Lone star

Hudson.” I found myself grinning. And, oddly, I agreed to a hasty lunch in Jack Warner’s private dining room. Now, sitting with the brilliantly handsome man in that quiet chamber, platters of untouched food delivered to us by obsequious servers who promptly bowed and disappeared, I stared across the table. I wondered why I’d taken an instant dislike to him. Steely eyed, suspicious, Rock stared back, a sliver of a smile on those beautiful lips.

“You seem uncomfortable.” His voice was throaty, a careful mannered drawl, rich and full.

“I’ve never really liked very, very tall men. You notice I’m very small.”

Suddenly he roared, Texas-style gusto, probably learned from my novel, his hand slapping his thigh. “And I thought you didn’t like me because of my personality.”

“I don’t know you, personally, that is,” I said evenly. “All I know is the matinee idol up there on the screen.”

“And that’s not me?”

“Do you believe it is?”

Again, the mesmerizing eyes, the purposely jutting chin, the graceful turn of the long rugged body in the Texas millionaire denim shirt. “There is someone called Rock Hudson, you know.”

“He’s an invention.”

He smiled broadly. “True, but I don’t remember the other person. That bumbling, frightened, wide-eyed lad from Winnetka, Illinois, named Roy Fitzgerald.”

“You like your success?”

“Of course.”

“Is that why we’re having lunch, so you can assure me that you’re happy in your celluloid world?”

A long silence, Rock playing with a fork. He put it down. “Jimmy Dean,” he said, finally.

“Magical words, no?”

“Not to me. I hear he’s seduced you into his fragile web.”

I laughed. “Good God, Rock, give me some credit.”

He held up his hand, palm out. “I don’t care about Jimmy, Miss Ferber. I care about this movie, and what he’s capable of doing to it. Sinking it. Giant is a milestone for me, a film that’s moving me one more step away from B-movie oblivion. That’s where I was three or four years ago. Jimmy’s playing fast and loose with his fame. I don’t. I’ve worked hard. I’ve bowed and scraped and played the game. I’ve totally embraced this invention-as you call it-called Rock Hudson until it’s cash at the bank.”

“You’ll still be a star.” My hand dramatically swept from his face down across the table.

“Not if the movie is killed.”

“No one is killing the movie. Not on my watch.”

Rock sat up, sucked in his breath. When he spoke his words were clipped, his face scarlet, his dark eyes piercing. “I think he’s a murderer. I do.”

“Rock, for heaven’s sake.”

“There’s something wrong with him. You know, Miss Ferber, in Texas we shared a house. He was a filthy pig, he was brazen, he was purposely rude and foul. Christ, he spit on the floor, he,” a pause, “did a lot worse things, I tell you. In Texas, working with George Stevens, we sensed-I sensed, Liz did, so did others-that here was our future. This movie would always say something about us. But Jimmy acted like it didn’t matter.”

“Of course it matters to him.”

He frowned. “He puts his private life out there. Everyone can talk about it, mangle it.”

“And you don’t?”

He looked alarmed. “Only I’m in control of my private life.” He drew his lips into a thin line. “That’s why it’s dangerous to get close to a guy like Jimmy.”

“You might be colored by the same brush?”

He hesitated. “Exactly.” Then he smiled. “No chance of that. He hates me. I hate him. If I have to talk to him, he refuses to answer me. A baby boy, a slaphappy puppy.”

“This doesn’t make him a murderer.”

“Miss Ferber, one thing I know that some folks around here don’t know is that it can all disappear in a flash.” He pointed around Jack Warner’s well-appointed room with the plush gray carpeting, the cascading draperies. “I fought my way here. I’m not gonna let it vanish. Warner has to play this murder his way.”

“What if Jimmy is innocent?”

That seemed to surprise him. “The Jimmy Deans of this world are always guilty of something.”

“Have you no sins?”

“Rock Hudson is an invention, as you said.” He grinned. “He’s been created without sin.”

“That’s not answering my question.”

He faltered. “I just want to do my job, Miss Ferber.”

I pushed some food around my plate. Neither of us had touched the lunch. “Well, I respect that.” And my words made him smile, sit back. “It’s how I got where I am, too.” We looked at each other a long time.

For some reason now, idly, he started to ramble on about acting-serious acting, he said-about dreaming. Especially dreaming, the will-o’-the-wisp vagaries allowed by unpredictable fortune. His early days, waiting for a break, his numbing work as a truck driver. I sat back, charmed by the warm-water flow of words. The more he spoke, the more he sounded like a schoolboy-some lonely fourteen-year-old kid, a feckless dreamy kid, cruising down a back lane on a clunky bike, hurling newspapers onto whitewashed porches and emerald-green lawns enclosed in picket fences. The modulated voice disappeared, and what surfaced was a curious mixture of laid-back Midwest twang and jittery teenage angst. I marveled at the transformation. And, emphatically, I liked it.

His stories reminded me of an Appleton, Wisconsin boy I remembered from Ryan High School days-a gangly, long-limbed boy whose name I’ve forgotten but whose presence has stayed with me. A boy on the high-school stage, acting a piddling role in A Scrap of Paper, his quivering voice and jerky body at odds with the ferocious hunger in his eyes, the fire there, the desperate desire to be away from the parochial town, to be out there in the world, magnificent on some city on some hill. So I felt then that I knew Rock in a way he’d probably forgotten. And the more he talked, the more I realized I couldn’t dislike him. That was too easy. I didn’t want to pity him either because so much of him struck me as so hollow, vain, lost. No, the fragility he refused in himself was what made me smile now.

So we talked about his role as Bick Benedict, about Giant, and he talked about So Big, which he said he’d read and loved. And when I stood up to leave, he said, “I’ll be in New York this fall. Can we have lunch, you and me?”

Standing, facing him, I nodded. “Of course. My pleasure.”

“Thank you.”

In the hallway I closed my eyes, still thinking of that shy boy from my high school days.

“I may actually learn to like Rock Hudson,” I told Mercy when I saw her in her dressing room.

“Oh, no, he charmed you.”

“No, Mercy, I just allowed myself to be charmed. That’s different.”

Later, resting at my hotel, I opened my door to face a dapper-looking man in formal attire-though the tie was slightly askew-a courtly-looking gentleman, graying at the temples. A sheepish grin on his face. Jimmy bowed to me, in costume as the middle-aged Jett Rink, the oillionaire in decline. They’d shaved his temples to create a receding hairline, and the makeup attempted to suggest a dissipated, unhappy man. I wasn’t convinced-he looked vaudevillian stock character, some clown in a monkey suit.

He looked over his shoulder, feigning nervousness. “I escaped for the afternoon. Stevens thinks I’m in my dressing room. My scenes were done this morning, but he likes us to be around in costume to flatter his ego.” He handed me a crumpled newspaper. “This is for you.”

“Come in,” I said. I’d been reading a novel by Sloan Wilson. The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit. Annoyed at its prosaic style and its ugly view of the world, I was looking for an escape. “Come in.”

He fell into a chair, drew his legs up to his chest, wrapped his arms around them.