![]() ![]() They would divorce less than three years later, and Gates would eventually write a tell-all suggesting she knew nothing of Hudson’s sexuality. 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. “Fans are urging 29-year-old Hudson to get married-or explain why not,” Life magazine wrote of its 1955 cover star. Movie magazines like Photoplay painted him as a quintessential straight man and wondered when he would walk down the aisle. He was called the Baron of Beefcake.”īut Hudson also had to navigate the midcentury Hollywood media landscape with absolute precision. He completely, obviously, has to be complicit in it, and he must have loved it. All of a sudden he’s a contract player at Universal, and there’s this whole machine creating this persona for you. 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. 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. It’s a very intimate portrait that emerges.”īorn Roy Harold Scherer Jr. “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. “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. ![]() In order to go beyond the facade, Kijak sought out the men in Hudson’s private orbit. ![]() 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.” “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. “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. But above all, he was a consummate performer-onscreen, but more vitally, off. Rock Hudson has been the subject of countless headlines, center of lifelong rumors about his sexuality, and keeper of secrets that influenced both. ![]()
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