My review of All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson, by Mark Griffin

All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson

by Mark Griffin

My rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Some stars illuminate a screen; others illuminate an era. Rock Hudson managed both, and in All That Heaven Allows Mark Griffin attempts the daunting task of separating the man from the legend while acknowledging that the two can never be fully untangled.

He was a wholesome Midwestern beefcake, with too many swooning female fans for the Hollywood machine to disappoint by letting his true paramour preferences out of the money bag.

But within his industry, social and neighbourhood circles it was an open secret, as with so many lavender marriage actors, male and female, who resorted to 'beards' for appearances and events.

That's just how things were, and none in the entertainment bubble gave a damn as long as $$$ came in. 

Anti-gay moralist cum anti-everything else gossip columnist Hedda Hopper went out of her way to 'out' him before he was ready, having to be sweetened by inside protectors. Further threats, averted by human alternative payoffs, came via Confidential magazine.

Hudson's ex-wife Phyllis Gates, former Henry Willson secretary and rumoured lesbian, allegedly retained a financial hold over him for keeping her lips firmly sealed (after she hired private detective Fred Otash to secretly record Rock confessing his orientation to her). 

Gates publicly denied this and skated around it in her 1987 memoir My Husband, Rock Hudson — withheld from release until after his foreseeable early death, ensuring him zero recourse to any falsehoods she may have concocted.

Pre-Stonewall USA was blinkered about anything outside its norm. McCarthyism was rife, as was the Hays ProductionCode. High-profile entertainment figures considered remotely subversive or deviant within America's straitlaced societal framework had to pull in their heads or face establishment ostracism and industry blacklisting.

The genesis of his film career, like a movie plot in itself, closely resembles the advents of his Golden Age of Hollywood peers:

Throughout 1947, truck driver Roy Fitzgerald leant seductively against his vehicle outside Universal Studios, hoping to be noticed.

The former US Navy aircraft mechanic, when discharged in San Francisco, had opted against returning to his hometown of Winnetka, Illinois, instead lodging awhile with his estranged biological father in Los Angeles.

He had become drawn to acting while ushering working at a cinema.

Talent scout Henry Willson, finding Roy's unsolicited headshot in the mail, saw rough-diamond potential and signed up the photogenic heartthrob quick smart, renaming him Rock Hudson (which the actor later admitted he hated) after the Rock of Gibraltar and the Hudson River.

Willson's client stable of hunks, which would include Tab Hunter and future Natalie Wood hubby Robert Wagner, were reputed to 'co-operate' with Willson to get film roles. 

Rock, not entirely against the idea, nevertheless drew a line, as with most of Willson's clients who knew the game but set boundaries (more deeply explored in The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson).

This predatory ingrained system was not limited to male hopefuls but standard for all. Unborn Harvey Weinstein would have been right at home.

Dental corrections, elocution lessons and etiquette training followed, as Willson groomed his new client for stardom while launching into fierce studio negotiation campaigns.

Finally contracted by Universal-International, Hudson's earliest films were uncredited as he worked his way up the ladder and learnt his craft, the studio schooling him in acting, singing, dancing, fencing and horseback riding.

His one-liner debut was as a pilot in war drama Fighter Squadron (1948), in which he took 38 takes to deliver his line. His first credited role as 'Roc' Hudson was in film noir Undertow (1949).

By the early 1950s he was on his way to becoming Hollywood's most bankable male lead, set to make over 70 films in a career spanning three decades.

Movie buffs most fondly remember him as earthy young arborist Cary Scott, in the age-discordant romance melodrama All That Heaven Allows (1955) opposite 'older woman' Jane Wyman (just eight years his senior at 38) from which this biography takes its name. 

He is equally loved in Giant (1956) with Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean. And romantic comedy Pillow Talk (1959) with Doris Day — featuring 'that' split-screen bath scene with them both naked in suds, chatting on a phone party line which, along with the title, almost didn’t get past the Production Code Administration.

Reading this biography, we are struck by the labour involved in maintaining the illusion. Modern celebrity culture celebrates disclosure, confession and personal branding. Classic Hollywood demanded the opposite. Secrecy was currency. Publicists managed narratives with military discipline. Careers could be wrecked by gossip that would barely raise an eyebrow today.

Hudson became one of the greatest beneficiaries of this arrangement, yet one of its worst casualties.

Griffin handles these complexities with admirable restraint, neither sanctifying nor condemning his subject. Instead, we encounter a man who could be generous, lonely, affectionate, ambitious and emotionally elusive, sometimes all at once.

Different witnesses describe different versions of Hudson. Former lovers recall one person, friends another, colleagues yet another. The resulting portrait feels appropriately fragmented. Rather than solving the mystery, the author demonstrates why the mystery existed in the first place.

One of the book's more fascinating aspects is its portrait of Hollywood itself. The supporting cast are as compelling as the star: agents, producers, studio execs and fellow actors pass through the pages like denizens of a lost world. The system they inhabited now seems unimaginable: an elaborate theatre of image management in which public identity trumped personal truth.

Hudson's life serves as both participant and cautionary tale within that world.

The biography's encyclopaedic middle sections are so exhaustive in their treatment of films, productions and career developments, that some readers may find themselves wishing for a quicker route through the mechanics of stardom.

Alas, there is a case for this fastidiousness. Hudson's professional life was not merely what he did for a living, but the fortress in which he hid. Each film role, publicity shot and choreographed 'romance' formed part of a larger architecture designed to protect both the man and the myth.

The book gains particular emotional power in its later chapters. As Hudson ages, his fame dims, the AIDS crisis starts reshaping public conversation, and the story acquires a tragic inevitability.

The author explores the actor's final years with restraint and sympathy, showing how Hudson's illness transformed not only perceptions of the star himself but also public awareness of the epidemic.

What emerges is not merely a celebrity biography but a study of performance itself. Hudson spent a lifetime acting both on screen and off. The tragedy is not that he played a role. Most people do. The tragedy is that circumstances required the performance to continue long after the cameras stopped rolling.

Griffin's achievement lies in recognising that Hudson's story cannot be reduced to a simple narrative of victimhood, triumph or hypocrisy. Humans are rarely so tidy. Hudson was a beneficiary of the very system that constrained him. He helped sustain the illusion that trapped him and enjoyed immense privilege while enduring profound loneliness.

In the end, All That Heaven Allows becomes a meditation on identity, fame and the often-painful distance between public perception and private reality. Griffin's work is compassionate without being sentimental, critical without being cynical, and scholarly without losing sight of the human heart at its centre.

Rock Hudson remains in some respects unknowable. Perhaps that is inevitable. Some people spend their lives constructing walls so carefully that even the most diligent biographer cannot wholly dismantle them.

This book illuminates the outline of the man standing behind those walls and allows us to briefly glimpse the cost of their construction.

A deeply researched, compassionate, and often moving biography that captures both the glamour of Old Hollywood and the personal costs of maintaining one of its most famous illusions.

My review of Judith Anderson: Australian Star, First Lady of the American Stage, by Desley Deacon

Judith Anderson: Australian Star, First Lady of the American Stage

by Desley Deacon

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

This had languished on my 'To Read' list for seven years, largely because of its intimidating girth.

At 520 pages, it looked less like a biography and more like a personal challenge. Alas, it proved well worth the wait and all the more rewarding for being savoured at a luxuriously unhurried pace.

For many classic cinema lovers of a certain ilk, Judith Anderson remains forever the unforgettable Mrs. Danvers of Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca (1940), that chilling housekeeper whose devotion to the tragically drowned first Rebecca de Winter becomes a form of psychological warfare against Joan Fontaine's vulnerable young successor bride.

Others know her as Gene Tierney's formidable aunt Ann Treadwell in Otto Preminger's 1944 breakthrough film noir Laura; or the quietly indomitable matriarch Ida 'Big Mama' Pollitt in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958).

She is immortalised as ill-fated Egyptian slave-nurse Memnet, pushed off a balcony and killed by Nefretiri (Anne Baxter) in Cecil B. DeMille's 1956 biblical epic The Ten Commandments.

Yet as author Desley Deacon demonstrates, those fabled screen appearances represent just a fraction of an illustrious career

Outside of Australia, few of those movie fans of the day realised she was Australian. Fewer still, except theatregoers or aficionados, knew she was also the 'First lady of the American Stage.'

When I mentioned recently to a not unseasoned theatre worker that I was reading this, they asked with sincerity: 'Who's Judith Anderson?'

Before I had quite recovered, another acquaintance wondered if she had been the lead singer of The Seekers. At which point, I felt compelled to retreat to a darkened room with a restorative cup of tea and ... just me and this book.

Veteran stars like Anderson are now a sort of insider secret: if you know, you're of a special vintage. If you don't, then you ought to.

This is precisely why books like Deacon's matter.

This sumptuous profile restores Anderson to her rightful place among the 20th century's performance behemoths. Structured in theatrical 'acts' and 'scenes' and richly illustrated, it tracks the journey of Frances Margaret Anderson, born 1897 in Adelaide — part of the young colony of South Australia with its mere 300,000 inhabitants — who becomes one of the most respected actresses to ever tread Broadway's boards.

The early chapters are among the most absorbing.

We meet 'Fanny' Anderson, youngest of four children, growing up in South Australia after the separation of her parents. Her father, a charismatic gambler and adventurer known as 'The Silver King', deserts the family when she is six, leaving her with only memories of him.

Her resourceful mother Jessie sells almost everything except the family piano and supports the family by running a grocery business.

Fanny emerges as a wilful, high-achieving tomboy who competes with boys and earns the moniker Outlaw Fan. She wags school, loving only its Friday afternoon Penny Concerts. Like many children of her era, she performs in home concerts, but in her case uses her talents to barter with.

Even as a child she seems destined for performance. She wins prizes for singing and recitation, and displays an early determination to carve her own path through life.

Although she has a music teacher, her heart is set on elocution and the art of verse speaking — at the time an essential accomplishment for middle-class girls around the English-speaking world. Her voice coach had studied under the teacher of Lionel Logue, who helped manage King George VI's stammer.

Fanny is soon quoting Shakespeare and winning medals for recitation and singing.

Her theatrical ambitions awaken on seeing Nelly Melba's Adelaide concert in in 1908. Her lifelong love of theatre is sealed that year at J. C. Williamson's Peter Pan, whose star Minnie Tittell Brune flies out on a wire, hovers over the gallery and sprinkles 11-year-old Fanny with stardust.

One of this book's notable strengths is that Deacon never merely catalogues events. She recreates worlds.

The Adelaide and Sydney of Anderson's youth feel tangible and alive. We accompany the ambitious teenager as she relocates to Sydney with her devoted mother, encounters the city's cultural elite, studies acting, and gradually morphs from gifted amateur to arch professional. 

These early chapters filled with sunshine and promise, let us feel the era and settings as if there ourselves, transporting the reader so completely that one almost forgets they are reading a work of scholarship.

That achievement reflects Deacon's gift as a writer. Although an accomplished historian, she is first and foremost a storyteller. Drawing on unpublished memoirs, diaries, correspondence and extensive archival research, she constructs a portrait of rare depth without ever allowing the narrative to become dry or academic.

The Anderson these pages uncovers is ambitious, witty, occasionally difficult, deeply committed to her craft and fascinating.

Arriving in America in 1918, Fanny becomes Judith, steadily establishing a reputation for intelligence, intensity and commanding stage presence. She will eventually stand among theatre royalty, working alongside the likes of Katharine Cornell, Ruth Gordon, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and Lillian Gish.

Anderson's rollcall of achievements is astonishing.

She plays Gertrude opposite Gielgud's Hamlet, Lady Macbeth with Olivier, stars in Chekhov's Three Sisters, tours globally, conquers radio and television and even undertakes a hallowed tour as Hamlet herself. Above all comes Medea, the role most closely associated with her and the performance that secures her place among the finest tragediennes of her time.

Reading these accounts, we start to see why film was always secondary for Anderson. While Hollywood made her famous, theatre made her a legend.

The author does not neglect the private woman behind the public figure. We learn of Anderson's marriages, friendships, disappointments and occasional insecurities. The sacrifices demanded by a life devoted almost entirely to art become increasingly apparent. What we discover is not a remote theatrical monument but a complex, very human individual.

What remains most striking is the scale of Anderson's accomplishment.

Here was a girl from Adelaide who became Broadway's reigning queen for an entire generation, earned Emmy and Tony awards, received an Academy Award nomination, was appointed a Dame Commander of the British Empire and later became a Companion of the Order of Australia. Yet today her name is often met with puzzled looks outside specialist circles.

This written work goes a long way towards correcting that injustice.

By the final curtain, one is left not only admiring Judith Anderson but wondering how such a towering figure could have slipped from public memory. More than a life story, this is a rich history of 20th-century theatre, a portrait of artistic dedication and a reminder that 19th-century-born Australians sometimes ventured far from home and quietly conquered the world.

Through Deacon's elegant storytelling, Judith Anderson steps out from the shadows of old programmes, fading reviews and grainy film appearances to reclaim centre stage. Long after closing the book, I found myself thinking about that determined Adelaide girl who crossed an ocean, remade herself and became one of the most venerated actresses of her generation.

A biography can do no greater service than that.

For lovers of theatre history, Golden Age of Hollywood and great actors' stories, this is an absorbing, elegant and deeply rewarding read.