Phyllis Gates,
who married Rock Hudson, dies at 80

Phyllis Gates, the Hollywood secretary who insisted that she married Rock Hudson out of love and not as a beard, died January 4 in Marina Del Rey, Calif., of complications from lung cancer, reports the Los Angeles Times. Gates first met Hudson in 1954 when she was working for Hudson's agent Henry Willson, the gay starmaker who is the subject of the recent biography The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson. She moved into his house in early 1955 and, amid growing media suspicion about Hudson's sexuality, married the star in November of that year. "I was very much in love," she later told Hudson biographer Sara Davidson. "I thought he would be a wonderful husband. He was charming, his career was red-hot, he was gorgeous. How many women would have said no?" Gates later wrote, in her 1987 book My Husband, Rock Hudson (written with Bob Thomas), that their sex life was unsatisfactory and that he "virtually abandoned" her during a five-month bout with infectious hepatitis in 1957. She divorced him the following year and never remarried. Gates, who never revealed the truth about her ex-husband until after his death, is survived by a sister and a brother. (Advocate.com)