Marc Christian, Rock Hudson’s ex: an update

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Since Thanksgiving eve, when I first blogged about the mysterious fate of Marc Christian, Rock Hudson’s ex-lover, more than three dozen of you have e-mailed me or posted a comment offering opinions, clues and anecdotes. I have learned something from each of you. And, thanks in part to the astute Internet hounds who read Afterword, I can now write the end of this story.

Marc Christian is dead. I have verified his death with his sister, Susan Dahl. I’m writing the obit, which you can read in tomorrow’s paper or online later today at www.latimes.com/obits.

Nailing this one down has been, in the opinion of some of you out there, a fool’s errand. Others commended me for my efforts (‘Bravo! We never knew that obit writers were such sleuths,’ Terry Bork of Pasadena wrote) or simply wanted to share a reaction. ‘For whatever reason, the Marc Christian piece held my interest, made me laugh and made me cringe. What more could you ask?’ a reader in Louisville, Ky., said in an e-mail yesterday.

Many others joined the chase, supplying me with birth and death databases, high school reunion websites, property records, and lots of entertaining and unprintable anecdotes about brief encounters with Christian. I’m still getting e-mail, most recently an hour ago from a reader who says that now, after just discovering my first blog item, he feels a ‘nagging curiosity’ about Christian’s fate.

I’m glad to put an end to the suffering. But I also hope this account has shed some light on the trials and perils of daily journalism. I’ll be posting more soon on the wiggly path of clues that finally ended today in a very gracious phone call from Christian’s sister.

--Elaine Woo