[On November 17th, 1925, Roy Harold Scherer Jr.—better known as Rock Hudson—was born. His iconic career and complex life open up a lot of American histories, so this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of them, leading up to a weekend post on other 20C gay celebrities who lived their lives in the closet.]
On how one
television role reiterated Hudson’s image, and one could help us revise it.
By the early
1970s, Rock Hudson’s draw as a movie star was seemingly on the wane, with a
series of mid- to late-1960s box
office disappointments—among them Strange Bedfellows (1965), A
Very Special Favor (1965), Ice Station Zebra (1968), and Darling
Lili (1970)—a main contributing factor. To be clear, I’m not weighing in on
the quality of any or all of those films, especially because the only one of
them I’ve seen, Ice
Station Zebra, is to my mind a pretty compelling spy thriller, based on
a novel by my childhood fav Alistair
MacLean; but all of them failed to recoup their budget, and we all know how
Hollywood responds to that trend. So, like so many fading movie stars did in
the second half of the 20th century (before the medium of television
evolved to its current place, where it’s perceived as at least as high on the
pecking order as film, and many of our most prominent actors work in TV first
by choice rather than career arc), Hudson took his talents to the
small screen of TV.
He did so
first with the very popular show highlighted in that last hyperlinked article: McMillan & Wife (1971-1977),
a detective show in which Hudson
starred as police commissioner Stewart “Mac” McMillan alongside Susan Saint James as his
wife Sally with whom he solves crimes. For this AmericanStudier, by far the
most meaningful thing about McMillan & Wife was that it was one of
three rotating shows in the original version of The NBC Mystery Movie,
alongside Dennis Weaver’s fish-out-of-water cop show McCloud and, most
importantly to your writer, Peter
Falk’s Columbo. (How is that the only time I’ve blogged about Columbo??
I’ll have to rectify that with a weeklong series at some point.) But if we’re
thinking about the show in the context of Hudson’s career, I’d say it represented
a pretty familiar and thus safe way to build on his film roles for this transition
to TV, with its irascible, lovable married couple protagonists for example very
similar to the roles played by Hudson and Day in the trio of romantic comedies
about which I wrote in yesterday’s post. Nothing wrong with that—every performer
has a wheelhouse—but it’s not particularly interesting from a cultural studies
standpoint.
Far more distinct
and interesting was Hudson’s tragically final television role, a recurring guest starring role as wealthy
horse breeder (and Heather
Locklear’s Sammy Jo Carrington’s biological Dad!) Daniel Reece in the
1984-85 fifth season of the primetime
soap opera Dynasty. Hudson’s deteriorating health due to his long-hidden
but eventually publicized diagnosis and struggles with AIDS (about which I’ll
write in Friday’s post) led to him being written out of the show abruptly and
prematurely, but before he was he shared a (to Hudson) fraught
kiss with costar Linda Evans. Knowing all we now know about AIDS, I’m not at
all interested in the “controversy” around that kiss, which was of course
entirely safe. But I think that Hudson’s overarching connection to Dynasty
can help us imagine a different potential career arc, one in which—perhaps throughout
his career, but at least in its final stage—his identity
as a sexually adventurous gay man was publicly known and he could lean into
performances that tapped into his full self. As I wrote in Monday’s post, that
doesn’t mean he would have to play only gay characters, just that we could see
a Hudson on-screen who was as comfortable as possible in his own skin off it.
Tragically, that wasn’t the case with Dynasty, but the seeds are there.
Next Rock
Hudson post tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Rock Hudson memories or connections you’d share?
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