Rock Hudson: The Gentle Giant
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Zak Spears, who played the character
based on Rock in The Wild Ones.
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Rock Hudson: Acting The Part (A & E Network, 1999). 45 mins. Director/Script: John Griffin. Narrator: Tim Bentinck.
This documentary concentrates more on Rock’s sexuality and death than on his acting career. Jack Larson and Robert Stack repeat the well-worn anecdotes, such as Rock’s fluffing of his lines in Fighter Squadron. Arlene Dahl, his co-star in Bengal Brigade, reveals that she had always suspected him of being gay because he had chewed his fingernails! Only 85-year-old Jane Wyman has anything worthwhile to say, regarding his fears over working in Magnificent Obsession, “Rock was a sponge. He just sucked up everything and pigeonholed and used it, when he could, and by the end of the picture he was a pro.” Despite this lack of input from colleagues who had disowned him owing to the manner of his death, it is perhaps a case of being thankful for small mercies. Like the aforementioned biopic, this starts off with images (home movies) of a hale and hearty Rock, before getting down to the nitty-gritty—film footage of his reunion with Doris Day in Carmel which is so poor that, even if he had not been seriously ill, it would have made him appear so. Cut then to Armistead Maupin, who speaks of the authentic autobiography Rock never got around to writing—and Sara Davidson who expresses the difficulties she encountered putting the Hudson story together due to her subject’s fondness for telling different people different versions of the same story: “It was like walking on a spider’s web, and there was no place I could put a foot that was firm.” Jack Scalia, Rock’s co-star from The Devlin Connection, observes how Rock like to tell stories, because this way he would never have to show people who he really was—whilst John Frankenheimer believed that Rock identified with his “reborn” character in Seconds because he too was a reinvented personality who had destroyed his past to become Rock Hudson.
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Rock himself reiterates this fact during a September 1984 clip from the BBC’s Terry Wogan Show: already starting to show the ravages of AIDS, he confesses that he dislikes interviews, much preferring to have a character to hide behind.
There are anecdotes from a cousin who hardly knew Rock, yet who distinctly remembers how she and her friends used to dress him as a girl to such effect that no one else could tell the difference—and a classmate who swears that the Rock he knew never aspired to becoming an actor. There are photographs of the young marine “stripped for action” and camping it up with his Navy buddies, and an interview with former “roommate” Bob Preble, who we are persistently reminded was very definitely straight and who in his younger days sported designer stubble to prove the fact. Obviously, Preble had forgotten the magazine photo-spreads and the galaxy of witnesses to the fact that, chez Hudson in those days, there had only been one bedroom and one bed. According to Preble, Rock had sex with men during his military service because there had been no girls around. Preble then goes on to say how Confidential had approached him for a story—though in the early fifties there was no such term as “gay-bird”. When Sara Davidson describes Rock’s preferences in men—blond, blue-eyed, big—the producer, inadvertently or not (considering the stills for the documentary were mostly supplied by Rock’s former handyman, Martin Flaherty, now head of the Rock Hudson Collection), risks a picture of by far the most handsome of all Rock’s men, Massimo, in near-naked glory.
Rock’s marriage is only lightly touched upon, though images of Phyllis Gates (who like Marc Christian refused to participate) crop up throughout the documentary. Stockton Biggle believes that it was an arranged marriage, Mark Miller states for the first time that Rock was a willing participant and a genuine bisexual who like getting physical with women, whilst Armistead Maupin
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needlessly defends him against the by-now-old-fashioned “lily-livered degenerate” image of gay men:
He was a man. He was an all-solid, god-like man. It seemed to confirm what I’d always felt about homosexuality—that it simply denoted a sexual preference a sexual orientation, not necessarily effeminacy.
Maupin voices his opinion concerning the world’s perception of AIDS, of how angry he was that someone famous had to succumb to the disease to make the public aware of a condition that should have been acknowledged years before. Mark Miller (in yet another “exclusive”) declares how he believed Rock had got AIDS from a lover in New York—the date and timing is suggestive of Pierre B—, the boat builder he had been involved with at the time of the 1984 Oscars ceremony. According to Miller the young man had confessed his HIV status in a warning letter to Rock, later that year. There is fleeting footage of a confident-looking Marc Christian arriving at the Los Angeles courthouse, with the announcement that, at the time of the lawsuit, he had tested HIV negative. We then witness disgraceful behaviour from the media as Rock’s body leaves the Castle in the van en route to the crematorium, when one of the security men yells at the press to back off and show some respect. Meanwhile, Ross Hunter breaks down in front of the camera and sobs, “He was the best friend I ever had in the world!”
The documentary concludes with the succinct but emotionless narratorial epigram, “Rock Hudson will be remembered as a great Hollywood leading man, a television detective, and one of the first celebrities to die of AIDS. His fans loved him for all of these roles.”
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Acknowledgements
Writing the original version of this book and this much-revised edition would not have been possible, had it not been for that select group of individuals whom I still regard as my true family and autre Coeur: Barbara, Marlene Dietrich, Dorothy Squires, Irene Bevan, Roger Normand, René and Lucette Chevalier, Jacqueline Danno, Helene Delavault, Betty & Gérard Gamain, Joey Stefano, John & Anne Taylor, “Massimo”, Annick Roux, Terry Sanderson, Francois & Madeleine Vals, Caroline Clerc, Tracy Terhune, Bob Dolphi, Charley Marouani, and those hiboux de foutre too numerous to mention who happened along the way. Very special thanks to Professor Ronald L Davis, and heartfelt appreciation to Peter Burton, and Kris Kirk. Least but not least grateful thanks to my wife, Jeanne, still the keeper of my soul. And a final chapeau-bas for Rock, for having lived.
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