The Rock who conquered Hollywood

Apr 21 2008 by Philip Key, Liverpool Daily Post

“There was this guy who was a screaming queen having sex with everything moving, but at the same time making his clients straight to present them to Hollywood. It was a sort of reverse Pygmalion.

“I have one scene with Wilson teaching the young Rock to walk and talk like a real American, and that’s what really drew me to the story.

“Wilson renamed these people and in a way created them. John Wayne’s real name, for example, was Marion Morrison, but no actor of that generation had his own name.

“If they were gay, they certainly did not talk about it.”

Fountain has worked on stage shows featuring real people before – Quentin Crisp and Julie Burchill among them – but admits he never tries to be totally faithful.

"The challenge is to do all the research and throw it away and then make it up,” he laughs.

“But I try to remain faithful, although in the end it is my version.

“I don’t know what Wilson was like and I don’t care, he was such a fantastic character who just made things happen.

“He turned people into the image he wanted them to be and made them successful. He certainly did so with Rock Hudson and by sheer personality made Rock a star.”

But like Frankenstein and his monster, the creator eventually found his creation taking over. “He became very dependent on Rock,” says Fountain: Hudson was his star client.

“When Confidential magazine got on to Rock and tried to expose him, Henry spent time covering up what Rock was up to. When Hudson died in 1985, no one outside Hollywood knew that Hudson was gay.

“Wilson even made Hudson marry Wilson’s secretary” – the marriage lasted just three years – “so this is a dark story, but a very funny one. A black comedy.”

In the Hollywood of that era, the 1950s and 1960s, actors found the press always on their tails. “Wilson was constantly doing deals to keep things quiet and when Rock was about to be exposed.

“Wilson sold a story of actor Rory Calhoun going to prison when he was younger in exchange for keeping quiet about Rock. You know, all that stuff is still going on in Hollywood today.

“Hollywood remains deeply homophobic.

“I know of one leading Hollywood actor who has worked in Britain who is gay without a doubt. But he won't come out.

“Hollywood is the last place you can come out, especially if you are a leading man – character actors like Ian McKellen can come out and it doesn’t make any difference.

“As Wilson says to Rock in the play, ‘No woman fantasises about making love to a man who is making love to other men’.

“It’s something about maintaining that illusion that a leading man is available. Whether women actually care about that stuff, I don’t know.

“But that’s Hollywood. I don’t think people in Britain give a toss either way.” Eventually, Hudson and Wilson had a parting of the ways and when Wilson’s own homosexuality became public knowledge, he was abandoned by many of his clients, straight and gay.

“He ended up with nowt,” Fountain declares bluntly.

There was no money for a gravestone and he was buried in an unmarked grave. Hudson, on the other hand, was praised for his bravery in admitting at the end that he had Aids.

Fountain has no qualms about his own sexuality.

“I have slept with 5,000 men and one lesbian,” he tells me.

In June, his latest book, Rude Britannia, is published in which he reports on his personal journey around British sexual habits.

“I joined in,” he announces merrily.

On one occasion, that meant dressing in tiger fur to join “Furries” who enjoy sexual encounters while dressed in fur “like Bugs Bunny”.

One thing he did discover, however, was that British men were generally more interested in the quality of parking than sex.

An examination of websites reporting on brothels revealed this: “Most of the entries were taken up with the quality of parking and the difficulties of the one way system in Croydon,” says Fountain.

* ROCK is at the Unity Theatre, Liverpool, May 13-17.

philkey@dailypost.co.uk