Rock Hudson: The Gentle Giant

by David Bret

  Rock’s interviewer could not resist concluding, truthfully but sarcastically, “Nobody who know Rock Hudson well would wager on that!”

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  Nothing proved quite so humiliating, however, as the very open public debate, conducted during the summer of 1971, when a Hollywood gay group—not unlike the “outing” movements of the present day who wrongly believe that society will be more tolerant of homosexuals if major celebrities and other important figures are forced out of the closet—sent out a large number of invitation cards that had been inscribed, “To Celebrate The Wedding Of Mr. Jim Nabors. And Mr Rock Hudson.”

  Five years Rock’s junior, Jim Nabors was a popular television host and actor who had also battled most of his career to prevent his sexuality from being exposed to the media. Rock had guested on his CBS variety show, and Nabors is thought to have stayed at the Castle on a number of occasions, though not as a lover—once while his house was being refurbished after a fire. The announcement was taken seriously by at least one gossip columnist who, though not actually allowed to name names for fear of prosecution, might just as well have done when he wrote, “One is like the Rock of Gibraltar—the other is like your neighbour.”

  The incident spilled over on to a number of radio and television chat shows, and for weeks the gates at the Castle were besieged by reporters, most of whom knew the real Rock Hudson but were afraid of putting pen to paper. Rock’s good-humoured but flippant comment—“It’s over! I’ve given Jim all his diamonds and emeralds back!”—did not help, but if the newspapers were unable to get a coherent response from the “groom and groom”, there was no shortage of witnesses who willing to offer first-hand and frequently graphic accounts of the nuptials, for suitable remuneration of course.

  No two stories matched as alleged guests gave “exclusives” to the press about the ceremony which had variably taken place in New York, Carmel, Las Vegas, Vancouver and Chicago—whilst

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  show business hacks “in the know” claimed that the likeliest location had been at a Hollywood party hosted by Carol Burnett, though how or why the “union” came about has never been explained. Rock and Jim Nabors were never lovers and most importantly, Nabors was neither blond nor muscular. What is virtually certain is that there was some sort of ceremony, serious or otherwise, though if a story in the News of the World—conveniently published after Rock’s death—is to be believed, this took place in London, as witnessed by “a beautiful model” who, again conveniently, gave her story to the newspaper on condition that her identity should not be revealed:

  The setting was the plush, candle-lit living room of a luxury house in Belgravia. And the odd couple made the vows before a “priest” and eighteen guests. Most were men, with a sprinkling of glamour girls including the ex-Vogue model. “I was an innocent 15-year-old at the time and was stunned by the whole thing,” said the model. “I’d gone to the wedding with a friend of Rock’s, thinking it was going to be a normal one between a man and a woman…I can’t remember what responses Rock and Jim made to the priest. What I do remember is that the whole event took place in great seriousness, as though it was a man and a woman getting married in church…Most of the guests were designers and models, and nobody else seemed to think it unusual.

  The outcome of the scandal was that Nabors’ television show was taken off the air, and at the end of 1971—buckling under the media pressure—Jack Coates packed his bags and returned to his family in Arizona. Later, he told Sara Davidson that that the real reason for him leaving Rock was because he had been incapable

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  of putting up with the persistent intrigue and in-fighting amongst Rock’s courtiers.

  “Everyone wanted to be the movie star’s best friend, and because I had pillow talk, they tried to get to the throne through me,” he said.

  Soon afterward, Jim Nabors began dating a man named Stan Cadwallader and in January 2013, aged eighty-two—when same sex marriage was legalised in Washington—they were married. The fiasco came close to ruining Rock’s long-standing reputation as a romantic leading man, and matters were not helped when Pretty Maids in a Row went on general release. A publicity amendment now promoted this as a black comedy, but the critics did not find the story of a man who went around bumping off young girls with whom he had had sex particularly funny. If this was the best Rock could so, one declared, then perhaps he should call it a day and go back to driving trucks. Rock himself confessed that some of the reviews for the film were the worst he had ever read. Salvation, however, came from the very worst source, as he later recalled to David Castell:

  Universal asked me to do a little Movie of the Week entitled McMillan & Wife. I said no. They upped the money and still I said no. More money, still no. Finally, they offered me so much that it would have been absurd to decline. I would have been cutting off my nose to spite my face. I agreed to do it. Of course, it turned out into a television series that tied me up for another seven years. I think perhaps Universal and I were fated to work together.

  Rock was paid $120,000 an episode, the most any actor had ever been paid for a television series. The comedy-dramas—ten were

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  scheduled to begin with, with ten more to follow if the series proved popular—were to be screened at three-week intervals as part of the NBC Mystery Movie season with McCloud, starring Dennis Weaver, and Columbo, with Peter Falk. In Britain, the series also included Banacek, starring George Peppard. Rock was told that if required, the series could be shot around any film schedule, that he would have full script approval, and most importantly for him that he would be able to choose his own leading lady. Though he had never wanted to do television, which he scathingly referred to as “that fucking oblong box in everybody’s living room”, he is said never to have complained once on the set though he did confess to the Guardian’s Bart Mills how he had hated the tight shooting schedule:

  The villain in all this is time. There’s not enough time. A movie, for instance, is made with some care. When I made Seconds with John Frankenheimer it was shot in four months. A McMillan & Wife segment is shot in three weeks, for the same amount of screen time [sic] as Seconds. They’re made back-to-back, one after another, with no development of character, always the same. It’s grounds for alcoholism! For five years I had to remain an all-knowing, superhuman son of a bitch who never went to the bathroom!

  After auditioning several potential “wives” by taking them out to dinner with series producer Leonard Stern, Rock selected a virtually unknown 25-year-old, husky-voiced actress named Susan Saint James—it was said at the time because like himself she hailed from Illinois, and because she had been born with the same surname as his best friend, Mark Miller. At once there were rumours that Rock “fancied” her—not true, of course.

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  McMillan & Wife was a camped up seventies version of The Thin Man (1934) and its sequels which had starred William Powell and Myrna Loy. Sally, the daughter of an eminent criminologist, proves the perfect if somewhat naïve spouse for the laid-back, non-smoking ladies’ man Police Commissioner Stewart McMillan, and together they are drawn into innumerable cases—mostly homicides—aided by Mack’s plodding, equine-faced sidekick, Sergeant Charles Enright (John Schuck) who says in one episode, “I’m not grinning—it’s the way my mouth is!” Completing the line-up is Mildred (Nancy Walker), the sharp-tongued housekeeper whose cooking fills Mack with dread, and who never misses an opportunity to chide him for his would-be womanising. When Sally says, “Mildred, you know that I trust Mack completely,” she cannot help the acid response, “That’s why we make such a good team. I don’t trust him at all!”

  The series has dated more than the Powell-Loy films of the thirties. Susan Saint James frequently looks like a teenager in her “Flower Power” costumes, while Rock is sometimes ungainly and unappealing in wide-lapel suits, kipper ties, and every now and then a moustache, which does not suit him. The feature-length pilot show, Once Upon A Dead Man, had most of its
interior scenes filmed at the Castle, and was an instant hit not just in the United States, but around the world where it was dubbed into twenty languages. As with Rock’s comedy films, there were a lot of in-house gay jokes and references, and another precedent was set—that of the “token fuck”. This was the requisite, easily identified, blue-eyed, fair-haired hunk who appears in almost every McMillan & Wife, with whom Rock was involved only while that particular episode was being made—the Highlands dancer, the musician, the cowboy extra, the corpse.

  The early shows varied in quality from passable to appalling. In Terror Times Two, credibility is stretched far beyond the limit

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  when Mack is kidnapped and a man from an underground gang is substituted in his place. “I’ve been fleeing women since I was fifteen,” the real Mack gulps, an obvious double entendre slipped in by Rock, a fact that is proved when even Sally cannot tell the difference between her husband and the fake. Yet in this first series of McMillan & Wife, Rock gives a good impression of bonhomie, as if he is genuinely enjoying the light-hearted romps that had returned him to the zenith of his popularity. He was, however, putting on a brave face to camouflage his burgeoning depression and disdain.

  “The whole thing is lamentable,” he told Joan Mac Trevor, the Hollywood correspondent of the French magazine Ciné-Revue, a close friend since Giant, to whom he opened up his innermost thoughts. “The characters have the consistency of cigarette paper and the intrigues only of interest to drunks and fools.”

  The scripts, he added, were corny and the hours way too long. He also professed to hating Susan Saint James who, aware that he was gay, boasted to friends that she had fallen in love with him, and that he had reciprocated her crush by letting her sit on his lap—which he denied. His shaky equilibrium took a savage blow in March 1972 when Marilyn Maxwell suddenly died of a heart attack. Some years later his agent, Dale Olsen, revealed to Joan Mac Trevor just how much this had affected Rock:

  His grief drove him to alcoholism. He became like a wounded animal, seeing no one, refusing to even pick up the phone, which at the time was ringing nonstop. Occasionally he would go out, drive around for a few hours, then stop off absolutely anywhere and down a dozen drinks, one after the other. That was the period when he’d become determined to wreck his health, and he didn’t give a damn about the circumstances.

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  Rock paid for Maxwell’s funeral, and was one of the pallbearers. He moved her 15-year-old son, Matt, into the Castle and looked after him while the estate was being sorted out—and when a reporter referred to Maxwell’s once being considered as the second Mrs. Hudson, he levelled, “Marilyn Maxwell was the only wife I ever wanted.” Then, setting his grief to one side, he flew to Mexico to make Showdown.

  Rock’s co-star in the film could not have been a worse influence on his alcohol problem—Dean Martin, one of the few people capable of drinking him under the table. One afternoon—to the relief of the studio’s insurers, both were sober—Rock was rehearsing a scene in which he had to drive an antique motor car when the brakes suddenly failed and he crashed into a concrete wall. He sustained a broken leg, two fractured arms, a cracked rib and severe concussion. Shooting was held up for six weeks while he recovered, firstly in hospital, then at the Castle. He was barely on his feet again when he received news from Mark Miller that George Nader had been blinded in one eye and forced to give up his acting career. Putting aside his own plight, Rock rushed to his friends’ side, offering not just moral support but financial help. Once Nader was able to look after himself, Miller was put on Rock’s payroll as his personal secretary, ostensibly so that he would be able to support the partner who had supported him for more than thirty years.

  Again, there was a new man in Rock’s life. Oklahoma-born Tom Clark was a former actor and MGM publicist whom Rock had known for some ten years, but the pair had never become involved, he said, because someone else had always been in the way. Clark was also several steps away from the Hudson stereotypical lover—big, but neither muscular, blond or even good-looking. Also, unlike most of the others he was around the same age as Rock, and a heavy drinker. Most importantly he was

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  possessed of the same offbeat sense of humour—and if Rock needed anything right now, it was cheering up. Soon after becoming an item the couple flew to Australia to collect Rock’s “Logie”, the country’s equivalent of a BAFTA or an Emmy, beginning a series of round-the-world jaunts that would raise many eyebrows, although “officially” Clark was Rock’s publicist and personal manager.

  The 1973 season of McMillan & Wife was an improvement on its predecessor, though some critics were unkind in referring to Rock’s “latest prop”—his midriff, prompting Universal into ordering him to diet.

  “What I would like is three hamburgers and a big bowl of spaghetti,” he told TV Times reporter Ken Martin when they met for lunch at the studio canteen. “But what I’m going to have is a salad and black coffee.”

  Rock was amused when Martin cracked, “Go ahead and have the hamburgers, Rock. You could always be the first fat superstar!” He was not so tickled when he read the finished article within which Martin observed, in light of the Nabors scandal:

  Maybe it is fear of questions that are too probing that makes him insist on a Press agent being present each time he gives an interview—though you only have to spend a week in Hollywood to find out all you want to know about him from friends and colleagues. You’d think by now he wouldn’t worry about privacy, because audiences these days are too intelligent to care if a star’s private life is different from his on-screen roles—and Hudson has proved that his popularity can survive anything.

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  Meanwhile, in Freefall to Terror, lip-readers got to see Rock mouthing “Oh fuck!”, and in the same episode, in a scene that the producer wanted to pull but Rock insisted stay put, Mack collapses with a fit of giggles. What viewers did not know was the reason for his mirth—his “token fuck”, playing a detective, had unexpectedly opened his raincoat and flashed at him!

  The in-jokes continued in No Hearts, No Flowers, when Sally tells Mack, “I just want to be as satisfied as any other woman you have to handle.” In Birth of a Legend, set in Scotland, the story covers every possible Scottish theme: sword-dances, the Highland Games, bagpipes, loch monsters, clan feuds and what Scotsmen wear under their kilts, with Mack not unexpectedly giving everyone an answer to this—and an eyeful. The plum line comes from Roddy McDowall, who tells Mack after someone has taken a pot-shot at him, “You’re lucky you’re not on your way to be stuffed and mounted!” Like Rock, McDowall—who had appeared in Pretty Maids All in a Row—was also gay and the scene required numerous takes because the pair kept cracking up. In Cop of the Year—which centres around the murder of Sergeant Enright’s ex-wife—there is a flashback where the McMillans are on their way to meet Enright’s new “other half” and are speculating about what she looks like when Mack poses the then very risqué question, “What makes you think we’re meeting a she?”

  Before these episodes were televised Rock and Tom Clark flew to South America, where the first series of McMillan & Wife had been dubbed hilariously into Spanish and was topping the ratings. Rock made personal appearances in Buenos Aires and one television company had attempted but failed to negotiate an agreement with Universal to film The Rock Hudson Story—a tell-all documentary, which of course would be anything but. Such was the hysteria among fans that the pair had to be escorted

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  everywhere by military police until they moved to Rio, where Rock hired a hotel suite which overlooked the gay area of Copacabana Beach. When they returned to Hollywood, Clark moved into the Castle.

  In March 1973, Rock was contacted by his friend Carol Burnett, claimed by some to have been matron of honour at his “wedding” to Jim Nabors. Burnett had revived the musical I Do! I Do! and having raved over his album of Rod McKuen songs proposed that he should be her leading man when the production went into summer stoc
k. This was a hazardous venture for a man who, though more than capable of doing so, had never sung or danced in front of an audience other than the half-hearted crooning of “Baby It’s Cold Outside” with Mae West at the 1958 Oscars. Now, he would be expected to perform seventeen numbers and routines! Burnett, however, would not take “no” for an answer, and without stopping to think what he might be letting himself in for, Rock consented. He told David Castell:

  I figured, after all, that I had nothing to lose and everything to gain, including experience. I learned the lines in one week, the score in the second….then we had three weeks in rehearsal. They say it’s the most difficult of all the American musicals to do because there’s nobody else on the stage except this couple and they age fifty years during the evening—so that even during the costume changes you have to keep talking, and when you go off the stage you still have a microphone to carry on the conversation.

  The dance routines were choreographed by Gower Champion (1919-80), who with his wife Marge had thrilled audiences with dazzling displays in some of Hollywood’s most famous musicals

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  including Showboat and Till the Clouds Roll By. The plot, based on the play The Four Poster, told of a couple who have been married fifty years, and who in a series of flashbacks re-enact the ups and downs of their life together. The 13 June San Bernadino premiere saw Rock affected by stage fright and twice missing his cue for the opening song—the audience were still cheering his entrance. The reviews were not always good, but every show was a sell-out, and the play transferred to Los Angeles.

  At the end of the year Rock and Susan Saint James began shooting a further series of McMillan & Wife—reluctantly on his part for he was starting to tire, he said, of the show’s lack of professionalism. He told Ron Davis: