Writers Paint Different Portraits of Hudson

Rock Hudson: His Story by Rock Hudson and Sara Davidson (Morrow: $16.95)

Idol: Rock Hudson, the True Story of an American Film Hero by Jerry Oppenheimer and Jack Vitek (Villard: $16.95)

Rock Hudson always seemed the least mysterious of movie stars. The shy, small-town boy who became a Hollywood god, appeared emotionally accessible and uncomplicated, a man’s man, which is to say, a ladies’ man. He was the idealized dream of American manhood, embodying the Zeitgeist of the ‘50s as surely as Ike, Edsels and the Cold War. But as every sentient person in the Western world must know, Hudson was living a lie. His secret life has been held up to unrelenting scrutiny.

Secrets are an old Hollywood problem. Once alcoholism and drug abuse were taboo--they still are, but now that vulnerability is in fashion, they are the subjects of press releases. Today, it’s questionable that acknowledgement of homosexuality would wreck an actor’s career. It might harm it in some quarters, but it would probably help in others. In the past, such secrets, whatever their power, were kept in cahoots with the press. In Hudson’s case, his homosexuality was well known to his colleagues and the media for years.

This sort of gentleman’s agreement is hardly unique to Hollywood. In Washington, every journalist and aide knows which officials are drunks, which are gay and which sleep around. But no one tells the public--oh, there are code words that pop up--”with his good friend” usually means mistress or lover, “looking exhausted and run down” means drunk as a skunk. In Hollywood, the traditional view has been that what the public doesn’t know won’t hurt you. But now that secrecy is impossible, the goal of movie star publicity is to present the unhideable as sympathetically as possible.

A generation ago, the publicist’s goal was to create idealized images and keep secrets; Hudson bought the line completely and hid the central truth about himself. He masqueraded all his adult life as a sort of sexy, straight-ahead guy who liked to overcook his steaks, play practical jokes and drink too much with his below-the-line pals. The psychic steam that must have been gathering inside him was ventilated only in his work. The rest of the time, on the evidence here, he lived a passive, unexamined life.

But it was not a life without interest. Born Roy Scherer Jr. (later, Roy Fitzgerald), he grew up poor in a rich town (Winnetka, Ill.) without a father. After the Navy, he went to Hollywood. He was a contract player at Universal and he learned what he knew of life and art in his classes at the studio. From a big, handsome bumpkin, he developed into an affecting dramatic actor and engaging light comedian. When the fact of his illness became known, he gave AIDS a face, and his deepest secrets absorbed the international media for weeks.

If any one event made the tragedy of AIDS seem real to Americans, it was the publication of the now-famous photo of a haggard Hudson in a reunion with his old sparring partner, Doris Day. It mattered less that he was homosexual than that he was dying. Very few people--and certainly not Hudson or those close to him--would have predicted such sympathy and generosity of spirit from the public.

The journalistic frenzy that followed Hudson’s acknowledgment of his disease was at once fascinating and appalling. The world seemed to be conducting a death watch, with no detail too trivial or too intimate to warrant space on the magazine racks or time on the evening news. These books, “Rock Hudson His Story” and “Idol,” are part of that frenzy, rushed to completion while the memory of the man and the publicity was fresh. Both books are at the mercy of their sources, which is the burden of journalism.

Sara Davidson’s, the so-called authorized version, has fewer but better sources and she has tried to put Hudson’s life into a meaningful perspective. Her book is more engaging than “Idol” and more revealing of its subject. Yet, despite friends’ testimony that he was a great guy capable of extravagant kindness, who wrapped all his own Christmas presents, the Hudson who emerges from her pages is an unpleasant, high-handed fellow who, for the most part, was not very likable. That portrait could not have been Hudson’s intent in “authorizing” Davidson; it is, however, the result.

Hudson’s friend, the former actor George Nader, one of Davidson’s principal sources, speaks of “many Rock Hudsons” and it seems apt. What Nader doesn’t say is that no one of them prevailed; there was no observable center to his life except his work. The most chilling example of this obsession is Hudson’s decision to appear on “Dynasty” rather than return to Paris for additional experimental treatment, which the doctors had told him was the only possibility of extending his life. Instead, he declared himself cured and went off to work. The man’s capacity for denial is almost inconceivable to the rest of us. But Hudson was a movie star, part of a tiny club whose members become accustomed to whispering their desires and seeing them fulfilled without fail, no matter what the financial or human cost. Hudson seems to have believed that the rules that applied to ordinary mortals didn’t apply to him.

The Hudson who appears in the unauthorized “Idol” (with one significant exception) is a more pleasant chap and a less interesting one. Jerry Oppenheimer and Jack Vitek have cast a wide net, talked to everyone who would speak and turned up interesting facts and interesting minor characters, like the fan who said Hudson shouldn’t have kissed Linda Evans on “Dynasty.” The fan’s counsel: “He should have let a stunt man do the kissing.” The authors have done a great deal of research and the requisite amount of pop-analytic thinking, but “Idol” winds up circling its quarry and never quite capturing it.

There are a number of contradictions in details between these two books. The significant difference is that Oppenheimer-Vitek assert that after the AIDS diagnosis, Hudson continued to have promiscuous sexual relations with partners provided by an unnamed, but witting, friend. Davidson has none of this, but from her account of the same period it’s pretty clear who the unnamed friend must be.

Davidson’s book soars in its final chapter with her account of the removal of the corpse from “The Castle,” Hudson’s house on Beverly Crest Drive. Swarms of journalists climb the gates, desperate for photos of the remains, but Hudson’s loyal and not-so-loyal friends are determined to protect this last shred of privacy. Elizabeth Taylor’s chief of security shouts orders; Hudson’s ex-lover is inside the hearse with the corpse, trying to keep the doors shut. Two friends faint. Meanwhile, another lover is hatching a lawsuit. Had Hieronymus Bosch and Joe Orton collaborated they couldn’t have done better.

Hudson was a star for 30 years; in good and not-so-good films and TV shows his appeal endured. The facts of his life are here, and in Davidson’s book, some insight; in Oppenheimer-Vitek, some scandal. In both, Hudson seems a tabula rasa on whom ordinary people projected erotic dreams and romantic fantasy. As he prepared to leave life, the dreams he engendered turned to nightmares of plague and horrible death. Along with his performances in “Giant,” “Seconds,” and the Doris Day comedies, a legacy he was proud of, he leaves the inescapable fact that his death brought a measure of understanding and sympathy to AIDS victims. It’s an honor he wouldn’t have understood and I doubt he would have wanted.