by David Bret
I saw the box catch fire. I stood there watching it, then they closed the doors and I left. It was the hardest thing I ever had to do, but I did it and there weren’t any photographs taken.
On 19 October 1985, Mexican music emanated from the grounds of the Castle as the celebration of Rock’s life, organised by Tom Clark and Elizabeth Taylor, took place. His last wish was that he should be given a noisy send-off, “with lots of laughter and good
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food”. A huge marquee had been erected, and three-hundred guests invited. Elizabeth determined that the most fitting service for a lapsed Catholic should be a Quaker one. She had been in London in July 1966 when Montgomery Clift had died, but had been intensely moved watching footage of his funeral at the Friends Cemetery in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, as had Rock. Elizabeth also insisted that Rock’s closest friends take the podium and share their most intimate memories of the buddy they had lost. A lot of these were funny, and some are said to have turned the air blue. George Nader had called Phyllis Gates, thinking that this had been the polite thing to do, but she had declined his invitation to attend—not that she would have been made welcome by anyone else because this was a celebration of all the good things in Rock’s life, and not the one thing that had brought him untold misery.
In a serious moment, the eulogies were read by Carol Burnett and Tab Hunter. The next day—it was George Nader’s sixty-fourth birthday—Rock’s ashes were scattered at sea, off Catalina Island, by Tom Clark. Because of the nature of his death, Rock’s assets had been temporarily frozen, so his friends and the household staff had clubbed together to pay for the ceremony.
It was over—or so everyone thought.
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Appendix I: Marc Christian vs the Rock Hudson Estate
The hearing of Marc Christian MacGinnis vs Mark Miller and Rock’s estate ran for seven weeks. Its transcripts, housed at the Los Angeles Superior Court, amount to more than 30 A4-sized volumes containing some 4,000 pages. These were studied exhaustively and edited by John Parker in his excellent The Trial of Rock Hudson (Sidgwick & Jackson, 1990), to which further reference should be made by the Hudson enthusiast. The following represents a summary of events, as reported daily by the media.
At the end of October 1985, Marc Christian left Rock’s house. The Castle and its contents were put up for auction, with a minimum expected purchase price of $5 million. However, in the age of AIDS hysteria the house stood empty for eighteen months and raised just half this amount. Rock’s New York apartment—deemed “cleaner” because he had not lived there whilst ill—brought in $2 million.
On 2 November, one month after Rock’s death, Marc Christian and his lawyer, celebrity advocate Marvin Mitchelson, announced their intention to sue the Hudson estate, Mark Miller, Wallace Sheft (Rock’s business manager), and two (never named) doctors for “in excess of $10 million”. This quartet, they alleged, had deliberately conspired to endanger Christian’s life by not making him aware that Rock had AIDS, whilst he and Rock had continued to have unprotected sex.
That Christian should have been desperately concerned for his health predicament is understandable, having witnessed first-hand the rapid deterioration of a gargantuan man to almost one third of his usual body weight. Surrounded by friends and loved
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ones, Rock had received the very best round-the-clock medical attention, something Christian knew he would never be able to afford, should he be stricken with AIDS, in the future. Also, he appears to have had few relatives or friends of the same caring nature as Rock’s entourage. And although he did have health insurance, there was no way of knowing if he would be able to claim on this. After Rock’s death, several of his closest allies—including Mark Miller, George Nader and Susan Stafford—are known to have promised to support him financially should the worst befall him. Christian, for his part, did not feel that he could trust any of these people.
Initially, Marvin Mitchelson tried to negotiate a “palimony” settlement with Rock’s lawyers and Wallace Sheft. This failed, setting in motion a series of tit-for-tat reprisals. Told that there was no cash, and made to relinquish the car that Rock had given him as a gift, Christian absconded with Rock’s massive record and video collection. He claimed Rock had given him this, along with several cameras and VCRs, a computer, and Rock’s favourite needlepoint rug. Sheft subsequently ordered all the locks at the Castle to be changed.
The so-called “Rock Hudson Trial” captured headlines around the world, each session of the hearing revealing yet another personal and often lurid aspect of Rock’s sexuality, ensuring that if he had been afforded little dignity during his last weeks, in death there would be absolutely none. The wholesome, boy-next-door reputation nurtured by Rock and the studios for four decades was demolished in one fell swoop. If many Americans still did not know—even in the late eighties—what homosexuals got up to in bed, and there were apparently many who did not, they certainly would now.
Before the hearing, there was a circus of public debates, in-depth newspaper confessions, and chat-show appearances—by a
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brave if not hard-faced Marc Christian, and which Mitchelson hoped would gain his client invaluable mass support as “unpaid ambassador for the wronged partners of AIDS victims”. This support would be essential to their winning arguably the most astonishing legal battle thus far in show business history.
Shortly before the proceedings opened on 6 January 1989, it emerged that Marvin Mitchelson was about to face charges of tax evasion. Christian replaced him with another tough-talking Los Angeles lawyer named Harold Rhoden—ironically the same man Mitchelson had hired for his own defence. Rhoden’s first move was to approach the Hudson estate and declare that his client would be willing to accept an out-of-court settlement of $1 million. This was refused. Thus the case came to court before Justice Bruce R Geernaert and a carefully selected jury of seven men and five women of mixed race, religions and profession. So far as Rhoden had been able to determine, all were wholly unshockable and non-homophobic.
The trial opened with Christian’s allegation that Rock, well aware that he had AIDS, had duped him into having “turn-and-turn-about” anal sex on a 160 occasions. No questions were asked as to how he had arrived at this precise number. Mark Miller, having also been aware of Rock’s illness, was accused of deliberately conspiring with Rock to endanger Christian’s life, as a result of which he was “petrified” that he might die. Though he had tested negative for HIV on several occasions, specialists had repeatedly warned him there was still no certainty of knowing if or when the virus might show up.
The defence avowed that Marc Christian was a blackmailer who had persistently cheated on Rock, and that their relationship had ended long before Rock had developed AIDS. Christian had forced Rock into letting him to live at the Castle after their split,
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by threatening to expose him to the press. Additionally, they claimed to have substantial evidence that Christian had worked as a prostitute. Christian had also aggrieved the defence by canvassing public support in telling his story on television chat-shows. The jury were further asked to consider the fact that, at the time Christian claimed to have been “worried sick” whilst awaiting Dr Dormont’s test results, he had gone off to the South of France with Steve Del Re, another AIDS patient.
On 8 January, Christian made his first appearance on the witness stand—a polite, well-dressed and, the press observed, strikingly handsome man of thirty-five who unflinchingly replied to the most intimate questions about his private life and sexuality. No, he was not a gigolo. Yes, he was bisexual—prior to Rock there had been one serious girlfriend before Liberty Martin, and around twenty male and female partners. He enlightened the court that he was not suing the Hudson estate because of his exclusion from Rock’s will, but quite simply because Rock and Miller had deceived him. He maintained that he and Rock had been deeply in love—later he furnished the jury with several intimate letter
s from Rock as proof of this. He added that he and Rock had been “sexually active” up to five times a week, from April 1983 until February 1985—nine months after Rock had been diagnosed with AIDS—and that during this period both of them had been monogamous, inferring that only Rock had put him at risk from the virus. He tremulously explained his reaction to the news of Rock’s diagnosis in a television report, and that it had been twenty-four hours before anyone had contacted him from Paris. He further claimed that Mark Miller had defended his own actions by saying, referring to his and Rock’s “secret”, “I’ve lied for thirteen months and I’m sick of it. The Movie Star told me not to tell you.”
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Christian took the stand again the next day, and explained the events that had occurred following his own return from Paris, when Mark Miller and George Nader had turned up at the Castle and ordered him to leave—of how he had refused, declaring that he would only take the instruction from Rock himself. He added that when he had tried to call Rock at the UCLA Medical Center, Miller had refused to let them speak. Neither had he been able to go and see Rock because Miller had not included his name on the visitors’ list. This situation had only been rectified when, desperately trying to see his lover, he had been arrested at the hospital and detained by security guards. According to Christian, Rock than then asked him to stay on at the Castle.
Miller’s alleged persecution of Christian had continued, and Christian explained how Miller had threatened him, saying, “If this goes to court, we’ll smear you. We’re going to call you a male hustler, a street hooker. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll call you a drug addict.” Christian’s defence read out the accusation levelled by Wallace Sheft: the plaintiff had solicited for gay and straight sex whilst Rock had been shooting The Ambassador in Israel and upon hearing of this, Rock had ended the relationship. This was denied. Harold Rhoden begged the jury to focus their attention on his client’s mental state because, despite having had at least four HIV tests, given the lack of knowledge of the incubation period of the disease—anything up to fifteen years—Christian still did not know if he was going to live or die.
Robert Mills, in his two-day cross-examination, suggested that if the disease’s incubation period was so lengthy, then Marc Christian could just as easily have passed it on to Rock, in which case the estate should be suing him. Christian responded that of the fifteen men he had sex with between 1979 and 1982, so far as he knew none had developed AIDS. Mills moved on, criticising him for his chat-show appearances—then asked about the sexual
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relationship between Christian and Rock, demanding to know where they had sex whilst Rock’s ex-lover, Tom Clark, had still been living at the Castle. Christian replied that they had sex at Liberty Martin’s apartment, at Miller and Nader’s house, and in hotels and motels—though he was unable to name any of these. When asked why they had not used condoms, his response raised a titter, “Because there was no fear of pregnancy.”
Mills further queried the sheer number of times that Christian claimed that he and Rock had sex—not strictly 160 times in eight months but taking into consideration Rock’s absences from home (Deauville, Florida, Washington, New York, Hawaii), 160 times in just five months, Christian’s reply to this was a cocky, “Rock wanted me to make up for lost time.”
As to Mills’ assertion that there was no evidence that Rock and Christian had been intimate after Rock’s diagnosis, Christian affirmed that a friend, Wayne Bernhard, had seen them “naked and embracing” on a chaise longue on the Castle patio on 23 June 1984, when all the guests had left after Christian’s birthday party. When reminded that Christian had not mentioned this in his pre-trial disposition, his excuse was that Bernhard had only told him what he had witnessed during the hearing’s weekend recess. Bernhard later verified his story on the witness stand, and insisted that Christian and Rock had actually been having sex, certainly during the few seconds that he had observed them before rushing into the house, acutely embarrassed. Bernhard told the court, “It was like walking in on your parents when they are making love.”
Mills next questioned Christian’s validity in Rock’s affections, asking why Rock had never taken him on overseas trips, always preferring the company of Ron Channell. He asked why Christian had not been Rock’s date for the state dinner with the Reagans, at the White House—which should have been blatantly
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Obvious. Christian’s reply was plausible: he had been unwilling to leave Hollywood because he had wanted to be close to his dying father.
On 20 January, Harold Rhoden began his interrogation of Marc Christian’s supporting witnesses. Liberty Martin, now 66, spoke of her first meeting with Rock at the end of 1982, and of how, as his friendship with Christian had intensified while his relationship with Tom Clark had started falling apart, the pair had begun visiting her apartment more frequently—at one stage Rock had felt guilty that he might have been taking Christian away from her. She spoke of how she had comforted Christian, her former lover, after he had watched the television news report and learned of Rock’s diagnosis, and of how she had persuaded Mark Miller to finance Christian’s trip to Paris for tests at the Hôpital Percy. She denied Rhoden’s suggestion that she had offered Rock an ultimatum—that unless he allowed Christian to stay on at the Castle, she would personally expose him to the press. The truth was, she added, that the National Enquirer had once offered her $100,000 or $200,000—she was not sure which amount—for such a story, but she had turned the offer down.
The second supporting witness was Gregory Rice who claimed that he had heard Mark Miller threatening Christian with the drugs and hustling smear campaign, should he go public about his affair with Rock.
Jeanne MacGinnis, Christian’s mother, attested (in a statement dismissed by Robert Mills as “inconsequential”) to Rock’s great generosity regarding the parties he had thrown at the Castle for herself and her family. Choking back her tears, she spoke of her son’s distress, upon learning that Rock had AIDS.
The most surprising of Christian’s supporting witnesses was Mark Miller himself…who near-perjured himself by saying that to his knowledge, Rock and Christian had never shared the same
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bedroom at the Castle. In an earlier statement he had sworn that they had, for three months. Miller also got himself into a muddle as to whether Rock had or had not instructed him not to tell Christian about his illness. According to Miller’s pre-trial disposition, Rock had said, “It’s my disease. Let me handle it my way.” Now, Miller denied that Rock had said such a thing—only to add a moment later that he had! He then dug a deeper hole for himself when Harold Rhoden confronted him with the fact that—being ignorant of Rock’s condition—Christian could have spread the disease amongst other sexual partners and “caused the deaths of thousands”. Miller’s response was to tell the court of Rock’s confession to him, two days before being diagnosed, that Christian was safe because they had never engaged in anal sex—and that in any case by then they had no longer been intimate because Rock had moved on to Ron Channell.
Harold Rhoden then grilled Miller over Christian’s alleged black-mailing of Rock, and promptly got him into another fix. Basically, Rhoden wanted to know how Christian could possibly have been threatening to expose Rock to the press whilst at the same time being allowed to share his bed—a valid point. On top of this, he was curious as to how Miller could have been so in touch with all the goings on at the Castle, and whether or not Rock and Christian had been sleeping together when he had not been residing there full time.
On 24 January, one of the first witnesses was Tony Rocco, a young actor friend of Christian’s who had worked as an extra in Dynasty. Rocco had submitted a pre-trial disposition to Robert Mills who declined to call him to the stand. Harold Rhoden subpoenaed him, suspecting that Mills may have bribed him into committing perjury should he be asked to give evidence. Rhoden declared that he had it on good authority that “in exchange for a piece of the action around $
250,000”, Rocco would tell the court
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that Christian had been sleeping around at the time of his affair with Rock, and that he had informed him that he had been aware of Rock’s AIDS diagnosis before the public announcement. To substantiate this claim, Rhoden called a back-up witness, Kevin Short, in whom Rocco had allegedly confided his plan. The court learned little from his cross-examination other than that Rocco and Short had once been lovers, that Christian liked attending gay softball matches—and that he had asked Rocco, of Rock, “Could you get it up for that old fart?”
On 25 January, Ron Channell was called to give evidence and testified that, despite the alleged intensity of the Hudson-Christian relationship, he had not even seen Christian until February 1984 and even then he had assumed him to have been an employee. He added that whenever he and Rock had socialised with friends, Christian had never tagged along and that during Rock’s trips overseas, so far as he knew, Rock had never contacted Christian by letter or phone, or even mentioned his name. Under cross-examination, Channell denied that he and Rock had ever been lovers.
After the quietly retiring Ron Channell, the court—particularly the fans and other members of the public who had queued for hours for seats in the gallery—were treated to some pretty eye-opening facts from members of Rock’s all-gay former household staff, each of whom had been urged by Robert Mills to do his utmost to blacken Marc Christian’s name. Clarence Morimoto, the octogenarian gardener, told of how, during one of Rock’s absences, he had gone into the master bedroom at the Castle to water the plants and seen Christian naked on the bed with Marty Flaherty, Rock’s part-time handyman. The middle-aged English butler, James Wright, who had been in Rock’s employ since 1978, explained how Christian had moved into the house on 5 November 1983—and that he had entertained several young men