Rock Hudson: From Hollywood Hunk to the First Face of AIDS
July 25, 1985, was a red-letter day in the history of the AIDS epidemic. A publicist for the movie star Rock Hudson, who had been looking alarmingly gaunt and was now in hospital, announced that the actor had been diagnosed a year or so earlier with that dreaded syndrome. In the 1950s and ’60s, Rock had been the ultimate male star — tall, rugged, handsome, millions of women’s dreamboat. Now he was the face of an ailment that, prior to that day, had been associated in the public mind with outcasts and social lepers — literal untouchables.
A new documentary, aired on HBO, directed by Stephen Kijak, and entitled Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, movingly recounts the life of this unpretentious chap from Illinois — born in Winnetka as Roy Harold Scherer, Jr., and then known, after his mother’s remarriage, as Roy Harold Fitzgerald — who, following a wartime stint in the Navy, sought his fortune in L.A. and was soon rechristened Rock Hudson by an agent named Henry Willson. (READ MORE: Hollywood Is Demoralizing Americans, One Story at a Time)
Willson also taught Rock and other young gay actors “how to be heterosexual.” Not that he was expected to really be straight: The studios didn’t care if actors were homosexual so long as they could deceive the moviegoing public into thinking they weren’t. And Rock’s life, as it happens, obliged him to engage in plenty of deception. Over the years, he had several significant others, plus casual encounters beyond number. Kijak supplies the names of many of the boyfriends — all of which one immediately forgets — and more details than one might want to know about the one-night flings.
More interesting is the material about Rock’s career. Contracted to Universal, he started out in “cheap adventure films” — war movies and Westerns — for which his manly looks seemed ideal. But he didn’t hit it big until the German director Douglas Sirk, recognizing that he was an actor with nuance, cast him as a rich playboy turned philanthropic brain surgeon in a sudsy romantic drama, Magnificent Obsession (1954), and then as a young arborist (yes, arborist) who woos a middle-aged socialite in another sudsy love story, All that Heaven Allows (1955). Both films were hits, and both starred him opposite Jane Wyman, Ronald Reagan’s first wife, who was eight years his elder (and looked at least twice that).
There’s a good deal of talk in this documentary about the obvious ironies of Rock’s career as a celluloid lady-killer. Actress Ileana Douglas (DeNiro’s bar pickup in Cape Fear) puts it this way: In his Sirk pictures, Hudson wasn’t just another actor playing a role — he was Roy, a gay Midwesterner who was “playing a man called Rock Hudson, who is the perfection of Americana.” Well, OK. Then, in 1959, came the romantic comedy Pillow Talk, in which he’s a gay actor playing a straight character who toys with Doris Day — and ultimately seduces her — by dropping hints that he might actually be gay. Producer Ross Hunter called it a “house of mirrors.” In a clip, sitting with Day in a cab, Rock thinks in voice-over, “I don’t know how long I can get away with this act.”
Pillow Talk (the first picture, by the way, that I was ever taken to) and Rock’s two later pairings with Day show him at his best. He had a natural flair for light comedy — and an immense, easy charm. In the two Sirk movies, he’s a perfectly fine romantic lead, and in a couple of later pictures, both released in 1966 — Philip Dunne’s snappy thriller Blindfold and John Frankenheimer’s chilling psychological horror film Seconds — he’s way more than just fine. No, he wasn’t quite up there with his generation’s greatest film actors, Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift, but for a guy from Winnetka who never took an acting lesson, he was pretty damn impressive. (READ MORE: Anniversary of a (Not Quite) Perfect Murder)
Kijak incorporates a great many clips from Rock’s films in his documentary. He might have used them to display Rock’s acting chops; instead — quite weirdly — they show Rock reciting lines that, ripped out of their original context, are used to provide comment on whatever theme the documentary is addressing at the moment. When Rock is dying, for example, we’re treated to a series of clips in which Rock says lines like: “So he’s dead,” “I told you I’d be better off dead,” and “He died the death of a hero.” It’s a lame, bemusing device, and Kijak runs it into the ground.
The film’s biggest surprise — to me, anyway — is the story behind Hudson’s AIDS diagnosis. In 1984, he attended a White House party; a few days later, he received a note from Nancy Reagan urging him to have a mole on his neck looked at. He did, and on June 5 of that year, he was told that he had AIDS. He was shocked but kept it secret. Appearing on Dynasty, on which the storyline required him to plant a big smoldering kiss on Linda Evans’ mouth, the leading man par excellence somehow couldn’t pull it off to the director’s satisfaction; what nobody knew was that he was terrified to give Evans a full-blooded smooch lest he infect her — at that point, after all, an AIDS diagnosis was a death sentence, and nobody knew yet exactly how the disease was spread.
As noted, AIDS had been ignored for years. That ended forever on the day Rock’s diagnosis was announced. During the last weeks of his life, the TV news divisions paid avid — read, morbid — attention to his desperate efforts to survive. He flew to Paris for experimental treatment but couldn’t gain admission to a hospital; he asked the Reagans to intervene, but they declined; he decided to fly home, but Air France wouldn’t issue a ticket to someone with AIDS — so he had to lease a private plane for $250,000. Repeatedly, the networks broke into scheduled programming to cover these grim developments live.
Nowadays, everybody on the left condemns Ronald Reagan for having ignored AIDS for so long. But the plain fact is that until it became known that Rock Hudson was among the stricken, everybody ignored it — including the news media and every last self-righteous lefty in showbiz. Indeed, it was Hollywood’s deafening silence on AIDS that led Rock’s close friend Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he’d starred in Giant (1956), to found the American Foundation for AIDS Research. One of his last acts was to write her a quarter-million-dollar check to help get it off the ground. (READ MORE: What’s in a Name?)
Rock died on Oct. 2, 1985, aged 59. His homosexuality had been an open secret throughout the film industry, but only one person was willing to step forward and confirm it. Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin, a good friend, recalls that for gay men back then, it was a “sign of loyalty” to stay mum about such matters. But Maupin disagreed. “I had to tell the truth,” he says. “So I did an interview saying of course he was gay, everybody in Hollywood knew it, and it has to be said. People had to learn to behave about this subject like grownups.”
And eventually, they did. The news that Hudson had AIDS, attests Maupin, “changed … completely” the way the general public viewed the disease. It also helped kick off the transformation, over the ensuing generation, in the way straight Americans viewed their gay relatives, friends, neighbors, colleagues, and — yes — film idols. Rock Hudson, the manliest of stars — respected by his colleagues, genuinely loved by his leading ladies, and chummy with the Reagans — smashed all the stereotypes and, in doing so, shocked more than a few Americans into beginning, at least, to reexamine their attitudes. It wasn’t everything, but it was a start.
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