Rock Hudson – The Marriage That Hid Hollywood's Biggest Secret

Rock Hudson was Hollywood's most desirable leading man — the star of Giant, Pillow Talk, and dozens of hit films that made him one of the biggest names of his generation. What almost no one outside Hollywood knew was that his entire public life was a carefully managed performance, engineered by his agent Henry Willson to hide the fact that he was gay. This is the full story: the shy boy named Roy Fitzgerald who escaped an abusive stepfather, the "Adonis Factory" that invented "Rock Hudson," the Confidential magazine scandal that nearly ended his career in 1955, and the arranged marriage to Phyllis Gates that was designed to bury the secret. It's also the story of his real relationships in the shadows, the private detective's tape that ended his marriage, his terrifying AIDS diagnosis in 1984, the Dynasty kiss with Linda Evans, and the ten weeks of dying that finally forced America to look at an epidemic it had spent four years ignoring. Rock Hudson never said the word "gay" in his lifetime. His death said it for him.