Rock Hudson: The Gentle Giant

by David Bret

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  On 20 July, four days after leaving Carmel and under tremendous pressure from those friends who loved him most, Rock flew to Paris, again accompanied by Ron Channell, who by now had been let in on his dreadful secret. At Orly, a limousine had been booked to take them directly to Percy. So far as everyone back home was aware, save for Mark Miller and George Nader, Rock was travelling to a clinic in Geneva, where doctors had developed an experimental serum for the treatment of anorexia. The car did not turn up, and when Rock collapsed in the airport lounge an ambulance was summoned, and he was taken to the Hospital Americain, in Neuilly. The next morning, a hospital spokesman issued a brief statement:

  It is my sad duty to announce that Mr. Rock Hudson is suffering from acute metastatic liver disease. The chances of recovering from this are not good.

  Ron Channell relayed this news to Mark Miller, and the next day Miller flew to Paris. On 23 July, following a tip-off from their Paris correspondent, Daily Variety ran a brief exclusive:

  The whispering campaign against Rock Hudson can and should stop…The Institute Pasteur has been very active in its research of AIDS. Hudson’s dramatic weight loss was made evidence to the national press last week when he winged his way to Carmel. His illness was no secret to close Hollywood friends, but its true nature was disclosed to very few.

  For a few days, the piece was dismissed as another exercise in tabloid scandalmongering. Its writer Army Archerd, had quoted the correct location but the wrong clinic, but more importantly, a

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  French hospital specialist had disclosed the exact nature of Rock’s illness, and the word AIDS had not been mentioned.

  For several days, Rock appeared to be rallying. Meanwhile the Hôpital Percy, who as pioneers in the treatment of AIDS patients could hardly deny that some of these were famous, was besieged by reporters. One of these, suspecting the truth about his illness, leaked the news to a male nurse. This caused confusion amongst the doctors, who asked Rock to leave the hospital—their official line being that the establishment was not licensed to treat infectious diseases.

  Neither was Rock allowed back at Percy. Though Dr. Dormont was permitted to treat day patients on an experimental-only basis, Percy was a military hospital and only ex-military civilians be admitted for overnight stays. Nancy Reagan (not her husband, as was stated at the time) personally intervened: Rock was allowed to stay at Neuilly, providing a “100 per cent truthful” statement was given to the media. This was read out by Rock’s French press agent, Yanou Collart, on 25 July:

  Mr. Rock Hudson has Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, which was diagnosed over a year ago in the United States. He came to Paris to consult with a specialist in this disease. Prior to meeting the specialist he became very ill at the Ritz Hotel, and his personal business manager, Mr. Mark Miller, advised him from California to enter the American Hospital of Paris at once. The doctors at the American Hospital conducted a series of diagnostic examinations of Mr. Hudson. At the time they suspected, but did not know, about Mr. Hudson’s AIDS diagnosis. They were informed of this by Mr. Miller upon his arrival in Paris. All our prayers are with Mr. Hudson, and we wish him the best.

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  Collart later said that she had to coerce Rock into giving his permission for the statement to be read. One of his conditions for doing so was that it should be made known that he had collapsed in his suite at the Ritz, as befit his status, and not in a common airport lounge. Also, it is very unlikely that anyone would have insisted upon him being conveyed to the Hôpital Americain, as more or less all celebrities stricken in and around Paris were treated there. The announcement was published by the world press, in almost every instance accompanied by pictures of Rock and Doris Day taken in Carmel nine days earlier—with emphasis placed on a head-and-shoulders shot taken from a larger photograph in which he really does resemble a corpse—being wired to press offices around the world. Terry Sanderson, writing in his acclaimed Gay Times “Mediawatch” column, rightly criticised this aspect of the Hudson smear campaign:

  The most pervasive image in the papers was that picture of Rock Hudson—gaunt and enfeebled. Day after day the same sunken-eyed, hollow-cheeked face looked out from the headlines…and the floodgates opened once more. Poor Rock Hudson. The vultures swooped in to pick at his bones before he’s even dead…All the old clichés were wheeled out: “Living A Lie”, “Secret Torment”, “Bizarre Lifestyle”, and so on. Oh, how they wallowed in it.

  Everyone who saw this picture, before reading the statement from the Hôpital Americain, knew at once that Rock was seriously ill, but it took the British tabloids to actually declare that he had AIDS. Over the next few days the public were fed the most lurid resumé of his personal life. Very dubious “exclusives” were acquired, from suspicious sources—insiders, talent scouts,

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  prominent doctors, long-time friends who were of course unnamed and almost in every instance editorial invention, the oldest trick in the book. In a stream of bile equalled by that which followed the death of Freddie Mercury, six years later, the tabloids fought to see which of them could come up with the headline that vilified him the most. Anti-gay supremo John Junor, of the Sunday Express, called the Dynasty kiss a deliberate attempt to give Linda Evans AIDS, a poisonous accusation he would never have got away with today, or even then, had Rock been aware of it. And if this was not enough, Junor concluded:

  There is rightly much public sympathy for Mr. Hudson. Might there not have been more if when suspecting, as he must have done, the nature of the ailment from which he was suffering, he had not gone out of his way—as do homosexuals who offer blood—to place other and innocent people in danger?

  This specific statement deeply offended the British gay community, the majority of whom were taking active steps to curb the spread of the disease, and who now found themselves attacked by the arch homophobes such as John Junor, who were being nasty just for the sake of it, well aware that on account of the unprecedented wealth of medical facts being broadcast by the media, the public knew that HIV could not be transmitted by kissing. This time in his Gay Times column, Terry Sanderson went for the jugular:

  Innocent? What is Rock Hudson supposed to be guilty of? As far as the vile Junor is concerned, he is guilty simply of being gay.

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  Only a select handful of journalists were similarly brave enough to defend him, the most sympathetic being Donald Zec, who observed in the Sunday Mirror:

  It is a sad and painfully embarrassing twilight for one of Hollywood’s best-loved legends…Not since Humphrey Bogart’s staggering courageous battle with cancer, years ago, have we seen so devastating a disintegration of a star. His Hollywood chums wince if not weep at what they see. I felt the stab of it, too, recalling the lively and pretty forthright character who invited me to his Beverly Hills mountain home for a talk not that long ago…Rock Hudson, lying stricken in a Paris hospital, is not fighting to sustain an image, but for his life. But if I know anything about this likeable and modest character, he won’t be whimpering at the stakes mounted against him.

  Phyllis Gates was in her element, and not much less merciless then the tabloids. She told a New York press conference that her long-threatened book about their troubled marriage was close to completion—in other words, as the terms of their divorce prevented her from writing about Rock whilst he was still alive, she was secretly rejoicing in the fact that he would soon be dead, enabling her hopefully to make a lot of money out of his tragedy. Her book, she vowed (as reported by the Sunday Mirror’s June Walton) would reveal all: Rock’s lack of sexual interest in her when she had truly believed herself to have been the love of her life; how a psychiatrist had advised her to try “straightening” him out by trying to seduce him in frilly underwear; and how they had only wed in the first place to prevent the Hollywood press from exposing Rock as a wildly promiscuous homosexual. And of course, when her book was finally published, she would

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  fo
rget this latter part of her statement and try to hoodwink her more gullible readers into believing that she had been unaware of Rock’s homosexuality, something those reviewing the book would conveniently not point out for fear of litigation from this cold, heartless woman.

  Rock was defended by several close, gay-friendly colleagues in a follow-up feature published in People magazine. Arlene Dahl, his co-star in Bengal Brigade, proclaimed, “Phyllis was not the love of Rock’s life. It was simply an arrangement!” And Mamie Van Doren hit out, “In Hollywood we all knew Rock was gay, but it never made the slightest difference to us!”

  Rock is believed never been told about Phyllis’ proposed book, but he was delighted by the level of support he received from the American gay press—surprisingly, perhaps, considering how he had upset some of the more militant publications by never declaring his sexuality. Some drew attention to the fact, not entirely true, that the Reagan administration was so homophobic that one of the country’s biggest stars, a man who had earned millions for the box office, had been forced to travel abroad and spend an estimated $350,000 of his own money on medical treatment that had been denied him at home. Others praised Rock for his tremendous courage.

  “It’s a hell of a way to come out, lying on a hospital bed and knowing how everyone’s talking about you,” observed Vito Russo, the author of The Celluloid Closet.

  And Brian Jones, the editor of San Francisco’s Bay Area Reporter, whose staff had frequently “rubbed shoulders” with Rock in some of the city’s bathhouses and more salubrious clubs and bars, was but one of many who regarded him as a modern-day Christ-like saviour put on this earth to suffer so that others might live and learn. Within days of Phyllis’ press conference he defended:

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  Rock Hudson’s illness may be an important factor in changing public attitudes. Yesterday, most Americans didn’t know anyone with AIDS. Today they do, for they feel they know their movie stars. This could represent a tremendous shift in public perception—that even nice people get AIDS.

  Rock’s friend, Armistead Maupin, told the San Francisco Chronicle:

  Actors in Hollywood, until now, have abided by the rules which keep the identities of gay actors secret. These rules state that if you keep quiet, everyone will lie about it for you. All Hollywood will know. But the public—never!

  Years later, Maupin told the Guardian’s Patrick Gale that he was still castigating himself for “outing” Rock: the fact that he had told the journalist from the Chronicle of how the “secret game” Rock had been playing all his adult life had tragically caught up with him, that this had resulted in the world learning that he was gay. Maupin had nothing to reproach himself for: he always spoke of Rock with great respect, and would never have done anything intentionally malicious. The fact that tabloid hacks could not see beyond the physical image of homosexuality and what they believed gay men did in bed, as opposed to the idea that one man could actually love another as wholeheartedly and tenderly as he might a woman, was hypocrisy of the worst kind.

  A Boeing 747 was chartered to fly Rock back to Los Angeles on 30 July and he was transferred by helicopter, gravely ill, to the UCLA Medical Center, where visitors were counselled before being ushered into the sickroom so that they would not let

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  him see how shocked they were by his appearance. They were further warned not to tell him what was being written about him in the press, though he was shown the cover of the 12 August issue of Newsweek, half of which was taken up by the Carmel photograph and a single word: AIDS. The report began:

  It’s the nation’s worst public-health problem. No one has ever recovered from the disease, and the number of cases is doubling every year. New fears are growing that the AIDS epidemic may spread beyond gays and other high-risk groups to threaten the population at large…

  The first person Rock asked for was Tom Clark, but he refused to see Marc Christian. Though Clark had been removed from his will—and Rock was far too ill to change it, drifting in and out of consciousness which could eventually lead to someone in his circle protesting that he may not have been in a sound state of mind when sealing it—his former lover would hardly leave his side from now on, and was Rock’s greatest comfort during his last weeks. Roddy McDowall, Elizabeth Taylor and Martha Raye also spent a lot of time with him.

  Marc Christian flew to Paris shortly after Rock’s admission to the UCLA Medical Center. Like the rest of the world he had only learned that Rock had AIDS by way of Yanou Collart’s announcement on the news, and was understandably devastated, especially since it emerged that Rock had been diagnosed over a year earlier. “I began to sweat, then I passed out,” he later said at the court hearing, repeating this time and time again on chat-shows. “I just thought, ‘Oh my God. I’m a dead man.’”

  Christian was met at Orly airport by Steven Del Re, Jack Coates’ lover who had been diagnosed HIV positive before meeting Coates, and who had since developed full-blown AIDS,

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  and was receiving treatment at the Hôpital Percy. Unlike Rock, he had kept up his infusions and was reported to have begun showing signs of slight improvement, though this was untrue. He would die less than a year later, aged twenty-nine. Del Rio escorted Christian to the hospital, sat with him whilst Dr Dormont tested him for HIV, and enlightened him on every known aspect of the disease.

  Distressed as he is said to have been, however, Christian did not refuse when his new friend asked him to accompany him to the South of France whilst awaiting his test results, and the pair shared a hotel room at Mougins. Christian subsequently told the Los Angeles Court (see Appendix I) under oath of how Mark Miller had laughingly told him over the phone, “Throw a rubber on your dick and have sex with Del Re. If you’ve got AIDS from Rock, it wouldn’t matter now if you had sex with Del Re.”

  Back at Percy, Christian was told by Dr. Dormont that though this test had proved negative, he should not build up his hopes: the prognosis (then) was that the HIV virus did not always show up in preliminary tests and that he would have to be re-tested every eight weeks until the hospital was satisfied that he was clear. Christian also received little comfort when Dr. Dormont added that the last test he had carried out on Rock, at a time when it had been obvious that he had developed full-blown AIDS, had shown no trace of the virus. Severely deflated, Christian flew back to Los Angeles on 10 August, and had no sooner entered the Castle when Mark Miller gave him his marching orders, claiming that Rock had issued this instruction. Understandably sceptical, Christian refused to budge until Rock had personally asked him to leave. According to him, when he went to see Rock in the hospital, he was told to stay put.

  During his first two weeks in hospital, Rock received over 30,000 letters, get-well cards and gifts from his fans and, though

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  much appreciated, there were considerably less than after his bypass operation, doubtless because many hypocritical former admirers no longer wished to be seen supporting him now that the truth was out. There were also hundreds of telegrams from show business pals and colleagues, and many from luminaries who had never met him. Madonna, Ava Gardner and Marlene Dietrich were but three who expressed profound admiration of his courage. None of these gave a damn about his sexuality, as if they ever had. They just wanted the impossible, for him to be well again.

  Elizabeth Taylor put Rock in touch with the Shanti Foundation, a Los Angeles organisation which had set up a telephone hotline for AIDS sufferers not wishing to be seen visiting their centre. Even this was mocked by the tabloids, who dubbed it “Hudson’s Hotline of Death”. But Rock’s personal message to his fans, published in newspapers worldwide, earned him tremendous respect, even from the harshest detractors:

  I’m not the first actor to get AIDS, but I’m the first to go public. At least in saying I have it, I might help others who are going through the same hell, and that might push the scientists a bit harder to find a cure. And of course, everyone is going to immediately assume how I got AIDS. Do you
think people will accept that I got it from a blood transfusion when I had heart bypass surgery three years ago? I don’t want all my fans making their own conclusions. That would make everything I’ve done in my life a sham.

  Tom Clark moved back into the Castle, and on the evening of 24 August, Rock was discharged from the UCLA Medical Center. The doctors told him nothing further could be done to save him,

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  or even to prolong his life. His homecoming was akin to that of the warrior returning mortally wounded from the battlefield, with weeping fans mingling with hundreds of cameramen, reporters, and photographers outside the Castle gates. He was the first major celebrity diagnosed with AIDS—the pop stars Klaus Nomi and Jobriath Boone had succumbed to the disease, but these were unknown outside their limited circles—and suddenly Rock, who had dreaded the repercussions of his sexuality being revealed to the world, was hailed a martyr by the gay community. Only the unimportant homophobes would revile him from now on.

  Elizabeth Taylor visited Rock almost every day, mindless of the fact that some days he could keep nothing down, and the stench of the sickroom was overpowering. Others found themselves incapable of witnessing his suffering. Claire Trevor told Ciné-Revue’s Joan Mac Trevor:

  It was horrible, just seeing him waste away like that, and I didn’t want my lasting image of Rock Hudson to be his looking like that. To me it seemed more decent to call him, rather than go to the house.

  Rock received a phone call from Nancy Reagan, who announced how much she and Ronald were looking forward to visiting the Castle. He was hardly surprised when the Presidential advisers voiced their disapproval declaring that such an “unconventional” meeting could never take place for fear of offending the moral majority. Rock reacted with a brief statement, delivered by Tom Clark to reporters clustered outside the gates of the Castle: