The Rock who conquered Hollywood

Apr 21 2008 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

A new play charts the relationship between legendary actor Rock Hudson and his agent Henry Wilson. Philip Key reports

THROUGHOUT his Hollywood career, Rock Hudson was the epitome of the leading man – rugged, tough, square-jawed and handsome as hell. Women loved him, men admired him.

But Hudson was hiding a secret that in the era would have killed his career stone dead – he was gay.

Amazingly, he kept his secret until near the very end when, dying of an Aids-related illness, stories of his private life began to be whispered in the film colony.

Now the tale of Rock’s troubled life and the man who helped create him – Hollywood agent Henry Wilson – is to be told on the stage for the first time.

Rock, by writer Tim Fountain, will have its world premiere at Liverpool’s Unity Theatre on May 13, with actor Bette Bourne playing Wilson. The role of Rock is taken by ex-Phantom of the Opera star Michael Xavier.

Fountain, the biographer of Britain’s gay icon, Quentin Crisp, and writer of the Crisp stage biography Resident Alien, says the play is a cross between Educating Rita and Wall Street.

“There are two people in one room and a sense of a pupil-teacher relationship with Hudson as the pupil and Wilson as the teacher.

“Wilson was also a real monster in the Gordon Gecko style, which makes it all real fun.”

The tale of Wilson and Hudson has been little known, but once Fountain came across it, he realised there was a perfect role for one of his favourite actors, Bette Bourne.

He has worked with Bourne before on Resident Alien and this time he had him in mind for the monstrous Henry Wilson.

Bourne, like Wilson, is gay but there the similarities end.

Wilson was born into a showbusiness family and soon decided on a career as a gossip writer, producing columns for Variety while still at university. A move to Hollywood landed him on a job on Photoplay and later other film magazines.

But it was a move into the agency business that turned his life around (he is credited with discovering the young Lana Turner), eventually creating his own talent agency.

He popularised the beefcake school of acting by promoting the careers of actors like Tab Hunter, Troy Donahue, Clint Walker and Ty Hardin, often helping rename them.

But it was Rock Hudson who became his star pupil. Hudson was a truck driver named Roy Fitzgerald (formerly Scherer) and, according to Tim Fountain, a pretty lousy actor.

“When he got going, he was very good but on his first film, he needed 38 takes to get one line delivered, ‘I want a bigger blackboard’.”

What makes the relationship between actor and agent even more interesting is that both were gay – and it is said they had a relationship at times.