LGBT Book & Video Blog

Bette Bourne plays the Hollywood icon Rock Hudson's agent in a new play. It's really a gay Pygmalion, he explains

There's a scene in City of Night, John Rechy's landmark gay novel, in which the narrator surveys the graffiti on a lavatory wall. Beneath the obscene drawings and offers of sexual favours are the words: “In the beginning God created fairies and they created men.”

If ever there was a fairy who lived up to this claim, it was Henry Willson. The so-called Fairy Godfather of Tinseltown, Willson was the Hollywood agent who created Rock Hudson. Now his tale is being told in a new play, Rock, written by Tim Fountain and starring Bette Bourne (pictured) as Willson.

For Bourne, it's a gay Pygmalion. “My character turns this gasoline attendant into the highest paid movie star on the planet. He takes a callow youth and turns him into Rock Hudson, who was the perfect, ideal man - or so everyone thought.”

Hudson's screen image was rarely straightforward, whether he was doing comedy in Pillow Talk or trying to disguise the ravages of Aids in Dynasty. But Bourne suggests that his manly screen image was weakened after he starred in Giant with James Dean in 1956.

“In that film was the person who ruined men like Rock Hudson,” Bourne says, “because from that point forward everyone wanted the boy who needed looking after. We wanted to nurse and cuddle James Dean, whereas previously we'd wanted men like Rock to do the nursing and the cuddling.”

posted by Tom Jackson @ Sunday, June 22, 2008