“I love to drink and I hate to exercise. I built a gym in my house and I don’t even like to walk through it.”
Cast on the strength of his looks, Rock Hudson had just one line in his first picture, Fighter Squadron (1948), and needed thirty-eight takes to get it right. But years of extensive training in acting, dancing, singing, fencing, and horseback riding finally paid off with an Oscar nomination in 1956, for Giant. He became a bankable lead in romantic comedies, especially when cast opposite Doris Day: Pillow Talk (1959), Lover Come Back (1961), and Send Me No Flowers (1964). He would make nine films with Danish-German director—and something of a father figure—Douglas Sirk, melodramas that included Magnificent Obsession (1954), All That Heaven Allows (1955), and The Tarnished Angels (1958). Hudson transitioned into television in the 1970s, starring in the long-running NBC series McMillan & Wife with Susan Saint James. In 1985 Hudson publicly announced he had contracted AIDS—the first major celebrity to do so. Despite residual scandals, his disclosure made the disease a mainstream health issue and had a substantial positive effect on funding for research and treatment.
ROCK HUDSON WAS NERVOUS. Understandably so: the relationship had to be believable. Though he was one of Hollywood’s most popular movie stars, he was also considered one of its worst actors, and this role, in George Stevens’s Giant, was his chance to prove everyone wrong. Adding to the pressure, his onscreen rival, James Dean, was a product of the Actor’s Studio in New York, the same school that had produced Marlon Brando and Montgomery Clift.
Fortunately, Hudson’s onscreen wife, Elizabeth Taylor, was a close friend of Clift’s and had some advice for her anxious costar: just add a little Method. If Hudson and Taylor were going to behave like a married couple in front of the camera, they should hang out as much as possible behind it. And in Marfa, Texas, the tiny cattle town in the desert where Giant was being shot, that meant one thing: they’d be drinking together—drinking a lot.
The bulk of the cast and crew were put up at Marfa’s one large hotel, the Paisano (which even today is covered in Giant memorabilia). Apart from the hotel, the town consisted of mostly a half dozen cafés and bars, a grocery store, and a boarded-up movie theater the production was using to screen rushes. Still, Hudson and Taylor found their fun.
One night, when a crazy storm rolled through, they rushed outside with buckets, collecting the falling hail to use in Bloody Marys. Another night, on a whim, they decided to add chocolate liqueur and chocolate syrup to a vodka martini, thus creating—so the legend goes—what both considered the finest cocktail they’d ever tasted, the chocolate martini. Even after the production returned to Los Angeles, they were two peas in a pod. They capped off one drinking session by sampling nachos at a string of Mexican restaurants, then challenged one another to a belching and farting contest. (Taylor won.)
Naturally, all this carrying-on sparked rumors that Taylor and Hudson were an item, which were fueled even further by Taylor’s on-set fights with her visiting husband, Michael Wilding. But Hudson was facing other romantic problems. Publicly, he was dating Phyllis Gates, the secretary of his agent, Henry Willson, and was being pressured on all sides to propose, not the least by Willson himself. Willson had received word that Confidential magazine was wise to Hudson’s homosexuality, even offering $10,000 to two former lovers if they’d be willing to come forward, and knew it was only a matter of time before his top client was outed. To placate the tabloid, Willson had given up the goods on Tab Hunter, who’d recently fired him, but still, when this Giant business was over, he knew the next role Hudson had to sign up for: husband.
On October 3, 1955—days after Jimmy Dean’s death near the end of production on Giant—Life ran a cover story on Hudson entitled “The Simple Life of a Busy Bachelor: Rock Hudson Gets Rich Alone.” In the opening paragraph was this sentence: “Fans are urging twenty-nine-year-old Hudson to get married—or explain why not.” That was it. Willson told Hudson he had one month to marry Gates. They did so on November 9. Giant was released the following year. For his performance as husband (Taylor’s that is), Hudson was nominated as Best Actor.