Nancy Reagan was the first person who expressed concern about the mole on Rock Hudson’s face. A visit to the doctor in June 1984 confirmed the worst: the actor had Aids. In his final days, Hudson, a lifelong Republican, asked Ronald Reagan for help transferring from an American hospital in Paris to a French military facility offering experimental treatments. No help was forthcoming from the US president. The actor spent $250,000 chartering a Boeing 747 home to Los Angeles. He would die two months later, the first celebrity to die of an Aids-related illness. He was 59.
“They all knew each other,” says Stephen Kijak, director of the new documentary Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed. “So as Reagan is rising politically, the diaries written by Rock’s friend George Nader that we use in the film record that they’re all delighted when Reagan gets elected. They’re kind of laughing at the hippies and the radicals. Rock had a very conservative mindset. It’s quite disappointing. But we all know the history of the 1980s and Aids, what a monster Reagan was, and how much blood his administration had on its hands.
“There comes a point when Rock is finally reaching out for help, and they won’t give it to him. But the more interesting and important part of the story is that despite maybe not even being aware of what he was doing by going public with his diagnosis, its effect was change. The original title of our film was The Accidental Activist.”
Roy Harold Scherer jnr was born on November 17th, 1925, in Illinois. After serving in the US navy during the second World War, he relocated to Los Angeles, where he was spotted by the talent scout Henry Willson and signed as one of Willson’s “beefcake” models, who also included Tab Hunter, Rory Calhoun and Dack Rambo.
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“The names are quite extraordinary,” says Kijak. “Chance was one of Willson’s favourite first names, and he kept trying it on all these different stars. And it never took. Rock was a stroke of genius. A new image of masculinity was coming into American culture: the beefcake models, the postwar obsession with sailors and soldiers. Even in gay culture, in certain cities at the time, it was in vogue to go see female impersonators in little weird clubs in Hollywood in the 1920s and 1930s.
“Then, as we move into the 1950s and the McCarthy era and the production code, American morality becomes this constructed thing that is used as a cultural weapon. All of the subversive, alternative culture goes away or gets pushed way underground. Rock was right there at the peak of that experience. And you couldn’t have constructed a beefier vision of American masculinity at the time.”
All That Heaven Allowed profiles Hudson and the pre-Stonewall Hollywood generation to illuminating effect. Drawing on archive footage and the testimonies of various lovers and friends, including Lee Garlington, one of Hudson’s long-term lovers, and the Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin, Kijak explores the strange dynamics of Hudson’s closeted queerness. Speculation from tabloid publications such as Confidential was counteracted by a three-year sham marriage to his agent’s secretary, Phyllis Gates. His on-screen romances with Doris Day in Pillow Talk and Jane Wyman in All That Heaven Allows pitch him as strangely unattainable. His Elizabeth Taylor-inspired rivalry with the similarly compromised James Dean on the set of Giant dates back to the 1952 film Has Anybody Seen My Gal? Hudson’s biographer Mark Griffin claims that while the actors were filming George Steven’s epic 1956 drama, Hudson was “privately hitting on Dean”. Hudson claimed, “I didn’t like the fellah too much. I don’t know if I should say any more… I don’t like to talk against the dead, so I think I should shut up.”
“Research points to this moment when there may have been a flirtation gone wrong, very possibly on the set of Has Anyone Seen My Gal?, when they were just starting out,” says Kijak. “They’re so weirdly similar in their closet queerness and reliance on older powerful gay men to sort of move them through the system. And then maybe James Dean’s method acting clashed with the studio-system acting. Rock learned to act on set. He was establishment. And they were both fighting over Elizabeth Taylor. Who’s her best favourite gay boyfriend? That kind of schoolyard shit was going on, too.”
The myth of the tortured Hollywood gay of the golden age, a (now questioned) narrative that for decades was attached to Montgomery Clift and Anthony Perkins, never pertained to Hudson, whom Kijak’s portrait characterises as a sexual gladiator. From parties at the Castle, his Hollywood home, to later visits to underground clubs, Hudson lived a joyous, carefree life.
“It does appear that way,” Kijak says. “I even have some quite older friends who were young men during that pre-Stonewall era who have all sorts of fabulous stories about the excitement of secret life and forbidden fruit. They paint a very florid, sexy picture of those days. And you have to remember, Rock was the biggest star at the studio. He’s got the money. He’s got the privilege. He’s got the protection. He was walled off from the real world in a lot of ways. He was square, socially and politically. The idea of gay liberation and being out would never have crossed his mind. He can have his fun behind closed doors, out of the public eye. And then he is notoriously nice. He was just so well liked and regarded, on and off camera, that I think there was a lot of goodwill towards him.”
Hudson’s frustrations were more likely career-related. Although deservedly nominated for an Oscar for his work on Giant, he lost out to Yul Brynner. His remarkable turns across the nine movies he made with Douglas Sirk were entirely overlooked by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Seconds, the cult plastic-surgery thriller from 1966, was a box-office bomb upon release, hastening Hudson’s defection to TV. He never quite escaped his early “Baron of Beefcake” celebrity.
“He worked very hard, and was very dedicated to the craft,” says Kijak. “But Rock was a movie star. He was constructed from the ground up. He was a studio guy, a cog in a massive machine. He had to fight for Giant. He had to fight for Seconds. He never got the plaudits or the credit for being a good actor.”
Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed is available on digital platforms
