"One of these days I'm going to have a lot to tell," Rock Hudson once promised a friend. The day never came, and when Hudson died of AIDS at his home in Beverly Hills last week, his story, as he alone might have told it, died with him. But it was clear that the role he played in life was more dramatic, and infinitely sadder, than any of the parts he had assumed in 65 movies and several TV series. For 37 years he had led a double life: in public he was a romantic star, adored by millions of women, admired by millions of men; in private he was a homosexual who bitterly resented the lies and deceptions that he felt had been forced upon him.
Yet in one of those plot twists that any screenwriter would have rejected as too improbable to consider, in the last weeks of his life Hudson became perhaps the most famous homosexual in the world, a man whose fatal illness belatedly focused public attention on the disease that killed him. If he had succumbed to a heart attack, his death would probably have occasioned only a brief notice; because he was the most celebrated known victim of AIDS, it became a significant event.
In keeping with his all-American image, Hudson, 59, was born in the heartland, in Winnetka, Ill. His mother was a telephone operator, and his father, Roy Scherer, was an automobile mechanic who left the family when his son was a child. When his mother remarried, little Roy assumed his stepfather's surname, Fitzgerald. After that, his boyhood was so normal and wholesome that one of his high school chums was later to recall, "It looked like apple pie and ice cream to me." Roy saw wartime service as a Navy airplane mechanic, then headed west to Hollywood. He had once seen Jon Hall swim across a lagoon in John Ford's South Sea romance The Hurricane, and, as he later told it, said to himself, "I can do that."
And so he could. After hanging around studio gates for several months, he was introduced to famed Agent Henry Willson. "You're not bad looking. Can you act?" asked Willson. "No," said the young man. "What did you say, feller?" asked the incredulous agent. "I said, no, I can't act." To which Willson replied: "Good. I think I can do something for you. Sit down." Willson transformed Roy Fitzgerald into Rock Hudson and secured him an apprenticeship in one of the biggest film factories, Universal Pictures. Fighter Squadron (1948) was his first film. During the next six years, 25 others followed, like The Iron Man and Air Cadet. The studio was his school. By the time his first big picture, The Magnificent Obsession, came along in 1954, he was able to establish his film personality: steady, likable, a man among men.