Rock Hudson: The Gentle Giant

by David Bret

  From the first, Jack kissed Rock on the cheek and hugged him, “because that’s the relationship I had with my own father. I could feel sometimes, Rock was awkward with it, but he got used to it”. Jack came to feel that he and Rock were similar in temperament. They both were Scorpios, born in November; both were secretive and private.

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  The Devlin Connection began shooting in Hollywood in September 1981. Rock had arranged somewhere for Scalia and his wife to stay, and the couple socialised with him and Tom Clark. Rock and Scalia also went out on the town together—dispensing with his earlier vow never to be seen alone or photographed with another man. While the second episode of the series was being filmed in Malibu, Rock and Scalia received a visit from Mark Rowland of Playgirl, which for the past decade had titillated America’s female population—and more than a few males—with tasteful photospreads and centrefolds of some of the world’s most attractive men. Almost all of these had posed naked—some, like Burt Reynolds and Henry Kissinger had gone as far as their public positions and reputations would allow, while actors such as teen idol Fabian, George Maharis and Flash Gordon star Sam Jones had insisted upon appearing full-frontal.

  Playgirl’s photographer, Alison Morley, had rather hoped to snap “father and son” in all their glory, or as much of it as they might allow, but when Rock learned of this—and that the magazine had been tipped off that he and Scalia might have been sharing the same trailer and having an affair—he refused to be interviewed and is further alleged to have “briefed” Scalia before allowing him to see Rowland, who reported:

  Shirtless, he reveals the rippling, muscular torso of a well-conditioned athlete (which he is), but his facial features are lean and surprisingly delicate. “Rock and I are similar sorts—we’re both cut-ups and like to joke and tell stories,” he reveals. “He’s really become like a father figure to me. You know, when I was a kid, if one of the gang would put on airs and graces or act stuck-up, we’d always say, ‘Hey, who do you think you are, Rock Hudson?’ And now I’m here!”

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  The series was plagued with problems from the outset. Rock hated the producer and denounced the scripts as tacky. There were no requisite “token fucks” as with McMillan & Wife. After shooting just three episodes, he began searching for a loophole that might get him out of his contract, though it was a cruel twist of fate that intervened at six in the morning on 30 October 1981, when Tom Clark found him in his kitchen, deathly pale and clutching his chest in agony. Not wishing to waste time calling an ambulance, Clark drove Rock to the Cedars-Sinai Hospital, where a heart specialist ordered an ECG and informed him there was no evidence to suggest that he had had a coronary. Rex Kennamer was dissatisfied, an arranged further tests which revealed that Rock had blocked arteries, almost certainly caused by excessive smoking and a high-cholesterol diet. And even at this stage, Rock refused to heed his doctor’s advice, as Tom Clark explained a few weeks later to Ciné-Revue’s David Duffy:

  Those last few weeks leading up to his illness were a real nightmare for Rock, but he was so obstinate. He told me, “I’ve got to make this comeback work. I’ve got to prove I’m still a great star!” It was a vicious circle because his worrying over this so-called comeback only aggravated the chest pains he’d been having for the last six months, since his housekeeper found him wandering around in the middle of the night, not even knowing where he was....So he began drinking hot toddies to ease the situation, and the worse the pains became, the more he drank. Even when Rock’s doctor told him how bad things were, he bellowed, “You can’t keep me [in hospital]. At least allow me to work tomorrow—just ten minutes are all I need to wrap up this last scene!” To which Dr Kennamer responded severely that ten minutes

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  was all that it would take to kill him. That’s when Rock decided to listen.

  Rock was re-admitted to the Cedars-Sinai for triple bypass surgery and on 1 November, the eve of his operation, summoned his closest friends to his bedside. Rex Kennamer had put the fear of God into him, he said, and he was convinced that he was going to die. For two hours the group drank and chain-smoked, until a worried nurse called Kennamer and he ordered everyone to leave. Rock was moved to another room, and the one he vacated was fumigated. His tenacity astounded the medical staff. During the six-hour operation the surgeons found more arterial damage than anticipated, and he was not expected to survive. The hospital switchboard was jammed with calls from well-wishers, and during the next twenty-four hours Rock received 50,000 letters and cards. Yet in less than a week he was on his feet, stomping impatiently around his room and pestering the doctors to allow him home. Jack Scalia visited him regularly, and later said how proud he had felt when Rock had held his hand and let go of his reserve—bursting into tears, and then just as quickly pulling himself together again. His preoccupation, of course, was with getting back to work. He told a bedside press conference:

  Staying healthy’s no fun at all. No drinks, no cigarettes, no excitement. But I’m sticking with it and feel better than I have in twenty years. Now that I’m no longer a sex symbol I can go ahead and act. The best years are still to come. I’m actually looking forward to growing old and playing good parts!

  It was all a façade. Within hours of returning to the Castle, in the

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  middle of November, he was smoking again and refusing to adhere to a low-cholesterol diet. He did cut down on his drinking on account of the medication he had been prescribed—pills that brought about the blackest of depressions and played havoc with his already sky-high libido. At 56, Rock was probably not exaggerating then he told friends he had reached a stage where he was capable of having sex with as many as five different men in a 24-hour period. His first public outing after his illness in December when he accompanied Elizabeth Taylor to Natalie Wood’s funeral. The actress had drowned off Catalina Island, but such was the media speculation as to whether her death had been accidental, suicide, or murder that the press were far less interested in Rock than they might ordinarily have been.

  In the spring of 1982, six months after his bypass, Rock and Jack Scalia resumed working on The Devlin Connection. During the long break between filming the crew had been seconded elsewhere, robbing the series of all continuity. Rock later said that everyone had been fumbling in the dark and that he had been truly relieved when NBC had pulled the plug after an unlucky thirteenth episode, and cancelled the second series. By now, his relationship with Tom Clark had disintegrated and they were sleeping in separate rooms. Rock also received news that his father had died. In his eighties and suffering from dementia, Roy Scherer had been living at the Motion Picture Home for several months since the death of his third wife, Edith. Rock, who had been paying him $200 a month for longer than he cared to remember, had insisted that Scherer spend his last days here, though he had hardly seen him since the day he had walked out on his family. The old man had kept wandering off and had been handed over to relatives in Oregon, where he had died. Rock paid for the funeral and sent flowers, but did not attend and for the rest of his life would rarely speak of his father again.

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  With Jack Scalia in The Devlin Connection.

  With Elizabeth Taylor in The Mirror Crack’d.

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  10: The Sleeping Prince

  “I welcome my birthdays. Relish them, as a matter of fact. I have confidence now and can look forward to trying new things. I don’t think fifty was a crucial age. Forty was, and thirty-nine because I was facing forty. But lately everything has fallen into place for me.” Rock Hudson.

  During the autumn of 1982, Rock met the most controversial of all his lovers—Marc Christian (surname MacGinnis, which he later dropped, Christian said to have been his mother’s maiden name), a tall, strikingly handsome, overtly muscular 29-year-old fitness enthusiast. In one interview, Christian claimed that he had been a musicologist with the Institute of American Musical, in another that he had worked for the Record Institute. His knowledge of
music and recording techniques are said to have been exemplary. He told Rock initially that he was a fitness instructor, and standing 6 feet 2 inches and almost as solidly built as Rock, he certainly looked the part.

  Much has to be said for Christian’s animal magnetism and innate charisma—borne out by the fact that when he won Rock over he had not just the then almost requisite moustache favoured by butch gay males, but—horror of horrors so far as Rock was concerned!—a beard, an “appendage” that soon came off once they began dating, earning the clean-shaven, almost ethereal-looking Christian the nickname “Sleeping Prince”.

  When and where the pair met is unclear. Christian cited three different locations in various interviews: at a fund-raising rally for Gore Vidal’s Senate campaign (which had concluded the previous June), at another unspecified political event, and at the Brooks Baths—the more likely of the three, for Rock is quoted by Sara Davidson as having told George Nader, “He kept waving his dick at me until I finally noticed him. The rest is history.”

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  On the face of it, where the couple met might have been of little consequence were it not for what would later transpire in the Los Angeles Court House, itself an indication of Christian’s mysterious, complex persona. As Davidson observed, “What’s disturbing is that people don’t usually forget the way they met their lovers, particularly important ones. They are asked how they met and tell the story again and again; it becomes a part of shared history.” Equally odd, Christian—a self-confessed bisexual, though he may have only later claimed to be so to save face, and so that he would not be over-castigated for his involvement in one of the most talked about gay relationships in Hollywood history—was living with a woman, 62-year-old Liberty Martin, a Libby Holman-type who had a penchant for much younger, gay men.

  Rock and Christian’s affair took off like wildfire. Initially they met discreetly at Liberty Martin’s apartment. Then Christian began spending weekends at the Castle. Rock found a way of adding his name to the payroll, for with infinite patience and expertise Christian had taken on the task of remastering and logging Rock’s vast collection of 78rpm records, using a costly technique which reduced surface noise—though on a weekly salary of $400 he was netting considerably more than the other household staff, who had been on the same low wages (but treated like Hollywood royalty by Rock) for years.

  On top of this, Christian was provided with a car and a personal fitness adviser, and Rock paid for him to have his teeth fixed. Taking another leaf out of Henry Willson’s book he called veteran actress Nina Foch, to whom he had grown close since she had played a murderess in the penultimate McMillan. Foch had cut down on film work and was currently running a small drama school. Rock was so besotted with his new lover that he genuinely believed he possessed the requirements to make it as a

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  movie star—something that would not happen—and he was enrolled for lessons.

  In addition to all these privileges, when Christian informed Rock that his father was terminally ill, that all that was keeping him alive was his dream of restoring his 1959 Chevrolet Nomad station wagon, Rock agreed to pick up the tab. Over the next year or so, Christian ran up a repair bill of over $20,000, several times the vehicle’s value. Needless to say, such favouritism only caused resentment amongst Rock’s often very bitchy employees, making it difficult to separate truth from hearsay whilst sifting through the events of the next two years and beyond.

  Rock was interviewed at home by Donald Zec, one of the few journalists he trusted. Referring to his recent heart surgery and ignoring rumours that he had pancreatic cancer, caused by drinking, Zec recalled, “Maybe he had a clue that all was not well inside that fine, bronzed torso that had, in the earliest days of his great career, earned him the title of Baron of Beefcake.” Now, Rock spoke of his failure during these formative years:

  I was always inhibited. It wasn’t just ordinary shyness, it was paranoia, probably the most painful sickness I ever endured in my life. I was so scared I wouldn’t make it, I just worked my arse off, always looking over my shoulder.

  He was bitter towards Phyllis Gates for sullying his reputation when filing for divorce:

  She cited mental cruelty, which is what you say when you can’t think of anything else. A lot of people speculated—still do. Well, let ‘em. The more they do, the more I like it!

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  Well aware that Rock was gay, Zec asked him if he was offended by the whispering campaign concerning his sexuality:

  Of course it offends me! I’ve heard it about almost everybody here in Hollywood. In the old days when I went out with an actor, the studio insisted that we had to take a couple of girls along. Actresses lunch together and nobody calls them lesbians, but God help actors who do the same! But if people want to think that way, let ‘em. What am I supposed to do to prove myself—take some broad up on to the stage and invite everybody to watch?

  Lastly he recalled with indifference his recent hospitalisation and brush with death:

  I said to myself either, I wake up or I don’t. Whichever it is, terrific! My life, like this house, has been a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant memories. I’m happy to settle for that!

  The final rupture with Tom Clark occurred in September 1983 when he and Rock flew to New York. Rock had been pencilled in to play one of the two flagrantly effeminate leads in a forthcoming British stage production of La Cage aux Folles, and for once no longer cared what the media’s reaction would be. His part was to have been the one immortalised in Edouard Molinaro’s 1978 film by Ugo Tognazzi, the owner of the gay nightclub that puts on transvestite revues and who secretly lusts after the “maid—a pretty black youth who minces around the stage wearing nothing but a pair of spray-on hot pants and whose lover is a cloying neurotic scene-queen who dresses and acts like an ageing, slightly mad Bette Davis.

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  Claire Trevor took Rock to see the Broadway revival of the show and although he did not give the producer an immediate decision, he very seriously considered the part over the coming months—until a British publicist sent him a clipping from Him Monthly, at that time the country’s most popular gay magazine. In this, the not always subtle but immensely revered journalist Kris Kirk had composed a fun feature entitled New Year Gay Alphabet, and under the letter “L” had written:

  L is for La Cage aux Folles, the musical, which is whispered to be opening in London in the New Year. Normally, you could count me out, but ROCK HUDSON playing a faggot? This I must see…

  Rock is said to have considered suing the magazine for “implying between the lines” that he was gay, but soon changed his mind upon the realisation that the likes of Kris Kirk had been getting away with murder for years in their acerbic columns. More often than not these were published in magazines with suggestive titles such as Bona and Gold, which folded after a few issues, leaving other publications free to unleash an incontrollable backlash of “gay Rock” anecdotes, real and invented.

  Meanwhile, just two days after arriving in New York, Rock told Tom Clark that he had booked himself on the next flight back to Los Angeles. Three weeks later, when Clark returned to the Castle in the hope of a reconciliation, the pair had a violent quarrel during which Rock hit him and ordered him out of the house. Clark left, but refused to give up on what he claimed were the ten best years of his life: he flew back to New York and moved into Rock’s Beresford apartment, where he waited for him to cool down.

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  On 31 October 1983, Rock flew to Israel to shoot what would be his last film, The Ambassador, with Robert Mitchum. Before leaving Hollywood, he installed Marc Christian at the Castle full-time—not just as his “wife” but to ensure that Tom Clark would not get back in whilst he was overseas. He returned home at the beginning of January, and his friends have commented that around this time he was observed to have lost weight, but that he looked better for it as, prior to his bypass operation, he had been getting a podgy around the middle. For the time being, Rock attributed the w
eight loss to the night-sweats he had suffered in Israel on account of the intense heat. And in any case he was still tipping the scales at a robust 210 pounds.

  As had happened earlier in San Francisco, Rock, accompanied by Christian, began “doing the rounds” of gay establishments in Hollywood—bars, clubs, saunas, restaurants—which he had refused to patronise before for fear of evoking a scandal which might ruin his reputation. Times had changed, he said, besides which it made him feel great that, at 58, he could be seen on the town with a devastatingly handsome stud half his age who had eyes for him alone. Little did he realise that Christian was cheating on him so soon into their relationship. Mark Miller told Rock—and later the Los Angeles Court—that on one occasion whilst Rock had been in Israel, he had gone into one of the bedrooms at the Castle to search for a photograph for a publicist, and had found Christian asleep in the bed with a young man called Keith Johnson.

  Neither was Johnson the only one. In March, Rock was asked to present the Best Actress Award to Shirley MacLaine at the Oscars ceremony. He wore an old tuxedo, and such was his weight loss, the audience did not see that it had to be tucked in at the back with dozens of pins. His elderly gardener, Clarence Morimoto, stated at the subsequent court case that during Rock’s