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Rock Hudson has been the subject of countless headlines, center of lifelong rumors about his sexuality, and keeper of secrets that influenced both. But above all, he was a consummate performer—onscreen, but more vitally, off.
“When you string out every Rock Hudson interview in print and radio or TV, he gives you nothing,” says filmmaker Stephen Kijak, who profiles Hudson in the documentary Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, premiering June 27 on HBO. “There’s this strange sense that he’s been so carefully controlled and created and crafted by the studio, by the publicists, that over time, his true self just got compressed to this little part that was just hidden from everybody. He never really lets it all out.” After seeing all the headlines touting “Rock Hudson’s big secret,” Kijak quips, “you look at the article, and the secret is he’s the worst interview in Hollywood.”
In order to go beyond the facade, Kijak sought out the men in Hudson’s private orbit. “I really wanted to go about creating a generational arc of men who were in his life as lovers, friends, playmates, a wing man, a costar, people that he really brought inside,” he tells Vanity Fair. “These men create a portrait of a generation that gets you from the pre-Stonewall days, before gay liberation, all the way to the other side of the AIDS crisis. It’s a very intimate portrait that emerges.”
Once the thing he shielded in order to preserve his Hollywood legacy, Hudson’s queer identity is now a significant part of why it endures. Inspired by Mark Rappaport’s experimental 1992 documentary Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, Kijak spliced scenes from everything including Giant, for which Hudson earned an Oscar nomination, to the psychological drama Seconds, a gloomy change of pace for the actor, to illuminate the person beneath the performance. “We wanted to manipulate the films to have them in conversation with each other,” Kijak explains. He cites “Rock in Pillow Talk sort of cruising Rod Taylor in another movie, and cutting them together to almost create this little queer cinematic space where Rock could present as a gay man. It was like setting him free in a way to show just a little hint of what could have been.”
This becomes a particularly impactful exercise when it comes to Hudson’s years as a romantic comedy leading man, particularly his trilogy of films with Doris Day—Pillow Talk (1959), Lover Come Back (1961), and Send Me No Flowers (1964). “In the films, he’s a heterosexual man who’s pretending to be gay or at least effeminate in order to woo Doris Day, so she can turn around and try to convert him,” Kijak says. “It’s this weird house of mirrors where, all of a sudden, there seems to be a lot of intentionality around screwing with the narrative and putting his queerness almost on full display, which is unheard of in a way. It has to have been an accident. Or was it?”
Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Born Roy Harold Scherer Jr. in Winnetka, Illinois, the would-be actor was renamed and given a rigorous makeover by his predatory agent Henry Willson, a dynamic on display in Ryan Murphy’s Netflix series Hollywood. Hudson was complicit in selling his carefully constructed image, Kijak says: “His big dream is to be a movie star, and I can’t imagine what it must have been like. He had no training. All of a sudden he’s a contract player at Universal, and there’s this whole machine creating this persona for you. He completely, obviously, has to be complicit in it, and he must have loved it. He was called the Baron of Beefcake.”
But Hudson also had to navigate the midcentury Hollywood media landscape with absolute precision. Movie magazines like Photoplay painted him as a quintessential straight man and wondered when he would walk down the aisle. “Fans are urging 29-year-old Hudson to get married—or explain why not,” Life magazine wrote of its 1955 cover star. In answer to that question, Willson brokered a marriage between his secretary, Phyllis Gates, and Hudson, which took place just eight days shy of the actor’s 30th birthday. They would divorce less than three years later, and Gates would eventually write a tell-all suggesting she knew nothing of Hudson’s sexuality. This, Hudson biographer Mark Griffin has said, “is really hard to swallow given the fact that virtually every bit player, Makeup man, assistant gopher at Universal knew the score about Rock Hudson. How did she possibly miss the memo?”
Hudson’s sexuality was a source of unbridled speculation for tabloids such as Confidential magazine, which “really just wanted to out people as gay, as commies, as drunks, as sluts—I mean, whatever it was, they just wanted to trash everybody,” says Kijak. Enter Willson with the damage control—this time, in the form of fellow client Tab Hunter, whose secrets were sacrificed in order to shield the more successful Hudson against an impending exposé.
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