Rory calhoun gay

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His first film role was a bit part in “Since You Went Away” (1944). Jackie Coogan was the only survivor of the accident. and he turned to television. He still didn't care all that much for being an actor. He cared more about being a rancher, which he now was. But he began filming TV's The Texan in 1958 and it brought in a paycheck until 1960.

The 60s began his downslide. The movies were moving away from the handsome actors with marginal talent to the not-so-good-looking with talent to burn. When he looked back to the first half of the fifties, the days of his greatest glory, all he could say was I sure liked how they turned you loose on all those starlets. In 1965 he auditioned for the lead role in TV's The Wild, Wild West but the producers didn't like his screen test and hired Robert Conrad instead.

Calhoun and Baron divorced in 1970. She accused him of sleeping with 79 women. She didn't even include half of them, Calhoun mused. Others said the number was in the hundreds. Six months later he married for the second and final time to an Australian journalist.

He began appearing as a guest actor in a lot of television series. I wonder if he thought he'd hit rock bottom when one of them was Gilligan's Island. He did some producing, screenwriting and wrote one novel. Not surprisingly he would wind up doing cheapie horror films like Night of the Lepus (1972) and Motel Hell (1980).

From 1982 through 1987 he appeared on the daytime soap opera Capitol. He said he did so because of the regret he carried around for turning down a lead on Dallas.

I hadn't seen his work in years (I was sick about missing Hell Comes to Frogtown, 1988) but there I was in 1992 watching singer George Strait in Pure Country and who should come ambling into a scene but Rory Calhoun? What the.....? Who knew it would be his last film?

The longtime cowboy star who loved horses but never wanted to be an actor and rarely poured his heart and soul into it died at age 76 of emphysema and diabetes in a Burbank, California hospital in 1999.

Next posting:
Friday, January 3
A little time off for
the holidays

Henry Willson, Agent ~ and his Dreamboat Factory

While researching yesterday's blog entry about Guy Madison, I found that there was as much or more to write about the fascinating real-life caricature who was Guy's agent, Henry Willson.

and more than once. He made three films with Monroe, two with Grable and two with Hayward. Grable would get special mention in his divorce suit.

He played the second husband of Susan Hayward in the Jane Froman biopic, With a Song in My Heart(1952). I thought he was great and so did he. He would also claim it was his favorite film and I can see why. He adored Hayward from a year earlier when they made I'd Climb the Highest Mountain. He would say I learned a lot from that lady. I learned more about my trade, about my presence in front of the camera by watching her. She acted like it was nothing, with no effort. He said she was one of his four favorite costars.

Another one was Gene Tierney, his leading lady in the Argentine western, The Way of a Gaucho(1952) where he played a fiery bandit leader and a lusty one at that. Those perky gossip columnists reported frequently about the Calhoun-Tierney affair which was hot on location but cooled back in California.

Powder River (1953) is a decent-enough oater about a temporary town marshal looking for his partner's killer. Both he and Calvet were a bit itchy about working with one another after the acrimonious ending of their love fest. But hey, they were troupers...

Shouldering Betty Grable

Calhoun got to costar with his other two favorite costars, Grable and Monroe in one film, How to Marry a Millionaire (1953). It was the most financially successful film he ever made. His squeeze was Grable who mistakenly thinks he's the millionaire she's searching for when, in fact, he was a forest ranger. He must have been happy about that, given he had wanted to be one in real life.

It was Monroe who was his girlfriend in the Otto Preminger western, River of No Return (1954). He was a snake which, of course, his Vaseline Hair Toniced mop of black hair attested to. She had the good sense to leave him for Robert Mitchum. It was gorgeously filmed near Calgary and fraught with problems not involving Calhoun.

With RM and MM

Good as he was in his latest films, he and Fox parted ways and in 1954 Calhoun signed on with Universal-International, the home, as you know, of the handsome and moderately talented. Nonetheless, in 1955 he made three colorful films I liked. He and Ray Danton, in The Looters, play mountain climbers who come across a plane crash in the Rockies. One is genuinely concerned about the welfare of the three survivors while the other is determined to make off with a booty of cash.

Danton joined Calhoun again, along with Jeff Chandler and Anne Baxter, in the third version of Rex Beach's The Spoilers. It is an Alaska gold adventure story with Calhoun jealous of Baxter's attention to Chandler and involves one of filmdom's great fight scenes between the two men.

The Treasure of Pancho Villa (1955) is about an American's involvement in the Mexican Revolution...

But there were never any substantiating facts or convincing rumors. During World War II, thousands of soldiers, sailors and airmen on their way to the Pacific theater were granted their last stateside leave in the port city of Los Angeles. As the 1940 guidebook, “How to Sin in Hollywood” put it:

"When Your Urge’s Mauve, go to the Café Internationale on Sunset Boulevard.

But with others claiming Madison was gay, I thought I’d share his story and let you decide.
Guy Madison was born Robert Ozell Moseley in rural California. Red Sundown, Flight to Hong Kong, Utah Blaine, The Domino Kid... No wonder Willson is said to have established his own "Dreamboat Factory"!

Probably Willson's most prominent client was Rock Hudson.

Merle sounded like I ought to go out in the farmyard and do the chores." This name game became a unique form of movie star branding that Willson sheepishly enjoyed since as he smirked, "everyone knew that I had named them," never mind the widespread mockery.

Call it his stable, call it his cadre, call it a possy, a heard, a pride, a gaggle, or even a platoon or a regiment -- I'd call it a massive convergence of testosterone infused vigor -- and whether bereaved or just plain old fashioned horny -- the inestimable Mr.

Willson had himself a whole heaping helping handfull of more than his fair share of hunks of burning man lovin'! But celebrity biographer Darwin Porter wrote in his 2005 book “Howard Hughes: Hell’s Angel” that Guy Madison was one of the many male and female actors that the bisexual tycoon wined, dined, and fucked.

So I decided old Henry deserved a blog spot all his own today.

Henry Leroy Willson (1911 ~1978) -- and yes, that's "Willson" spelled with two l's plus, appropriately enough, a "son" added on at the end -- was an older gay man, what today we would call a notorious "chicken hawk" of an old queen, frequenting gentlemen's night clubs along the Sunset Strip bar scene where he wooed younger men for both personal as well as professional reasons.

You see, Henry Willson also just so happened to be the head of talent at David O.

Selznick's newly formed Vanguard Pictures. Born Trent Bernard Durkin, he began his acting career on stage in the New York theater. He is most remembered for How to Marry a Millionaire. Even at that time, for a gay actor to come out of the closet was akin to committing career hara-kiri, not to mention that it was prosecutable to boot (not just among actors, of course).

In our era of AI fakes, I’m suspicious of their authenticity. Thus, Willson changed "Orton Whipple Hungerford, III" into the suggestively phallic "Ty Hardin," while "Arthur Andrew Keml" was changed to Tab Hunter" and "Roy Harold Scherer, Jr" turned into Rock Hudson. Willson took a clumsy, naive, Chicago-born truck driver with bad teeth named Roy Scherer, got him some dental work and some acting lessons, and transformed him into one of Hollywood's most popular leading men.

In 1955, Confidential magazine threatened to publish an expose about Hudson's clandestine homosexual lifestyle.

In fact, Willson is credited with coining the term "beefcake" first to describe his scrumpdillicious client Guy Madison.

In the early 1950s, TV antennas sprouted all across the nation's rooftops replacing long lines and SRO seating which until recently had universally predominated movie theaters.