Rock Hudson
The personification of the words “tall, dark, and handsome,” actor Rock Hudson was a Midwestern boy, born Roy Harold Scherer Jr. in Winnetka, Illinois, on November 17, 1925. His mother, Katherine, was a telephone operator. His father, Roy Harold Scherer Sr., an auto mechanic, abandoned his wife and son when Roy Jr. was eight years old, during the Great Depression. Katherine’s second husband, Wallace Fitzgerald, formally adopted her young son and changed his name to Roy Fitzgerald.
Roy was a disinterested student at New Trier High School, much more intent on achieving a career as an actor than he was on his studies. After graduation he served as a naval aircraft mechanic in the Philippines during World War II and moved to Los Angeles when his tour of duty was over. His first effort at pursuing a serious acting career was an application to the University of Southern California drama program, but he was disqualified because of his lackluster grades. He drove a delivery truck to make ends meet and spent every possible nonworking hour distributing his “head shots” to every studio executive, filmmaker, and agent he could find.
His determination was rewarded when, in 1948, Henry Willson, an openly gay Hollywood talent scout, recognized Roy’s potential as a true movie star, changed his name to the intensely masculine sounding Rock Hudson, and secured Rock’s first job, a small part in the 1948 Warner Bros. film Fighter Squadron. He also began grooming his handsome new client for stardom, with lessons in acting, singing, dancing, horseback riding, and fencing as well as launching a publicity campaign that soon had movie magazines across the country featuring Rock Hudson’s face on the cover. By the time he was twenty-nine, Rock was receiving some critical applause for his role in 1954’s Magnificent Obsession with Jane Wyman, and his career was off and running.
In an effort to maintain Rock’s masculine, heterosexual image at a time when show business wasn’t embracing homosexuality, Henry Willson recruited his secretary, Phyllis Gates, to marry Rock Hudson in 1955, with widely publicized photos of the wedding and the happy couple at home. Although the marriage only lasted three years, it’s widely believed that there was great affection and mutual respect between Rock and Phyllis for the duration of their relationship, and the public perception of Rock Hudson as a “straight” movie star was firmly established.
Rock’s greatest career triumph to date followed shortly after his marriage, when he starred with James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor in Giant in 1956. Not only did Rock walk away with a truly prestigious film and his first Oscar nomination under his belt, but he also formed a close friendship with Elizabeth Taylor that would last for the rest of his life.
After several more moderately successful dramatic roles, Rock found a whole new niche in romantic comedies costarring another dear friend, Doris Day. Their charming chemistry resulted in three box-office hits—Pillow Talk (1958), Lover Come Back (1961), and Send Me No Flowers (1964).
Film roles became fewer and farther between as the 1960s progressed, and in 1971 Rock reluctantly waded into the television business with a movie of the week called Once upon a Dead Man, which evolved into the six-year detective series McMillan and Wife, with Susan Saint James, John Schuck, and Nancy Walker.
In 1982 Rock signed to star in a second series, The Devlin Connection, but filming was interrupted, and the show was ultimately cancelled, when Rock had a massive heart attack, his health compromised by many years of heavy smoking and scotch drinking. His quintuple bypass surgery was a success, but he never seemed to rebound completely. Although he was signed to play the recurring role of Linda Evans’s character’s love interest in the hit drama Dynasty in 1985, his increasing weight loss, unsteadiness, and apparent frailty forced the producers to write his character out of the series after fourteen episodes.
Rock went into seclusion for several months until July 1985, when he made his last public appearance to help his friend Doris Day launch her new talk show Doris Day’s Best Friends. He was heartbreakingly gaunt, pale, and mumbling as he admitted the obvious to her and to the rest of the world—he was dying. Photographs of the ravaged star were broadcast around the world, and it wasn’t long before Rock filled in the missing piece to the story and confirmed that it was AIDS that was taking his life.
On October 2, 1985, Rock Hudson died of AIDS-related complications. In the wake of his death, now having a once beautiful and beloved face to attach to the then relatively dismissed scourge of HIV-AIDS, the public, the medical establishment, and the Hollywood community began moving AIDS awareness and treatment to the top of their priority lists, with Elizabeth Taylor leading the march toward fund-raising, care, and compassion in the name of her dear fallen friend. Rock Hudson’s legacy extends far beyond his more than seventy film and television roles—it’s impossible to calculate the impact of his life and death on AIDS victims throughout the world from 1985 on.
From Francine
Like most AIDS victims, Rock was ecstatic to leave his body and come Home to fully restored health and vitality. His mother was the first to greet him, once she made it through a wildly enthusiastic herd of large dogs, led by an Irish setter he especially adored. They were promptly joined by Roddy McDowall, Marlon Brando, and a host of other Hollywood friends, including Montgomery Clift, with whom Rock had always felt a unique connection—Rock says he was among the first on the scene of the tragic car accident that nearly killed and, in the long run, devastated Clift’s life, and it moved Rock to tears to see him thriving again.
He definitely returned Home with an agenda. It took all the patience he could muster to sit through the replay of his latest lifetime at the Scanning Machine, because he was so eager to begin training as an Orientator, to help other AIDS victims make as smooth and peaceful a transition as possible to the Other Side. He also volunteered himself for intensive study at one of our many medical research centers, where finding a cure for AIDS is a steadfast priority. Teams of brilliant minds at Home are vigilantly at work in search of treatments and cures, infusing any and all advances they discover.
Rock’s home here is made entirely of windows, which overlook his vast hydroponic gardens. He’s one of our most prolific and charming hosts, regularly entertaining the widest possible variety of friends, and during the course of a party he can always be counted on to sing one of his favorite songs, “Send in the Clowns,” accompanied on piano by his frequent sidekick Martha Raye.
(He wants those he left behind to know that he finally remembers all the words.) He never misses a concert of music from the 1950s and, a self-described “frustrated song and dance man” on earth, is excited to be in rehearsals for the title role in The Music Man.
About his most recent lifetime he says, “Of course I have regrets, especially about those times when I was completely irresponsible with the excuse that I was just having a good time. But for the most part, I loved my life, my career, and my dear, dear friends. I was blessed in so many ways, and whether or not I remembered to show it often enough, I was and am so grateful to God for every moment.” His chosen life themes of Victim and Humanitarian became clear to him in his final months on earth, when he proved to the world what an equal-opportunity monster AIDS really is. When he was first diagnosed, he says, he didn’t want anyone to know. But when his diagnosis and prognosis became undeniable, he took pride in the fact that he helped to “wake people up” and inspired global awareness, more informed prevention, and, above all, compassion.
He’s often a tangible presence at AIDS clinics around the world and still stops by the courtyard of the home in the Hollywood Hills where he lived so many happy years. (It delights him that he’s occasionally successful in setting off the motion detectors as he checks on what he continues to think of as “his house.”) He was also the first to welcome Home his longtime partner, Tom Clark, who was by Rock’s side for the last months of his lifetime.
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