‘Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed’ Review: An Illuminating Account of a Beloved Hollywood Icon’s Dual Life

David Rooney
·8 min read
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Just over 30 years ago, director Mark Rappaport in his playful deconstructionist essay Rock Hudson’s Home Movies, cleverly mined the queer subtext in the midcentury Hollywood superstar’s screen work to speculate on his inner conflict as a gay public figure confined to the closet. Stephen Kijak’s more conventional, though also more heartfelt docu-portrait, Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, takes a similarly cheeky approach to sniffing out coded behavior in a staggering array of clips that find just as much pathos as amusement.

Contextualizing Hudson’s regimented stardom against the relative freedom with which he lived his sexuality within a trusted circle, the HBO film paints him less as a victim of repressive times — though he certainly was that — than as a savvy product of the studio system who learned quickly how to play the game without losing his sense of self.

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The tragic conclusion of his life in 1985, when he died of AIDS-related causes at age 59, turned what had been a relatively open secret in Hollywood into a startling public revelation, exposing evidence of Hudson’s homosexuality that had been just beneath the surface all along. Kijak argues that being the first major celebrity to contract HIV and succumb to its ravages helped destigmatize the disease to an extent, two years before President Reagan belatedly addressed the pandemic and began funding research.

Whether or not you agree with the doc’s assessment that Hudson’s death made him “an activist without knowing it,” there’s no doubt that it pushed the subject into the mainstream conversation by putting a highly recognizable face — one widely believed to be the essence of wholesome all-American masculinity — on an illness that almost invariably was a death sentence at that time. The support of Hudson’s close friend and ally Elizabeth Taylor, among others, further amplified the attention.

While most of the specifics here are familiar from biographies, news reports, previous documentaries and fictionalized treatments like Ryan Murphy’s Hollywood, Kijak and editor Claire Didier have assembled the wealth of material into a fascinating, multilayered portrait that will be of interest both to queer historians and Hollywood obsessives. Insights from friends, co-stars and former lovers also provide as much intimate access as we’re ever likely to get to the beautifully chiseled hunk of granite that women wanted and men wanted to be. OK, and a lot of men also wanted, too.

It’s a given that exposure of Hudson’s sexuality would likely have ended his screen career in that unapologetically homophobic era, and it now seems astonishing that it remained under wraps for so long. In an ironic twist, the gay relationship that came closest to outing Hudson was the completely fabricated rumor of a “marriage” to his friend Jim Nabors.

The idea that a 1952 Photoplay spread titled “Bachelor’s Bedlam” — its images conveying what looks unmistakably like conjugal domesticity between Hudson and fellow actor Bob Preble in the one-bedroom house they shared off Mulholland Drive — could be taken as anything less than a full coming out points up the hilarious naivety of that less cynical time. Instead, the text depicted them as “two hunks living together to save a buck.”

Much of the successful secrecy was due to the careful handling of talent agent Henry Wilson, the gay casting couch vulture (described by one of Hudson’s boyfriends as “that evil agent of his”) whose efforts to keep the gossip tabloids away from his biggest earner included arranging Hudson’s marriage to his assistant, Phyllis Gates, in 1955; and brokering a deal with Confidential magazine to scapegoat another Wilson client, Tab Hunter.

But one of the overall impressions to emerge from the doc — fortified by former co-stars like Piper Laurie and Doris Day — is that Hudson’s good standing in the community as an all-round nice guy made Hollywood protective of him. That’s certainly the image he puts over in archival interviews seen and heard here — of easygoing amiability and relaxed confidence.

His public persona while under contract with Universal was as manufactured as that of any studio star of the time, set up with “dates” for premieres and camouflaged by romantic items planted in the press. But compared to many queer matinee idols and sirens back then, Hudson lived as openly as he could under the circumstances. He was untroubled by being the star guest at clothing-optional gay pool parties, and once caused Wilson and Universal to go into frantic cover-up mode by heading off unannounced on a cross-country vacation to New Orleans with a boyfriend.

His relationships tended to be brief, but his friendships were enduring, notably with longtime partners George Nader and Mark Miller, whom he entertained in his hacienda-style Beverly Hills home dubbed “The Castle” and visited frequently at their Laguna home, accompanying them to the gay beach there. (When the couple fell on hard times financially, Hudson hired Miller as his personal assistant from 1972 until his death; Miller’s diary entries from the period after Hudson contracted HIV are heartbreaking.)

Even later, when Hudson’s big-screen star had waned and he was headlining the primetime NBC police procedural McMillan & Wife through much of the ‘70s, he made seemingly little effort to stick to the shadows. Gay archivist Ken Maley recounts an amusing night out with Hudson at a sex club unequivocally named Glory Holes, where the star stuck around for hours even after being recognized.

While Kijak’s doc foregrounds the subject’s queerness, it doesn’t neglect the Hollywood success that transformed him from Roy Fitzgerald into Rock Hudson, christened “The Big Man from Winnetka” in one fan-mag headline. Instead, it weaves those films into his life story by finding parallels and overlaps with the characters he was playing.

His early screen appearances were in disposable Western, military and action B-movies, until Douglas Sirk, Ross Hunter and later, George Stevens, saw his potential for more nuanced roles. In archival interviews with Sirk both in German and English, the director jokes about getting Hudson “off the truck” to star as a drugstore soda jerk in the mostly forgotten 1952 comedy Has Anybody Seen My Gal? (James Dean, who would go on to co-star with Hudson in Stevens’ Giant, is seen in an uncredited role as a cocky kid ordering a soda.)

But it was Sirk’s glorious mid-‘50s melodramas, Magnificent Obsession, All That Heaven Allows and Written on the Wind, that turned Hudson into a heartthrob. While Kijak includes no shortage of illuminating audio commentary from critics, film scholars and biographers, he makes interesting choices to provide the key analysis on the actor’s canonical films, starting with Ileanna Douglas on Sirk.

She notes that as an outsider, the German director was adept at poking holes in American values, pulling back the glamorous surface world to show the torrid reality underneath. According to producer Hunter, Hudson was the perfect sensitive male Adonis, “the personification of Americana,” which makes his hidden offscreen sexual identity now seem more subversive.

Allison Anders speaks extensively on Giant, noting that while Hudson clashed with Dean, he instantly bonded with leading lady Taylor and they remained close thereafter. Anders also makes a case for Hudson’s role as a progressive American hero — inclusive, feminist and, by the end of the movie, grandfather to a mixed-race child.

The other part of Hudson’s Hollywood output that gets major attention is his popular comedies with Day, beginning in 1959 with the risqué-for-its-time Pillow Talk and following in the early ‘60s with Lover Come Back and Send Me No Flowers. With Hudson’s character blurring his sexuality for plot purposes, Pillow Talk, especially, became positively meta. As Hunter puts it: “A gay actor playing a straight man impersonating a possibly gay man.”

The echoes between Hudson’s on- and offscreen personae make All That Heaven Allowed highly entertaining, with its spry editing and uncanny juxtapositions, often suggesting Hollywood was winking at its audience. But Kijak handles the swerve into sorrow with delicacy and class, particularly in reconstructing the ugly speculation that was sparked after Hudson’s death by a screen kiss with Linda Evans in his role on Dynasty.

In an emotional audio interview, Evans recalls how Hudson held back and kept his mouth tightly closed in take after take of the kiss, later realizing he was trying to protect her. The uncertainty at that time over the ways in which HIV could be transmitted also caused Evans to be ostracized on the Dynasty set, with makeup artists and others refusing to go near her, while personal friends also kept their distance.

Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 casts a long shadow over the closing stretch. Perhaps the most damning evidence of public ignorance and intolerance is when Hudson was taken ill in Paris while participating in a clinical drug trial. Medics determined that the best place for him was in the U.S. military hospital. But this required special permission from Washington. Despite Hudson’s years of friendship with Nancy Reagan, she responded that this was not a matter in which she felt the White House should become involved, representing a shocking betrayal.

Commentators recall those crisis years as a time of despair, when the lives of gay men became an endless round of funerals and fundraisers as the government continued its obstinate inaction. But the doc makes an eloquent case for reconsidering Hudson’s passing as a hero’s death that singlehandedly changed a lot of attitudes. The impeccable selection of closing clips allows us to reimagine him as a man not just idolized as a star but accepted for the entirety of who he was.

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