The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty
Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson
by Robert Hofler
Carroll & Graf. 468 pages, $26.
Tab Hunter Confidential: The Making of a Movie Star
by Tab Hunter with Eddie Muller
Algonquin Books. 378 pages, $24.95
AT THE TROCADERO, one of the Sunset Strip’s hottest hangouts in the late 1940’s and early 50’s, he would give the handsomest young men a card which read, “If you are interested in getting into the movies, I can help you. Henry Willson. Agent.” Robert Hofler’s cultural biography of Willson focuses heavily on his greatest known creation, Rock Hudson, but the book also tells a story about the Hollywood system in a bygone era, in a sense setting the story straight about gay Hollywood.
Willson is a figure worthy of a biography in part because of his key role in shaping the careers of many stars, not only Rock Hudson but other hunks like Rory Calhoun, Guy Madison, Troy Donahue, and Chad Everett, as well as a few actresses, notably Natalie Wood, Joan Fontaine, and Gena Rowlands. As a star maker, Willson “invented” the Hollywood hunk and its other great incarnation, the teen idol, exemplified in his creation of Tab Hunter. Hunter tells his own version of the story in his new memoir, Tab Hunter Confidential. The title alludes to the gossip rag—the National Enquirer of its day—that almost destroyed Hunter’s career, first with a story about his arrest at a “pajama party strictly for the boys” and later with a story that he beat his dog. This kind of scandal-mongering bedeviled big stars in an era that we may think of as pre-paparazzi, but it was positively frightening and suffocating for closeted gay actors and show business people of this era. Hunter’s book, which sports a stunning image of the young actor on the cover, is made up of sharp, succinct anecdotes about the actor, who started life as Art Gelien, offering glimpses of the boy who loved horses and who did a stint in the Coast Guard starting when he was only fifteen. It was during that period in his life that he met Henry Willson and Willson’s associate, Dick Clayton, who together “made” Tab Hunter more-or-less out of whole cloth. Hunter wrote the book, at least in part, because his longtime companion and producing partner, Allan Glaser, told him that an unauthorized biography was being written. Hunter decided to write his own version of the story. He says that “having been burned multiple times, let’s just say my guarded nature is well earned.” And guarded it is: Hunter’s book is at best a “tell-some” account. The pattern of the book is to pile anecdote upon anecdote, which does not exactly a memoir make. The only real through-line is that he survived, he’s happy, he’s got few regrets, and he’s got a pretty good sense of humor about some of the bad movies he made and about his rent-earning work in dinner theater. The best professional tales involve his work with John Waters and Divine in Polyester and Lust in the Dust. In fact, those anecdotes could have been told in greater detail. The juicy bits include some stories about Hunter’s relationships with Tony Perkins and with world-class figure skater Ronnie Robertson, whose liaison with Hunter damaged the skater’s career. As reported by Hunter, “a well-connected person in the U.S. Figure Skating Association said, ‘Ronnie Robertson didn’t have a chance at the Worlds as long as he was with Tab Hunter.’” Hunter then explains, “To this day I have a hard time believing antipathy existed. If it did, I’m sure it had more to do with my being a ‘movie star’ than with me and Ronnie being an ‘item.’” Is he kidding? It’s hard to say whether such an interpretation is delusional or just naïve, but later in the story, Hunter says, “Finding out who I was, sexually, was one thing. Admitting it was something else entirely. … Accepting that I was wired differently was no cause for celebration, believe me. We all have our various urges and desires and shouldn’t be made to feel ashamed of them. Being ‘proud’ of your homosexuality was a concept still years away. Not that I’d ever feel that way. To me, it’s like saying you’re ‘proud’ to be hetero. Why do you need to wear a badge? You simply are what you are.” One wonders how differently the Hunter life story would come out had it been written by someone else, perhaps a journalist such as Robert Hofler, whose research on the story of Willson, Hudson, and the rest is thorough and nicely presented. Hofler depicts Willson somewhat sympathetically—and somewhat pathetically—in this rather long book. The size is justified, though, by the multifaceted nature of the story, which includes a history of the agent’s rise to prominence and his subsequent life story, the demise of the studio system, the life of Rock Hudson, and the Red Scare of the 50’s with its implications for homosexuals. Willson and Hudson were both investigated by the FBI, and this is a particularly alarming part of the story. Hofler had access to some material from Hudson’s rather thick FBI file, and there is the insinuation that Willson had some under-the-table deal with none other than Roy Cohn. It seems quite likely that Willson was a willing source of dirt in Hollywood for Cohn and his Commie-busting cronies. Willson’s two fatal flaws were inextricably linked to his two greatest assets. He could spot beauty—if not always talent—from a mile away, and he knew how to wheel and deal. However, his æsthetic sensibility didn’t evolve, and the post-World War II hunk image did not endure, as the male Hollywood type shifted by the end of the 50’s. Likewise, Henry’s “dirty deals” may have helped create stars like Hudson, but they involved the eventual sacrifice of both Rory Calhoun and Tab Hunter to protect the golden Rock. It’s pretty clear that Willson fed stories about those less lucrative personalities to Confidential to protect Hudson. Such betrayals, along with the growing sense that Willson’s homosexuality made him radioactive, cost him dearly in his career. By the early 1960’s, his stable of stallions was down to just Hudson and Chad Everett, both of whom would leave before the decade was out. If Tab Hunter can now be philosophical about his life and content with his lover, Willson’s end was rather more tragic. He wound up in the Motion Picture Country Home in Woodland Hills, a far cry from the toney Bel-Air estate of earlier times, reportedly depressed, paranoid, penniless, and more-or-less abandoned by his old friends and his clients. He died in 1978, in his late sixties. Both of these books provide fascinating insights into what it meant to be gay in Hollywood in the middle of the 20th century. This was a time when people of the same sex could be arrested for any physical contact in a bar, a time when a story in Confidential could crush dreams and end careers. The different outcomes of Willson and Hunter show that the oppression and secrecy of that era were survivable, but even in Hunter’s case, the level of apologetics suggests that the cost of survival was a hefty one.
