My secret love affair WITH ROCK HUDSON
The late star’s long-ago boyfriend shares their vacation album – and memories of their forbidden romance
He keeps the photos in an antique box in his bedroom closet – mementos from a long-ago love. “We couldn’t take any pictures together, only of each other,” says Lee Garlington, 81, a retired investment manager who had a three-year romance with screen idol Rock Hudson in the mid-1960s. The pair, who met when Garlington was a Hollywood extra, had to keep their affair hidden because “being authentically who he was would have shattered his career,” says Mark Griffin, author of a new biography of Hudson, All That Heaven Allows, to which Garlington contributed. Hudson’s 1985 death from complications of AIDS brought his sexuality – and the disease’s awful reach – out of the shadows. “He became a poster boy for a global pandemic,” Griffin notes. More than 30 years later, Garlington spoke to WHO and shared exclusive shots of a trip he and Hudson took in 1963. “He was so handsome,” Garlington recalls, “and we had so much fun.”
We rented a house on the beach in
Puerto Vallarta. He was the biggest movie star in the world, but people left him alone there. They didn’t even know who he was. We walked on the beach and took pictures of each other with his camera. I remember driving around in an open Jeep ... just living the life of two normal gay men that loved each other.
I was 25, Rock was 37. He never asked me to keep our relationship quiet – he just assumed I would and I did. It was a prescription for financial suicide to admit you were gay. We’d see each other three or four times a week. Rock was easygoing on the surface, but inside he was a bundle of nerves – he chain-smoked and he grated on his thumb with his forefingers until it was concave. He was terrified that his entire life would be ruined by one false step. On the other hand, he was one of the most promiscuous gay men in Hollywood.
I wanted a father figure, and he was not able to be that – he wanted one too. It was one of the reasons we went our separate ways. Plus the fact I did not like the Hollywood scene.
I didn’t know he had AIDS until I read it in the paper. I called up the people taking care of him at his home and they said he wouldn’t recognise me and it would be best to remember him how he was. I feel very guilty for not being there for him.
He helped people see that anyone could get AIDS. It was not a “moral affliction” and not a “gay disease”. But he never knew the impact he had.
After Rock’s death I learned he had told his biographer that his mother and I were the only people he ever loved. I broke down and cried. I had no idea.
It’s so sad that he didn’t have the opportunity to live his life the way he wanted to. I wish he had been born 30 or 40 years later. He’d be elated about how much has changed.