The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson

Henry Willson, the influential talent agent who created the "beefcake" craze in Hollywood in the 1950s, started out in La-La Land in the early 1930s as a journalist, writing articles about young actors for movie magazines. As a gossip rag hack, Willson "discovered" Lana Turner while she was kicking up her bobby-soxed heels and flashing her Angora sweater-shrouded headlights on a stool at Schwabb's Drugstore in the late 1930s, and he later represented her as a talent agent.

By the 1940s, Willson was working for the producer David O. Selznick before returning to agenting full-time, though he did try his hand at production like David O.'s older brother Myron, being credited as associate producer on the Rock Hudson potboiler "Come September" (1961). In addition to Turner, he represented Joan Fontaine, who won an Oscar playing the second Mrs. de Winter in David O's "Rebecca' (1940) and Natalie Wood after she put aside her childish ways and made like a teenage tease to Fifties uber-icon James Dean. However, the homosexual agent's true metier, his bread and Butter, economically speaking, was his stable of "beef cake" male stars, the epitome of which was Rock Hudson, who played the role of Galatea to his Pygmalion. For a time in the 1950s, Henry Willson was one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood.

Willson's niche as an agent was handsome young men, whom he would rechristen with a new moniker as part of the assembly process of his "Adonis factory," according to the biography The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson by Robert Hofler. In addition to Hudson (nee Roy Fitzgerald), the Adonis Factory's product included Guy Madison' (the original "beefcake" male starlet in the lingo of the Hollywood Trades), Rory Calhoun, Troy Donahue, Tab Hunter, John Saxon, and the twins he renamed Dack and Dirk Rambo.