Rock Hudson and Henry Willson. In Hollywood's inner circles, the two men epitomized the quintessential powerbroker and the impressionable yet ambitious young man who would do anything to fulfill his dream. The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson is the story of that controversial, legendary relationship, which took Roy Fitzgerald from lowly truck driver to star of Magnificent Obsession, Giant, and Pillow Talk. From 1957 to 1965, Rock Hudson reigned as the most popular movie star in the world. But there was a price for such glory. And it was one that Henry Willson, a gay man and Hollywood's most "notorious" starmaker, brokered repeatedly in the twenty years he masterminded Rock Hudson's career and kept the star's name out of the scandal sheets. Variety reporter Robert Hofler chronicles Willson's maneuvers to sidestep the FBI's investigation into Hudson's homosexuality, the tradeoffs to expose the police arrests of Rory Calhoun and Tab Hunter to keep Hudson's name out of Confidential magazine, the use off-duty LAPD cops and Mob ties to intimidate Hudson's blackmailers, the "arranged" marriage between Hudson and Willson's secretary Phyllis Gates, and the movie star's affair with a Universal Pictures vice-president to help secure starring roles in Magnificent Obsession and Giant. Henry Willson, however, was much more than the man who kept Rock Hudson's name in marquee lights and off the front page of Confidential.
He discovered Lana Turner. He turned Natalie Wood into an adult star with the role of James Dean's girlfriend in Rebel Without a Cause. But it was Willson's representation of male actors that made him as powerful as he was notorious. As head of talent for Gone With the Wind producer David O. Selznick, Willson came to the job of Hollywood starmaker with an uncanny eye for male beauty that in time would define the post-World War II sex symbol. Much as Hugh Hefner created the Playboy Bunny, the homosexual Henry Willson cornered the other half of the flesh market with Guy Madison, Rory Calhoun, John Derek, Robert Wagner, Troy Donahue, Tab Hunter, Clint Walker, John Saxon, and Chad Everett, among hundreds of others. Book jacket.