Rock Hudson’s Hidden Film Vault
“I’ve lived in New York for twenty-five years, and I’ve never shown a movie here. But I still have my film prints,” observes TV host, journalist, film historian, and collector Robert Osborne. “There’s something very difficult about giving them up. That was such an important part of my life; it was so meaningful to me.” With his silver-white hair and his always-dapper suit and tie, he is something like America’s official ambassador for Hollywood history. A longtime journalist for The Hollywood Reporter, he’s written a number of highly regarded books on the history of the Academy Awards. Since 1994 he has been an omnipresent fixture on Turner Classic Movies as the channel’s primary host (and before that, as host on The Movie Channel for nearly a decade). He’s been described by Susan King in the Los Angeles Times as “a delightful hybrid of Walt Disney and Walter Cronkite,” which captures much of his charm and the familiarity he brings to the subject of film, having been close friends with many of the stars he discusses, including Bette Davis, Rock Hudson, and Olivia de Havilland—whom he still calls every Sunday to chat with on the phone, as he has for the past thirty-five years. “When I got my print of Gilda, I thought I’d never be able to see it again. Now I’ve introduced it, like, twenty-five times on TCM over the last eighteen years,” he observes wryly about the changes in media since he began collecting in the late 1960s. His comments underscore a deep irony: it’s much easier to be a film lover these days. But with this ready availability, something indefinable has been lost since the days when Osborne and his friends would huddle together over a noisy 16mm projector. “We started collecting because we wanted access to films,” he says simply. When you can find a movie with a few clicks of a mouse, is it as special?
When we speak, Osborne is in what he describes as a “chilly New York,” although he’s grateful that he can now tape his TCM material there instead of having to commute to and from Atlanta. In his early eighties, he still keeps up a remarkably busy schedule, and even more remarkable, he’s kept his boyish enthusiasm and love for the movies intact. He was born in 1932 in Colfax, Washington, and grew up during the WWII era. “All the adults were really focused on the war effort, and I was ignored by them, so I spent a lot of time at the movies as a child,” he says. Although he doesn’t go into detail, there is more than a hint of loneliness in his memories of his small-town childhood. Without much cash to spend, he began collecting on a modest scale, acquiring 8mm Castle Films reductions of classic Laurel and Hardy comedies. After graduating from college with a degree in journalism, he traveled out to Los Angeles to pursue a career as an actor and was accepted as a contract player at Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz’s Desilu Studios in the late 1950s. He made appearances in several Desilu Playhouse episodes and was even seen, very briefly, in the pilot for The Beverly Hillbillies in 1962—although, perhaps wisely, he decided to take Lucille Ball’s gentle advice when she suggested his future was in writing, not acting. He published his first book, Academy Awards Illustrated, in 1965.
Around this time he became friends with a dancer and film collector named Jeff Parker, who’d appeared in films like Twist Around the Clock and Gypsy and later danced in the Ginger Rogers Revue. Osborne gives Parker credit for introducing him in Hollywood film-collector circles—and also, just as important, to many of the golden-age stars who were still alive. “We didn’t have any money, but enough money to buy cheap wine and spaghetti,” he says fondly about those early collecting years. “We’d go over to his house, and, being a dancer, he got to know these people. Jeff would have Eleanor Parker over and show her numbers and talk about that.” Other dance legends who appeared at these private screenings include, astoundingly, Vera-Ellen, Fayard Nicholas of the Nicholas Brothers, Cyd Charisse, and Ginger Rogers. “Jeff had been in her nightclub act and ran The Barkleys of Broadway. It seems strange now, but this was an era when people didn’t care about Ginger Rogers.” It’s an indelible image, of Osborne, Parker, and their young, impoverished, and film-crazy friends sitting in the dark with these great stars, watching clips of classic MGM-musical dance scenes. It’s also easy to understand why he finds it hard to part with his film prints, even if he doesn’t screen them anymore. “What money we did make we’d usually spend on collecting,” he recalls. “It was great, because those people [like Vera-Ellen, Charisse, and Rogers] were around, and they loved having young people interested in their work.”
In the late 1960s he went to work as a publicist for a PR firm called Pat Fitzgerald & Company and through the owner became friends with another Hollywood legend and film collector: Rock Hudson. “He found out I was an avid film collector. He’d loan me copies of his films,” he says about Hudson, whom he still regards with great affection. To illustrate what a dedicated collector Hudson was—at least of films he appeared in—Osborne recalls that the actor refused to do a film called Pretty Maids All in a Row with director Roger Vadim at MGM, unless the studio agreed to give him a print of that and another movie, Something of Value, that he’d made with Sidney Poitier. “As a favor to him I went through his whole collection and decorated the cans with the title on, so it was easy to read,” Osborne says. To return the favor, Hudson surprised Osborne by buying him a brand-new 16mm sound projector—the first one he ever owned. I ask if Hudson had an interesting film collection, and Osborne suppresses a chuckle: “He didn’t have much of a collection except his own movies. Rock was somebody who was a great guy, but he lost interest if you weren’t talking about him,” he replies with candor. “The way you could perk him up was ask him a question about Giant, and then he joined the party again.”
For a film buff like Osborne, those must have been glorious days, hobnobbing with the star of Written on the Wind and Pillow Talk. “Rock had this wonderful house up in the Hollywood Hills, kind of a big sprawling place. It looked like a ranch all on one level. He had a separate entertainment room with couches and a stage so that people could get up and do acts. He’d have Carol Burnett there, and he would sing at the piano,” he remembers. “He didn’t sing that well, but he was charming with his singing, and he was so attractive and tall and likable. He used to have parties there and get roaring drunk. When he was at his own home, he was very relaxed, and he would show movies in that room.” Hudson soon invited Osborne to come over and screen some of his 16mm compilation reels of classic musical numbers. Soon, though, there were dark rumblings in the collector underground that caused paranoia even for a Hollywood legend like Hudson. “The FBI was after film collectors then and put the terror into them. When Rock found out about Roddy [McDowall] and them taking his film collection, Rock had a side room built in his entertainment room. Right off the entertainment building, he built a film vault—but it was kind of in the back so you didn’t notice it,” Osborne recalls. “What he did was he got bricks and bricked it up so it looked like the fireplace, so nobody knew it was there. So when they [the FBI] did come to investigate, they couldn’t find it, and they never bothered him.”
One of Osborne’s favorite stories of his collecting days shows how, as the adage goes, for the want of a nail the kingdom was lost—or in this case, for the want of a print. Through his good friend Jeff Parker, he made a contact at Columbia Pictures who’d surreptitiously loan Osborne private studio prints on Friday night to watch over the weekend. At the same time, through his job at Pat Fitzgerald’s PR company, he came into contact with a client of the firm’s, producer Ross Hunter, the man behind hits like Imitation of Life, Pillow Talk, and Airport. “Ross was looking for another film to do. He ran into Cary Grant one night at a dinner party, and they got to talking, and Cary said, ‘Say, you should remake a movie I did called Penny Serenade.’ It was Ross’s kind of movie: he loved stories that were big and splashy and elegant and kind of melodramatic.” Grant—who, like Rock Hudson, apparently liked to collect prints of his own movies—even offered to lend Hunter his personal copy of Penny Serenade to show to the executives at Columbia Pictures.
What happened next sounds something like a slapstick sequence out of a Blake Edwards film. Hunter decided to throw a lavish dinner party for the Columbia execs, capped by a surprise screening of the original Penny Serenade to convince them to finance a remake. “It’s getting close to the night of the dinner party; it’s maybe a Wednesday, and the party is on Saturday night. Hunter calls up Cary Grant to borrow that print. A house man answers and says, ‘I’m sorry, but Mr. Grant isn’t at home—he’s away on a cruise.’” In a panic, Hunter calls Osborne, who says not to worry, he can get a print of the film from his inside contact at Columbia. “My friend at Columbia said, ‘No problem, nobody ever checks it out. But I can’t let you have it until Friday.’ So Friday comes, I go over at five o’clock. The guy says, ‘You’re not going to believe this—somebody checked it out.’”
“Ross has a conniption fit. ‘That ruins my plan. Is there something else I can borrow?!’” Osborne recalls with a rueful chuckle. “So I’m going down the list of films they have available for Ross: ‘There’s Gilda …’ ‘No, don’t want that,’ Ross said. ‘Born Yesterday?’ ‘No, don’t want that.’
‘There’s Lost Horizon …’ Hunter considers it for a moment. ‘Hmm, that’s interesting. Why don’t you borrow that one?’ I took a couple prints home for him—and on Saturday night he decides to show Lost Horizon.”
Even by the standards of bad movies, Hunter’s 1973 musical remake of Lost Horizon is in a category of its own. It is, in short, a colossal flop, and the last theatrical feature the producer ever got to make. “It ruined Burt Bacharach and Hal David, the two most successful composers in the business. For a time it ruined Peter Finch. It ruined Liv Ullmann’s Hollywood career; she was coming off all those great Ingmar Bergman movies. Sally Kellerman had just done M.A.S.H. with Robert Altman, and her career never recovered.” Osborne breathes in deeply, then heaves a long sigh. “It’s this movie that destroyed all these careers, and it’s all because we couldn’t borrow this print of Penny Serenade!”