The ROCK HUDSON Only I Knew

HIS MCMILLAN & WIFE CO-STAR SUSAN SAINT JAMES SHARES SPECIAL MEMORIES WITH CLOSER

- A. BARILE

Susan Saint James confides that kissing Rock Hudson on the set of the hit TV series McMillan & Wife never felt like a hardship. “We were kissing all the time, and it was fun,” she tells Closer, calling her late co-star “engaging, wonderful, friendly and sexy.”

During his decades in Hollywood, Rock made many friends, but Susan, who played his wife, Sally, for five seasons on the police procedural, enjoyed a special relationship with the Hollywood icon. “We had so much fun,” she says. “From the day I met him, I can’t remember a time when he was ever unpleasant.”

Rock’s long movie career included westerns, war pictures and dramas, but he always excelled at romantic comedies. McMillan & Wife, which joined the rotating NBC Mystery Movie series in 1971, played to the matinee idol’s best strengths by combining a whodunit crime with comedy and romance. Rock and Susan played witty, bantering couple Mac and Sally McMillan, who solved cases between fashionable parties and gala benefits. “It was glamorous and sort of rom- commy,” says Susan, 77.

The actress won the role of Sally after a lunch meeting with Rock, reportedly beating out other future stars, including Diane Keaton and Jill Clayburgh, for the part. “Years later, I asked Rock why he picked me,” Susan recalls. “He said, ‘I was getting so fat from having lunch with actresses that I just decided to go with you!’” Of course, Rock was joking.

LAUGHTER ON THE SET