Rock Hudson
Scott Holleran celebrates the centenary of the actor’s birth
From the beginning of his career, Rock Hudson exhibited magnetism on screen. Personifying the tall, dark and handsome archetype, he managed himself well given the context of America’s Puritanical or anti-sex culture. The pervasive sexism of the last 100 years—an anti-male strain culminating in feminism, which I define as the fallacy that female is inherently superior to male—could have ruined his career. Instead, the closeted gay movie star, to the extent he is a movie star, prevailed. Rock Hudson, born by another name 100 years ago today in Winnetka, Illinois, not far from where I grew up—crafted his acting against impossible safeguards countering his success. Rock Hudson’s acting deserves consideration.
This is neither biography nor obituary. Mine is a review; an essay about his career as an actor. During my youth, after coming out as gay in the early 1980s, I heard scads of rumors from people who claimed to know, or to have proximity to those who claimed to know, that Rock Hudson was gay. Some went into detail, undoubtedly with embellishment. I was dubious of those claims. I still am. When Rock Hudson came out as gay after contracting HIV and AIDS following his guest starring role on ABC’s Dynasty, my response was empathy, followed by sympathy. Seeking medicine to save his own life, Hudson showed courage.
At that point, Rock Hudson was a desperate, dying man. I could see the loss, sorrow and confusion in his eyes in television appearances during that bleak period. That’s when the contradiction, confusion and America’s cultural depravity became evident; that an actor canonized yet minimized, trivialized and reduced to being a “hunk” of flesh could be universally and abruptly deplored, dehumanized, ignored, dismissed and abandoned by audiences struck me as forewarning to the gay man. Rock Hudson, making himself vulnerable in the spotlight to the whole world, altering his image, caught my attention. I began to take interest in his work. Whatever the truth of rumors I’d heard, whatever his flaws, Rock Hudson deserved to be treated with dignity.
After an early life in Chicago’s northern suburbs, he began a film career in the late Forties. This was at the end of Hollywood’s Golden Age. I barely noticed him in Winchester 73, an interesting motion picture I reviewed after attending the Turner Classic Movies film festival several years ago. Rock Hudson would rise in stature in several hyper-masculine roles from Bend of the River (1952) to roles as American Indians. Some of these pictures are forgettable. Many I have not yet seen. Rock Hudson’s performance opposite Jane Wyman in the hokum-laced Magnificent Obsession (1954) previews his ability to layer melodrama with an aura of easygoing strength.
The six-foot, five-inch actor, born on this date of his centenary (he died of AIDS in Beverly Hills on October 2, 1985), reunited with Wyman for All That Heaven Allows a year later. Rock Hudson’s even better in this film because the role requires him to show restraint as a strong, simple man in love with a woman above his station in life. The third of Douglas Sirk’s stylized, billowy melodramas, Written on the Wind (1956), merits attention, too. That same year, Giant, an epic directed by George Stevens, in which he portrays a bigoted Texas patriarch opposite Elizabeth Taylor, is overhyped and overestimated. Giant hinges on Rock Hudson. The actor risked his career to play a lieutenant in an adaptation of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms (1957) which failed at the box office. By the end of the Fifties, he rebounded with the first in a series of light and daringly sexual movies opposite Doris Day.
Pillow Talk in 1959 marks his comeback from the Hemingway debacle. Hudson’s movies with Doris Day are enjoyable frivolity, particularly in retrospect. Come September (1961) with Gina Lollobrigida is worth checking out. The strange or avant-garde Seconds in 1966 may be his most demanding performance. Rock Hudson dominates the screen in this otherwise forgettable film experiment; you watch solely for his performance. After that, he returned to playing manly military roles in films such as Tobruk (1967), The Undefeated opposite John Wayne in 1969 and one of my favorite Rock Hudson movies based on the Alistair MacLean novel, Ice Station Zebra (1968), which captures the tension of the so-called Cold War. It’s a good, not a great, film. Rock Hudson is memorable in it. He showcases his skill as a leading actor.
He also displays a sense of humor in various television appearances, including on I Love Lucy and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-in. He starred in television series and mini-series, including an adaptation for television of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles before fading doing Dynasty. When you watch Rock Hudson on screen, knowing what you know about his sexuality and his allure as a tall, dark, handsome man living a lie for decade after decade, it affords the opportunity to appreciate the quality of his performances and contemplate what might have been.
Other than a rogue episode, book or movie or an occasional admission by an intellectual such as Brené Brown, today’s culturalists rarely meaningfully address what it means to be a modern man, let alone the scourge and poison of feminism, which emasculates the best in men. Being out as a gay man in Hollywood, which I know something about, is even more rarely addressed. Hollywood’s gay female—Rosie O’Donnell, Jodie Foster, Ellen DeGeneres, Wanda Sykes, Sarah Paulson—or CBS News boss Bari Weiss and other out, powerful gay women in today’s media, such as Queen Latifah, are accepted as gay without question, doubt or controversy.
Yet the gay man is vilified in today’s culture (or emasculated as a stereotype). The more successful gay man, such as the secretary of the U.S. Treasury, authors, pundits and intellectuals such as Andrew Sullivan, Dave Rubin, Andy Ngo and others, is rarely acknowledged as gay, let alone welcomed in the culture, let alone in society. Gay men in Hollywood remain in the closet, decades and decades and decades after building Hollywood into the world’s newest and most exciting and profitable artistic industry.
From speculation about Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Chopin and Cole Porter to today’s closeted gay male artists, the looming fear over the prospect of persecution for being a man who’s gay is rational. Rock Hudson, put on a pedestal, sexualized as a piece of meat, chiefly by women, and by powerful Hollywood men who condescend to them, was savvy in using his height and handsomeness to pursue happiness in concealment. This is tragic. Whether he recovered himself with vulnerability in Paris as he went “all in” to save his own life is unknown. There’s a sense in which he lived on his terms. In any case, Rock Hudson deserved to be proud.
No one should have to live a lie. Even a man who’s a giant. Rock Hudson was neither larger-than-life nor the greatest Hollywood actor. I don’t think he was a movie star. To his credit, he wasn’t smaller-than-life. He lived in private.
If you’re a man, you probably know of the unspoken modern custom to keep what’s sacred secret. I think most men know that honest expressions of emotion—let alone passion, let alone passion for something of value that’s unpopular or out of fashion, such as ideas or desire for sex and romantic love with the same sex—can cast one into a state of suspicion of being unmanly. I know firsthand that living “down low” represses, drains and depletes life, hastening and deepening a sense of gloom and death. On this centenary, let it be known that Rock Hudson, by coming out at the end of life—in his most vulnerable state—died as a wholer, better, stronger man.
Related Articles, Episodes and Stories
Turner Classic Movies in Hollywood Review
Mine was a rowdy if sporadic attendance at this year’s Turner Classic Movies film festival in Hollywood. I studied the program. I made my movie picks.
Sunday with Barbara Stanwyck
For an enjoyably fresh and surprising women’s prison picture, pre-Hollywood production code Ladies They Talk About hits the spot. Here, Barbara Stanwyck plays Nan, a bank robbery gang’s bait. She gets caught, obviously. There’s more to it and it’s well done.
Movies: The Celluloid Closet
In 1995, a documentary about gays in movies debuted. The result, based upon a gay activist’s book of the same name, is The Celluloid Closet. The 102-minute film begins and ends with grainy film footage by Thomas Edison—the world’s first moviemaker—of two men dancing. The adaptation of the book, also a college-level course by its author, the late film historian Vito Russo, was funded by a variety of sources, including state subsidies, HBO and Hugh Hefner.
Obituary: Earl Holliman
Read my exclusive 2003 movie website interview with the late actor Earl Holliman, who recently died at the age of 96.
Series Review: The Kominsky Method (Netflix)
Chuck Lorre’s series include Two and a Half Men (2003-2015) with Charlie Sheen and Mom (2013-2021) with Allison Janney. Both shows aired on CBS. These comedies were biting, dry and cynical. The Warner Bros.-produced show for the streaming service Netflix,
Movies: I Wanna Dance with Somebody
Advertised as being written for the screen by the same man who wrote Bohemian Rhapsody—an enjoyable, flawed rock star movie which compartmentalized sex from its subject—I Wanna Dance with Somebody deserves an audience. This is probably thanks to its director, filmmaker Kasi Lemmons (
Obituary: Peter Bogdanovich
This is not comprehensive. The best movie-themed obituaries are published in The Hollywood Reporter. You can read Peter Bogdanovich’s in that trade publication here. Turner Classic Movies (TCM) and Leonard Maltin also posted remembrances.
Movies: “Lover of Men” and “Am I Racist?”
Recently, I saw two documentaries at local movie theaters. I was invited to attend the premiere of a new, independent documentary about Abraham Lincoln by one of the film’s producers. This was a festive affair in Century City. I was also invited to attend a screening of conservative filmmaker and Daily Wire contributor Matt Walsh’s new movie about racism.