by David Bret
148
sleep six, though so far as is known, since returning from Italy he had not gone in for group sex. Rock’s favourite room was his den. This contained a bar and fully-equipped theatre, and housed his vast record collection and his “gadgets”—movie equipment, juke box, hi-fis, cinema-screen television, and an exhaustive film library. Over the years he acquired a 16mm print of every film he appeared in but also the scripts and hundreds of stills from each one. The patio area was gargantuan: a 40-foot pool “guarded” by a lion’s head fountain surrounded by Mexican statues—mostly naked, frolicking youths—pride of place going to the largest stone barbecue in Hollywood at the time. Ferndell, the tropical area behind the pool, was designated an official pissoir for those who could not make it back to the house toilets on time…and for those guests who wanted a little indiscreet fun, Rock had created “Assignation Lane”, a narrow, lantern-lit pathway threading through the dense cliff-side vegetation, which—she claimed on account of the vast number of ejaculations that took place here—Tallulah Bankhead re-baptised “Liberace’s Passage” Chez lui, Rock almost became Garbo-like, inviting only the very privileged into his domain. Most of his guests, certainly during his early years here, would be expected to sit through his old movies, though they would usually be offered a choice, as he explained to Photoplay’s Mike Webb in 1969:
I guess I’ve run Giant fifty times since settling down in the house. Well, the movie’s thee-and-a-half-hours long and this doesn’t include the time it takes to change reels. The intervals run quite a bit as people repair themselves to the bathroom and you mix fresh drinks and all that, so it’s usually four or five in the morning before they take off home, everybody bombed. Alternatively I surprise them by showing Tomahawk or Taza…Then they’re in a
149
spot because the movie’s terrible and I’m terrible…and they say futile things like, “You were marvellous!” when I know all the time I was absolutely lousy!
Rock also took up a new pastime—needlepoint!—creating some beautiful pieces of embroidery which would be universally admired. And for the first time in his life, perhaps, he had found inner peace:
My house is the only place I really have any privacy. Outside the house, everything I do is watched and talked about, but once I come in those gates I can relax and let go. I love to work on my house, to tear down walls and lay bricks. And for real relaxation, there’s nothing like gardening. When I’m thinking about career decisions and working out new roles in my head, I like to go out in the garden and sweat. Sometimes I’ll just pull weeds for hours and be totally lost in my thoughts. If I had it all to go over again, I’d probably be a landscape gardener.
“I hate dominating females!” Rock bellows in Man’s Favourite Sport? which began shooting in the spring of 1962. The film was directed by Howard Hawks, a member of Hollywood “royal family” who had produced and directed such movie milestones as Red River, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Hawks was equally at home working with intense drama as he was screwball comedies. Barring a few hilarious scenes and despite the presence of 23-year-old Paula Prentiss, this one was second-rate compared with his recent comic exploits. Prentiss had recently tickled audiences in a series of capers with Jim Hutton in The Honeymoon Machine, but unlike Gina Lollobrigida and Doris Day did not ‘click’ with Rock. He played Roger Willoughby, the
150
lumbering assistant in a department store fishing equipment section. He has published the best-selling book, Fishing Made Simple, though its tips have come about not through practical experience, but by eavesdropping on customers’ conversations. When his manager elects to profit from his non-existent expertise by entering him in a fishing competition, sponsored by the father of wacky Abigail Page (Prentiss), mayhem ensues.
At around this time, Rock acquired a new lover, his first regular relationship since Massimo. Lee Garlington was a 24-year-old former trainee stockbroker from Atlanta. Four months previously, having completed his military service, he had arrived in Hollywood, found himself bitten by the acting bug, and had been fortunate to have been hired as an extra in the hugely popular television Western series, The Virginian. Garlington had been obsessed with Rock for some time and, not sure how to go about getting an introduction, had begun hanging around outside his home—pretending to be reading a newspaper in the hope of being noticed. Garlington concluded that his only reward had been a cursory glance one day as Rock walked straight past him.
“He was the biggest movie star in the world, and the rumours were that he was gay,” Garlington told People magazine in the spring of 2015. “So I thought, ‘Let me get an eye on him.’”
Rock had noticed the young man, but come to the conclusion that the dishy blond “giving him the eye” might have been an agent provocateur employed by the press. He was however sufficiently interested to hire a gay-friendly private detective to find out if this stranger was “clean”…in other words, genuinely gay. The detective reported back that Garlington was, but spoken for and living with a man. Rock was unperturbed: never one to break up a relationship when there were so many willing fish in the sea, he paid the detective to monitor the situation and inform him should Garlington become “available”.
151
Several months later, and single once more, Lee Garlington was contacted by an intermediary—almost certainly this was Mark Miller—and a meeting arranged. He also appears to have been told that Rock would be expecting them to have sex on their first date, as Garlington later explained:
I was scared to death. Of course, he was 6-foot-4, a monster. He offered me a beer, but nothing happened. Literally. I was too scared. He said, “Well, let’s get together,” and we did…I’d come over after work, spend the night and leave the next morning. I’d sneak out at 6 a.m. in my Chevy Nova and coast down the street without turning on the engine so the neighbours wouldn’t hear. We thought we were being so clever.
Having returned to stockbroking after giving up acting, and unafraid of public opinion because homophobia was less rife in his line of work, Garlington was out of the closet but, concerned that this might affect Rock’s career, refused to move into the Castle. Again there was talk of Rock’s being wanting to risk everything for the man he loved, and no Henry Willson around to persuade him otherwise. For a while they behaved like any other couple. They travelled extensively, never separately, and always shared a hotel room mindless of gossips. They socialised cheaply because Garlington valued his independence and insisted on paying his way. Only at official functions such as film premieres was protocol applied, with each man accompanied by a studio date. Like any other Hollywood “marriage” there were setbacks. Garlington confessed that initially he had found Rock to be a disappointing lover because, despite his size, he was a gentle man who preferred to be the passive partner whereas he hankered after domination. Later in their relationship, however—
152
when Rock discovered that his new beau liked picking up rough trade, there was an argument and Rock told him that they would have to stop going steady. Even so, they remained close for over ten years, and regularly resumed their sexual relationship whenever one of them was between lovers:
Rock was always himself. He would plant a kiss on a leading lady and I would say, ‘Geez, he does that to me the same way.’ That was always a giggle on my part…One of the reasons we went our own way was because in a way I wanted a father figure and he was not strong enough. Rock wasn’t a real strong personality. He was a gentle giant.
Immediately after completing Man’s Favourite Sport, Rock began shooting Send Me No Flowers, his third and final outing with Doris Day. In it he played hypochondriac George Kimball, too enveloped in his imaginary ailments to know much about the outside world. We see him taking his temperature under the shower, then at the breakfast table where he devours a plate of pills from the pharmacy he keeps in his bathroom. “Men of my age are dropping like flies,” he tells Judy, his scatty, long-suffering wife who supports his habit by grindi
ng up fake sleeping pills. “Do you ever read the obituary page? It’s enough to scare you to death!”
Thinking he is about to die—he has heard his doctor talking about another patient over the phone—he sets about finding Judy a new husband, and buys a burial plot for the three of them. This is her former sweetheart Bert Power (Clint Walker), a super-smooth charmer who announces that he is in town for his latest swindle. Looking George/Rock in the eye, he says the reason for his permanent bachelor state is that, since being dumped by Judy
153
when they were in college, he has never been settled for second best. George does his utmost to push them together, though he cannot stand his smarmy rival—whilst Judy thinks that George is cheating on her, until he informs her that he is dying. Then she pampers him, in one scene ensconcing him in a wheelchair and taking him out into the garden to talk to his favourite tree! She is about to book him into a private clinic when his doctor enlightens her about the mix-up. Then she plots her revenge, certain that he is having an affair and that he has invented his illness as a cover-up, by arranging a series of hilarious mishaps—though needless to say, all turns out well in the end.
Although Rock and Doris Day has tremendous fun, as usual, making the film, he later denounced it, telling Gordon Gow:
Right from the start, I hated the script. I just didn’t believe in that man for one minute. Making fun of death is difficult and dangerous. That scene where I went out and bought a plot for myself in the cemetery—to me it was completely distasteful.
In the mid-sixties Rock along with many other major Hollywood stars suffered a temporary but nevertheless distressing slump in his career. Television was to blame for robbing the studio system of much of its mystique. In the Golden Age of Hollywood, megastars such as Garbo, Dietrich, Gable, Crawford and Bogart commanded the unflinching respect of fans because, despite the complexities of their private lives, they had been perceived as regal, untouchable beings—deities almost, created and nurtured by insensitive moguls and immature, sycophantic movie magazines for those who wished to escape the drudgery of the real world, especially between the two wars. Now, some of these luminaries had been demoted and brought into American living-
154
rooms to advertise soap powder, junk food, and less useful paraphernalia. In the meantime, cinema screens played host to a new breed of grittier star: Faye Dunaway, Al Pacino, Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford and Warren Beatty—stars who would rarely be in the same class as their predecessors, but who were held in awe by their fans because the more realistic roles they played demanded considerably more than glamour alone.
At this time Rock made Blindfold, a lukewarm comedy spy thriller directed by Philip Dunne, and co-starring Claudia Cardinale—a veteran of some thirty films at twenty-six, her best-known in the English-speaking world probably The Pink Panther (1963). Just as lovely as Gina Lollobrigida—who Rock had wanted in the film—her abilities as a comedienne were limited, and though she has her moments here, much of the time she makes for little more than pretty scenery. There were rumours in the Continental tabloids that the pair were amorously involved—a story probably instigated by Rock himself, who is said to have had an “unreciprocated interest” in another co-star, 35-year-old Alejandro Rey, whom he had admired three years earlier when he had flexed his muscles as a champion diver in Elvis Presley’s Fun In Acapulco. Whether he got around to propositioning the handsome—and straight—Argentinian is not known, but thought to be unlikely, though he did have a fling with a young actor who played a sailor in the film, whose storyline is both contrived and confusing with lots of double agents in homburgs and raincoats, a psychotic mule, and a dilapidated house in the middle of an alligator-invested swamp.
Blindfold saw Rock slump to Number Two in the Name-Power chart, offering his pride such a battering that he decided that a change of direction might be the only way forwards. As a loan-out from Universal and acting on his new agent’s advice, he accepted the part of Antiochus Wilson, in John Frankenheimer’s
155
Seconds, a bizarre but entertaining exercise in Grand Guignol which succeeded in confounding the critics. Depending on one’s point of view the film was a masterpiece, the best drama Rock had done since Written on the Wind—or just unadulterated hogwash! It certainly challenged his abilities, proving to detractors once and for all that he could act as well as the very best of them and carry a picture virtually without any support from his co-stars. Of these, only Salome Jens and Frances Reid are remembered: the latter would soon become a household name as matriarch Alice Horton in America’s longest-running soap, Days of Our Lives.
Seconds provided strange fare indeed, and was most un-Rock-like: a romp in a vat of mushy grapes after being stripped naked by men, authentic (as demanded by Frankenheimer) drunken outbursts, shots through fish-eye lenses in triptych, special effects creating grotesquely deformed features and limbs, and at times totally incomprehensible dialogue. The story tells of an organisation dealing with “reborns”—disillusioned souls like Rock’s character, Arthur Hamilton, who have reached the end of the road and need to be surgically, psychologically and vocally reconstructed to once more become perfect, younger, life-loving specimens. His death, Arthur learns, will take place in a hotel fire after he has tried to rape a young woman, and no one will realise that the corpse is not his. He is handed over to surgery, emerging a foot taller and twenty years younger as Antiochus—Rock making his appearance, scarred and confused, twenty minutes into the film, finding himself at the centre of a new, optimistic circle of friends with his new identity as a successful painter in Malibu. He even has a pretty mistress. Then everything goes awry when he realises that everyone in this new world is a “reborn” like himself, and when he visits his widow, who does not recognise him. He desperately wants his procedure
156
to be reversed so that he can return to his former life—but there is no turning back as he is wheeled into the operating theatre to have the hole bored into his head which kills him.
Seconds was one of Rock’s favourite films. Cynics have suggested this is because of the name “Wilson” [sic], as Henry Willson had brought about Roy Fitzgerald’s rebirth, only to be destroyed by his creation, with Rock’s character hating the society he had been thrust into—ostensibly, Hollywood itself. Ten years after the film’s release, and subsequent failure, he told Gordon Gow:
What I liked was that the story wasn’t really told until the film had been seen. Or in my case, until I’d finished reading the script…For some strange reason it’s only truly told when you think back on it. I mean, that clinic is a death clinic. But as you watch the movie you don’t feel that. You’re thinking of these unfortunate people who can’t grapple with life the way they are. So they change for a better life—for nothing! Meanwhile the clinic’s gotten rich from the assets of the clients—just flat rich. That’s what made it terrifying to me. And equally, that’s what made it intriguing to do!
In the summer of 1966 Rock made Tobruk, directed by Arthur Hiller and co-starring George Peppard and Nigel Green. Rock’s swansong for Universal proved his best for the studio for some time, though he professed, also to Gordon Gow, how much he had hated it:
Did you ever start to read a book and never finish it? Well, it’s like that with me if I’m stuck with a poor script. It just feels as if there’s no point in continuing….I
157
could name you many examples from the movies I’ve made. The most recent would be Tobruk or Showdown. If you’re not gripped by the first fifteen minutes of a movie, the movie’s in trouble. Likewise, I’ll give a book 75 pages and if it doesn’t hold my attention by then I stop reading. But on the other hand, what a joy it is to be hooked on page two of a book. Or a film begins, and bang! Something happens and it’s electric!
In the film Rock played Major Craig—a role originally intended for Laurence Harvey—a fictitious Canadian hero of the ill-fated British campaign that failed to recapture the Libyan port
from the Germans in September 1942 but nevertheless paved the way for Montgomery’s defeat of Rommel at the Second Battle of El Alamein. His mission succeeds, but it is a Pyrrhic victory when most of his men are killed.
So far as Rock’s association with Universal was concerned, the film was the last straw. Although he had got along well with the other actors and crew, as usual, he felt that he had been snubbed by the studio executives—many of whom despised his versatility in an era when movie stars were pigeonholed into type, even more so than today. He told David Castell:
When I was playing drama, there was always surprise that I could do comedy. When I left the comedies to appear in Seconds, everyone was amazed that I could tackle dramatic parts. People in Hollywood had awfully short memories. When I finished Tobruk, I had to pay for my own party. I asked everyone from the front office, but nobody came. When it was over, I drove my car up and down the streets of the lot, out through the gates and said, “Right, I’m never coming back here!”
158
For the first time in fourteen years, Rock was free to choose his roles. He also became the owner of the Castle...but suddenly became paranoid about his future, wholly convinced that without the support of the studio that had launched him, no more decent parts would ever come his way. He began drinking, though not yet heavily enough for it to affect his health. He was getting through two packets of cigarettes a day, but still looked astonishingly fit and saw no reason to give up his so-called vices. He told Photoplay’s Mike Webb:
