When Rock used to look in the mirror during his Charlie Movie Star days, he would never deny the fact that he was handsome. Handsome men know they’re handsome. There was no reason to be coy or overly modest about it—that kind of thing just reeked of phoniness to him.
He used to have the kind of black hair that was almost blue like Clark Kent’s in the old Superman comics he read as a boy back in Winnetka. His strong, square jaw, a built upper chest, that mythical “V” shape of his torso—he had all the right things that make a man real, topped off with a face the camera adored. He loved being seen as a real man. And, my God, he had charisma. That went a long way toward enhancing his purely physical features. That easy, casual way about him that had always opened doors leading to an easier path through life—it’s not something you can fake, even in Hollywood.
Before arriving at the White House that night, Rock searched for those same things in the bathroom mirror in his suite at the Mayflower Hotel. It had become a habit of his. Whenever he’d catch his reflection somewhere—passing by a shop window, staring into a photographer’s camera lens—he would pause to see if he could locate that younger man he had once been, the one in all the movies. At fifty-nine years old, that man was becoming harder to find. His hair was all gray, not black and certainly not blue. His face was lined with deep, unforgiving crevasses etched down his cheeks, hugging the corners of his mouth—deep enough for him to run credit cards through if he wanted. He supposed he was still what some would consider handsome (heck, that whole distinguished dad look had definitely secured for him the part on The Devlin Connection even though the show had flopped spectacularly), but now it was an older and more weathered kind of handsome. Gawking rather than being gawked at. He wasn’t used to it. Not at all.
Ron and Nancy had invited him to the White House to attend the State Dinner for President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado of Mexico. This was something he’d done once before during Ron’s first administration, and it had been a good time, but also a surprising one. He wasn’t particularly close with the President but they had become friendly at several Hollywood functions in the past. When he came to Washington this time, he’d considered accepting their invitation to stay at the White House, but had opted for the Mayflower on a recommendation from his secretary.
During his first visit, staying at the White House had presented its own unique set of problems that went along with the more obvious perks. He’d hated having to check in at the security hut like a damn tourist, for example. Back in Hollywood at the Universal lot, he had always simply waved a hand from his car at one of the security guards and they’d let him pass. They would never have stopped him at the gate to check his driver’s license. Rock Hudson—Movie Star? It would’ve been unheard of.
There were also things at the White House that remained invisible to the average straight male visitor, yet appeared to Rock as temptations flashing at him around every corner. They were as obvious to him as a dead trick floating in a Beverly Hills swimming pool on a Sunday morning. Along the hallway of the East Wing, Secret Service stood at regular intervals at every third door. As Rock walked past them, he was reminded of his late night hauntings of Flex, the L.A. bathhouse he often frequented. There too, men stood guard in front of their rooms. They had towels wrapped around their slim waists that were slightly opened up at the crotch as if to invite him in. Some of the men appeared to him as stoic and impenetrable as these Secret Service members—without affect, robotic and vacant, as if it were up to Rock to tell them how they should want him. Turning them on might be as easy as caressing the small soft place under the chin to flip a switch. Others appeared to him starved, their desires or kinks on full display. Those were the men who were hungry for any kind of male touch, any kind of sustenance Rock could always be depended upon to give.
There were also gangs of young interns who had been seemingly let loose to roam about the White House unchaperoned, all with their pretty little ambitions, their awe at the sudden proximity to power, those hormonal hailstorms percolating. He’d once slipped directions to his room into the pocket of one of them in a moment of uncharacteristic indiscretion, convinced that the boy (he had thought of him at first as a “boy,” but the young man must’ve been at least twenty-one, college-aged) had made a certain eye signal with which he was very familiar. In fact, the young man had made eyes at him at several points during the evening and Rock felt certain that he could get him into bed without a lot of coaxing. He was, after all, Hollywood royalty.
The boy came to his room later that night. Rock let him in and began rubbing him through his pants, feeling him grow hard. The boy (who gave the name Thomas after some initial hesitation) was simply beautiful, exactly Rock’s type: blond, blue-eyed, young, well-built. This set of criteria was well known to those in his trusted circle back home and his friends would often make sure to invite young men who fit this type to his pool parties. He usually liked them taller but he wasn’t as choosy as he had once been and Thomas was a specimen at which anyone would have marveled, no matter his height. He let Rock undress him and because he was so much shorter, it was easy to pick him up and take him to the bed, laying him on top of the duvet in such a way that his body naturally arched back against one of several oblong, tasseled pillows under his bare back. As they fucked, Rock could feel Thomas gripping his shoulder tightly at first as if he were in pain and wanted Rock to slow down. But then he cupped one hand on Rock’s buttock and pulled him in closer, all the way. Rock kissed him deeply and felt, in that moment, as connected to Thomas as he had with any actor in any scene in any movie in which he’d ever appeared.
*
The White House never seemed cozy or intimate to him. It felt more like a well-kept museum than the actual home of anyone, much less the President of the United States. It wasn’t even that big, he thought. Tab Hunter’s house was bigger.
“Rock, dear, we’re so glad you could come,” the First Lady said to him.
“Hi!” he responded, at first. “Thank you so much, ma’am.”
“We’re old friends. You can dispense with the formalities.”
“In that case, you look incredible, Nancy,” he said, flashing a smile. Rock remembered that Nancy Reagan (née Davis) had been known back in the day as the “MGM Blowjob Queen.” He really couldn’t judge anyone though. There had been one married producer who he’d let blow him occasionally back in the early days of his career and that man turned out to be a very good friend to have in his back pocket. He might have even saved Rock’s career once.
“You’re so kind. Charming as ever,” said Nancy.
“Have you got me seated next to someone special?” Rock asked.
“Every guest of ours is special! You know that,” she said. “You’ll be seated at my table.”
“Wonderful. I’m honored.”
“Rock, you’re too thin. We need to fatten you up,” she said, gripping his shoulder in a friendly gesture.
“You’re thin, also,” he said. Nancy nodded and smiled. “I think I caught a flu bug while I was filming in Israel, but I’m feeling fine now.”
Rock had worked with the President’s first wife, Jane Wyman, on a couple of films in the ‘50s. The first film they did together was Magnificent Obsession. He’d caught an airing of it after Carson one night a couple months back. Not having seen it in years, he settled back and found himself utterly absorbed by it. He followed the story very closely, wondering if he’d ever seen the whole movie in its entirety. He wasn’t actually sure. He must have at one point. Back home at the Castle he kept videocassettes of all his movies and many of his favorites.
In Magnificent Obsession, he played a rich, swaggering playboy named Bob Merrick whose recklessness gets him in a boating accident which inadvertently causes a doctor to die when the doctor’s own resuscitator, commandeered to save Merrick’s life, is missing at the precise moment the doctor himself needs it. Later, Merrick is also responsible for accidentally blinding the doctor’s widow, Helen Phillips, played by Wyman. Merrick then goes to medical school to become a doctor so he can cure her blindness.
“Didn’t Jane Wyman already play blind?” asked Jack Navaar, his boyfriend at the time, as he thumbed through Rock’s script.
“She was deaf in Johnny Belinda. Not blind.”
“Now she’s playing blind? This is such trash,” said Jack. “Joan Crawford already did that whole blind thing last year in Torch Song.”
“It’s melodramatic.” Rock had responded. “But it’s still one helluva part.”
“I think Jane won an Oscar for playing that deaf-mute,” Jack said.
Rock made a spiraling sign with his finger and said, “Whoopee.” He stood up, towering over Jack with his hands on his waist. “I could win an Oscar, too.”
Jane Wyman had been very kind to him on set. It was one of his first starring roles and Rock had been so nervous that some of his scenes had to be reshot thirty or forty times. Jane had been so patient and professional, just a lovely person. He was so appreciative that he asked her later why she was being so nice to him. “Let me tell you something, Rock.” She took his hand and said very confidentially, “It was handed to me by somebody. And I handed it to you. And now it’s your turn to hand it to somebody else.”
At the premiere of Magnificent Obsession at the Westwood Theater, the studio had made him bring a gal named Betty Abbott to the premiere and Jack came with a young actress named Claudia Boyer. That’s just what he had to do back then. He would never have been able to arrive with Jack or even make eyes at him at the premiere. He’d wanted to though. He would love to have shared that moment with him, watching his big break happen on the screen with his man sitting right next to him. In the lobby he had tapped Jack on the shoulder “1-2-3,” their code for “I love you.”
One of the things that struck him while watching the movie all these years later was how easygoing he appeared on the screen. Affable and approachable. Flirtatious and strapping. Overtly, almost chronically heterosexual. A regular “Charlie Movie Star.” That’s the name he came up for himself during that period of his life his friends had called the “Impossible Years” when he’d been a real marquee idol and maybe a little bit full of himself. But there had been so much more going on beneath his exterior that the Joe Meatloaf and Suzy Chapstick theatergoers would never have seen themselves. His face hadn’t been marked yet with any of it. It had always been such a dependable mask.
“Rock, let’s get a picture of the three of us,” said President Reagan, motioning to the White House photographer.
“I’d be honored, Mr. President,” he said. Nancy stood between them in her bright red dress. She clasped Rock’s hand and hooked her other arm through the President’s.
“Smile!” the photographer said. Flash.
*
The cab driver looked at him oddly in the rearview mirror when he gave the address in the Southeast neighborhood of Navy Yard.
“Sure you want to go there, sir? It’s not a good neighborhood. Lots of crime. And it’s tough to get a cab back.”
“I think I can manage, but thanks,” Rock said.
Rock had heard about Tracks from an ex-lover who had been there a couple months before when it first opened. He said there had been several Marines who’d come down to the Navy Yard from the Marine Barracks on Eighth Street and ended up at Tracks the night he’d been there. Rock imagined them just like he had been back in the day when he was fresh off his own time in the service. Most of them would probably pretend that they were unaware of the bar’s gay reputation. His ex-lover had also given him the address of a nearby townhouse in Capitol Hill that operated as a no-questions-asked private sex club. But Rock had learned the hard way not to put himself in situations like that and thought he’d try his luck out at Tracks.
When he first walked in, he was cautious by habit. Back in the day, he would never have just waltzed into a sissy bar like this. Maybe if he’d gone with his publicist (who had also been his live-in lover at the time) he wouldn’t have cared. No one really knew about that kind of thing and it was easy to just hide in plain sight. But it would’ve been a very rare event. He much preferred to have friends over to the Castle for drinks and dinner. Only in the last couple of years had he allowed himself to be seen in a gay establishment at all. Before his relationship with Marc Christian had deteriorated, he’d started going out to gay bars and restaurants in West Hollywood with Marc because Marc liked them so much.
But he was older now and wasn’t as easily recognized. It was perhaps the one good thing about losing his looks. Older gay men fade into the background. At least he thought they did—he certainly never saw them. Sometimes he thought about the older man back in Winnetka who used to pay Rock to blow him in the back of his convenience store. Surely that man was dead by now. Or he’d be close to a hundred years old. He wondered where old homosexuals went. What happened to them? He had never asked any of his friends and thought now that he probably should have.
The crowd at Tracks was very young. So many of the kind he liked too. They were young and confident and bopping around almost in unison. He didn’t recognize the song playing and he also couldn’t tell if a man or a woman was the singer. He wasn’t sure that something like that mattered now.
After ordering a glass of gin, he wandered into an outdoor courtyard that turned out to be a beach volleyball court. There was a hamburger and hotdog grille in the corner adjacent to a series of banked wooden steps on one side for people to hang out and watch the game. Several shirtless young men were currently engaged in one. They went diving for the ball, grunting and hollering. It reminded Rock of being on the beach back home with friends and horsing around. He loved being surrounded by all those wonderful young men he used to have at his parties.
One of them came over to him with his shirt slung over his shoulder, all sweaty with a dewy sheen on his stomach. He was very attractive, perhaps mid-twenties. He was also exactly Rock’s type: blond, blue-eyed, well-built, and young. He gave off a vibe as if he’d be just as comfortable with a woman as he would a man—Rock’s kind of guy.
“Hiya! Some game going here, huh?” Rock asked him.
“Yeah, I guess,” he said. “You should join.”
“I’d just beat you all and what fun would that be?” Rock answered.
“Oh yeah? I just bet you would.” Rock wasn’t sure if he was serious but he thought he caught a wink. “I’m Gus.”
“Pleased to meet you, Gus.” Rock put his hand out and Gus accepted it. “I’m—”
“Wait, hold on. Don’t say it. I know exactly who you are.”
“Really?” Rock said and looked away toward the game.
“Yes, I do. You’re fucking Rock Hudson.”
“Ya know me?” Rock got excited. He’d been out with Marc and his friends Mitch and George one night the month before, and their waiter had tried to stick them at a table near the kitchen and remained completely stone-faced when Mitch told him who Rock was. It had really bothered him.
“Yes, of course, I know you! I watched All That Heaven Allows when I was younger and it really hit me. The one where Jane Wyman is a rich widow and you’re her gardener?”
“Landscape designer. Yes, I always liked that one. Jane certainly played a lot of widows back then,” said Rock. He thought it was cute how Gus had provided him a mini plot summary of the movie as if Rock might’ve forgotten it. Maybe he looked like he might not remember things. There had been a German remake of the film about ten years ago, but he’d never seen it.
“When I saw it, I wanted you to hold me next to a fire in a cabin with you wearing that red flannel shirt, just like you did with her,” he blurted out, then paused, nervous. “God, that sounds cheesy.”
“No, it doesn’t. Not to me,” Rock said.
“I watched it with my aunt. I think she knew I was a fag right then and there.” Rock put his gin down on the wooden step and asked Gus to join him on the main dance floor. He was so far out of his comfort range and he couldn’t believe he was doing this. But he was.
Gus put his head on Rock’s chest, a chest that wasn’t as strong as it had once been, muscles beginning to wane, just barely there. But still. There he was in the middle of the dance floor with this young man embracing him like it was the most natural thing in the world. He thought about how proud Jack Navaar would’ve been of him. Jack had always hated how Rock hid him from view.
While they danced, Rock spied a young man across the dance floor who was very tall and very thin. He was wearing a bright green t-shirt that, coupled with his unkempt brown hair, made him look like Shaggy from Scooby-Doo. He was dancing with a shorter man in a tight shirt and a mustache and a fat woman stuffed into a Betty Boop dress. Shaggy was hooked up to an IV and moved it across the dance floor with him as if it were a waltz. It was kind of touching, he thought, the young man escorting his IV, his partner for the night while his two friends danced together next to him also in a pair. When he attempted to dip his IV, Shaggy began to fall and his male friend caught him and brought him back to the corner of the bar where the three of them camped out for the rest of the song.
It hadn’t occurred to Rock what might be physically wrong with Shaggy until he spied a group move all the way to the other side of the dance floor to get away from him. It was such a swift migration—the group’s movement syncopated, almost choreographed with the sudden shift in song—that anyone else might’ve missed it. But Rock had seen one of them give a terse nod to the two others as if to alert them of a hazard in their midst and then all three of them quickly danced away from Shaggy and Shaggy’s two friends to the beat of the new song (another song that Rock failed to recognize, but one whose tempo was slow enough so that he and Gus could rock back and forth while holding each other close and still feel invisible).
Rock admired Shaggy in a way. He seemed so unapologetic about who he was, what he was and his friends were so acclimated to it. Rock didn’t understand this whole AIDS thing. Newsweek had done a cover story about it in ‘83 the year before calling it “the health threat of the century.” But there had been so many of those throughout history already—it was unclear to Rock what made this the big one. He himself didn’t feel threatened by it, but this young thin man was proof that it was out there in the world. Nobody Rock had gone to bed with had come down with it as far as he knew. And he’d been having sex with men for decades, longer than Shaggy certainly. He should have been swept away in the first wave of deaths. He must be in the clear now. Poor kid, he thought. So young. He might have a chance to beat it. Rock had beaten so much through the years to get where he was. Kids had it so much easier these days.
Still, he couldn’t help but notice a certain alignment of feelings he had. That becoming older had so naturally edged up against his loss of looks, his loss of coveted casting. His overall failure to be recognized in public. None of it was random—he really didn’t look like himself, a daunting fact to accept when your entire profession had always depended on that recognition. He assumed, unwittingly, that the face he had now was always built into the one he had then—that the man he was now was the man he was always destined to be.
He pulled Gus closer to him, tighter. He ran his hand down Gus’s back, pressing into his spine, guiding him along the dance floor.
“Would you like to come back to my hotel room?” he asked. He felt he knew what Gus’s answer would be.
* * *