Rock Hudson
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He was also a lifelong closet case, whose life served as both a warning about the dangers of denial, and a wake-up call to a public too willing to believe that all faggots were limp-wristed fairies — and only limp-wristed fairies (and junkies, and Haitians) could get AIDS.
A walking mass of testosterone, Hudson fell into the leading-man category occupied by Gable, Lancaster, Mitchum — he was raw masculinity, tempered by an engaging smile and easy demeanor. Women wanted him, and men wanted to be like him. He was voted “star of the year,” “favorite leading man,” or any number of similar epithets by countless movie magazines, and was unquestionably one of the most popular and well-known movie stars of the 1950s.
| KING: You remember, as an onlooker then, Marvin, did you think Rock Hudson was gay? You lived here.
MITCHELSON: I lived here all my life. KING: You heard the rumors… MITCHELSON: I heard the rumors, but it just didn’t seem like he was. KING: No one looked less — I don’t know if you look gay… Is there such a thing as looking gay? CHRISTIAN: No, but if look at him in “Pillow Talk,” you’ve got the Tony Randall character, and Tony Randall seems gay, but he’s absolutely hetero, and you’ve got Rock, who was extremely macho and he was gay,or bisexual, so… — Larry King, |
What the his legions of adoring fans didn’t know — but Hollywood did — was that Rock Hudson was a big homo. When it looked like the heat generated by the industry gossip mill might singe Rock’s eyebrows, his agent Henry Willson (another team player who made a career of handling handsome closet cases, such as Tab Hunter, and Troy “I am not gay” Donahue) talked Hudson into marrying his secretary, Phyllis Gates, in 1955. The sham union lasted a respectable three years, long enough to put the rumors to rest… at least for those who were blind in one eye and couldn’t see out of the other.
Rock didn’t have much to worry about from the better-known gossip mavens of the day; the Hedda Hoppers of the 1950s were all too willing to keep his homosexuality a secret (and gush over his happy life with his bride). It was the notorious Confidential magazine — a scandal rag that made The National Enquirer look like Highlights for Children, and which took especially intense delight in outing closet queens — that proved the biggest thorn in Rock’s musclebound side.
If you were around in 1955 — or if you’ve read Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon — then you’ve seen the mug shots of actor Rory Calhoun, along with Confidential’s screaming headline: “But for the Grace of God, Still a Convict!”
There’s a story behind the Calhoun story: Confidential was about to drop the Hudson-is-a-homo bombshell on an unsuspecting public, when suddenly the magazine held its fire. Why? Because Rock’s studio, Universal (or so informed sources say) paid Confidential $10,000 in hush money — and threw in information about Calhoun’s ex-convict status to seal the deal.
Hudson had one more notable close call with Confidential during the 1960s, when the magazine threatened to expose Rock’s “affair” with not-so-deep-in-the-closet George Nader. The truth was that Nader wasn’t sleeping with Hudson — he was having it off with Mark Miller, Hudson’s personal secretary, who ended up becoming Nader’s partner for life (and, with Nader, inherited Hudson’s estate).
Again, Hudson’s studio quickly cut a check — and fired Nader — and Confidential backed off.
Hudson sailed through the 1960s on a cloud of romantic comedies with Doris Day, and was just finishing up his six-season run as one half of “MacMillan and Wife” (he as the super-hetero San Francisco police commissioner, and Susan St. James as the young, sexy missus) when he met writer Armistead Maupin in 1976. Despite Rock’s ongoing relationship with Jack Coates, the movie star and the writer fell into the sack together.
Maupin explained it to Michael Giltz of The Advocate in 2001: “When I tell it to straight interviewers, they end up saying, ‘He had an affair with Rock Hudson.’ No, no, no. It wasn’t an affair. We played a couple of times. That’s what gay men do sometimes. The first time we played, I was completely unable to perform because I was acutely aware that I was going to bed with Rock Hudson. To make matters worse, he had a little black leather popper case that was embossed with the initials ‘RH’ in case I forgot who I was with. But he was just really a good guy about it and terribly funny and pointed out to me that this happened to him all the time with his sex partners. It sometimes took a while for him to seem like an ordinary guy. And all of that is reflected rather graphically [in the encounter between Michael and Cage Tyler, portrayed] in Further Tales of the City.”
| Well, we had all kind of heard that [Rock Hudson was gay]. I’m — I’m close to the police department, and we heard that he one time had picked up a young boy or something, but you know, I always figured in this profession, with this Ingrid Bergman with Rosselini, is none of my damn business, you know.
— Robert Stack |
Throughout their friendship, Maupin tried to talk Hudson into coming out, and for a while Hudson was even agreeable to mulling over the idea of a tell-all biography — but he was probably just throwing Maupin a bone. So to speak.
Meanwhile, the professional gossipmongers continued to toe the line.
Rona Barrett told The Advocate why she refused to out Hudson: “I just don’t believe in it. I think it’s wrong. A person is entitled to some degree of privacy in that part of his or her life.”
Liz Smith (herself a lesbian who shies away from the “lesbian” label) simply washed her hands of the decision: “I was not into protecting him or trying to make him seem not gay.”
That’s not entirely true. Just two months before making the above statement to The Advocate, she was asked by Larry King if she had helped Hudson “keep the secret.”
Smith replied: “I helped him to the extent — I helped keep a woman from blackmailing him, because I happened to have a file on this woman for some unknown reason, and I sent it to him, and he showed to it her, and she dropped her blackmail.”
Still, she wouldn’t have outed him. “I wouldn’t have reported him going out with girls or anything,” she told The Advocate. But she wouldn’t have reported him going out with boys or anything, either.
“The AIDS epidemic was mushrooming in those years,” reflects Michelangelo Signorile, “and the urgency of gay visibility was being underscored by activists while the silence around AIDS in the media and among politicians was deafening. [Rock Hudson's] life and death exposed how the media bought into the Hollywood machine that heterosexualized actors — and how that machine reflected an entrenched media hypocrisy that went well beyond Hollywood.
“What was the rationale among mainstream journalists to promote such inaccuracies? I asked. They were protecting people’s right to privacy, they claimed, noting that it was up to the individual to decide whether or not to be out or to put forth a heterosexual facade and that no one else could make that decision. And at that time, make no mistake, suggesting or even hinting that someone was gay was considered as horrific as outright reporting it.”
There was no rationale — unless you want to credit the stifling conservatism of the times. Ronald Reagan was in office, and bolstering his complete disregard for those filthy homosexuals was the newly-organized extremist wing of the Radical Right, led by the most phobic of homophobes, Jerry Falwell.
And then there was the president’s plain, willful ignorance. Even his White House physician, Brigadier General John Hutton, stated that Reagan thought of AIDS as though “it was measles and would go away.”
After Reagan’s death, Allen White wrote:
By Feb. 1, 1983, 1,025 AIDS cases were reported, and at least 394 had died in the United States. Reagan said nothing. On April 23, 1984, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced 4,177 reported cases in America and 1,807 deaths. In San Francisco, the health department reported more than 500 cases. Again, Reagan said nothing. …With each diagnosis, the pain and suffering spread across America. Everyone seemed to now know someone infected with AIDS. At a White House state dinner, first lady Nancy Reagan expressed concern for a guest showing signs of significant weight loss.”
That guest was Rock Hudson.
| EVANS: Yes. Sure. Sure. No, I knew he was gay. I just didn’t know he had AIDS.
KING: You ever talk to him about it? EVANS: Gay? KING: Yes. Did he ever talk about it? EVANS: No. Because the thing about Rock was so great is when he was with you, he always made you feel like he was just a man that could flirt with you and be with you. He didn’t — he was just this kind of a man-woman thing, that he would do. — Larry King, Linda Evans |
In 1984, after a series of forgettable (and some, like Embryo, downright embarrasing) movies, Hudson landed a recurring role on the nighttime soaper, “Dynasty.” Never mind that Rock was a bit old to be frolicking about with the much-better-preserved Linda Evans — the fact was, frankly, he looked like hell.
Some people thought maybe he was just old, since they hadn’t seen him in a while.
But some of us — especially those of us who had been running into the star for years at gay clubs up and down the California coast — suspected something else was very, very wrong.
His co-workers were certainly alarmed. While Rock’s inability to memorize dialogue was the stuff of legend, now he was exhibiting all the signs of a man in serious trouble. The need for cue cards was one thing, but when his speech began to deteriorate, everybody knew the least of Rock’s problems was simple forgetfulness. And at just 58 years old, no one was quite ready to brand him “senile.” The word “cancer” was tossed around — but not, at least by those who had something to lose, was the phrase “gay cancer” mentioned. Not yet.
Marc Christian, Rock’s bisexual lover of three years, was as much in denial as anyone. He finally asked Hudson about his startling weight loss in the spring of 1985, and, Christian later told Larry King, “he said I’ve been checked for cancer, I’ve been checked for everything, including the plague, meaning AIDS, and I don’t have it. And then the word got around the house that he had anorexia, which was typically a teenage female infliction. I didn’t buy that either. I thought he probably had lung cancer. He was a very heavy smoker.”
Hudson’s friend and publicist Dale Olson finally asked, “‘Rock, do you have AIDS?’ And he said, no, he was anorexic. I think I believed that because I wanted to believe it.”
The jig was up in July of 1985, when Hudson joined his old pal Doris Day for the launch of her new cable show, “Doris Day’s Best Friends.” His gaunt — nay, skeletal — visage (and nearly-incoherent speech) was so shocking that it was broadcast again all over the national news shows that night and for weeks to come. D-Day herself stared at him throughout their appearance together; she appeared as if she was trying, as we were, to comprehend how this sunken-eyed bag of bones could really be Rock Hudson.
Even Hudson’s publicist couldn’t believe what he wanted to believe any longer. Dale Olson asked Doris Day to talk to Rock. The two stars had breakfast alone, and Rock finally came clean.
But it was veteran gossip columnist Army Archerd — who had somehow got his hands on one of Hudson’s lab reports, and saw the words “Kaposi’s sarcoma” — who broke the story in Variety.
Olson denied it outright. “I wasn’t lying, actually,” he told Larry King. “I simply ignored the fact that he had AIDS, but I announced that he had liver cancer.”
Olson has continue to justify his own actions, and defend Hudson’s. The publicist told King he considered Rock Hudson “the hero of AIDS awareness.” When King reminded Olson that if Hudson had been allowed to keep his condition a secret, he could have gone on infecting other people, Olson replied: “He could have infected people, I’m sure, I don’t know anything about that, because I didn’t know anything about that at the time. … All I’m saying is that when that announcement was forced by the American hospital in Paris, who discovered he had AIDS when he collapsed at the Ritz Hotel. … I spoke to him and said, ‘Rock, this is terrible,’ and frankly said ‘You have a terminal disease. This is going to affect a lot of people. And you can be the person who can make people aware of it.’ He agreed totally, was not capable of doing it himself, but asked me if I would be a spokesperson and get that message out. Which I did.”
Which he did indeed — but only after there was no other way to deny it.
On July 25, 1985, while in Paris for experimental treatment, Hudson issued a formal statement: He was gay, and he had full-blown AIDS.
“And,” Christian recalled, “the very day that the news broke, I was sitting in his living room, and he was over in Paris and he had collapsed. And his secretary called me and said, ‘We have very bad news, he’s got liver cancer and they’re going to say it on the news.’ And of course I’m devastated, thinking, ‘Liver cancer, it’s inoperable.’
| He took it very well. He knew that he had something very serious. He was aware of the disease. He had friends who had been affected. And he knew that there was no cure at that time.
— Dr. Michael Gottlieb |
“So I’m watching the television, and [Hudson's French press secretary] came on and said he has Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. And my first reaction was, ‘They just discovered this?’ But then she said, later on, ‘which was diagnosed a year ago in the United States.’ And then I knew I had been lied to. It just was — so I was devastated.”
So, Rock Hudson knew he had AIDS for a full year, and didn’t tell his lover… which is strange, considering that Hudson told his own doctor he had sent anonymous letters to at least four other sex partners to inform them that they had been exposed. Why didn’t he do the same for Christian? (Perhaps his relationship with Christian wasn’t all flowers and roses — but we’ll get to that later.)
In any case, Hudson did continue to have sex — unprotected sex — with Christian.
But no one — besides Marc Christian — was thinking about that. Immediately, all thoughts went back to the full-bore kissing scene Hudson shared with Linda Evans for “Dynasty” less than a year earlier.
Of course, now we know that you don’t catch AIDS from kissing. But this was 1985, and even the best doctors out there weren’t too certain about the risk of transmission through saliva. In that light, it was extremely unfair of Hudson to go through with the liplock without informing Evans of his status. People — Hudson included — just didn’t know if kissing could kill.
| The anxiety over actor Rock Hudson’s death from AIDS was that he had shortly before kissed actress Linda Evans on the set of Dynasty. The genuine concern of the day was that “beautiful innocent Linda Evans” was going to become infected and die. (The queers, after all, deserved it.)
— Eric Resnick |
“You’d go to parties,” recalled Liz Smith in her Advocate interview, “and people would have really negative things to say about how afraid they were of getting AIDS from shaking hands with somebody. I mean, people were just ignorant.”
So Evans got tested, while friends and co-workers worried from afar (”People started staying away from me,” she said on a Lifetime special a couple of years ago. “People wouldn’t hug me anymore”), and the media lambasted Hudson for putting her at risk.
Evans herself was about the only person who wasn’t angry with Hudson. She knew something was a tad off in Hudson’s performance — his kisses just weren’t so hot — and then after his AIDS announcement decided that he was holding back because he was afraid of infecting her.
“They saw the dailies,” Evans told Larry King in 2001, “and they came back a couple weeks later, and they said, ‘We’d like to do that scene over, and we’d like you to be more passionate.’
“I said, ‘I can’t be more passionate, because I’m the one who’s just laying there on the ground. He has to be.’
“They explained it to him. We do it again. He does the same thing. He did it because he knew he had AIDS. And because over the years we were such good friends. And I’d — you know, whenever I’d be at a party or anything, I’d sit and we’d talk together and everything. He was trying to protect me in his own way.
“And people were just so upset, they said, ‘Why? Aren’t you mad at him for doing that to you?’ And I knew he was trying to protect me.”
| Speculation about whether or not Hudson, who in real life was living with AIDS, had possibly transmitted HIV to Evans ran rampant. Not only was it a reminder that the public was woefully uninformed about the transmission routes of HIV, but it was also a reminder of a double standard in television: Shows were saturated with sex, but nary a word was spoken about the risks and responsibilities of those juicy trysts. That is, until Hudson’s real-life HIV-positive status accidentally intersected with the high-glam fantasy world of the Carringtons and Colbys.
— Chael Needle |
Since no one really knew at the time whether or not you could get it from kissing, maybe Evans’ calm was self-protective denial. “I never thought I could catch it,” she said. “In my mind, I felt fine.”
In the meantime, Army Archerd was taking the heat for breaking the story — and especially for breaking rank. “There are quite a few people who were upset with the fact that I had written this story,” Archerd told Larry King, “among them, several at Dale [Olson]’s profession, press agents who had worked with Rock who were very fond of him and thought that I should not have done it, and who one of whom never spoke to me again.
“It was a strange time. There were some people who were trying to do things about AIDS, and they couldn’t get any celebrities to help them” — and yet those same people went absolutely ballistic now that they did have a celebrity poster child (albeit a reluctant one).
Archerd had been invited to a book party for Carol Bayer Sager, hosted by Elizabeth Taylor. A couple of days before the party, he received a call from Sager’s publicist, “disinviting” him, telling him: “If you come to the party, Elizabeth will not show up.”
The Elizabeth Taylor? AIDS activist and lifelong fag hag?
It’s impossible to know if Taylor really was that angry with Archerd, or whether Archerd was just getting the cold shoulder from yet another pissed-off publicist.
After finally copping to AIDS publicly, Hudson left Paris (the only passenger on a chartered commercial jet) and came home to die.
“You know,” Liz Smith told The Advocate, “Rock didn’t know what getting AIDS meant. He didn’t know what he would do for the movement, for activism against AIDS. He didn’t have to cooperate. And he didn’t. But he didn’t lie.”
But he did lie, by omission. And he knew very well “what getting AIDS meant.”
“He was very cognizant of the fact that he had AIDS,” Army Archerd told Larry King, “and he was not a stupid man, and he knew what the ramifications of AIDS was.
“In spite of this… he continued a lifestyle endangering lives of so many people in San Francisco; the stories that were very well-known, those kinds of things did not fit in with the kind of person that we liked to believe Rock Hudson was.”
| When the book, the biography that I wrote, came out, I was attacked by people who said: “Rock would never have wanted this to be known. He wouldn’t have wanted people to know about his lovers, about his romantic life.” And I realized that it was because he was homosexual that they felt people didn’t want to know. If he was a straight actor, everybody would have expected to hear about all the women he had loved and who had been in his life. But because he was gay, you weren’t supposed to tell, weren’t supposed to talk about it.
— Sara Davidson |
On the other hand, Hudson put his last few months to good use. Less than a month after announcing he had AIDS (and at the request of his doctor, Michael S. Gottlieb), Hudson wrote a check for $250,000 to help get the then-fledgling National AIDS Research Foundation (NARF) off the ground. (It was for NARF that Rock’s old friend Elizabeth Taylor began leading the public fight against AIDS in earnest — although Taylor is wont to remind us that she was already concerned and active in the AIDS battle before she knew Rock was sick.)
Just before his death on October 2, 1985, Hudson said: “I can at least know my own misfortune has had positive worth.”
We don’t think he was referring to his quarter-million-dollar donation when he said that.
There is no denying that Rock Hudson’s death was probably the number-one catalyst that forced the public — especially Americans — to reconsider the AIDS controversy. “Rock Hudson’s death gave AIDS a face,” said Morgan Fairchild.
But more than two years would pass before Ronald Reagan would even acknowledge the existence of AIDS, much less provide funding for research.
Wrote Allen White:
With AIDS finally out of the closet, activists such as Paul Boneberg, who in 1984 started Mobilization Against AIDS in San Francisco, begged President Reagan to say something now that he, like thousands of Americans, knew a person with AIDS. Writing in the Washington Post in late 1985, Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Los Angeles, stated: “It is surprising that the president could remain silent as 6,000 Americans died, that he could fail to acknowledge the epidemic’s existence. Perhaps his staff felt he had to, since many of his New Right supporters have raised money by campaigning against homosexuals.”Reagan would ultimately address the issue of AIDS while president. His remarks came May 31, 1987 (near the end of his second term), at the Third International Conference on AIDS in Washington. When he spoke, 36,058 Americans had been diagnosed with AIDS and 20,849 had died. The disease had spread to 113 countries, with more than 50,000 cases. …
Reagan could have chosen to end the homophobic rhetoric that flowed from so many in his administration. Dr. C. Everett Koop, Reagan’s surgeon general, has said that because of “intradepartmental politics” he was cut out of all AIDS discussions for the first five years of the Reagan administration. The reason, he explained, was “because transmission of AIDS was understood to be primarily in the homosexual population and in those who abused intravenous drugs.” The president’s advisers, Koop said, “took the stand, ‘They are only getting what they justly deserve.’”
How profoundly different might have been the outcome if his leadership had generated compassion rather than hostility. “In the history of the AIDS epidemic, President Reagan’s legacy is one of silence,” Michael Cover, former associate executive director for public affairs at Whitman-Walker Clinic, the groundbreaking AIDS health-care organization in Washington. in 2003. “It is the silence of tens of thousands who died alone and unacknowledged, stigmatized by our government under his administration.”
Revisionist history about Reagan must be rejected. Researchers, historians and AIDS experts who know the truth must not remain silent. Too many have died for that.
Yet it’s hard to fight revisionist history about Reagan, when Reagan himself is at the core of it:
LARRY KING: AIDS — did — were we late on that?REAGAN: I don’t think — no, certainly we — it was a — we were not unnecessarily so. It was a plain case of catching up with things, and I immediately appointed a commission to get into the whole problem of AIDS and come back with the recommendations of what we could and should be doing.
KING: Do you think Rock Hudson focused a lot of our attention on it?
REAGAN: Oh, I think that brought a lot of attention to it, sure.
…
KING: Are you hopeful about it?
REAGAN: Well, yes, I think we have to be hopeful about it, or we’ll find ourselves back in those days of the plagues… that wiped out millions of people.
— Larry King Live
January, 1990
After Hudson’s death, Marc Christian sued his lover’s estate on grounds of “intentional infliction of emotional distress.” Christian tested negative (and as far as anyone knows is still HIV-free) — but the fact remains that Hudson continued having sex with him for a year after he knew he had AIDS.
Today, in some states, a person can be convicted of attempted murder for that.
Through high-profile attorney Marvin Mitchelson (the plaintiff’s lawyer in the 1976 Lee Marvin “palimony” case), Christian sued for $5 million, and ended up with $14.5 million (”Sometimes juries get angry,” Mitchelson later remarked).
Footnote
Lest you applaud Marc Christian as a hero — despite the fact that his suit and subsequent win sent a message to those who might fail to inform partners of their HIV status — keep in mind Christian’s apparent internalized homophobia and obvious disdain for the gay community:
In 2001, when Larry King remarked that “a lot of people” were mad at Christian when he won his case, Christian replied, “Yeah, especially the gays. … I found out that I got a lot more vitriolic hatred from liberal gays than I did from conservative straight people. Straight people were great to me, because I think they found themselves in a position of, gee, if my wife or my husband hadn’t told me, I’d know how he would feel. … I think that liberal gays think that if you had AIDS, you couldn’t do any wrong. You could go out and infect anyone you want, you’re the victim. … There is this whole victim mentality that we have, not just in the gay world, but in America now, that it’s always somebody else’s fault. … [A] lot of the groups like Lambda, GLAAD, and amfAR, they didn’t like me too much.”
With an attitude like that, it’s easy to see why they didn’t.
Too, there is the question of Christian’s relationship with Hudson. Hudson biographer Sara Davidson later told King: “By the time I met Rock… Marc Christian was living in his guest house, and Tom Clark, who had been his lover for many years before, was living in the house, and he — Marc was frozen out, he wasn’t allowed to come in the house. He was holding on to his territory. It was a very strange scene.”
Addenda
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“I hope I die of a heart attack before they find out,” Hudson said when he was diagnosed.
Hudson was romantically linked with Jim Nabors (yes, “Gomer Pyle”), Wally Cox, James Dean, and, the butchest of the bunch, Joan Crawford.
He was a Republican. He considered John Wayne a friend.
Due to too many potentially damaging jokes after Hudson’s death, the Prudential Life Insurance Company killed its longtime commercial slogan “Get a Piece of the Rock.”
Hudson’s ashes were scattered at sea.
His Hollywood Walk of Fame star is at 6104 Hollywood Blvd.
Filmography:
Fighter Squadron (1948)
Undertow (1949)
One Way Street (1950)
I Was a Shoplifter (1950)
Peggy (1950)
Winchester ‘73 (1950)
The Desert Hawk (1950)
Shakedown (1950)
Tomahawk (1951)
Air Cadet (1951)
The Fat Man (1951)
Bright Victory (1951)
Iron Man (1951)
Bend of the River (1952)
Here Come the Nelsons (1952)
Scarlet Angel (1952)
Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (1952)
Horizons West (1952)
The Lawless Breed (1953)
Seminole (1953)
Sea Devils (1953)
The Golden Blade (1953)
Gun Fury (1953)
Back to God’s Country (1953)
Beneath the 12-Mile Reef (1953) - narrator
Taza, Son of Cochise (1954)
Magnificent Obsession (1954)
Bengal Brigade (1954)
Captain Lightfoot (1955)
One Desire (1955)
All That Heaven Allows (1955)
Never Say Goodbye (1956)
Giant (1956)
Written on the Wind (1956)
Battle Hymn (1957)
Something of Value, a.k.a. Africa Ablaze (1957)
A Farewell to Arms (1957)
The Tarnished Angels (1958)
Twilight for the Gods (1958)
This Earth Is Mine (1959)
Pillow Talk (1959)
The Last Sunset (1961)
Come September (1961)
Lover Come Back (1961)
The Spiral Road (1962)
A Gathering of Eagles (1963)
Marilyn (1963)
Man’s Favorite Sport? (1964)
Send Me No Flowers (1964)
Strange Bedfellows (1965)
A Very Special Favor (1965)
Blindfold (1965)
Seconds (1966)
Tobruk (1967)
Ice Station Zebra (1968)
A Fine Pair (1969)
The Undefeated (1969)
Darling Lili (1970)
Hornets’ Nest (1970)
Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971)
Once Upon a Dead Man (Made for TV, 1971)
Showdown (1973)
Embryo (1976)
Wheels, a.k.a. Arthur Hailey’s Wheels (TV miniseries, 1978)
Avalanche (1978)
The Martian Chronicles (TV miniseries, 1980)
The Mirror Crack’d (1980)
Superstunt II (Made for TV, 1980)
Star Maker, The (Made for TV, 1981)
World War III (Made for TV, 1982)
The Ambassador, a.k.a. Peacemaker (1984)
The Vegas Strip War (Made for TV, 1984)
And the Band Played On (1993) - brief clip
Film & TV documentaries:
The James Dean Story (1957)
Lionpower From MGM (1967)
The Man Who Makes the Difference (1968)
Hollywood: The Selznick Years (1969)
Elizabeth Taylor: Hollywood’s Child, a.k.a. Elizabeth Taylor: An Intimate Biography (1975)
Sixty Years of Seduction (1981)
George Stevens: A Filmmaker’s Journey (1985)
ABC News Nightline: Rock Hudson Suffers from AIDS (1985)
Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989)
Rock Hudson (1990)
Rock Hudson’s Home Movies (1992)
Fame in the Twentieth Century (1993)
James Dean: A Portrait (1996)
Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen’s (1997)
Elizabeth Taylor: The E! True Hollywood Story (1998)
Memories of Giant (1998)
A&E Biography: Rock Hudson - Acting the Part (1999)
Elizabeth Taylor: A Musical Celebration (2000)
Elizabeth Taylor: England’s Other Elizabeth (2000)
Hollywood Screen Tests, Take 1 (2000)
Hollywood Screen Tests, Take 2 (2000)
Cleopatra: The Film That Changed Hollywood (2001)
The Making of Far From Heaven (2002)
E! 101 Most Shocking Moments in Entertainment History (2003)
Return to Giant (2003)
Television series:
McMillan and Wife (1971-1976)
The Devlin Connection (1982)
Dynasty (1984-1985)
External links:
Rock Hudson - The Knitting Circle
Stag Night at the Steam Room - photo spread from Modern Screen, October 1950: “Hugh O’Brien, Scott Brady, John Bromfield, Rock Hudson and Tony Curtis sit on hot shelves of various tempertures at the Finlandia Baths. … Rock takes a close shave as Tony and John relax. … Hugh kibitzes while Rock gets a salt rubdown in the next room so he can go back to the steam room and sweat some more. …”
Remembering Rock Hudson - fan tribute
Doris & Rock - Discovering Doris Day
Good Nabors Policy - Snopes
Rock Hudson Offscreen - Larry King Live, June 7, 2001
Interview With Linda Evans - Larry King Live, March 15, 2004
Reagan’s AIDS Legacy: Silence equals death - Allen White, San Francisco Chronicle, June 8, 2004
Case Study: Rock Hudson - The Van Wyhe Group - how Marc Christian’s suit against Hudson’s insurer went down
