ROCK IN A HARD PLACE...........ROCK HUDSON'S STRANGE LIFE IN "ALL THAT HEAVEN ALLOWS"

All That Heaven Allows -A Biography Of Rock Hudson by Mark Griffin (2018)........

                   First, a confession about how I read, if it all, celebrity biographies......

                   I usually skip and skim the childhood crapola.......tough childhood?  Boo hoo. Who cares.  I want to dive right into the whole reason for even reading the book in the first place........what was it was like making all those movies?  How did the films come together?   Who hated who behind the scenes?

                   But I felt honor bound to attentively read all of "All That Heaven Allows", an exhaustively researched account of that gloriously studio-assembled movie star Rock Hudson.......

                   Was there ever a more bizarre, adventurous and strangely successful film career than Hudson's........a gay man who managed to navigate his way through decades of stardom in the shark-infested waters of Hollywood.........through an era when revealed homosexuality could murder an actor's career quicker than if he put a loaded gun to his head.......

                     Call it karma, call it a charmed life, call it whatever.........but somehow Hudson (with the help of Universal Studios' public relations spin doctors) maintained his busy career and flourishing stardom despite the steady parade of boy-toys who wandered through his entire life.......

                     Author Mark Griffin lays all this out in meticulous detail.........it reads like he spoke to literally everyone left alive who ever knew or encountered Hudson........and for film buffs like me, the book's a goldmine in its chronological, encyclopedic accounts of all of Hudson's films.......(personally, I couldn't wait to reach the pages on "Seconds", that grim, weird John Frankenheimer thriller about the aging shlub transformed by a sinister organization......into Rock Hudson)

                      And there's the added fascination in the book's descriptions of the studio-starmaking machinery......from which handsome lugs like Hudson, Tony Curtis, and Tab Hunter would come off the assembly line as newly-minted Golden Gods........sooner or later, all of these contract hunks would learn the craft of acting by the studio-enforced regimen of putting them in one movie after the other.......(especially Hudson, who diligently worked and learned from every movie Universal plopped him in....)

                       Hudson's double life and his robust sexual appetites seemed to be the worst kept secret in Hollywood.........and yet the only thing that really damaged his career was the rapid collapse of the studio system in the 1970's, leaving him adrift to find work in mediocre TV shows and crummy, low budget films.

                       It's all here in voluminous detail,,,,,, an inconclusive account of Hudson's brief unhappy marriage-of-deception to a woman who worked for his manager, and of course,, his physical decimation and demise by AIDS, becoming one of the first public faces of the disease.

                       But the key goal of any book like this.........to reveal the real man behind the publicity and legendary stories.......never happens here.

                        For all of Mark Griffin's research, Rock Hudson remains a figure just out of his reach.
From the author's portrayal, we get a fundamentally gentle-hearted, generous man.......unfailingly polite, kind and forever dedicated to his craft.........yet you know there's more to it....(and to him)

                         As Griffin goes into the turbulence of Hudson's personal life, it makes you more curious than ever about the very core of his subject..........what kind of a man sustains an existence like this, leading two different, separate lives, one of them brazenly public?

                       The enigma of Rock Hudson never attains any clarity, no matter how many anecdotes Griffin collects..........and we'll admit we went back to skimming in the final pages, all about Hudson's surviving boy-toys squabbling over his estate......yawn.

                        Still an entertaining read......and probably as complete a portrait as you'll ever get of this one-of-kind major figure in old Hollywood history.  For the terrific, informative work on the making of Hudson's films,...3 stars (***).......but overall, sad to say.....Rock, we hardly knew ye.....