Stargazing at the movies has this in common with celestial stargazing: you’re looking at activity that happened long before you looked. What seems a living present is a trick of time and perception.
Sometimes the paradoxes of the cinema cosmos can be even more headspinning. Past, present and future perform a mega-dance of change, contradiction and counterintuitiveness. Take a famous, starry rock in the Hollywood firmament. First appearing to the eye 70-some years ago, it swiftly became a major heavenly body. Yet decades later it grabbed more attention, even stupefaction, when it proved to have been a totally different rock from the one we thought.
Rock Hudson has become special, even unique. An actor who in the 1950s and 1960s embodied chiselled masculinity and romantic screen maleness (count the movie love-mates, from Jane Wyman to Elizabeth Taylor to Doris Day to Gina Lollobrigida) was later revealed to be a gay man with a long-hidden history as a practising non-heterosexual.
The wow may have gone out of the story today in our newly accepted reality of fluid sexual identity. So, power to Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, Stephen Kijak’s new feature-length Rockumentary, for trying to put the wow back — or at least to stretch our memory of it into new and reviving shapes. Hudson the star with a secret, Hudson the Hollywood tarnished angel . . .
Yet the main truth emerging, or re-emerging, from the film is this: the only people really shocked at the revelation were us, the gawping, gaping public. Were those truths ever an anxious or guilt-inducing issue for Hudson himself?
The more this one-man Mount Rushmore of good looks, sculpted jawline and bumpkin grace gets “outed” by the film’s swarm of interviewees — for his “double life”, his notional inner torment, his hypothetical hypocrisy, his covert promiscuity and the conflicted value system he must surely have suffered from — the more I started to feel “No. No. No.”
Here, on the contrary, was a rather well-adjusted Jekyll-and-Hyde. Here, at least until his fatal illness (Hudson died of Aids-related illness in 1985), was a bachelor pin-up who seemed happily at home in the bewilderment of film-goers (if there was any); a man able to curate his own life and legend and to know when and how to keep those apart. Even when he got married — in 1955 to his agent’s secretary to appease the studio’s publicity department — it lasted a short, apparently painless three years followed by a scandal-free divorce.
Ergo: I don’t believe in tortured Rock. I don’t even believe in “two-faced Rock”, if that’s said condemningly. Most of us keep life and work separated. And why not?
I more believe, and like to suspect Hudson did, in his fulfilled status as a he-man for all seasons — and a demigod for all persuasions. His early fan base, we learn from All That Heaven Allowed, even included Armistead Maupin, a smitten testifier telling his own funny story of a close Rock encounter.
You could argue that no one knows. Maybe, scanning the observable facts, I just want to believe that man and star are symbiotic, going on selfsame. Fact one: Hudson’s handsome gaucherie on screen, his most appealing asset when young, had a flawless ease and assurance, as he marketed his blend of natural man and incredible hunk.
Fact two: his avocation, from movie to movie, was to incarnate Mr Healthy and Normal, while (mostly female) crackpots, neurotics and ditzes swirled around him. (It’s a short step from Jane Wyman’s scared-of-life widows in Magnificent Obsession and All That Heaven Allows to Doris Day’s spinster-singletons in Pillow Talk and Lover Come Back. And let’s not even begin on the men, starting with Robert Stack’s screwed-up alcoholic oil heir in Written on the Wind).
Fact three: Hudson’s knowing expression. He had a way of keeping his upper lip raised slightly over his teeth. It’s a grin but not quite. It says, “I so enjoy keeping my teasing distance from taking all this seriously”. All this being not just the crazies who are his fellow characters — but the whole process, perhaps, of movie make-believe.
In the old language of gender semiotics, Rock played the traditional female role and women played the male role. Women were the protagonists propelling the plot and driving the drama. Women were the lightning rods for crisis, accident and story thunderbolt. Rock, by contrast, was a passive, soothing blend of bedside manner and sex object, combined with a kind of terrene dream-man earthed by his natural ways and closeness to nature.
Note he wears brown, amid the prevailing greys, throughout Written on the Wind. Note All That Heaven Allows, in which he plays a gardener whose home community is a trysting place for nature-loving pantheists (though not in the loony Bacchanalian mould of Seconds, a late folly in the Hudson cannon). Note even Giant, where his land-loving cattle baron is pitted against James Dean’s land-despoiling jumped-up oil tycoon.
Note too in that film, while we’re passing, how well Hudson’s easy, “classic” screen acting style has held up compared to Dean’s once-lauded Method variant, now looking dated, mannered, even narcissistic.
So. Maybe onscreen Rock was gay after a fashion — or “queer” in today’s affirmative vernacular. Maybe he was “queer” all the time we thought he wasn’t: countercultural, counter-hetero, counter-normative, counter-stereotypical. Although our first glance at those near-caricatural movie good looks suggest some alpha heart-throb or comic-book he-male translated to Earth from a Roy Lichtenstein painting, where in his screen roles is the heavy-duty testosterone? Where is the action machismo? Where is even the concupiscence we might expect from a love-story hero?
In a cinema history filled with femmes fatales, Rock Hudson may be the great, enduring homme fatale: the still centre of screen whirlpools, some of them still stupendous (especially if directed by Douglas Sirk of Magnificent Obsession and All That Heaven Allows), in which both men and women crash around him or against him, in the eddies and vortexes of Hollywood high drama. Or, in the Day days, high comedy. Leaving this star peerless and unscathed, all-wise and all-surviving, a sort of pansexual rock of ages, un-cleft for eternity.
‘Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed’ will be on digital platforms in the UK from October 23 and is on HBO Max in the US now