No, Rock Hudson Didn't Hit on James Dean in Drag on the Set of "Giant"

Julie Gilbert Relied on Bad Sources to Produce a Surprising and False Claim

This week, Remind magazine published an excerpt from Julie Gilbert’s Giant Love, her new book on the making of the movie Giant, and it contained another dubious claim about James Dean that I should probably take a moment to refute. In the piece, and in her book, she writes about the relationship between Dean and costar Rock Hudson:

Dean altered the dynamic of the shoot as well as zeroing in on the bond between Hudson and Taylor. He refused to be the third wheel, and taking advantage of Taylor’s kindness, he began actually repositioning their chairs so that she was angled away from Hudson and toward him, where he would fret about things, gossip, and make her laugh at clownish antics. Hudson became the disgruntled odd man out, forcing him to either drop Taylor or vie for her—which he chose to do. To invoke another big Western movie, theirs was a “duel in the sun.”

Perhaps Hudson had more of an agenda or backstory with Dean than it would have seemed. Certain truths were not spoken of back in the mid-fifties. Hudson had a good deal on the back burner. He was a closeted gay man embarking on a heterosexual marriage of convenience. His stardom was hitched to a studio-planned personal life. He was to be married to a woman and entirely discreet about everything else. According to various sources, Hudson fell deeply into a platonic love with Taylor but was also attracted to Dean. In the beginning of filming in Marfa, when Hudson and Dean shared a house, Hudson purportedly enjoyed dressing in drag in the privacy of this rented home. Dean deplored this as well as the overtures that Hudson made toward him, hastily moving out and into a room at the Hotel Paisano.

OK, so… No.

Gilbert’s “various sources” hide the tiny bit of research she did into this claim and the problems with it. I’ll deal with Rock Hudson first. Hudson was indeed a closeted gay man, but he was not yet embarking on a marriage of convenience. That only occurred after Confidential magazine got hold of evidence that Hudson was gay and threatened to publish it. Hudson’s agent, Henry Willson, traded Tab Hunter’s homosexuality and a second scandal featuring another actor for the Hudson story, convincing the magazine not to publish. This took place in the summer of 1955, with the Hunter exposé on sale in the September issue in late August. It was after that publication that Hudson faced public pressure to marry (Life magazine ran a cover story a few weeks later asking why he wasn’t married—hint, hint) and contracted a marriage agreement with Willson’s secretary.

The rumor that Hudson enjoyed dressing in drag was an open Hollywood secret, though it was not committed to public record until a sleazy direct-to-VHS documentary called Hollywood Scandals and Tragedies made the claim in 1988. At no point did anyone claim Hudson dressed in drag on the Giant set, during filming or off hours.

Similarly, there is no evidence Hudson propositioned Dean on the set of Giant. The actual story, told by William Bast in his 2006 memoir Surviving James Dean, is that Hudson propositioned Dean four years earlier, on the set of Hudson’s film Anybody Seen My Gal? where Dean was a bit player. According to Bast, Dean deeply resented what, according to Hudson’s standard practice (as reported by his biographer), was likely closer to what we would today call sexual harassment.

James Dean pretends to punch Rock Hudson on the set of “Giant.”

So where did Gilbert’s story come from? She doesn’t cite sources, but her bibliography makes it evident. She is badly summarizing a passage from Don Graham’s 2018 book Giant, also on the making of Giant.

Dean moved in with Chill Wills and Rock Hudson in a private home, while Hopper took a room in the Paisano. Putting antagonists in a film together was an old trick of directors, believing that proximity would intensify their antipathy on-screen. It probably did, but Dean and Hudson already didn’t like each other. Although a photograph has survived of Dean, Hudson, and two other men playing cards, whatever camaraderie they had didn’t last long. After about a week, Dean moved out, and according to one of his acquaintances, “Rock tried to ‘queer’ him, and when he resisted, Hudson became embittered and asked him to leave.” Biographer Paul Alexander surmises that “Jimmy would have hated Rock for his fey ways and his penchant for drag. A part of the ‘old’ homosexual set, Rock would have been threatened by Jimmy’s edgy and unconventional personality even as he was attracted by his sweet boyish looks.” “Would haves” are not evidence, however. But there was certainly tension between the two men. Not only that, they both vied for the attention and company of one of Hollywood’s most desirable actresses—Elizabeth Taylor.

Rock simmered while Dean pulled one offensive act after another. One morning, Dean and Hopper were walking past Rock’s trailer as he was coming out, and Dean jumped onto Hudson and French-kissed him.

Now, we could leave this at that, but I happened to have done the research into this for my own book, so I know a couple of things; namely, that Graham relied on very bad sources.

First, as Graham himself notes, Alexander is an unreliable, speculative source. Now, Alexander wasn’t exactly wrong—he seems to have been reporting things Bill Bast told him off the record, but the details are blurry and mixed up. And that’s how Gilbert, not reading carefully, mistook Alexander’s speculation for a solid description of what actually happened.

Worse—the claim that Hudson hit on Dean in their shared house (i.e. “tried to ‘queer’ him”) is based on a lie. That unnamed “acquaintance” Graham mentions likely never existed. Graham is quoting the line from C. David Heymann’s Liz: An Intimate Biography, where the acquaintance is named as one Jeffrey Tanby, but in 2014 Newsweek carefully exposed how Heymann, who died in 2012, was in life a serial fabulist who made up much of the material in his celebrity biographies. I searched records exhaustively and could find no record of Tanby, whose unusual name, remarkably, appears only in Heymann’s book. (And, no, even if it were a pseudonym, the claim never appeared anywhere else under anyone else’s name.)

The French-kissing, though, comes from Dennis Hopper and is more credible than the rest of the claims.

In short, Gilbert misinterpreted Graham’s summary of two unreliable sources. But it doesn’t matter because nobody will care as long as the story is “fun.”