ROCK HUDSON His Long Road to STARDOM

IT TOOK DRIVE, TALENT AND HEART TO TURN A SHY SMALL-TOWN BOY INTO A LEGEND

- LOUISE A. BARILE

Rock Hudson’s former classmates at Illinois’ New Trier High School were surprised when he appeared in a small, uncredited role in 1948’s Fighter Squadron. Though he’d always been handsome, the tall, shy, soft-spoken boy they knew as Roy never let on that he wanted to be an actor.

Rock’s journey to stardom on the silver screen was complicated by a terrible childhood, his inherent bashfulness and his secret life as a gay man. “It’s a pretty remarkable achievement for this Winnetka boy to overcome so much,” says Mark Griffin, an associate producer and consultant on the new HBO documentary Rock Hudson: All That Heaven Allowed, bowing on June 28.

Today, Winnetka is a wealthy suburb of Chicago, but Rock, who was born Roy Harold Scherer Jr., didn’t come from money. His auto mechanic father abandoned Rock’s mother, Katherine, when Rock was 8. Her subsequent marriage to a former Marine officer brought them financial stability, but at a terrible cost. “Wallace Fitzgerald was an out-of-control drunk,” says Griffin, author of All That Heaven Allows: A Biography of Rock Hudson. “He’d fly into rages and assault both Rock and his mother.”

It’s hardly a surprise that Rock, despite his good looks, grew up trying to avoid attention. He never talked about wanting to be in movies, and even his closest friends didn’t know he was gay. Times were very different then. “In Winnetka, you were expected to announce you wanted to be a fireman or a police officer. You couldn’t have said you wanted to be in show business,” says Griffin. “It would be equivalent to announcing that you wanted to be a prima ballerina.”