There were better actors certainly, and a few were even handsomer. But to moviegoers of the 1950s and '60s, no star better represented the old-fashioned American virtues than Rock Hudson. "He's wholesome," said Look magazine in 1958. "He doesn't perspire. He has no pimples. He smells of milk. His whole appeal is cleanliness and respectability--this boy is pure." Last week as Hudson lay gravely ill with AIDS in a Paris hospital, it became clear that throughout those years the all-American boy had another life, kept secret from his public: he was almost certainly homosexual.
Many people on the inside knew, as...