Hollywood’s seedy underbelly
Netflix series introduces viewers to monster who helped create Rock Hudson
Among the many fictional players grasping at fame in Hollywood, Ryan Murphy’s new drama about the film business in postwar Los Angeles, one real-life character stands out.
His name was Henry Willson, a high-profile agent played in the series by Jim Parsons as a star-maker extraordinaire — and rapacious sexual predator.
Willson’s major achievement was to establish the leading man status of one Roy Fitzgerald, the Illinois sailor boy he took under his wing in 1947 and sculpted, piece by piece, into the matinee idol we know as Rock Hudson. He was neither the first nor the last starry-eyed nobody Willson would exploit to feed both the era’s demand for beefcake pin-ups, and his own insatiable libido. But he was the only one who became a real hit — Hollywood’s most bankable male star in the late ’50s — before the Willson brand became hopelessly tarnished.
When Fitzgerald, a six-footfive delivery boy nervously trying his luck in a new tweed suit, first knocked on the door of his office, the unattractive, nerdy-looking
Willson had already been working for a few years as chief talent scout for Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick, who was some way on the downward slope from his glory days. The way Hollywood plays it, Willson sees instant potential in Fitzgerald’s hidden vulnerability — then seals the deal by insisting on oral sex.
This feels thoroughly in line with the Willson modus operandi, as does the character’s thing for watching clients romp around together. More fanciful, perhaps, is a scene in which Parsons drags up in a kimono and parades around his living room in front of a bewildered Hudson. Willson was an arch-conservative with a hatred — internalized or otherwise — of all such effeminate displays.
As Robert Hofler recounts in his enjoyably salacious book about Willson, The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson, it was his hands-on (in all senses) management style that made him both feared and despised. Ruthlessly protecting Hudson from any whiff of tabloid scandal about his homosexuality — an open secret in the industry, but a career-ender if it had got out — Willson traded information about other clients’ police records to stop
Confidential magazine publishing an exposé in 1955. That same year, he orchestrated one of the most transparent sham marriages in film history, coaxing his own secretary, Phyllis Gates, into marrying Hudson.
He was a born fixer. Scion of a showbiz family, he’d started out writing puff pieces for Variety and Photoplay, before setting himself up as a junior agent. He became a regular at gay bars on the Sunset Strip, where he would splash the cash and the cocktails, while trying his luck with promises of an audition here, a screen test there.
He had some female clients — Lana Turner, Joan Fontaine, Natalie Wood, Gena Rowlands — but it was a certain category of male client, typified by Hudson, with which Willson was most infamously associated. They tended to be young men with no conspicuous acting talent but a certain look to make the bobby-soxers swoon. They went into his office with names that called to mind farm boys (James Westmoreland; Merle Johnson Jr.; Robert Mozeley) or a certain ethnicity (Carmine Orrico; Louis A Morelli) and came out, sometimes a little dishevelled, as Rad Fulton, Troy Donahue, Tab Hunter, John Saxon or Trax Colton.
At least, that’s how it was for the lucky ones. Those less fortunate went back to being waiters or bus boys or car valets. None of Willson’s stunts was as outrageous as the Gates-hudson marriage, which fooled no one, was expensively dissolved after three years and marked the beginning of the end for Hudson and Willson. Hudson felt pressured into making A Farewell to Arms (1957), the last and least successful film of Selznick’s producing career, and would never forgive Willson for failing to secure him the much-coveted, Oscar-winning lead role in Ben-hur (1959).
Willson’s grasp of the youth market also started to falter when the edgier likes of James Dean, Warren Beatty and Paul Newman rose to prominence. As his career faltered, Willson spiralled into alcoholic destitution.
By the mid-’70s, an unemployed Willson was moved as a charity case into a retirement home. He died penniless, from cirrhosis, in 1978 and was buried in an unmarked grave. Years later, a mystery well-wisher paid for a headstone to mark the spot. “Henry Willson, 1911-1978,” it reads. “Star — Star Maker.”