Selznick during Selznick's less than glorious post-"Gone With the Wind" years, mostly Willson was an agent. Although for a while he worked with the legendary producer David O. Willson, who started out writing puffery about a set of young film actors for fan magazines in the early 1930s, was a star-maker of genius. Rock Hudson was a male Eliza Doolittle, the masterpiece of Henry Willson, who fabricated a matinee idol out of the raw material of one Roy Fitzgerald, a gauche former sailor and truck driver who could barely cross a room without tripping over his own feet when the two men first met in 1947. His desire for his leading ladies was patently artificial, yes, but so were his teeth, his walk, his voice, even his smile. Now, having read Robert Hofler's "The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson," I have a better understanding of what made Hudson so stilted on-screen. Enough to prompt shrieks of shock and disbelief throughout the land when Hudson died of AIDS in 1985. 1 box office attraction for several years in the '50s and '60s. Plenty of Americans bought Hudson as a heterosexual leading man, enough to make him the No. On the other hand, the bizarre, glossy comedies Hudson made with Day were huge hits. Unlike other gay performers, he wasn't a good enough actor to convincingly simulate the lust for Doris Day that he never personally felt.
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Later, when I went off to college in the San Francisco Bay Area, I learned what "everyone" knew: Rock Hudson was not only gay, he was the basis for the closeted movie star who romanced one of the male characters in Armistead Maupin's serialized novel "Tales of the City." That, I figured, explained Hudson's implausible performances. Apparently, a sex comedy can be so devoid of sexual energy that even a child in the latency stage will notice its absence. Even as a kid, watching "Pillow Talk" on Dialing for Dollars during the long, rainy afternoons of the pre-cable era, I knew there was something odd about Rock Hudson.