[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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