Rock Hudson's One True Love Speaks Out: "[Rock] Said His Mother And I Were The Only People He Ever Loved"
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Hudson and Garlington in 1963.[/caption]
Lee Garlington, a retired stockbroker and former movie extra, spoke with People magazine this week about a three-year affair he had with late screen legend Rock Hudson.
Garlington, 77, recounts his first encounter with Hudson while working as an extra on the Universal Studios lot:
He was the biggest movie star in the world, and the rumors were that he was gay. So I thought, 'Let me get an eye on him.' I stood outside his cottage on the Universal lot, pretending to read Variety, which was probably upside down at the time.
He walked out and down the street. He looked back once. That was it.
A year later, Garlington and Hudson began seeing each other regularly, with Garlington practically living at the Giant star's Beverly Hills mansion.
Because of Hudson's status as a sex symbol, though, their affair was discree—Garlington remembers sneaking out of Hudson's house at 6 a.m. and coasting down the street in his car without turning on the engine so neighbors wouldn't hear.
"We thought we were being so clever," he recalls.
The two attended numerous movie premieres and Hollywood events together, each with a female date in tow. "Nobody in their right mind came out," Garlington said of the era. "It was career suicide. We all pretended to be straight."
After three years the two broke up, owing in part to the strain on a closeted Hollywood relationship, and Garlington lost touch with his movie-star lover.
He says he was devastated when Hudson revealed he had AIDS in 1985.
I was shocked. AIDS killed everybody in those days. I called up the people taking care of him, but they said he was so sick that he wouldn't know who I was and it was best to remember him how he had been before.
After Hudson's death, Garlington read in his biography that he considered him his "one true love."
"I broke down and cried," Garlington says. "[Rock] said his mother and I were the only people he ever loved. I had no idea I meant that much to him."
Someone turn this into a movie, please.
