What it costs to play it straight

Rupert Christiansen on Rock Hudson’s journey from closet homosexual to brave face of the Aids crisis

AALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS

496pp, Harper, £20, ebook £10.99

n actor of limited range who never won an Oscar or played the classics, Rock Hudson spent the last 20 years of his life in a relentless attempt to keep working in a business that had long been losing interest in his charm. It is a tragic irony that he would only recover his diminishing fame when, in 1985, at the age of 59, he became the first celebrity to die publicly of Aids-related complications.

Mark Griffin’s very decent biography of this melancholy figure, well researched and written in straightforward fashion, sympathises without sentimentality: it is a cut above the salacious drivel that usually records the sorry tales of Hollywood stars, and does its subject honour.

Rugged and clean-cut with an all-American smile, apparently free of hidden depths or neuroses, Hudson belonged squarely to an era in which manhood was an unquestioned quantity. He was pure Fifties beefcake, with a fan base among those suburban housewives whom Betty Friedan would set out to liberate in The Feminine Mystique. In comparison with his contemporaries James Dean and Marlon Brando, he seemed bland and cookie-cut. But in his prime, he embodied a physical and moral nobility that made him a plausible romantic hero – ardent yet chivalrous, and straight as a die.

Off screen, Hudson in many respects lived up to his image: he was clearly a fundamentally nice man, kind, easy-going, unpretentious and without side. Almost everyone enjoyed working with him: he was a pro and a sport. Douglas Sirk, who directed several of his best films (including Magnificent Obsession and the one that gives this book its title), paid tribute to “his straight goodness of heart”: Griffin reveals little to belie that.

But there was, of course, something else going on – Hudson’s erotic activities, at a time when homosexuality was barely legal, unacceptable socially and pure poison to his career in the event of scandal.

Yet despite the threat of falling foul of the Hollywood gossip machine (in particular the vicious tabloid Confidential that exposed Hudson’s fellow beefcake Tab Hunter), Hudson seems to have moved easily enough through an underworld that supplied him with a trail of bedfellows, replaced on the principle of the revolving door. True love wasn’t something he ever achieved, but he always had friends and very few of his discards bore him any grudge.

The back story isn’t particularly interesting. A child of the

Midwest Depression, he was born Roy Scherer, the son of a garage mechanic who walked out on his mother. An alcoholic stepfather made his teenage years miserable, but taught him the virtue of keeping one’s mouth

He skated on thin ice, playing womanisers who masquerade as camp effeminates

HOUSEWIFE’S FAVOURITERock Hudson, c1955