Rock Hudson Was Not
When it was publicly revealed that Rock Hudson was gay — back in the mid-1980s, as the actor became the best-known person with AIDS in the world — I was surprised to learn that people were surprised about the "news." After all, years earlier, when I was a little kid, I remember my mother mentioning that fact to me while we were watching reruns of McMillan and Wife on TV. (The Wife, by the way, was the delightful Susan Saint James. Where the hell is she??)
Anyhow, today’s jaded crowd, looking at the above photograph, will surely assert that it’s so obvious that Rock Hudson was gay. Just look at him! Well, I thoroughly disagree. There’s nothing obvious about Hudson’s sexual orientation in the photo. No, I’m not blind. The guy just looks like a man — gay, straight, anything in between — doing his best to appear classy, or at least what used to pass for classy.
Personally, I don’t find Hudson very convincing as a "classy" type à la Cary Grant. In fact, I find Rock Hudson, whatever his sexual predilections, much more believable in rugged roles, such as his gardener in All That Heaven Allows and, especially, his rancher in Giant.
Now, I should add that the photo, which a friend sent me via e-mail, is from the August 1967 issue of Movie Life magazine. But more importantly, you ask, What was Rock Hudson not? Well, the answer, as per Movie Life, is: (he was not) "Going to the Dogs." The magazine wasn’t referring to Hudson’s film career; the promo piece featured eight photos of the actor and his canine pals.
In truth, however, by the late 1960s Hudson’s stardom, despite a well-received serious role in John Frankenheimer’s 1966 thriller Seconds, was headed straight to the kennel — think A Fine Pair, Hornet’s Nest, and the box-office disaster Darling Lili.
McMillan and Wife boosted Hudson’s popularity in the early 1970s, but only on the small screen. He was never to star in another major motion picture — unless, that is, you’d call Pretty Maids All in a Row, Embryo, Avalanche, and The Mirror Crack’d grade-A productions.
Hudson died of AIDS complications on October 2, 1985. He was 59 years old.
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