The Full Biography
Rock Hudson. Actor. The Winnetka boy the studio renamed, then a man whose last public fact changed what the country was willing to say out loud.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a tall man sharing a telephone party line with Doris Day, or a Texas rancher aging across Giant, or the gaunt face that appeared beside Day again in 1985 and told the truth without a speech. The years are 1959, 1956, 1985. What the still cannot show is Roy Harold Scherer Jr. of Winnetka, a Navy aircraft mechanic on Samar, a truck driver who sent a photograph to an agent named Henry Willson, and a death in Beverly Hills on October 2, 1985, at fifty-nine, that gave AIDS a face the evening news could no longer treat as someone else’s rumor.
He was born on November 17, 1925, in Winnetka, Illinois, the only child of Katherine Wood, a homemaker who became a telephone operator, and Roy Harold Scherer Sr., an auto mechanic. German-Swiss on one side, Irish on the other. Raised Catholic. During the Depression the father lost the job and left. The parents divorced when the boy was four. In 1932 Katherine married Wallace Fitzgerald, a former Marine the son despised. Fitzgerald adopted him. The legal name became Roy Harold Fitzgerald. The second marriage ended bitterly and produced no children. At New Trier High School — the same school as Charlton Heston and Ann-Margret — he ushed in a movie theater and wanted the stage. He tried out for plays and could not remember the lines. He graduated in 1943. In 1944 he enlisted in the Navy. Great Lakes for training, then the troop transport SS Lew Wallace, then Aviation Repair and Overhaul Unit 2 on Samar in the Philippines, as an aircraft mechanic. He came home in 1946 on a carrier and was discharged the same year.
The door was a photograph and a new name.
He moved to Los Angeles to live with his father, who had remarried, and to act. Odd jobs, including a truck. USC’s dramatics program rejected him for grades. In 1947 he sent Willson a picture. Willson took him on and coined Rock Hudson from the Rock of Gibraltar and the Hudson River. Hudson hated the name and used it anyway. In 1948 Raoul Walsh gave him a bit in Fighter Squadron at Warner Bros. A late source says it took thirty-eight takes to deliver the single line. Universal-International signed him to a long-term contract and taught him acting, singing, dancing, fencing, and a horse. Fan magazines received the face. The first on-screen credit, as Roc Hudson, was William Castle’s Undertow (1949). 1950 was a year of parts: Winchester ’73, Peggy, The Desert Hawk. 1951 put him in Iron Man as a boxer. 1952 made him a leading man opposite Yvonne De Carlo in Scarlet Angel and gave him the first of the Douglas Sirk pictures, Has Anybody Seen My Gal with Piper Laurie. Bend of the River with James Stewart. Then a run of adventure titles Universal knew how to sell: The Lawless Breed, Seminole, Sea Devils, The Golden Blade, Taza, Son of Cochise.
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Sirk and producer Ross Hunter changed the file in 1954. Magnificent Obsession, opposite Jane Wyman, made him a romantic star. The picture took more than five million dollars. Exhibitors voted him the seventeenth most popular star in the country. All That Heaven Allows (1955) put him with Wyman again, a gardener and a widow, a Sirk melodrama that film schools would reclaim a generation on. George Stevens’s Giant (1956), with Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean, earned Hudson his only Academy Award nomination, for Best Actor. Dean died before the picture opened. Hudson carried the ranch across decades of makeup. Sirk’s Written on the Wind (1956) and Battle Hymn (1957), which Hudson produced, kept the run hot. In 1957 exhibitors voted him the most popular actor in American cinemas. He stayed in the top ten through 1964.
Not every large picture worked. MGM’s Something of Value (1957) disappointed. David O. Selznick’s remake of A Farewell to Arms (1957) failed; Hudson had turned down the roles that became Sayonara, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and Ben-Hur to make it. The Tarnished Angels (1958) reunited the Written on the Wind company. Then Hunter teamed him with Doris Day in Pillow Talk (1959). The party line, the split-screen, the comic timing no one had ordered from the Sirk leading man — the picture was a massive hit. He was the country’s most popular star in 1959 and second for the next three years. Lover Come Back (1961) and Send Me No Flowers (1964) completed the Day trio. Between them: Come September with Gina Lollobrigida, Man’s Favorite Sport? for Howard Hawks, dramas like A Gathering of Eagles. He formed 7 Pictures Corporation in 1955 and, after the divorce, Gibraltar Productions, so the contract would not be the only boss. John Frankenheimer’s Seconds (1966) is the picture inside the pictures: a man who buys a new face and cannot live in it. It failed then. It is the one cinephiles now name when they need to prove Hudson could do more than the telephone.
The comedies thinned. Strange Bedfellows and A Very Special Favor (both 1965) did not repeat Pillow Talk. Blindfold (1966) was a lark. Then Tobruk (1967), A Fine Pair with Claudia Cardinale, Ice Station Zebra (1968) — a favorite of his, a submarine picture he chose when the light comedies had begun to bounce — The Undefeated (1969) with John Wayne, Blake Edwards’s expensive Darling Lili (1970) with Julie Andrews, Roger Vadim’s Pretty Maids All in a Row (1971). In 1971 he took television. McMillan & Wife, opposite Susan Saint James, ran until 1977 on the NBC Mystery Movie wheel. He was Commissioner Stewart McMillan. The chemistry was the show. He risked the stage in I Do! I Do! in 1974 and was well received. Showdown (1973) with Dean Martin, the science-fiction Embryo (1976), the disaster picture Avalanche (1978), the miniseries Wheels (1978) and The Martian Chronicles (1980), a reunion with Taylor in The Mirror Crack’d (1980) — a working life after the studio system had already ended.
I am not happy that I am sick. I am not happy that I have AIDS. But if that is helping others, I can at least know that my own misfortune has had some positive worth.Rock Hudson, telegram to a 1985 AIDS benefit he was too ill to attend
The closet was not a rumor invented after the death. It was a working condition of the 1950s leading-man contract. Willson kept the private life out of the columns. In 1955 Confidential magazine threatened an exposé; Willson fed the magazine other clients’ secrets instead. That same season Hudson married Willson’s secretary, Phyllis Gates. He told the press the marriage topped his list of blessings. She filed for divorce in 1958, citing mental cruelty. He did not contest it. Colleagues — Andrews, Taylor, Saint James, Hepburn, Carol Burnett among them — have said they knew and said nothing, which is what friendship looked like in that weather. He dated men. He did not tour the fact. The honest chapter is short because the life was lived under a rule he did not write: the face that sold Pillow Talk was not allowed to be the man who lived in the house.
The turn is the last year, when the body made the secret unsustainable and he let the diagnosis become public. That is not a conversion narrative. It is a medical and civic fact.
Six things most people never knew
- Henry Willson invented the name from a rock and a river. Gibraltar plus the Hudson. The actor hated it. His independent company was still called Gibraltar.
- The first speaking part took dozens of takes. Fighter Squadron, one line. Universal then trained the voice the way it trained the ride.
- He turned down Ben-Hur and The Bridge on the River Kwai. Selznick’s A Farewell to Arms was the choice. It failed. The other pictures did not.
- Seconds is the hidden great performance. Frankenheimer, 1966, a new face that cannot hold a life. It found its audience late, which is a cruel joke the plot already knew.
- A 1981 quintuple bypass took a year out of him. The Devlin Connection was delayed and then canceled. He did not quit smoking.
- He gave amfAR its first large check. $250,000, while dying, to the AIDS research foundation Elizabeth Taylor was helping to build. The disclosure itself raised millions more that autumn.
He left the grind of being only the handsome contract. Television, then the last honesty, became the work.
The later years
Home was a Beverly Hills house and a body that had been used hard: drink, cigarettes, the long handsome career. In November 1981 emergency quintuple bypass surgery kept him off The Devlin Connection for a year; the show died soon after it aired. He turned down the role of Colonel Trautman in First Blood. He narrated Disney’s Candlelight Processional at Walt Disney World, first in 1971 and last in 1984. He kept working: the miniseries World War III (1982); The Ambassador (1984) in Israel, a shoot he did not enjoy, opposite Robert Mitchum. From December 1984 to April 1985 he played Daniel Reece on Dynasty, a horse breeder written as a love interest for Linda Evans’s Krystle. Cue cards had always helped him. On Dynasty the speech itself began to fail. The character was written out and died off-screen.
On June 5, 1984, he was diagnosed with AIDS. He did not tell the public. He went on working. He went to France and elsewhere looking for treatment. In May 1984, three weeks before the diagnosis, he had stood with Ronald and Nancy Reagan at a White House state dinner; they were friends from the picture years. On July 16, 1985, he appeared with Doris Day to launch her cable show. The thinness of the face went out on the national news that night. Two days later he flew to Paris. After a collapse at the Ritz, a publicist first said liver cancer. On July 25 Yanou Collart confirmed AIDS. He was among the first major American stars whose diagnosis the public was told. Airlines refused to carry a patient with the disease; he chartered a 747. A stretcher, a helicopter, UCLA, a month of treatment, then home to Beverly Hills for hospice. He asked that there be no funeral. He died in his sleep on the morning of October 2, 1985. The body was cremated within hours. A cenotaph stands at Forest Lawn in Cathedral City. The ashes went into the channel between Wilmington and Catalina.
The disclosure did what a thousand public-service announcements had not. Private AIDS donations more than doubled. Congress set aside hundreds of millions. The Commitment to Life benefit had to move to a larger room. Morgan Fairchild said his death gave AIDS a face. Joan Rivers said she had not been able to get major stars to a benefit two years earlier. William M. Hoffman said that if Rock Hudson could have it, nice people could have it — a cruel sentence that was also, in 1985, the civic key that unlocked money and talk. Reagan, who had not yet spoken the name of the disease in public, telephoned the Paris hospital and issued condolences after the death. The closet, once a studio rule, became a national conversation the columns could no longer postpone. That conversation was not tidy. It does not need to be made tidy now.
After he was gone
Elizabeth Taylor bought him a plaque on the West Hollywood Memorial Walk. amfAR kept the work. Giant and the Day comedies kept playing. Seconds found the audience it had missed. Marc Christian, a former lover, sued the estate and won a verdict the appeals would wrestle with — a coda about disclosure that belongs to the legal file, not to a tour of the bedroom. The leading-man face remains on the lobby cards. The useful remaining fact is the July confirmation and the October death, and the money and the speech that followed them. He did not have a long old age. He had a manufactured name, a real gift for light comedy, one great odd film, a television decade, and a last year that forced a country to say a word it had been ducking. If you only remember the telephone and Doris, you have the still. If you remember the charter jet and the telegram to the benefit, you have him.
I can’t play a loser. I don’t look like one.Rock Hudson
The still of the party line will last. It should. But the life behind it was a father who left, a name a man hated, a marriage the studio weather required, a ranch in Giant, a commissioner on Thursday nights, and a diagnosis that did more civic work than any of the handsome pictures. He came out of Winnetka, found the one kind of face the camera would take, and then, when the face failed, he let the failure be useful. That is the arc. That is the story.
Portrait: Universal Pictures · Public domain (PD-US, published 1931-1977 without notice) · via Wikimedia Commons