All That Heaven Allows : A Biography of Rock Hudson (9780062408877) by Griffin Mark

Author:Griffin, Mark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-10-16T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 14

Seconds

“He identified with this guy,” director John Frankenheimer said of Rock’s reconstructed character in Seconds (1966). Here, Richard Anderson, Will Geer, and Hudson prepare for the big reveal.

(Photo courtesy of Photofest)

We just don’t know what to do with it,” Paramount’s publicity chief, Bob Goodfried, would say of Seconds. “It’s a very interesting movie but the Rock Hudson in this movie isn’t the Rock Hudson the public is used to seeing, or wants to see.”

Following The Manchurian Candidate (1962) and Seven Days in May (1964), Seconds was the third and final installment in director John Frankenheimer’s so called “paranoia trilogy,” a genuinely unsettling trio of films that were released during a period when political assassinations and government cover-ups seemed to be occurring with alarming frequency.

Seconds started life as a novel by David Ely, whose work has been described as unusually prescient. “I would hesitate to characterize Seconds in terms of how our culture has proceeded in the last fifty years,” Ely says. “Although I’ve written a lot of things as fiction that unfortunately, turned out to be true in political and social life.” Ely’s gripping narrative concerns a mysterious organization known only as The Company, which provides a unique service to graying, discontented clients eager to shed the skins of their unfulfilling lives: a stage-managed death, followed by a complete physical overhaul. Arthur Hamilton, a paunchy, conservative banker trapped in a soul-deadening existence in Scarsdale, signs on with The Company and is reborn as Antiochus—or Tony—Wilson, a playboy painter with a luxurious studio and a free-spirited mistress in Malibu.

With its highly original premise, Seconds caught Frankenheimer’s eye. “He was fascinated by the book,” recalled Evans Frankenheimer, the director’s wife. “The story said that no matter what you do, you can’t just go and be another person. You can’t escape and start all over again.” At the height of his Seconds obsession, Frankenheimer attended the theatre one evening in 1963. Before the performance was over, he knew that he had found a gifted writer capable of adapting David Ely’s acclaimed novel into a film.

As screenwriter Lewis John Carlino recalls, “I had a play off-Broadway with Shelley Winters and Jack Warden, which dealt with identity. It was called Epiphany. Frankenheimer came to see this play, which is about a man who seeks to project his masculinity and control his wife. In a sudden reversal at the end of the play, he symbolically reveals himself as a homosexual. In a sense, I think the subject matter also led to the selection of Rock Hudson for Seconds.”

However, the star of Pillow Talk was hardly anybody’s first choice for such a dark dystopian exercise. Kirk Douglas had optioned the property through his Bryna Productions after Frankenheimer encouraged him to secure the rights. For Douglas, taking on a challenging dual role as a bottled-up banker and his repurposed younger self probably seemed like a direct route to his fourth Best Actor Oscar nomination. Though with The Heroes of Telemark and Cast a Giant Shadow waiting in the wings, Douglas’s plate proved to be too full.

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