What I'm streaming: Rock Hudson, the pioneer of gay liberation

HOLLYWOOD (Netflix)

This is up there - for me - with Grace & Frankie in the "Best of Netflix". It starts well in a splendid recreation of 1940s Hollywood with a far-from-fictitious LA gas station, run by Ernie West (Dylan McDermott, clearly enjoying himself in an off-character role) with a sideline in pimping his hunky attendants as gigolos and rent-boys. The hunkiest of the gigolos is Jack Castello (David Corenswet), a wannabe filmstar who can’t even get hired as an extra until he screws Avis Amberg, a studio head’s neglected wife (Patti LuPone, outstanding in a cast of fine actors). Another of the gas station boys is Archie (Jeremy Pope), a cute black guy whose first ‘client’ is Roy, another struggling actor who will come to be superstar famous when his name is changed to Rock Hudson (Jake Picking, a very good look-alike).

David Corenswet and Dylan McDermott, a gigolo and his pimp

When Avis takes over the running of her ailing husband’s studio she ‘greenlights’ a movie about Peg Entwistle, the actress who jumped off the Hollywood sign in the 1930s. The movie is scripted by Rock’s new boyfriend Archie and directed by another newcomer Raymond Ainsley (Darren Criss, who played Gianni Versace’s serial killer stalker a couple of years back).

There never was a movie about poor Peg, and this take on her story goes somewhat off the rails when the decision is made to change Peg to Meg and give an opportunity to Raymond’s gorgeous black girlfriend Camille (Laura Harrier). So, the two big twists on the ‘real’ history of Tinseltown are the breakthrough for black actors on screen being brought forward by several decades, and Rock Hudson becoming a pioneer of gay rights also many years before any major player risked coming out of the closet.

Jack Picking as Rock Hudson: "Fill it up, and while you're about it ..."

Gays everywhere knew that Rock was a ‘fag’ but it was kept a secret from his female fanbase until just before his death from Aids in 1985. Even today, when privacy is harder to come by and a number of high-profile stars are Glad to be known to be Gay, there are several who aren’t (naming no names).

Other real-life people are woven into this story – Vivien Leigh, Cole Porter, Anna May Wong, Hattie McDaniel (Queen Latifah, always a joy to watch) – which adds to the glamour as well as the authenticity. The making of the Peg/Meg movie becomes a bit tiresome – I wish they’d thought up a grander project for the era of Mildred Pierce and The Best Years of Our Lives – but the gas station brothel contributes plenty of juice to the story (and it’s true) and I relished the fantasy that Gay Liberation was kick-started by Rock Hudson in the 1940s. He could be canonized!

The real Peg, who jumped off the big H in 1932

What I'm reading: Love in the shadow of the gas chambers

Heather Morris: THE TATTOOIST OF AUSCHWITZ

I had reservations about this. I still do. A love story in a Nazi death camp? I still question the ethical stand of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas, which made the fate of one German officer’s son an ironical counter-point to the systematic slaughter of six million victims of Adolf Hitler's extermination programme.

The Tattooist of Auschwitz is based on the true story of Lale Sokolov, a Slovakian Jew who chanced into the job of tattooing the new arrivals, Jewish and Romany, at the twin Polish concentration camps of Auschwitz and Birkenau. He falls in love with Gita, also from Slovakia, who escapes the gas chamber by getting clerical work documenting the deportees (the Nazi obsession with documentation makes the Holocaust even more chilling). Their love affair consists of snatched moments together and is overshadowed by the constant threat of illness or execution. The most beautiful girl in the camp becomes the plaything of the commandant. Some of the women processing new arrivals steal cash and jewellery which Lale smuggles to the local villages through bribed guards to be exchanged for extra food. 

'Work will set you free.' The great Nazi lie.

This is a harsh story, but it could have been harsher. Heather Morris gives us one glimpse of the gas chamber in operation and a few glimpses of the rain of ash from the crematorium chimneys, but she spares readers the most harrowing images we have seen in other accounts and TV documentaries. Josef Mengele appears (‘this man whose soul is colder than his scalpel,’ she calls him), but she gives barely a hint of his obscene medical experiments on prisoners. Yes, it’s all been detailed before, but I think we do the six million dead an injustice if we gloss over the full horrors of the Final Solution.

Morris writes in the present tense, as does Hilary Mantel. Past history in the present tense grates with me (the only time I enjoyed it was in John Updike’s Rabbit quartet, four of the greatest novels of my lifetime). But, for all my reservations, I can see why The Tattooist of Auschwitz has been so widely acclaimed. It has a surprise ending. And there is an irresistible charm to the notion that Love can blossom, can flourish, even on what in another memorable phrase the author calls ‘the threshold of Hell.’