighty bust-up between herself and Rock, and that he had not spoken to her for days—angry it would appear because she had committed the cardinal sin of speaking to the press. “I thought I had acted selflessly, trying to be of help in a drastic situation,” she recalled. “But he acted as if I had been guilty of some transgression. Was it because I had been in the spotlight and he hadn’t?”

  Rock was paranoid about his wife speaking to anyone about anything when he was not peering over her shoulder, even their close friends, albeit that most of these knew more about his pre-stardom days than Phylis ever would. It is therefore not difficult to imagine his reaction when he learned that she had consulted a specialist about his alleged premature ejaculation. She observes in her memoirs, “I realised that all husbands were different and that perhaps he was going through a phase where he couldn’t control his exuberance.” However, according to Massimo, who I met in Paris in 1992, “If Rock ever had sex with that woman, and it’s a big if, he would have wanted to get it over with as quickly as possible, so that he could save the real passion for the next guy. When it came to staying power, Rock Hudson had invented the term!”

  Phyllis discussed Rock’s mood-swings with a psychiatrist, which if true would today reveal him to have been suffering from a bi-polar disorder: the dark depressions following by periods of unprecedented hilarity which brought about the exhibitionist tricks he played on her and their friends. One of his “party pieces” was to walk into a room, stark naked with his erect penis tucked back between his legs so that he looked like a woman. After executing a clumsy ballet routine he would then release it so that it slapped back against his stomach. The first time Phyllis watched him doing this she tried to laugh off her embarrassment,

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  telling him that he “looked like one of the dancing hippos in Fantasia”. Alternatively he would purposely forget to shower, raise his arms and ask her, “Wanna smell my pits?”

  The Hudsons’ marriage started to hit rock bottom when, shortly after Montgomery Clift’s accident, Rock signed a loan-out contract with MGM for Something Of Value, to be shot on location in Kenya. Peeved over the predicted success of Giant—still being edited by George Stevens but receiving mass press interest owing to the unexpected iconic status of James Dean—Universal attempted to sweeten Rock into staying with them by offering him a “belated honeymoon”—a two-week all-expenses-paid trip to Europe to take place immediately before he flew to Africa. Rock accepted the gift, but gave no indication to Universal as to what his future plans might be. Before leaving for Europe, the couple spent a few days with Phyllis’ family in Montevideo, the first time the Gates had seen him. According to Phyllis, it was an irritating sojourn for Rock, who was pestered non-stop by autograph hunters and extremely reluctant to show these people the time of day until she persuaded him otherwise.

  The first stop in Europe was Paris, where the Hudsons stayed in the honeymoon suite at the Plaza Athenée Hotel. Rock was amused to peruse the register of former guests—in 1924 and 1926, the suite had been occupied by Rudolph Valentino and the great love of his life, André Daven, the showman who had later been installed as his “husband” at his Hollywood home. But if Rock was hoping to find his knight in shining armour in Paris, he would be disappointed. The paparazzi trailed the couple everywhere as they visited all the tourist attractions and ended their first day at the Tour d’Argent restaurant.

  Rome was another matter. Within an hour of his arriving here Rock contacted Massimo, the young Italian he had met in Venice and who had kept him company in Ireland while filming Captain

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  Lightfoot. Not content with their afternoon assignations whilst Phyllis was being driven around the city’s shops by a studio chauffeur, Rock made the mistake of introducing Massimo to her, in full public view of the packed lobby at the Grand Hotel.

  Since their last meeting in Ireland, Massimo had appeared in Suor Letizia, starring Anna Magnani, the finest dramatic actress in Italian film history, and it would appear that Rock—who had raved over her recent Oscar-winning performance opposite Burt Lancaster in The Rose Tattoo—was just as excited as the prospect of lunching with her, courtesy of Massimo, as he was of seeing more of the handsome stud.

  Phyllis was aware of Rock’s relationship
with Massimo, and devoted a chapter of her memoirs (“The Clash in Rome”) to what happened in the Eternal City. She even accompanied him to a Greco-Romano celebrity lutte, in which Massimo was one of the contestants and which ended up on cinema newsreels, revealing that she was clearly enjoying the spectacle as much as he was. In the hotel lobby, however, she became wildly hysterical—calling the Italian a “silly little fruitcake”, not an apt euphemism because if one watches the newsreel one observes that though not as tall as Rock, Massimo was inordinately muscular and not remotely effeminate. For her pains she received a smack across the mouth. The blow was not a heavy one—Rock only slapped her to curb her hysteria, but his fingers snagged in the string of pearls she was wearing, snapping it and sending the pearls scattering across the marble floor. The incident made the front page of at least one Italian newspaper, which made only passing reference to “Mr Hudson’s actor friend” but nevertheless printed the damning claim that Rock had been drunk at the time of the “attack”, and that Phyllis had been so terrified of him hitting her again that she had asked the hotel to post an armed guard outside her room. As for Rock, he spent the night with Massimo.

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  News of the Hudsons’ fight over Massimo was relayed to Robert Harrison, who commissioned a feature for Confidential, “Big Rock And His Roman Romeo”, which though not actually stating that they were lovers, did claim that Rock preferred being with “the lusty Latin” than with his wife, which reading between the lines was of course the same thing.

  Again, the wily Henry Willson stepped into the breach, this time with what might have been Harrison’s biggest scoop. Along with a substantial pay-off, he fed him the trashy titbit about Elvis Presley’s alleged relationship with Nick Adams, who had starred with James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause, and who later claimed to have been Jimmy’s last lover. Elvis and Adams, also a procurer of drugs and rent-boys for studio bigwigs, had been snapped cruising the Memphis streets on twin Harley-Davidson motorcycles, and Willson supplied the caption, “Elvis: How I Like To Ride With The Guys”. This story would turn out to be true, though it never made the printed page. Elvis and Rock were let off the hook when, for a second time, the scapegoat was Rory Calhoun. Ironically, Calhoun would become the actors’ last lover, shortly before Adams’ death in February 1968.

  The Hudsons had been scheduled to fly from Rome to Nairobi, where Rock would spend several days getting accustomed to the climate before starting work on Something of Value. Based on the novel by Robert Ruark, this told of the on-going Mau Mau uprising and would provide Rock with one of his most acclaimed dramatic roles. Because of the incident in Rome, Phyllis initially refused to accompany him, and he was all for leaving her behind and taking Massimo—an idea that was soon put out of his head by Universal’s Italian representative. The last thing the studio wanted to read in the tabloids was that their golden boy had split from his wife halfway through the honeymoon they had paid for, and gone off with a man they had known about for some time.

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  Phyllis was contacted by Henry Willson, and threatened with exposure of her lesbian affairs, alleged at the time but which in the wake of evidence revealed since her death appear to have been true. The aforementioned feature in The Advocate observed:

  In fact, she may have qualified as that rarest of species: the lesbian fag-hag. According to actor John Carlyle, a Willson client, he and his boyfriend used to double-date with Rock and Phyllis on various weekend trips to Palm Springs, before they married in 1955. Acquaintances such as Broadway publicist Shirley Herz and literary agent Gilbert Parker recall conversations with Phyllis about her marrying big gay Rock. “I think it will be fun,” she told Herz. Maybe it turned into too much fun. Phyllis had a double standard, [Mark] Miller says of the marriage, “That is, she could go out with women, but Hudson couldn’t make it with men.”

  Willson certainly had something on Phyllis, as indeed he had on everyone who worked for him, and Phyllis knew only too well that in his shameless world of double standards, Rock’s agent would have stopped at nothing to protect his investment. She could of course have beaten them at their own game by exposing Rock to the media and ending all the speculation, but as Mark Miller pointed out (as repeated in The Advocate), “Always the pragmatist, Phyllis feared that Hudson’s homosexuality would be exposed and, in effect, derail her gravy train as Mrs. Star.”

  Therefore at the eleventh hour, Phyllis changed her mind and accompanied Rock to Nairobi, though the studio should not have allowed this on account of the escalating danger. The Mau Mau, Kenya’s secret military Kikuyu guerrilla movement, had been in operation since 1952, its aim to end British colonial rule—a goal

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  that would be achieved in 1960 with the granting of the country’s independence and the election of Jomo Kenyatta as Kenya’s first prime minister.

  By the time of the Hudsons’ visit, the colonial government forces had set up a despicable exercise in ethnic cleansing and killed over 10,000 Kikuyu, Kenya’s largest ethnic group, and the Mau Mau had retaliated with unprecedented brutality. Nowhere was safe and Phyllis, who spent much of her time confined to her suite at the New Stanley Hotel whilst Rock was filming, cannot have had an easy time. Neither was there much fun to be had once the day’s filming had been canned, with Rock unable to engage in his favourite pastime when he was on location—cruising for sex. Phyllis got on well with Rock’s co-stars, Sidney Poitier and Wendy Hiller, but she loathed the director, Richard Brooks, on account of his coarseness.

  Brooks was as renowned for his vulgarity as for his gritty scripts and supremely professional direction, but many of the actresses who worked with him, including Pier Angeli and Bette Davis, maintained that complaining about his anti-social behaviour only made him worse. Phyllis was having none of this and the last straw came when Brooks took Rock into the very heart of Mau Mau country to meet some of them. As he had earlier upset her by declaring how much he loved war, he did so again, or so she claimed, by informing her that the Mau Mau were actually “very nice people”. True or not, and regardless of what Henry Willson or the Universal chiefs might have to say, a few days later Phyllis caught the first available plane out of Nairobi and returned to Los Angeles.

  “When we take away from a man his traditional way of life, his customs, his religion, we had better make certain to replace them with SOMETHING OF VALUE.” So read the opening credits of this profoundly disturbing film whose synopsis deserves no place

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  here. Rock played Peter McKenzie, the quietly spoken white settler’s son who has watched his family struggle to maintain their farmstead, but nevertheless enjoyed a peaceable existence. He and his Kikuyu best friend, Kimani (Poitier) attended missionary school together and until now have been like brothers

  —Kimani’s mother brought him up after the death of his own mother. Times however have changed, and it is only Peter who does not regard Kimani as another cheap hired hand, or frown upon the customs of his people: incest, female circumcision, bestiality and sacrifice, and the ritual smothering of “demon” babies born feet first.

  Amongst the pile of letters marked “personal” that Rock opened upon his return home was one from an eleven-year-old Australian fan, Lynnette Flood. He was so gutted by its contents that he burst into tears halfway through reading it. The little girl was suffering from a brain tumour and had asked for a signed photograph of her idol. Rock called her family and learned that since writing the letter, Lynnette had had the tumour removed and was now in remission. Though very concerned, Rock got in touch with her parents again and joked that this was just as well: he was extremely busy at the moment, and Lynnette would have to collect the photograph herself, and save him the trouble of walking to the mailbox! He paid for her and her parents to fly to Hollywood, and cleared his diary so that he could personally drive them around town and show them the sights. The Sydney Morning Herald reported, “There are many stars in Hollywood, but if you put all their hearts together they still wouldn’t b
e half as big as Rock Hudson’s.”

  On 10 October 1956—George Stevens had taken more than a year to edit the inordinate amount of footage—Giant premiered at the New York Roxy. Rock’s “date” for the evening was Tallulah Bankhead and the undisputed Queen of One-Liners told

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  a bemused woman reporter, “I’m here tonight because this divine young thing is a giant in every conceivable way, darling!” Twenty years on, the occasion evoked a shiver when Rock recalled it in his interview with Gordon Gow:

  Outside the theatre were thousands of people. Traffic was blocked. All of that. And I thought, “My God, I’m in this movie playing one of the leads!” Jesus, it was exciting! Then I sat there in my suit and was booed throughout the film. It was terrifying. And it wasn’t until the fight near the end of the film—where the bigot I was playing was tangling with a worse bigot and getting a couple of good licks on him—that suddenly I was applauded. And it was only then that I realised that the audience was reacting so volubly to the character. Not to me, but to Bick.

  One week later, Giant opened at Grauman’s Theatre, outside which Rock and Elizabeth Taylor left their hand and footprints in the famous pavement cement. This time Rock was accompanied by Phyllis, Mark Miller, and George Nader. The guests of honour were Clark Gable, Joan Crawford, Tab Hunter and Natalie Wood—the latter two an “item” representing the Willson stable. The film was nominated for ten Oscars, two more than for Around the World In Eighty Days, the epic directed by Mike Todd, who married Elizabeth Taylor days before the ceremony. Rock and James Dean were nominated for Best Actor, but the award went to Yul Brynner for The King and I.