"It never bothered me. Life's too short. Who the hell cares if he's queer? The man plays great chess."
--John Wayne on Rock Hudson.
"Physically he [Marc Christian] fit Rock's type perfectly," says Hudson's friend Ken Maley. "It was like a paper doll cut-out. You couldn't have found a taller, blonder, sexier guy. In every way this was Rock's dream man. Well, at least in the beginning he was."
quotes from All That Heaven Allows, Mark Griffin (HarperCollins 2018).
Any biographer of a film actor faces the dilemma of relating the work to the person, always a tricky business. Rock Hudson's name was changed from Roy Scherer, Jr. and he was groomed for stardom by agent Henry Willson, who also discovered and groomed Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue and Rory Calhoun and had a casting couch of his own. Hudson was something of a wooden actor but was fortunate to sign with Universal and make eight films with Douglas Sirk (including All That Heaven Allows in 1953), films rich with beauty and irony not much detected or appreciated at the time. Griffin works hard to find personal and gay themes in Hudson's movies, with middling success. Howard Hawks's Man's Favorite Sport (1962) for instance, is indeed about artifice and pretending to be something one is not, though missing is what Hawks called "a love affair between men," common in Hawks films such as Red River (1948).
Mark Rappaport, in his "documentary" Rock Hudson's Home Movies (1993) goes to great lengths to document what he calls "cruising scenes" in Hudson's films. The problem is that such scenes are common in many movies with many different actors, from Cary Grant to Gary Cooper, and points out that sexuality is a rather complicated issue. Rock Hudson was less in the closet than some other actors and was only outed when he died of AIDS.
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