Whether Hudson was playing the hero, the lover or even the science experiment, many of the characters were, on some level, conflicted. Many of the characters Hudson played were deeply conflicted. “Henry Wilson knew that there was only one way to silence all of the rumors about Hudson’s homosexuality,” Griffin writes. What is known is that the public was openly wondering why Rock Hudson wasn’t married and Confidential Magazine was intent on exposing him. Gates, secretary to Hudson’s notoriously predatory agent, Henry Wilson – the man who “invented” Rock Hudson – may or may not have known Hudson was gay. His brief marriage to Phyllis Gates was meant to keep scandal sheets at bay.

“From an early age,” Griffin writes, “he learned that you could talk about pretty much anything – except what you truly felt and what you really wanted.

in Winnetka, Illinois, in 1925. Hudson’s biological father abandoned his mother, Katherine, and his stepfather, Wallace Fitzgerald, was physically abusive – including, Hudson once said, when he told Fitzgerald he wanted to be an actor. Griffin fills in what’s left to say in between the lines with an impressive list of interviews with movie star friends, acquaintances and co-stars and digs deep into private journals and correspondence.Īmong the themes and highlights, most of them known but gaining heft in detail: 1. That’s the narrative thrust of this onscreen/offscreen examination of Hudson: “Long before he landed in Hollywood, he understood that if he wanted to be accepted, the very essence of who he was would have to be edited out of the frame.”Īnd that’s exactly what Hudson did, until the public disclosure of his AIDS diagnosis shortly before his death in 1985 at age 59, cast him in a new role as the face of a global and much misunderstood pandemic. Rock Hudson was everything a romantic leading man could be in the 1950s and ‘60s – hunky, clean-cut, extraordinarily handsome – so much so that he ascended to a place where he was considered the “king of Hollywood” and lived in a Beverly Hills mansion nicknamed “The Castle.”īut as author Mark Griffin points out in his exhaustive and empathetic biography “All That Heaven Allows” (Harper, 496 pp., ★★★ stars out of four), the actor paid a heavy personal price for his pre-eminence.ĭeeply closeted in an era where an openly gay man could never be a celluloid hero, Hudson – a matinee idol of the first order who wooed Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall, Gina Lollobrigida and Doris Day onscreen and starred most successfully and famously in films like “Giant” and “Pillow Talk” – spent his life and career hiding in plain sight.

New Kids on the Rock by Mark Miller