All That Heaven Allows: A Biography Of Rock Hudson

Mark Griffin Harper €27.05 ★★★★★

When rugged leading man Rock Hudson died just months after revealing he had contracted Aids, in 1985, millions of admirers were forced to digest the fact that Hollywood’s ‘King of Beefcake’ had always been as gay as bunting.

It’s surely a biographer’s nightmare when the life he’s investigating has been spent mostly in the closet. Mark Griffin compensates for the secrecy by stressing the elements that might have formed his sexual identity. He was born Roy Scherer in Illinois, to a mechanic who walked out on his family, probably because his mother devoted too much attention to her son. She became over-protective and domineering. When she remarried, Roy’s stepfather used to beat him savagely.

Roy became addicted to the cinema, and, at 12, the sight of a handsome sailor diving into a lagoon in John Ford’s The Hurricane convinced him that his future lay in movies (and, indeed, men). At 21 he moved to Hollywood, where the creepily hands-on agent Henry Willson transformed him into a confident star and changed his name. ‘Rock Hudson’ started appearing on screen, in feeble war films, flying-ace dramas, westerns and romantic comedies, such as Lover Come Back (1961) with Doris Day, pictured .

His four-decade career was studded with gay hook-ups – invariably mid-20s, blond, tanned men keen to be in movies. About Hudson himself we learn tiny details but little of his interior life. By the end, he remains the sum of his celluloid appearances.

As his friend Michael Kearns said: ‘Rock was a brilliant actor, though not necessarily on the screen. His most brilliant performance was playing “Rock Hudson” all his life.’