HBO Rock Hudson doc, All That Heaven Allowed, coming to MAX.

Looks interesting. Occasionally on tv shows from the 1960's you'll hear Rock Hudson's  name dropped as the quintessential hunk. 

I agree with you about imposing a modern perspective on people's actions from previous eras.  It's complicated and unproductive.  I remember when Rock Hudson started looking thinner and sickly in the 1980s.  It must have been terrible to be dealing with that and the public scrutiny over his private life.  

It'll be interesting to see how the documentary covers the marriage. His wife was an employee of his agent Henry Willson, which led to a lot of speculation about the legitimacy of the marriage even at the time. She wrote a book after he died but many people seem to think she never came clean about the terms of the deal.

TCM just showed Come September to honor Gina Lollobrigida after her death and it's still one of my favorites.

This is probably the best review/recap I've seen, from the Breakfast All Day podcast with Alonso Duralde and Christy Lemire. He mentions Mark Rappaport's Rock Hudson's Home Movies (1992), which I would also recommend for its clever use of movie clips to piece together a story about the place of gay themes in mid-century movie history.
Be aware that there are a couple of ads imbedded in this short 10-minute clip.

Dammit. Now I'm going to have this song in my head all day.

It is pretty catchy.

Montgomery Clift was kind of an outlier in the industry, with a real independent streak, resulting in a refusal to sign a standard seven-year contract with any studio. He finally signed a three picture deal with Paramount, then later signed for three more, but never wanted to be tied to a studio. This was at a time when studios still felt they had a lot of say in the private lives of their stars, including the right to pressure gay actors into marrying if fans or the press were wondering too much. Tab Hunter told in his book about Jack Warner telling him after Confidential broke the story about Tab at a "limp-wristed pajama party" in earlier days that Tab should just let it pass and not acknowledge it, which was frankly an unusually tolerant attitude, especially from a bully like Warner. But in general the pressure to marry was so real that actors often just fell in line without even having to be told. There's a famous story about William Haines, a gay silent star who successfully transitioned to sound films and was at one time a big MGM star, who basically told Louis B. Mayer to go f*** himself and walked away when Mayer told him to dump his long-time partner Jimmy Shields and get married after a scandal involving the two of them. He became an interior decorator with a huge Hollywood clientele (including Mayer's wife). But he and Clift were exceptions; generally gay actors went on all the studio-arranged dates and played the game because the alternative was no career. Studios also had a well-oiled machine to squelch scandals, which was an added incentive to cooperate in order to stay viable in the industry.

The WHAM! documentary they mentioned is new from Netflix. The point she made was that it was remarkable how little things had changed because people in the public eye still couldn't come out with any kind of confidence that they'd still have a career. We think of Elton John now as super-gay but he took many years to come out for the same reason.

Again going back to Tab Hunter, he wrote in his book (co-written by Eddie Muller, by the way) that Tony was always ambivalent and touchy about his sexuality, which was one of the reasons they didn't fare all that well as a couple. In the book and in the documentary Tab Hunter Confidential (2015) actress Venetia Stevenson admitted to being a beard for the couple on public dates and said basically the same thing about Tony, that he wasn't ever able to really relax into it. He later married and fathered a family and I'm not about to speculate one way or the other what that was about, other than to say it seemed to fill a personal need. To each his own.



You're probably right that not a lot of people were surprised to find out that Elton, Rosie, Ellen, etc. were gay, but we have to remember that this was a number of decades after the time we're talking about and well after the time of Stonewall. Public opinion had slowly changed, but in the 1950's homosexuality was both illegal and a mental illness as far as the public was concerned. Gay people weren't just doing something "nasty" and immoral, they were committing a crime and every major movie studio had morality clauses in their contracts and were prepared to enforce them.

EDIT: Actually, I take that back. Lots of people were surprised. Ellen lost a lot of her sponsors, notably Wendy's, and the show was cancelled within a year, leaving her without much of a career for a good while. Many people rallied but an equal number or more withdrew their support. It really wasn't until the new millennium that the logjam of intolerance started to break up and people like Ellen and Elton were able to have careers on their own terms.