‘I couldn’t do it’: Joel Thurm’s book reveals 1970s sex party with Rock Hudson and sexual encounter with Robert Reed
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA: Casting director Joel Thurm asserts that he had sex with 'The Brady Bunch's' Robert Reed and movie legend Rock Hudson. In his new biography, 'Sex, Drugs & Pilot Season: Confessions of a Casting Director,' Thurm, who is renowned for his casting choices in movies like 'Grease' and television episodes like 'The Golden Girls', explains how he got along with the two actors.
The 80-year-old told Page Six how his 1970s sex party meeting with Hudson didn't work out in the end, but the 'Pillow Talk' singer was sympathetic. He claimed that his attempts to settle Reed down on the set for a John Travolta movie were more successful.
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Thurm described how he attended a business dinner in the 1970s where the majority of the guests were secretly gay. They were present at the party to watch 'Boys in the Sand' which was one of his first full-length homosexual porn movies. According to him, his childhood idol Rock Hudson invited him into a bedroom. Thurm, in his biography, says that he "couldn't get it up" for Hudson once they were alone.
"I was embarrassed and mortified, getting it up was a specialty of mine," the legendary casting director told Page Six. "I couldn't do it because he was Rock Hudson! It so intimidated me. Someone said, 'Well, why didn't you just blow him?' I said, Because I was too... I couldn't do anything."
Fortunately, Thurm claimed that the star, who passed away from AIDS in 1985, was sympathetic towards the aborted sex attempt since "it had happened to him before." A few years later, while Thurm was casting and producing the 1976 television film 'The Boy in the Plastic Bubble', starring a young John Travolta, he would see greater success.
'I didn't go in there with the intention of that'
Thurm alleges that Reed, who co-starred in the movie, was disappointed that he was not the main character, and was especially irritated that his hair had to be curled and then uncurled in one day. Thurm claimed that he went to Reed's changing area to make him relax.
"It was known [that Reed was gay]," Thurm said. 'But I didn't go in there with the intention of that. I went in there with the intention of just [saying], "Hey thank you for putting up with what we have to do". And then, I don't know, I just started rubbing his back'. I thought, "Well that's what you do in a situation like that." I had no intention of anything more than that". Thurm claims, "But he seemed to respond". After the encounter, "Reed went back to being the same little p***k he was before", said Thurm. In 1992, Reed would die at the age of 59 from colon cancer. It was discovered later that he tested positive for HIV.