From Francine
I wish you could have seen the look of shock on George’s face when he emerged from the tunnel and rediscovered that there really is life after death after all. And when he found his first wife, Brenda, waiting to greet him, he was stunned into a long silence while he held her, after which I’m told he gaped at the hundreds of spirits and animals who gathered for the reunion and said, “I’ll be damned.” George is an excellent example of the fact that atheists are embraced on the Other Side as surely as the most devoutly religious, and with his humor, self-honesty, and misguided but honorable intentions, he tried to live a godly lifetime, no matter what words he used to define it.
Once he spent time at the Scanning Machine and in Orientation, all his memories came flooding back, not only of the life on the Other Side to which he’d just returned, but also of the life that preceded this most recent one—he was a black man in the mid-1800s, wrongly convicted of and executed for a murder he did not commit, the murder of a white woman, which, it was later learned, was actually committed by the presiding judge. It was understandable that George arrived angry and rebellious against “the system,” and it was brilliant of him to have charted a sense of humor that would allow him to express his outrage through the power of laughter. He regrets that he found it difficult to distance himself from the penetrating anger that drove his comedy, so that he could genuinely relax and enjoy his success from time to time. He also recognizes that he was conflicted about his success, loving the comfort it afforded him, but also not wanting to get so comfortable that he’d lose his edge, and it was in pursuit of that edge that he allowed himself to indulge in his addiction to cocaine. He wants his daughter to know how much he adores her, wishes he’d been the father she deserved, and is intensely proud of her. He’s also grateful to his second wife, who he says was more understanding and compassionate about the “baggage” he brought to their marriage than he could ever repay.
His life at Home is blissfully happy, in its own unique way. You need to remember that all of us maintain the same basic personality traits throughout the eternity of our spirits—the outgoing remain outgoing no matter how many times they incarnate and return to the Other Side, the introspective remain innately introspective, the humorless remain humorless, those with a sense of humor eternally have a sense of humor, and so on. George is no exception. He loves spending time in the Hall of Records, researching past and present charts of historically powerful men and women and entertaining at large gatherings with his singularly insightful perspective on those who experienced power on earth. He’s also very devoted to study and meditation on the charts of his own lifetimes, intent on tracking the onset of his avowed atheism in an effort to learn how he grew to be so loudly, outspokenly wrong about the existence of God. He has no plans to incarnate again.
Rock Hudson
The personification of the words “tall, dark, and handsome,” actor Rock Hudson was a Midwestern boy, born Roy Harold Scherer Jr. in Winnetka, Illinois, on November 17, 1925. His mother, Katherine, was a telephone operator. His father, Roy Harold Scherer Sr., an auto mechanic, abandoned his wife and son when Roy Jr. was eight years old, during the Great Depression. Katherine’s second husband, Wallace Fitzgerald, formally adopted her young son and changed his name to Roy Fitzgerald.
Roy was a disinterested student at New Trier High School, much more intent on achieving a career as an actor than he was on his studies. After graduation he served as a naval aircraft mechanic in the Philippines during World War II and moved to Los Angeles when his tour of duty was over. His first effort at pursuing a serious acting career was an application to the University of Southern California drama program, but he was disqualified because of his lackluster grades. He drove a delivery truck to make ends meet and spent every possible nonworking hour distributing his “head shots” to every studio executive, filmmaker, and agent he could find.
His determination was rewarded when, in 1948, Henry Willson, an openly gay Hollywood talent scout, recognized Roy’s potential as a true movie star, changed his name to the intensely masculine sounding Rock Hudson, and secured Rock’s first job, a small part in the 1948 Warner Bros. film Fighter Squadron. He also began grooming his handsome new client for stardom, with lessons in acting, singing, dancing, horseback riding, and fencing as well as launching a publicity campaign that soon had movie magazines across the country featuring Rock Hudson’s face on the cover. By the time he was twenty-nine, Rock was receiving some critical applause for his role in 1954’s Magnificent Obsession with Jane Wyman, and his career was off and running.
In an effort to maintain Rock’s masculine, heterosexual image at a time when show business wasn’t embracing homosexuality, Henry Willson recruited his secretary, Phyllis Gates, to marry Rock Hudson in 1955, with widely publicized photos of the wedding and the happy couple at home. Although the marriage only lasted three years, it’s widely believed that there was great affection and mutual respect between Rock and Phyllis for the duration of their relationship, and the public perception of Rock Hudson as a “straight” movie star was firmly established.
Rock’s greatest career triumph to date followed shortly after his marriage, when he starred with James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor in Giant in 1956. Not only did Rock walk away with a truly prestigious film and his first Oscar nomination under his belt, but he also formed a close friendship with Elizabeth Taylor that would last for the rest of his life.
After several more moderately successful dramatic roles, Rock found a whole new niche in romantic comedies costarring another dear friend, Doris Day. Their charming chemistry resulted in three box-office hits—Pillow Talk (1958), Lover Come Back (1961), and Send Me No Flowers (1964).
Film roles became fewer and farther between as the 1960s progressed, and in 1971 Rock reluctantly waded into the television business with a movie of the week called Once upon a Dead Man, which evolved into the six-year detective series McMillan and Wife, with Susan Saint James, John Schuck, and Nancy Walker.
In 1982 Rock signed to star in a second series, The Devlin Connection, but filming was interrupted, and the show was ultimately cancelled, when Rock had a massive heart attack, his health compromised by many years of heavy smoking and scotch drinking. His quintuple bypass surgery was a success, but he never seemed to rebound completely. Although he was signed to play the recurring role of Linda Evans’s character’s love interest in the hit drama Dynasty in 1985, his increasing weight loss, unsteadiness, and apparent frailty forced the producers to write his character out of the series after fourteen episodes.
Rock went into seclusion for several months until July 1985, when he made his last public appearance to help his friend Doris Day launch her new talk show Doris Day’s Best Friends. He was heartbreakingly gaunt, pale, and mumbling as he admitted the obvious to her and to the rest of the world—he was dying. Photographs of the ravaged star were broadcast around the world, and it wasn’t long before Rock filled in the missing piece to the story and confirmed that it was AIDS that was taking his life.
On October 2, 1985, Rock Hudson died of AIDS-related complications. In the wake of his death, now having a once beautiful and beloved face to attach to the then relatively dismissed scourge of HIV-AIDS, the public, the medical establishment, and the Hollywood community began moving AIDS awareness and treatment to the top of their priority lists, with Elizabeth Taylor leading the march toward fund-raising, care, and compassion in the name of her dear fallen friend. Rock Hudson’s legacy extends far beyond his more than seventy film and television roles—it’s impossible to calculate the impact of his life and death on AIDS victims throughout the world from 1985 on.
From Francine
Like most AIDS victims, Rock was ecstatic to leave his body and come Home to fully restored health and vitality. His mother was the first to greet him, once she made it through a wildly enthusiastic herd of large dogs, led by an Irish setter he especially adored. They were promptly joined by Roddy McDowall, Marlon Brando, and a host of
other Hollywood friends, including Montgomery Clift, with whom Rock had always felt a unique connection—Rock says he was among the first on the scene of the tragic car accident that nearly killed and, in the long run, devastated Clift’s life, and it moved Rock to tears to see him thriving again.
He definitely returned Home with an agenda. It took all the patience he could muster to sit through the replay of his latest lifetime at the Scanning Machine, because he was so eager to begin training as an Orientator, to help other AIDS victims make as smooth and peaceful a transition as possible to the Other Side. He also volunteered himself for intensive study at one of our many medical research centers, where finding a cure for AIDS is a steadfast priority. Teams of brilliant minds at Home are vigilantly at work in search of treatments and cures, infusing any and all advances they discover.
Rock’s home here is made entirely of windows, which overlook his vast hydroponic gardens. He’s one of our most prolific and charming hosts, regularly entertaining the widest possible variety of friends, and during the course of a party he can always be counted on to sing one of his favorite songs, “Send in the Clowns,” accompanied on piano by his frequent sidekick Martha Raye. (He wants those he left behind to know that he finally remembers all the words.) He never misses a concert of music from the 1950s and, a self-described “frustrated song and dance man” on earth, is excited to be in rehearsals for the title role in The Music Man.
About his most recent lifetime he says, “Of course I have regrets, especially about those times when I was completely irresponsible with the excuse that I was just having a good time. But for the most part, I loved my life, my career, and my dear, dear friends. I was blessed in so many ways, and whether or not I remembered to show it often enough, I was and am so grateful to God for every moment.” His chosen life themes of Victim and Humanitarian became clear to him in his final months on earth, when he proved to the world what an equal-opportunity monster AIDS really is. When he was first diagnosed, he says, he didn’t want anyone to know. But when his diagnosis and prognosis became undeniable, he took pride in the fact that he helped to “wake people up” and inspired global awareness, more informed prevention, and, above all, compassion.
He’s often a tangible presence at AIDS clinics around the world and still stops by the courtyard of the home in the Hollywood Hills where he lived so many happy years. (It delights him that he’s occasionally successful in setting off the motion detectors as he checks on what he continues to think of as “his house.”) He was also the first to welcome Home his longtime partner, Tom Clark, who was by Rock’s side for the last months of his lifetime.
Heath Ledger
Another star who left before the world was ready, actor Heath Ledger was born April 4, 1979, in Perth, Australia. His father, Kim Ledger, was both a race car driver and a mining engineer with the family company, the Ledger Engineering Foundry. Heath’s mother, Sally Ledger, was a French teacher. Heath was an incredibly bright child, winning Western Australia’s Junior Chess Championship when he was only 10. Inspired by his older sister, Kate, an actress and later his publicist, to whom he was very close throughout his life, he was cast, also around the age of ten, in the lead role in his elementary school’s production of Peter Pan. Sadly, his parents’ marriage fell apart at this same time, forcing Heath to spend the next few years moving back and forth between them. But his love of acting, which expanded into a love of dance and choreography as well, became his outlet, and his determination led to extra roles in a feature film called Clowning Around and the television series Ship to Shore.
He graduated from high school at the age of sixteen and promptly headed to Sydney, where he became even more serious about his career as an actor. He found television work almost immediately and made his first official appearance on the big screen in 1997’s Blackrock, which was impressive enough to land him a starring role in the successful Australian series Home and Away and in a fantasy series called Roar. Roar was financed with American money, giving Hollywood its first exposure to Heath Ledger. His costar and girlfriend, Liza Zane, convinced the nineteen-year-old actor to move with her to Los Angeles and find himself an agent.
Success came quickly after his arrival in the United States—in 1999 Heath costarred with Julia Stiles in the internationally successful movie 10 Things I Hate About You, after which he was officially in demand. In 2000 he was cast by Mel Gibson in The Patriot. Next came Billy Bob Thornton’s Monster’s Ball, also in 2000, followed by A Knight’s Tale in 2001. All the while, after a breakup with Liza Zane, the handsome young Australian rising star was having no trouble finding success in his personal life as well, and his reputation as a playboy was attracting the attention of the Hollywood social scene and the tabloids.
A string of smart, gifted performances in several independent films kept him busy and stimulated through the early 2000s. But then, in 2005, along came the glaring spotlight that accompanied the controversial “gay cowboy movie,” Brokeback Mountain, in which he costarred with another rising star, Jake Gyllenhaal. The film was a triumph for Heath Ledger—he was nominated for a Golden Globe Award and an Oscar, and he won the 2005 Best Actor awards from the San Francisco and New York Film Critics Circles.
He also met actress Michelle Williams on the set of Brokeback Mountain. Their whirlwind romance produced a daughter, Matilda Rose, who was born in New York on October 28, 2005. By now Heath was relentlessly targeted by the paparazzi, and it was as a result of that exhaustive attention that he, Michelle Williams, and their baby daughter moved from their home in New South Wales to an apartment in Brooklyn, where they lived until 2007.
He followed Brokeback Mountain with an Australian film called Candy, in which he played a heroin addict whose effort to overcome his addiction is mentored by the brilliant Geoffrey Rush. He was rewarded with three nominations for Candy and won the Film Critics Circle of Australia Best Actor Award. Next came the award-winning I’m Not There, a study of Bob Dylan with six actors portraying different aspects of his life, for which Ledger, the cast, director Todd Haynes, and the film’s casting director won the 2007 Independent Spirit Robert Altman Award.
In the early fall of 2007 the relationship between Heath Ledger and Michelle Williams ended, at around the time he gave what was to be his last completed film performance, as the character of the Joker in a Batman sequel called The Dark Knight. During filming, as Heath described in a November 4, 2007, New York Times interview, he struggled with severe insomnia. “Last week,” he said, “I probably slept an average of two hours a night. . . . I couldn’t stop thinking . . .” He’d begun taking Ambien to help him sleep, and even two at a time did nothing more than leave him “in a stupor, only to wake up an hour later,” with his mind still racing. Adding to his insomnia was a serious respiratory illness that struck in January 2008 while he was in London to shoot a Terry Gilliam film, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a performance he would never complete.
On January 22, 2008, Heath was found unconscious in his bed at approximately 2:45 p.m. All efforts to resuscitate him failed, and he was pronounced dead in his apartment in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood at 3:36 p.m. According to the autopsy performed the following day, he died of acute accidental intoxication from a combination of six prescription medications typically prescribed for insomnia, pain, depression, and respiratory congestion.
Tributes poured in from the film community and fans around the world, and after a private memorial ceremony in Los Angeles, Heath’s body was taken home to Perth by his parents and sister for a second memorial attended by hundreds of mourners. Michelle Williams told the press that she was sure his spirit would live on through their daughter, Matilda, to whom Heath’s family awarded her father’s $16.3 million estate. In the aftermath of Heath Ledger’s death at the age of twenty-eight, The Dark Knight broke several box office records, and for his role as the Joker he won both a Golden Globe and an Oscar as Best Supporting Actor.
From Francine
Heath was exhausted when he emerg
ed from the tunnel and shocked to find himself here—he had every intention of waking up in his bed in his apartment a few hours after he settled in for a desperately needed nap. His spirit was safely Home before his unconscious body was found, and his first words when he realized where he was and what had happened were, “I want Matilda taken care of.” After reunions he was too dazed to enjoy, he was taken to Orientation even before his trip to the Scanning Machine. He slept, “detoxed,” received loving, reassuring therapy from his team of Orientators, and traveled frequently to the quadrant devoted to Orientation to meditate, take long, private canoe trips, read the works of Shakespeare (which he loves, I’m told), and listen to Mozart concertos (which I’m also told he loves).
His healing took nearly two years in your time, and he’s thriving now, euphorically resuming his life on the Other Side. Heath appreciates the value of Orientation more than many, since he himself is a skilled Orientator. Since his latest incarnation he’s begun specializing as a physical therapist for those who arrive with unintended prescription drug overdoses and addictions. He also returned with a passion for filmmaking, both in front of and behind the camera. “Loved the work, hated the fame,” he often says. He exhaustively studies current films in production around the world, and, in anticipation of his next incarnation, which will begin in 2016, he’s being trained as a film editor by the enormously gifted Verna Fields and honing his acting skills under the private tutelage of Spencer Tracy, whom he’s always admired.
Heath says he never planned for this most recent incarnation to be a long one, after four previous lifetimes in which he suffered a great deal both physically and mentally in his later years. Although his prescription drug use wasn’t recreationally motivated, he was painfully aware that it had developed into a serious problem that he would have to overcome if he were ever to be the involved, attentive father his daughter deserved. He wants Michelle and his family to know how deeply grateful he is to them for seeing to it that the entirety of his estate is being held in trust for her.