TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/caps/85/85capmil.7

Text File | 1992-09-25 | 5.8 KB | 108 lines

                                                                                October 14, 1985

The Double Life of an AIDS Victim

Rock Hudson:  1925-1985


"One of these days I'm going to have a lot to tell," Rock Hudson
once promised a friend. The day never came, and when Hudson
died of AIDS at his home in Beverly Hills last week, his story,
as he alone might have told it, died with him. But it was clear
that the role he played in life was more dramatic, and
infinitely sadder, than any of the parts he had assumed in 65
movies and several TV series. For 37 years he had led a double
life:  in public he was a romantic star, adored by millions of
women, admired by millions of men; in private he was a
homosexual who bitterly resented the lies and deceptions that
he felt had been forced upon him.

Yet in one of those plot twists that any screenwriter would
have rejected as too improbably to consider, in the last weeks
of his life Hudson became perhaps the most famous homosexual in
the world, a man whose fatal illness belatedly focused public
attention on the disease that killed him. If he had succumbed
to a heart attack, his death would probably have occasioned only
a brief notice; because he was the most celebrated known victim
of AIDS, it became a significant event.

In keeping with his all-American image, Hudson, 59, was born in
the heartland, in Winnetka, Ill. His mother was a telephone
operator, and his father, Roy Scherer, was an automobile
mechanic who left the family when his son was a child. When his
mother remarried, little Roy assumed his stepfather's surname,
Fitzgerald. After that, his boyhood was so normal and wholesome
that one of his high school chums was later to recall, "It
looked like apple pie and ice cream to me." Roy saw wartime
service as a Navy airplane mechanic, then headed west to
Hollywood. He had once seen Jon Hall swim across a lagoon in
John Ford's South Sea romance The Hurricane, and, as he later
told it, said to himself, "I can do that."

And so he could. After hanging around studio gates for several
months, he was introduced to famed Agent Henry Willson. "You're
not bad looking. Can you act?" asked Willson. "No," said the
young man. "What did you say, feller?" asked the incredulous
agent. "I said, no, I can't act."  To which Willson replied:
"Good. I think I can do something for you. Sit down."
Willson transformed Roy Fitzgerald into Rock Hudson and secured
him an apprenticeship in one of the biggest film factories,
Universal Pictures. Fighter Squadron (1948) was his first film.
During the next six years, 25 others followed, like The Iron
Man and Air Cadet. The studio was his school. By the time his
first big picture, The Magnificent Obsession, came along in
1954, he was able to establish his film personality:  steady,
likeable, a man among men.

The actor who had been inspired by Hall's breaststroke never
turned into Laurence Olivier, never attempted the challenging
parts taken by such contemporaries as Marlon Brando and
Montgomery Clift, who reached deep into themselves to express
their characters. Hudson knew his limitations, and what he did,
he did well. One of his most successful roles was that of the
Texas patriarch in Giant (1956), for which he received an
Academy Award nomination. His real talent, however, was for
light romantic comedy, beginning with Pillow Talk (1959), in
which he was first teamed with Doris Day, and ending with his
TV series of the '70s, McMillan and Wife. He possessed not
only a sure sense of timing but a natural and self-deprecating
manner that enabled him to have fun with sex without putting
audiences off by actually making fun of sex. His final
appearance as an actor was on last season's Dynasty, in which
he unsuccessfully chased Krystle (Linda Evans). He was already
looking drawn and gaunt, causing many to speculate about his
health.

The public Hudson was summed up by a list of his performances.
In private, he had to live by a double standard that seemed,
in the last few years, to make him cynical and even resentful.
From the moment he attracted enough attention to be noticed by
gossip columnists, he had to lie to hide the inescapable fact
that he was attracted to men rather than women. In 1955, when
a scandal magazine threatened to expose his sexual preference,
Universal arranged a hasty marriage of convenience with Henry
Willson's secretary Phyllis Gates. Divorce followed.

Hudson was still hiding as recently a 1980. "Look, I know lots
of gays in Hollywood, and most of them are nice guys," he told
the London Daily Mirror, which was indelicate enough to ask if
he was homosexual. "Some have tried it on with me, but I've
said, 'Com on, now. You've got the wrong guy.'"  In fact, he
had a longtime male lover, and he made no secret of his
homosexuality to the show- business friends whose discretion he
knew he could count on. His secret became public in July, when
he flew to Paris hoping for treatment with an experimental AIDS
drug not then available in the U.S. His illness had progressed
too far. Several days later, he returned to Los Angeles on a
stretcher, in a Boeing 747 that he had chartered.

The disease took its inevitable course. Hudson was too ill to
appear at a Hollywood AIDS benefit on Sept. 19, which raised $1
million. Such an outpouring of money would not have come about
had it not been for Hudson's illness. Nor, without the
subsequent publicity, is it likely that both houses of Congress
would have moved last week toward vastly increasing the
appropriations for AIDS research. From his misfortune good
fortune may have sprung. His friend and Giant co- star
Elizabeth Taylor wrote perhaps the most eloquent epitaph:
"Please God, he has not died in van."

--By Gerald Clarke.  Reported by Denise Worrell/Los Angeles