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Everybody who knows Rock is sure that, given the right woman, he ivould make a happy marriage
ever. '"I made mistakes," he said at the time of his separation from Phyllis Gates, "but the fault wasn't all on my side." Even today. Rock refuses to talk about his marriage, nor will he answer questions about his marital plans for the future. When he wants to be, he is the undefeated champion at keeping his lips clamped. "'Anyway," he said, "they all try to marry me off. I just balk at talking about it any more."
Married life for the Hudsons was not "just one long, wonderful, sentimental journey." as an ecstatic woman writer cooed: it was, in some ways, a leap into a dark unknown for Hudson. His marriage was planned in such secrecy that Rock did not even confide in his mother. The story is that Rock's mother phoned him one evening and invited him over to her house for dinner.
"I'm sorry. Mother." Rock said, "but I won't be able to make it."
''Are you busy?" Mrs. Oleson asked.
"Well, the truth is," said her son, "I'm getting married."
Such reluctance to talk of his plans might have meant that Rock feared, from the beginning, that the marriage might not last. Rock has always vehemently denied that Henry Willson. his long-time agent, engineered the marriage, just as Willson himself has disavowed any major role in Rock's romance. But Willson. when pressed, told a writer, "Well, I think Rock needed a home. I felt he needed a Mrs. Hudson."
Later, after he and Phyllis separated. Rock reputedly indicated to an intimate that "he had married too late, that he had missed all the youthful, exciting years of married life, and he was so 'settled' that it wasn't easy for him to adjust." Rock was just a few weeks short of his 30th birthdav when he
ABSORBED in his career during his 20's, Rock may have waited a little too long to make the transition to marriage successfully.
THE SHADOW of his mother's own two divorces and his father's leaving home when Rock was a boy has always hovered over him.
took a wife — apparently, in his own viewpoint an old, settled, no-stars-in-his-eyes man too rigidly attached to the freedoms of bachelor life to make the transition from bachelor to husband successfully. It is an uncertainty that many single men feel, but Rock may have felt the uneasiness more keenly.
Not that Rock didn't try with all his will to be a good husband. Rock's boyhood chum. Jim Matteoni. who was his best man at his wedding, has said. "\\hen Roy (Rock's real name, as most people know, is Rov Fitzgerald) came back to Chicago in March. 1955. I suddenly knew that, for the first time, he was willing to get married. Before, he hadn't wanted to commit himself because it seemed such an irrevocable step. Now, I got the impression that he thought he could make it with Phyllis."
As Rock himself has said, in one of his rare moments of self-revelation. "I like being married — especially in winter when the days are short, when it grows dark early and there are lights in the house, coffee on the stove, a big log burning in the fireplace and steps to walk up the hill."
It is the sentiment of a man to whom marriage has a real deep meaning.
Yet Rock hesitated during most of his early twenties to