SEATTLE, WA — Golden Age of TV star Jim Nabors—who played lovable but innocent marine in “Gomer Pyle: USMC” during the 1960s—has tied the knot with his longtime partner, Stan Cadwallader.

Nabors, 82, flew with Cadwallader, 64, a macadamia nut farmer from Hawaii and his partner of 38 years, to Seattle (where gay marriage is legal, as in the rest of Washington State) for a ceremony presided over by a friend of Nabors who serves as a judge.

Nabors and Cadwallader, whom the actor calls his “best friend,” own a macadamia farm that is part of the National Tropical Botanical Garden on the Hawaiian island of Maui.

There is an urban legend which maintains that Nabors and actor Rock Hudson were married in the 1970s, but the two were never more than friends.

As Hudson himself recounted during a 1985 interview (the actor died in October of that year, the first major celebrity to die from an AIDS-related illness), the Nabors marriage myth originated with a group of Huntington Beach, California gays whose annual parties included joke invitations.

“There appears to be a couple of elderly or middle-aged homosexuals who live in Huntingdon Beach, which is just down the coast from Los Angeles, who every year give a party, a big party, 500 people or so,” Hudson explained.

“And they invite everyone they know. It’s an engraved invitation, and to make it amusing they will say ‘You’re cordially invited to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in Huntingdon Beach.’ One year the invitation was, ‘You are cordially invited to the wedding reception of Rock Hudson and Jim Nabors,’” with the punch line being that Hudson would take the surname of Nabors’ character, Gomer Pyle, becoming “Rock Pyle.”

Those who didn’t get the joke spread the rumor.

“It went all over the country,” Hudson said, even though Nabors was datingCadwallader, whom he married last month.

Both Nabors and Hudson were closeted at that time, and because of the fear they might be outed, never spoke to the other again.