‘All That Heaven Allowed’ asks: Did success spoil Rock Hudson?
Attempting to wrangle the sprawling life story of Rock Hudson into 105 minutes is asking a lot. From bit player to romantic leading man to masculine archetype to, finally, “the face of AIDs” when he died in 1985, Hudson’s life was Giant — just like the epic 1956 George Stevens film he starred in and the six feet, five inches of his magnificent frame.
Stephen Kijak’s new documentary about Hudson’s life, which premiered at the 2023 Tribeca Film Festival in June, feels a bit rushed at times. If Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward’s marriage can get an entire miniseries, why not Rock’s enormous life? Hudson’s childhood – born Roy Harold Scherer Jr. in 1925, abandoned by his father during the Great Depression, re-named Roy Fitzgerald when his abusive stepfather stepped into the picture – is barely glanced at. Same goes for his time in the Army during World War II. But to be fair, the film seems to know that ain’t nobody coming to a Rock Hudson doc to find out all that much about his childhood and military service.
Rock Hudson was transformed into a hetero heartthrob.
It’s clear from the start that Kijak & Co. intend to make this the most honest telling of Rock’s story as they can, as within the first five minutes, Roy Fitzgerald — soon to be renamed Rock Hudson — is already sleeping with and breaking the hearts of multiple male agents in order to best facilitate his climb up the Hollywood ladder. One friend of Rock’s details a dream that Rock shared with him wherein he’s a diamond sparkling in the middle of a sea of darkness. In other words, he possessed the requisite single-mindedness of every nobody who’s turned themselves into a household name. Nothing was going to stop Roy Fitzgerald from becoming Rock Hudson.
Not even a lack of acting talent or the vestiges of latent “sissy boy” behavior. Once the actor landed the big prize superagent and major creep Henry Willson as his representation, he was immediately enrolled in diction and fencing and horseback-riding lessons – anything to straighten the limp wrist in him. They lowered his voice while raising his pecs, and they gave him his new hulking, hunk name. He quickly became Willson’s number-one property, topping a stable of midcentury pretty boys (most of whom were also closeted gay men) like Tab Hunter and Rory Calhoun. Producer Ross Hunter, also gay, got involved, and before you knew it, they’d whittled Rock down to the diamond he’d dreamed of. (Willson got the Ryan Murphy treatment in Netflix’s Hollywood, where he was portrayed by Jim Parsons.)
When stardom came for Rock Hudson, it came hard.
Douglas Sirk’s 1954 romantic masterpiece Magnificent Obsession, which cast Hudson as the stalwart love interest to a tragedy-beset Jane Wyman, was a massive success and finally set Rock’s movie-star image in stone. The people wanted him to be their real, live 1950s Prince Charming – impossibly handsome and strong, but with a mystery, a secret, a sensitivity that appealed to the unhappy housewives of the era.
Sirk knew what Hudson’s secret was, and he wielded it masterfully; all of Hollywood did. And they dutifully kept that secret for Rock; Willson threw the aforementioned Tab Hunter and Rory Calhoun to the tabloid wolves in order to stop his top man from getting outed by them. Actresses like Piper Laurie and Elizabeth Taylor were happy to play the publicity game. And eventually, once the bachelor stories began to hurt his image, Willson went and married Rock off to his personal secretary to keep those hetero fires burning.
So far, this is pretty standard stuff for not just movie stars of the time, but for all queer people – a public front of glistening perfect smiles, all covering up so much saliva. The thing that’s most striking about Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed‘s telling of all of this, then, is that it finally does so from the vantage point of the gay men that Rock Hudson surrounded himself with in his personal life. There are interviews with every living partner (brief or extended) and friend of Rock’s that they could get their hands on.
This, blessedly, isn’t a miserable portrait of the closet snuffing out Rock’s light. Rock Hudson had a good life, a fun life, for a lot of his time on this earth. He was Rock Hudson! Which is exactly what all of the gay men who saw him wandering the gay sex clubs in San Francisco in the 1970s would scream at one another. Hudson had the money and the privilege to lead his two lives without that ripping him to shreds. None of the ex-lovers that they interview nor any of the people that he worked with seem to have anything but nice things to say about the man. As Tales of the City author Armistead Maupin puts it, “If I was fucking Rock Hudson, I would want my mother to know immediately.”
Rock Hudson managed to carve out happiness from inside the closet.
Which isn’t to say that Hudson didn’t obviously make enormous concessions in order to achieve and keep his movie-star status. One of his more long-term boyfriends describes how they were never allowed to take any photos together on their vacations lest the images fall into the wrong hands. But they did go on those vacations. The fact that LGBTQ people survived and loved and lived whole lives, that every moment wasn’t relentless cruelty and degradation, is as vital a story to be told as the other. We are resilient survivors, and we have managed to find one another across millennia, no matter what endless obstacles the majority have thrown our way.
Rock Hudson was no different. Not even his becoming “the face of AIDS” (to paraphrase frontline AIDS activist Morgan Fairchild) in the last year of his life is all-consuming of his legacy – not in this documentary’s assured hands, at least. The last act is sad, yes, as was the last act of far too many gay men in the 1980s. (Especially when Hudson’s old friends, the Reagans, refuse a phone call from his deathbed.) But Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed makes it abundantly clear that Hudson giving that disease a recognizable face at that moment in time was one of the most important flashpoints at the worst moment of the pandemic. He put AIDS on the cover of every newspaper and every magazine, after years of it going devastatingly underreported. The charity organizations and the donations coming into them shot off like a rocket after his death.
That sense of generosity spills across all of Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed. Even if pieces of Rock’s life do seem slightly abbreviated, you still end up with a genuine sense that you have seen who he was and the life that he lived, at long last. It’s not just Rock Hudson movie star, not just Rock Hudson gay man, and not just Roy Fitzgerald underneath all of that. The heightened masculine iconography of what he stood for at the height of his stardom, and the surprise that so many people felt when his personal life seemed to them to undermine that image – all the facets of the diamond get their chance to shine in this moving and indispensable documentary.
Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed is now streaming on Max.