by David Bret
Meanwhile, the Italian tabloids reported how Rock had promised his “Latin buddy” a head start in Hollywood, and Massimo’s agent was confident that, just as he had arranged the loan-out for Anna Magnani to appear in The Rose Tattoo, so Massimo would be granted a work permit to try his luck in the United States. Upon hearing this, Henry Willson flew to Rome with the young man Rock had described as his “hottest fuck in years”—Troy Donahue. Willson’s plan was that Donahue would seduce Rock away from his Italian lover long enough for him to be paid off and sent packing. The plan backfired. Rock’s and Massimo’s relationship may have been intensely sexual, but they
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also loved each other, unconditionally and profoundly. The pair were reputed to have been having group sex with as many as six different men in any one day during breaks from A Farewell to Arms, and so far as Troy Donahue was concerned it was a case of the more the merrier. The hunky blond was asked to join in, and did.
Italian journalists were given plenty of opportunities to write about Rock’s unconventional love life, but refrained from doing so not just because Europeans were more sexually liberated than their United States counterparts, but also on account of the draconian privacy laws in some countries. In the meantime, the American exploitative press were being taken to task. In February 1957, Confidential’s Robert Harrison had been served with a staggering $2 million lawsuit by the black actress Dorothy Dandridge—after four years of exposés peppered with innuendo, Harrison’s exclusives had started living up to what their headlines and captions promised.
Dandridge had seen red after Harrison accused her of “perverted antics” with a naturist group, and within weeks there had been further writs from Maureen O’Hara and Errol Flynn. O’Hara, accused of gross indecency with a man in the back of a cinema, supplied the court with passport evidence proving she had been out of the country at the time. Flynn, alleged to have spent his wedding night with a call girl, had also been hundreds of miles from where the supposed event had taken place. These and dozens of other stars, supporting each other morally and now well aware that Harrison did not have a leg to stand on, used only the costliest lawyers in Hollywood so that they could obtain the maximum in damages.
Only the likes of Rock, Elvis Presley and Dan Dailey—the latter like Jeff Chandler outed for cross-dressing—did not sue, largely because what Harrison had implied about them had been
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true, and in any case their stories had not reached the published page. Lana Turner, advised by her lawyers to take Harrison to the cleaners for revealing that she and Ava Gardner had shared a man in bed, took more drastic action. She hired a hit man to kill him during a hunting trip, a mission that failed when the bullets hit a tree trunk.
By the late spring of 1957, Confidential had received so many lawsuits that Hollywood’s public relations office warned the district attorney that unless the matter was resolved quickly, all the major film studios would withdraw their support from the forthcoming Republican campaign. Harrison however needed to keep circulation figures as high as possible while he could. Rock’s name entered the equation once more, and when Henry Willson returned to Los Angeles and heard what Harrison was planning—an exposé of Rock’s affair with Massimo—he called Rock and informed him that even if Phyllis died, he would have to stay put in Rome until the fuss had blown over. For his part, Rock could not have been more content.
Willson’s next “mission of mercy” was to visit Phyllis in hospital, though this was no exercise in well-wishing. She was told that if she persisted with her appeals for Rock to come home, she would be the one held responsible for wrecking his career, particularly as it was widely speculated that he would win an Oscar for A Farewell to Arms. She bitterly recalled:
After he left, I reflected on what a fool I had been even to mention Rock’s coming home. Human feelings meant nothing to Henry. His only concern was how his clients could pour more money into his own pockets.
Phyllis spent three months in hospital, much of this time in an isolation ward, and several weeks more at home—nursed around
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the clock. During this period, Rock neither called nor wrote to her. She did receive flowers from him every few days—at least this was what she was led to believe by Henry Willson, who arranged for them to be sent, even forging Rock’s signature on the cards. When she was feeling a little stronger she began spending time with friends—the ones closest to her were the Nivens (David’s wife, Hjordis, had also been a patient at St John’s) and Marlon Brando’s wife, Anna Kashfi. She moved out of the house on Warbler Way, taking a twelve-month lease on a beach property on Malibu’s Pacific Coast Highway. For a while her only companions were a housekeeper and Demitasse, the poodle Rock had given her soon after their wedding.
Aided by twice weekly sessions with a clinical psychologist, Dr Dubois, Phyllis claims in her memoirs of how she began taking positive steps to deal with her failed marriage. Her basic weakness, she says Dubois convinced her, was that as a movie star’s wife she too was play-acting instead of facing up to the reality that Rock was only interested in his career—and, when not working in having fun with friends rather in spending valuable leisure time with her. The money that Rock had lavished on her, Dubois avowed—jewels, clothes, and only the most exclusive restaurants—was being spent for no other reason than he was trying to make an impression on those who mattered in his own, self-centred sphere. Phyllis keeps up the pretence, writing of how opening up to a third party had unburdened her mind of the problems she had bottled up since marrying Rock, and that she could now start taking steps towards planning her future. Trying to convince her readers that she had still been in love with Rock—though all she was really interested in was the “gravy train” later referred to by Mark Miller—she concludes that she had decided to give him one last chance by eliminating the evil element from their lives: Henry Willson.
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Meanwhile, Justice Irving Saypol, appointed by the district attorney to oversee the investigation into the wealth of lawsuits filed against Confidential, announced that the proceedings—hailed by the press as “The Trial of 100 Stars”—would open on 2 August, and that Robert Harrison had been called upon to submit a defence and honour his magazine’s motto, “Tells The Truth And Names The Names”. In other words, he had been ordered to submit his files and details of all his contacts and employees for closer scrutiny.
Harrison had no option but to comply with Saypol’s orders, though he made a last-minute bid to ensure that his July issue—almost certainly his last—would be the best ever. The cover boasted exclusives about Anthony Quinn (“Caught With A Gal In A Powder Room!”) and Eartha Kitt (“The Man Who Sat There, All Night!), though the most damaging exposé concerned Liberace. Under the heading, “Why Liberace’s Theme-Song Should Be ‘Mad About The Boy’!” a journalist, writing under the pseudonym Hoarton Streete, detailed an alleged incident—though quite possibly true—wherein the glitzy entertainer had tried to seduce a young male press agent in his suite at an Ohio hotel. “The floorshow reached its climax when Dimples, by sheer weight, pinned his victim to the mat and mewed in his face, ‘Gee, you’re so cute when you’re mad!’” Liberace proved no less over-the-top when sung for libel than he was in his stage act. Denouncing Dorothy Dandridge’s writ as “a piddling little trifle”, he hit Harrison with a whopping suit for $25 million and successfully acquired an embargo that would prohibit the media from referring to the incident again during his lifetime.
Rock was airmailed a copy of the Liberace Confidential article by Henry Willson, and again instructed not to leave Rome. He was well aware that even the European press would begin criticising him if he did not return home to his sick wife now that
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shooting had wrapped—and in any case, should he wish to stay on it Italy he would have to apply for an extension of his work permit, which would not have been granted because there was no work for him to do. Therefore, leaving Massimo in their suite at the Gr
and Hotel—the idea was that his lover would wait a month or so before following on, giving Rock time to fix him up with an apartment, and for Henry Willson to acquire him a screen test and an American work permit—Rock left, arriving in Hollywood just days before the Confidential trial.
Once they had recovered from the Willson stage-managed meeting at the airport, with scores of reporters and a myriad of popping flashbulbs as Rock swept her up into his arms and carried her to the waiting limousine, Rock’s reunion with Phyllis appears to have been successful. She recalled how they had made love the instant they had entered her beach house, and of how he had bought her dozens of gifts from Italy. What she did not know was that Rock had given Massimo the money to go out shopping for these.
Phyllis claimed in her memoirs that Rock had made no fuss when told that she had made an appointment for him to consult Dr. Dubois about his “premature ejaculation problem”, One finds this hard to believe, and gets the impression that she may have invented the condition to belittle his memory—the fact that this big, handsome heart-throb, idolised by millions was not the lover everyone assumed him to be, but “quick on the trigger”. More credible is her admission that Rock was not perturbed to learn that she had investigated Henry Willson’s financial dealings, suspicious that Universal had paid him a rake-off in return for a promise that Rock would never complain about the studio underpaying him. Rock seems to have suspected Willson of short-changing him for some timee, and though he kept him on as his agent for now he transferred his business affairs to Morgan
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Maree, who had handled Humphrey Bogart and recently rescued David Niven from financial ruin. For Phyllis, the repercussions were more severe than she had anticipated:
Henry’s Machiavellian mind told him who was responsible for the switch to the Maree office. From that day forward, our relationship changed. Henry had first treated me as his protégée, then as the useful consort for his best client. Now he viewed me as a dangerous monster that he, a well-meaning Dr Frankenstein, had created…I didn’t realise what a formidable enemy I had made. I had done the unforgivable: I had threatened Henry’s relationship with Rock. Now Henry was determined to do everything possible to destroy my credibility.
For a little while, certainly from Phyllis’ point of view, it seemed that the Hudsons might have patched up some of their difficulties, to the extent that their lavender marriage might have been saved. Though no amount of psychological counselling could change the fact that Rock was, and always had been, sexually interested only to men, an uneasy compromise might have been effected—as had happened with the marriages of Cary Grant, Robert Taylor and Tyrone Power, to name but a few similarly indiscreet matinée idols. Any hope of this was dashed when Rock took his wife out to dinner one evening, and forget to latch the gate. Phyllis’ poodle, Demitasse, got out into the road and was killed by a truck. The suppressed anger and frustration of the last months came forth with such venomous hysteria that a doctor had to be summoned to sedate her.
The death of her much-loved pet meant that Phyllis no longer wished to live at the beach house, and, she writes, to compensate
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for the tragedy Rock promised even more fervently that he would seek help for his “problem”, and persuaded her to move back to Warbler Place. For him, this led to a gruelling, wholly unnecessary period of psychological torment—he was more or less expected to don the proverbial hair shirt for a “trait” which he did not even wish to rectify, and to make a futile but genuinely heartfelt attempt at keeping Phyllis by his side the only way he knew how, by showering her with intermittent affection and more material possessions. This was blackmail at its most extreme, for not to comply would have seen her shopping him to the press.
George Nader later repeated to Sara Davidson what he claimed Rock had told him, “I have tried thinking of razor-blades. I have tried thinking of black widow spiders. I have tried thinking of snakes…It doesn’t do any good. Nothing works.” Nader added that he had been unsure of Rock’s exact implication, but it is not hard to draw the obvious conclusion. Had Rock been trying to frighten Phyllis out of his life—worse still, had he become so desperate that at some stage he had actually wanted her dead? Certainly, Henry Willson would have been capable of anything, as he is known to have had at least two unwilling partners of his clients “roughed over” for not complying with his regime.
These outbreaks from Phyllis, she claimed, interspersed with moments of out-of-character brutality from Rock, escalated once he had been to see a psychologist and made to discuss his supposed behavioural and sexual shortcomings with a total stranger. She recalled an incident when they were out driving with friends. Rock was speeding, she said, and when she touched on a raw nerve by accusing him of “trying to do a Jimmy Dean”, he gave her a slap across the mouth. Henceforth, she says, they would spend more and more nights sleeping in separate rooms, though there was one last bid to patch up their differences when,
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early in October, Phyllis accompanied Rock to Hawaii for the location work on his next film, Twilight of the Gods.
Rock’s morose mood enabled him to add a little Method to his portrayal of David Bell, the shabby, hard-drinking captain of a steamboat whose licence has been revoked on account of accident, and whose job now amounts to ferrying around a weird assortment of characters, including criminal Cyd Charisse. Rock however made too much of the part, and when the head of Universal saw the early rushes he ordered him to “clean up his act” or risk being suspended from the picture—defeating director Joseph Pevney’s objective, for Bell’s persistently tawdry state and erratic behaviour had been essential to the plot, and in the revised takes Rock looks grotesquely out of place.
For a little while, in their suite at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel, the Hudsons appeared to be getting on rather well, though Phyllis was still weak following her recent hospitalisation and unable to participate in their usual sporting-fishing activities. Her fluctuating indisposition offered Rock a perfect excuse to leave her resting at the hotel whilst he went off in search of male company. Matters reached crisis point when the film wrapped and they returned home. Within hours of crossing the threshold Phyllis made another appointment for Rock to consult a psychologist. On 17 October, having had enough, he moved into the Beverly Hills Hotel under an assumed name.
Phyllis’ refusal to accept Rock as he was—bearing in mind they had started out together with her as his beard—instead of interfering with human nature, contributed more to the failure of their sham marriage than any of Henry Willson’s machinations. The note pinned to the door at Warbler Place was almost an open invitation for visitors to get in touch with the scandalmongers—“I’m going to the Beverly Hills Hotel. Let’s keep it quiet”—resulting in Louella Parsons, referred to by him as “The Paganini
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of Piffle”, exploding the whole saga across the front page of the Los Angeles Examiner.
The Parsons piece appears to have been behind Rock’s next move, two weeks after the split, to take Phyllis out to dinner and suggest a reconciliation. She agreed, with one condition: he would have to see her psychiatrist this time, a Dr Rankin, and come clean about his most personal thoughts and secrets. Not unexpectedly, Rock refused, and a few days later he relocated to a furnished apartment on Crescent Heights. Within a week he had more furniture than he knew what to do with—Phyllis had called in the removal men and rid the house on Warbler Place of any evidence that her estranged husband had ever been there. She had even had the place redecorated.
An early visitor to the Beverly Hills Hotel had been Massimo. When he turned up at Crescent Heights and announced that Henry Willson had secured him a work permit and a number of auditions, Rock would have nothing to do with him. He was lying low, he said, and did not wish to be reminded of his “murky” past. The “Trial of 100 Stars” was in full swing and Hollywood had recently seen a mass exodus of anyone from headline names down to the extras and studio personnel who might have had somet
hing to hide, no matter how trivial. Two weeks into the proceedings there was a major drama when one of Robert Harrison’s key witnesses—a sub-editor named Peggy Gould scheduled to take the stand the next morning— was found dead in a hotel room. It emerged that she had been going to testify against Harrison and that she had double-crossed him by selling Confidential’s headlines, ahead of publication, to the district attorney. The verdict was suicide. Not long afterwards, Howard Rushmore, Harrison’s editor-in-chief and a former member of the Communist Party, shot his wife dead in the back of New York taxi, then turned the gun on himself.
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Although the jury were out for fourteen days before all the issues were resolved, the trial resulted in little more than a large number of out-of-court settlements. Liberace came off best—donating his $40,000 payoff to charity, and urging everyone else to do the same. Few of the other settlements amounted to more than $10,000—even so, collectively they were sufficient to force Harrison out of business and put an end to his hated publication.