Rock Hudson: The Gentle Giant

by David Bret

  Meanwhile, in May 1953 Rock filmed Taza, Son of Cochise, with Barbara Rush. There was a cameo for gay heart-throb Lance Fuller, who unusually gets to keep his clothes on in this one, and a fleeting appearance by an uncredited Jeff Chandler, playing Cochise for the second time and looking remarkably fit as he expires on cue after trying to persuade his sons to continue with the peace process he brought about. There is untold disregard for historical accuracy and the film now views like any other routine

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  “Cowboys and Injuns” B-movie. Back in 1954 when it was released, however, it provided the homoerotic experience for closeted gay men across the United States, with its lashings of oiled pecs, bulging biceps and sucked-in stomachs. In yet another tale of sibling rivalry, Rock plays Taza, the new chief who swears allegiance to his dying father whilst his evil brother conspires with the infamous warlord, Geronimo, to bring about Taza’s downfall. Complicating matters are love interest Oona (Rush), whom both brothers fall for whilst she is only interested in Taza—and the US cavalry. Shot in primitive 3-D, the film may have titillated a certain section of Rock’s fan base, but it did few favours with some critics who proclaimed that he was not yet ready to tackle a major role opposite an established non B-movie star like Jane Wyman. Rock regretted making it, as he explained to Gordon Gow of Films & Filming:

  I know I didn’t look right in it. Indians, Mexicans, the Eskimo, they’re all really the same race, with similar semi-Oriental appearance. Furthermore, I’m too tall. The fact that they make you darker and wear a wig does not help you to resemble an Indian. I couldn’t even keep my wig on. It kept blowing off in the wind when I rode horseback. An actor takes a role, and an audience either accepts it or rejects it. If they don’t see him in the role, it’s because he played another role better in a previous film and therefore the audience is married to that image. In the opera-house people would accept Leontyne Price as Madame Butterfly—she’s black and she’s playing a Japanese. But in a film, could you see Mickey Mouse playing Hamlet?

  In August 1953, two weeks before shooting was due to begin on

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  Magnificent Obsession (as it had been retitled), Rock and Jack Navaar went off for the weekend to Laguna Beach, where they spent much of their time wave-riding—a perilous pastime where inflated car inner-tubes were used instead of surfboards. Rock was caught by a freak wave and dashed against the rocks, fracturing his collarbone.

  The fact that the accident had happened on a men-only section of the beach, and that Jack Navaar had ridden in the back of ambulance conveying Rock to the hospital almost giving the game away, did not go down well with Ross Hunter. When advised by Universal’s doctors that Rock’s shoulder would have to be set in a splint and that filming would have to be delayed for six weeks until he was fit again, the producer, under explicit orders from studio bosses and therefore unable to take his personal feelings into consideration, ordered Douglas Sirk, who had also directed Rock in Taza and Has Anybody Seen My Gal? to find a replacement.

  The situation was saved by the wily Henry Willson. Not so long before, it would appear, Rock had been offered “lip-service” by one of the senior Universal executives. According to Sara Davidson, who collaborated with him on his autobiography:

  Rock told his friends stories of how the executive would lock his office door, have his secretary hold his calls, and come after Rock on his knees. Rock did not see him frequently, but it was enough to keep the executive hooked and eager to help Rock’s cause.

  Almost certainly this man was Sirk himself—the director is known to have been similarly involved with several of his male stars, who regarded him as a kindly, benevolent sugar daddy. “He was like Ole Dad to me and I was like a son to him. I think,”

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  Rock told Ron Davis. “When you’re scared and new and trying to figure out this thing, suddenly an older man will reach out and say, ‘There, there, it’s okay!’ That was Douglas Sirk.” Rock also praised Sirk’s skills as a teacher, telling John Kobal:

  When you’re in a drama class, you’re urged to get everything out of that scene that you can. Sirk was the first to make me realise that you don’t push, you hold back and let it come out. Don’t hammer! React instead of act! He was the first good director I worked with, and I had by then worked with a lot of bad directors, which is by the way invaluable experience because you learn what not to do.

  Henry Willson warned Douglas Sirk and Ross Hunter what would happen should news of their private lives be leaked to the press, adding that such a risk would naturally be minimised, should Rock be allowed to continue with the film. Needless to say the appropriate strings were pulled and Rock got to keep the part, but rather than hold up the production he himself suggested a compromise—he would have his injured shoulder strapped up during shooting, mindless of the agony this would cause him.

  Magnificent Obsession, shot on location around Lake Arrowhead, remains the quintessential tugger of heartstrings, and a classic of its genre. In his debut romantic lead Rock plays Bob Merrick, a failed medical student who since inheriting his father’s fortune has become a selfish, hard-bitten playboy. When he crashes his speedboat after being warned not to take it out during adverse weather conditions, the police fetch the town’s only resuscitator from the home of Dr Phillips and whilst Merrick’s life is saved, Dr Phillips—an eminent surgeon who runs the local hospital—dies of a heart-attack, which might have

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  been avoided had the equipment stayed put. Merrick falls for Phillip’s widow, Helen (Wyman), and initially she is not surprisingly reluctant to have anything to do with him—until a car accident leaves her blind, and Merrick returns to his studies to qualify as a surgeon, operate on her and save her sight.

  It is an improbable story without any doubt, but a masterpiece all the same. The film cost a modest $850,000 to make, but was a colossal success, grossing over $10 million at the box-office. Rock’s performance was singled out by Bosley Crowther, the infamously acerbic critic with the New York Times. Though not overtly fond of the production as a whole he wrote of its star, “The strapping, manly Rock Hudson gives a fine, direct account of himself—in the film’s only real surprise.”

  In April 1954, Ross Hunter—now a privileged member of Rock’s inner circle—learned that Warner Brothers, who three years earlier had purchased the rights to Giant, Edna Ferber’s epic novel about the all-American dream, had begun testing for the leads and the director, George Stevens, was reputed to be close to signing William Holden for the role of Texan billionaire Bick Benedict. Both Alan Ladd and Clark Gable had been considered for the part and rejected, and whoever got it would star opposite either Elizabeth Taylor or Grace Kelly, both then contracted to MGM. Taylor’s closest friend, Montgomery Clift, was pencilled in for third lead, the rebellious outsider Jett Rink.

  Ross Hunter called Henry Willson, saying that he had read the script and that the part of Bick was tailor-made for Rock. Within the hour Ferber, Stevens and the producer, Henry Ginsberg, were invited to Willson’s Stoke Canyon home for private screenings of Magnificent Obsession and The Lawless Breed—in the latter, Rock had “aged” twenty years for the final scene, something he would be required to do in Giant. Stevens was an independent director lacking the backing of a major studio, so he had formed

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  a corporation with Ferber and Ginsberg to get his project off the ground. However, Jack Warner had come forward with a substantial cash injection, and believed the film would be more credible if younger actors aged as the story unfolded, rather than the other way around, which was why he had dismissed the 53-year-old, over-the-hill Gable.

  Stevens was impressed with the films, but kept Rock hanging on for a week before offering him a contract. Rock’s still persistent lack of confidence in his abilities niggled him, but Stevens attempted to boost this by asking him which leading lady he would prefer, should he be given the part. Rock chose Elizabeth Taylor, which was just as well as she had already signed the contract days be
fore! Then, when the part was definitely his and the temporary release document had been signed between Warner Brothers and Universal, Rock was asked to choose the colours for the interior of the Benedict mansion, which was being constructed on a studio backlot.

  George Stevens’ track-record was impeccable and as such he was regarded as the undisputed king of the epic movie. After working as assistant cameraman on some of the Laurel and Hardy shorts, in 1935 Katharine Hepburn chose him to direct her in Alice Adams, since which time he had worked with Carole Lombard, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, Barbara Stanwyck and Cary Grant. He had won an Oscar for directing Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun (1951), and recently been nominated for Shane, starring Alan Ladd.

  Meanwhile, Magnificent Obsession was premiered at the Westwood Theater and Rock and Jack Navaar—who thus far had thwarted all of Universal’s attempts to split them up—travelled to the venue in separate studio limousines. Both had been supplied with studio dates—Rock with Betty Abbott, the niece of comic Budd—Navaar with a starlet named Claudia Boyer. Henry

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  Willson’s eagle-eyed aides also ensured that the two men were kept apart all evening in what would, in retrospect, herald the end of their affair. Hundreds of girls screamed as Rock strode along the red carpet into the foyer, directly behind Jane Wyman and her husband Ronald Reagan, but one voice rose high above the cacophony—that of a young man who bellowed, “Faggot!”

  Rock tried to laugh off the incident, and the large contingency of reporters who witnessed the event made nothing of it at the time: their preoccupation was in giving Rock the praise he deserved for his stupendous on-screen performance. Within weeks, the so-called “Midwest hick” would be elevated to the position of third most popular movie actor in America. Universal would reward him with a substantial increase in salary, his own monogrammed dressing room, and an exhaustive wardrobe tailored by the best designers in Hollywood.

  According to those close to him, success went straight to Rock’s head. Some years later Mark Miller told Sara Davidson, “Before, Rock would answer the phone, ‘Hiya!’. Now it was a deep ‘Hello? This is Rock Hudson speaking.’ He became an instant authority on everything. He could walk on water.”

  And of course, as he was pocketing a hefty percentage of Rock’s salary, the more his protégé earned, the more Henry Willson grew concerned about Rock’s sexual activities, particularly when he learned that reporters from the scandal-rag Confidential had been snooping around the set of Rock’s new film, Bengal Brigade, having been told that he was having an affair with one of his male co-stars.

  For years the press had been supplying the press with mostly fictitious stories about their stars, but as the power of the moguls and the credibility of the press offices slowly declined, a new form of exposé was launched on a public greedy for scandal and titillation: cheaply produced periodicals where readers could find

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  pictures of their favourite movie idols accompanying lurid, no-holds-barred accounts of their indiscretions, wedged between advertisements for impotency pills, personal horoscopes, slimming aids and other useless paraphernalia. With titles such as Whisper, Inside Story and Tip-Off, and with self-explanatory headlines—“The Wild Party That Helped Frank Sinatra Forget Ava Gardner”, “John Carradine’s Other John”, etc—they could be found stacked on newsstands everywhere: in supermarkets, laundromats, gas stations and mostly outside cinemas where they were showing the films of whichever unfortunate happened to be on the cover of that week’s issue.

  Confidential was the most horrendous and feared publication of them all and its motto, “Tells The Facts & Names The Names” appeared on the cover beneath the title. The magazine was launched in 1952 by Robert Harrison, who got the idea because of his infatuation with top-rated televised crime investigations hosted by Senator Kefauver. According to Kefauver, America was gripped in a wave of vice, corruption, gambling scams and organised crime that was rapidly transforming it into a Mafioso state. Harrison therefore decided that he would explore the nucleus of this so-called den of iniquity, Tinsel Town, and thus far had managed to stay a step ahead of orthodox scandalmongers Hopper, Parsons and the grossly overbearing Elsa Maxwell by not always checking the authenticity of his stories before publishing them—usually alongside the most unflattering or suggestive photographs, many of which had nothing to do with the accompanying feature. By the time Harrison became interested in Rock, such was the demand for this sensationalist trash that Confidential was selling four million copies per issue.

  What everyone in Hollywood feared and detested the most about Robert Harrison were the devious methods he employed to

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  obtain some of his exclusives. Whores of both sexes were paid huge sums of money to coerce stars into compromising positions, whilst a tiny machine concealed in the bedroom whirred away, capturing not just the sex act itself, but the all-important post-coital small talk. Jealous or thwarted stars were encouraged to rubbish rivals so that they could step into their shoes when important parts were up for grabs. For “special” cases such as Rock and Elvis Presley (homosexuality, real or alleged), Errol Flynn (two-way mirrors at his home) and Lana Turner (sharing lovers), Harrison supplied his “detectives” with tiny, sophisticated infra-red cameras. Marlene Dietrich told me, “We all read it, not because it was any good—it was rubbish and worse even that some of the garbage you get on newsstands nowadays—but to find out if we were in it. Sometimes you never got an inkling until it was too late.”

  Harrison pounced on Rock when Bengal Brigade wrapped, offering former lover Bob Preble a reputed $5,000 for his story, to be published in his September 1954 issue, along with two previously published photographs—the one with the alarm clock, and that of Rock in his undershorts, poring over his record collection prior to bedding his interviewer. Whether Preble agreed to sell Rock down the river is not clear. Henry Willson was taking no chances. In an act of pure spite he traded the Hudson exclusive for a feature on another of his discoveries, the less-marketable and therefore to his way of thinking dispensable Rory Calhoun. “But For The Grace Of God Still A Convict”, the headline ran, alongside mug-shots from the Salt Lake City Police Files of the younger Calhoun who, it emerged, had served a prison sentence for burglary. For the time being Rock’s reputation was allowed to remain as solid as his name implied.

  In fact, the double-dealing Harrison had no intention of running an exposé on Rock or any other known homosexual star,

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  and Preble had only been offered a large amount of cash to entice Willson into paying Harrison considerably more not to publish. It was all very well, the editor knew, to publish stories about alleged thieves, gangsters, bluebeards and loose women who were wildly promiscuous with the opposite sex, but Rock and his friends belonged to a completely alien group of individuals whose extra-curricular activities were taboo. Less than five years after the infamous Kinsey report, few of even Confidential’s liberated buyers would have wanted to acknowledged their existence by reading about them.

  Alfred Kinsey (1894-1956), the zoologist-sexologist, had published the results of his studies into the sexual behaviour of the American male, the first serious research into the topic, in 1948: the one dealing with female sexuality appeared five years later. For his paper Kinsey had interviewed, via questionnaire, some 12,000 men of all ages and walks of life, and the American public at large were shocked to discover that there were variations of sexual practice other than the conventional one. Until the Kinsey report, most Americans outside the acting profession had not even heard of homosexuality, and now they were being told by no less an authority than the Director of the Institute for Sex Research that one in ten American males actually liked having sex with other men, and that in doing so they were not considered abnormal.

  Henry Willson, though perhaps not his protégé, would have been well aware that Robert Harrison would not have been allowed to publish words such as “faggot” or “sodomy”, but
the threat of his describing Rock as “an actor who prefers unconventional behaviour as defined by Dr Kinsey” would have finished his career on one fell swoop. He therefore encouraged Universal to pay Harrison to keep quiet. As for Harrison, he was so detested and received so many death-threats that—towards the

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  end of Confidential’s run, he was compelled to employ round-the-clock protection.

  Rock is reputed to have told Jack Navaar that, should he be outed by the press, he would sooner have given up Hollywood than his lover. One finds this hard to believe, though the pair were still very much an item during the summer of 1954, when Rock left for Ireland to film the locations for Captain Lightfoot. The reason for these being shot overseas and not in California was that Henry Willson had assured the Universal executives that, should they bear the expense of Rock’s trip, he would make it worth their while by ridding them of Jack Navaar—who of late had been taking his role of “movie-wife” too seriously, calling Douglas Sirk’s secretary most evenings to enquire when Rock would be home so that he could “get the dinner going”.