Homo confidential

From blackmail to fake marriages, Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson led strange double lives as '50s heartthrobs who were secretly gay.

By Laura Miller

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AP/Wideworld photos

Tab Hunter and Rock Hudson

Oct. 19, 2005 | Even as a kid, watching "Pillow Talk" on Dialing for Dollars during the long, rainy afternoons of the pre-cable era, I knew there was something odd about Rock Hudson. Apparently, a sex comedy can be so devoid of sexual energy that even a child in the latency stage will notice its absence. Later, when I went off to college in the San Francisco Bay Area, I learned what "everyone" knew: Rock Hudson was not only gay, he was the basis for the closeted movie star who romanced one of the male characters in Armistead Maupin's serialized novel "Tales of the City." That, I figured, explained Hudson's implausible performances. Unlike other gay performers, he wasn't a good enough actor to convincingly simulate the lust for Doris Day that he never personally felt.

On the other hand, the bizarre, glossy comedies Hudson made with Day were huge hits. Plenty of Americans bought Hudson as a heterosexual leading man, enough to make him the No. 1 box office attraction for several years in the '50s and '60s. Enough to prompt shrieks of shock and disbelief throughout the land when Hudson died of AIDS in 1985.

Now, having read Robert Hofler's "The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson," I have a better understanding of what made Hudson so stilted on-screen. His desire for his leading ladies was patently artificial, yes, but so were his teeth, his walk, his voice, even his smile. Rock Hudson was a male Eliza Doolittle, the masterpiece of Henry Willson, who fabricated a matinee idol out of the raw material of one Roy Fitzgerald, a gauche former sailor and truck driver who could barely cross a room without tripping over his own feet when the two men first met in 1947.

Willson, who started out writing puffery about a set of young film actors for fan magazines in the early 1930s, was a star-maker of genius. Although for a while he worked with the legendary producer David O. Selznick during Selznick's less than glorious post-"Gone With the Wind" years, mostly Willson was an agent. For a time he was one of the most powerful in Hollywood, and eventually he was -- to use a term Hofler is particularly fond of -- the most notorious.

Willson represented some big female stars in addition to Hudson: Natalie Wood, Joan Fontaine and Lana Turner, whom he discovered. (He also saw the potential in Montgomery Clift and Alain Delon, though he failed to sign them on.) But Willson's specialty was handsome, strapping young men, each of whom he rechristened with some preposterously butch moniker: Guy Madison (who inspired a journalist to coin the term "beefcake"), Troy Donahue, John Saxon, Rad Fulton, Race Gentry, Cal Bolder, Clint Connors, etc., even a pair of twins he renamed Dirk and Dack Rambo. Acting ability wasn't required, conventional good looks were a must and willingness to have sex with the ferret-faced Willson was -- while not absolutely necessary -- very, very strongly encouraged.

This Article

"The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson"

By Robert Hofler

Carroll & Graf
470 pages
Nonfiction

Buy this book

"Tab Hunter Confidential"

By Tab Hunter

Algonquin Books
358 pages
Nonfiction

Buy this book

"The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson" is a gritty, often coarse but well-researched biography of a tough Hollywood power broker famous for his "Adonis factory." Its counterpart, also just published, is "Tab Hunter Confidential," the autobiography of an Adonis and former Willson client. Hunter tells the story of prefab '50s stardom from the other side of the contract. His career was fairly brief; he was a teen idol, swamped with fan letters and photo requests from pubescent girls for a few years (he received 62,000 valentines in 1956), but he never succeeded in landing any really memorable film roles. Even in Hunter's heyday, people joked about his synthetic persona the way they joke today about teenybopper acts like Jesse McCartney and Ashlee Simpson. When Hunter's fame began to dim, he resorted to cheesy B-movies with titles like "Operation Bikini" and an endless grind of dinner-theater engagements that helped him pay the rent and support his ailing mother.

For all that, Hunter seems astonishingly free of bitterness. Most of his indignation is reserved for scandal sheets and two-faced directors and performers who buttered him up in person then, years later, mocked his work. Today, he lives with his younger partner, a producer, and still keeps a hand in the business; he's a living testimonial to the idea that a sweet disposition is its own reward. The smart, cynical, ruthless Willson wound up a paranoid wreck of a charity case, living in the Motion Picture Country Home, a sort of rest home for indigent show business people, until he died in 1978. As Hofler points out with relish, the master name inventor died without enough funds to put his own name on his grave.

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