Scandals of Classic Hollywood: The Long Suicide of Montgomery Clift
Montgomery Clift had the most serious faces: large, pleading eyes, a set jaw, and the kind of immaculate side part we haven't seen since. He played the desperate, the drunk and the cheated, and his life trajectory was as tragic as any of his movies. A car accident at the prime of his career left him in constant pain, and he drank himself to an early death, creating an aesthetic of suffering that has guided the way we think of him today. But for 12 years, he set Hollywood on fire.
From the start, Clift was framed as a rebel and an individual. When he first came to Hollywood, he didn't sign a contract, waiting until after the success of his first two movies to negotiate a three-picture deal with Paramount that would allow him total discretion over projects. It was unheard of, especially for a young star, but it was a seller's market. If Paramount wanted him, they would have to give him what he wanted: a power differential that would structure the star-studio relationship for the next 40 years.
When the press talked about Clift, they talked about his ability and beauty, but they also talked about how unconventional and strange he was. He insisted on keeping his residence in New York, spending as little time as possible in Hollywood. His apartment, which he rented for $10 a month, was described by his friends as banged up and by him as fantastic. He survived on two meals a day, mostly combinations of steak, eggs, and orange juice, and avoided nightclubs, instead spending his free time reading Chekov, classic works on history and economics, and Aristotle, whom he praised. for his faith in happiness. , or the sweet art of the soul. When he wasn't reading or exhausted in preparation for a role, he liked to go to the local night court and attend high-profile court cases just to see the humanity on display.
Clift didn't care about appearances: the Los Angeles Times called him the idol of the movie Rumpled; he infamously owned only one suit. When he came to visit famous fanzine author Elsa Maxwell at her house, she had her maid elbow curse him on her jacket. His beat-up car was 10 years old and his best friends were out of the movie business. In his words, he was nothing more than an ordinary second class wolf.
Clift's private life was dull: he didn't date, he didn't flirt, he didn't go out in public. The image of him was, more than anything else, confused, unmatched by pre-existing Hollywood star categories. But he was handsome and seductive on screen, creating an appetite for confirmation of that same Clift off screen. So the fan magazines got creative: the August 1949 cover of Movieland, for example, featured a respectable-looking, suit-wearing, smiling Clift along with the enticing headline Making Love the Clift Way. But when readers looked inside the magazine, all they found was a two-page spread of stills from The Heiress featuring Clift in various stages of flirtation with Olivia de Havilland, extrapolating that Clift's kissing style was soft but possessively brutal; pleading, but demanding everything. . . .
It was flimsy speculation built on shaky evidence, but with no sign of any lovemaking in Clift's life, it was all the fan magazines had. In fact, it was his apparent lack of romantic attachments that most confounded the gossip press. He had a close friendship with a woman named Myra Letts, whom gossip columnists tried so hard to frame as a love interest. But Clift's rebuttal was firm, emphasizing that they were neither in love nor engaged; They've known each other for 10 years, she helped him with his work, and those romantic rumors embarrass us both. He was also close to stage actress Libby Holman, 16 years his senior, who had become a notorious figure in the gossip columns following the suspicious death of her wealthy husband, rumors of lesbianism, and her general practice of dating. with younger men. Clift was so protective of Holman that when he was offered the lead role in Sunset Boulevard, he turned her down, reportedly to avoid any suggestion that Libby Holman was her own delusional Norma Desmond, using a handsome young man to pursue her lost stardom.
Clift was unfazed by his apparent lack of love life: he told the press that he would marry when he met a girl he wanted to marry; meanwhile, he was playing in the field. When asked by another columnist if she had any hobbies, she replied: Yes, women. But as the years passed, it became increasingly clear that Clift wasn't just picky. It was, at least in the press, something akin to asexual: the title of a Moving Image article, written by Clift, stated simply, I like it solo!
The unspoken truth was that Clift was gay. The disclosure of his sexuality did not come about until the 1970s, when two high-profile biographers, one backed by his close confidants, came out, making him a gay icon within two years. Today, the details of Clift's sexuality are impossible to know: his brother, Brooks, would later claim that his brother was bisexual, while various Hollywood writings indicate that Clift's sexuality was not entirely a mystery. secret. In Truman Capote's unpublished novel Answered Prayers, for example, the author imagines a dinner party between Clift, Dorothy Parker, and the flamboyant stage actress Tallulah Bankhead:
. . . It's so beautiful, Miss Parker murmured. sensitive. So finely done. The most beautiful young man I have ever seen. Too bad he's a cocksucker. Then sweetly, with wide eyes and the girl's naivete, he said, Oh. Oh darling. Did I say something wrong? I mean, he's a cocksucker, isn't he, Tallulah? Miss Bankhead said, Well, d-d-honey, I r-r-wouldn't really know. He has never sucked my dick.
Other accounts of Clift's homosexuality abound: early in his film career, he was supposedly warned that being gay would ruin him; he was so self-conscious about being seen as feminine or fairy in some way that when he ad-libbed a line in The Search, calling a boy darling, he insisted that director Fred Zinnemann reshoot the take.
Clift's sexuality, like those other '50s idols Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, was carefully hidden from the public. But that didn't mean the gossip press didn't hint at something different, something weird, in the broadest sense of the word, about him. Just look at the fan magazine titles: Making Love the Clift Way, Two Loves Has Monty, The Tragic Love Story of Montgomery Clift, Is It True What They Say About Monty? Who is Monty kidding? He is Travelin' Light, The Creepy Love Life of Montgomery Clift and, perhaps most blatantly, Monty Clift: Woman Hater or Free Soul?. Benign to most but, in hindsight, highly suggestive.
Whatever relationships Clift had, he was prudent. Unlike Rock Hudson, whose affairs were exposed almost to the entire nation by Confidential, Clift never made it to the pages of scandal rags. He was lonely, but aided by his refusal to live in Los Angeles or participate in the café society, he was able to keep his private life private.
Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor in A Place in the Sun.
Courtesy of the Everett Collection.
Clift earned Best Actor Oscar nominations for the 1951 film A Place in the Sun and 1953 From Here to Eternity; both times he lost to older actors (Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, respectively) and established his reputation, along with Marlon Brando and James Dean, as a young outsider whose talent intimidated Hollywood. After Eternity he left Hollywood for several years and signed a three-year contract with MGM in 1955 to do Raintree County, which reunited him with his Place in the Sun co-star Elizabeth Taylor. The script wasn't necessarily that special, but it would give him a chance to reunite with Elizabeth Taylor, and that, it seemed, was enough to bring him out of semi-retirement.
Taylor had married British actor Michael Wilding in 1952, but by 1956, her marriage was on the decline. During the filming of Raintree County, Clift and Taylor seemed to have rekindled their 'it is or it isn't' relationship; According to one of Clift's biographers, on some days he threatened to stop seeing Elizabeth Taylor; then the idea made him burst into tears. Another apocryphal legend has Taylor sending Clift reams of love letters, which she then read aloud to her male partner at the time. It's impossible for us to know what happened, or if the two even had a relationship that went beyond platonic, but he was returning from a party at Taylor's house, in the middle of filming for Raintree County, that he crashed his car into a telephone pole.
Moments after the crash, actor Kevin McCarthy, driving in front of Clift, ran back to check on him and saw that his face was a smashed, bloody pulp. I thought he was dead. McCarthy ran to find Taylor, Wilding and Rock Hudson and Hudson's wife, Phyllis Gates, who ran to the crash site. What happened next is somewhat confusing: one version has Hudson pulling Clift out of the car and Taylor cradling him in her arms, at which point Clift began to choke and point to his throat, where, it soon became apparent, two of his teeth they had stayed. after coming loose during the accident. Taylor gasped, put her hand to his throat, and pulled out his teeth. True or not, the strength of the story is a testament to what people wanted to believe about the bond between the two stars. According to this version of the story, when the photographers arrived, Taylor announced that he knew each and every one of them personally, and that if they took pictures of Clift, who was still very much alive, he would make sure they never worked in Hollywood again. . Regardless of the veracity of this story, one thing remains true: there is not a single image of Clift's broken face.
According to Clift's doctors, it was surprising that he was alive. But after an initial flurry of coverage, he withdrew from the public eye altogether. Months of surgeries, reconstruction and physical therapy followed. Production resumed on Raintree County, which the studio feared would fail following Clift's accident. But Clift knew the film would be a hit, if only because audiences would want to compare his long-unseen face before and after the accident. In truth, his face was not really disfigured. It was much older though, by the time Raintree County hit theaters it had been off screen for four and a half years. But the facial reconstruction, heavy use of painkillers and rampant alcohol abuse made him look like he had aged a decade.
And so began what Robert Lewis, Clift's teacher at the Actors Studio, called the longest suicide in Hollywood history. Even before Raintree, the decline had been visible. Author Christopher Isherwood tracked Clift's decline in his diaries, and by August 1955, he was drinking from his career; on the set of Raintree, the crew had designated words to communicate how drunk Clift was: Bad was Georgia, really bad was Florida, and worst of all was Zanzibar. Almost all of his good looks are gone, Isherwood wrote. He has a ghastly, broken expression. And it wasn't just on private record: In October 1956, Louella Parsons reported on Clift's very poor health and Holman's attempts to clean him up. His decline was never explicitly evoked, but with his face in Raintree County, he was there for all to see.
While filming his next picture, Lonely Hearts (1958), Clift lashed out, proclaiming that I am not—I repeat, not—a member of the Beat Generation. I am not one of America's angry young men. I don't consider myself a member of the ripped sweatshirt fraternity. He was not a young rebel, an old rebel, a tired rebel, or a rebellious rebel; the only thing that mattered to him was to recreate a part of life on the screen. He was tired of being a symbol, a symptom, a testimony of something.
In The Young Lions (1958), published just two years after the accident, the pain and resentment seem almost visible. It would be his only film with Brando, even though the two barely shared the screen. Taylor, finally free from his long-standing contract with MGM, then used his power as Hollywood's biggest star to insist that Clift be cast in his new project. Suddenly Last Summer (1959). It was a huge gamble: Since everyone knew how much alcohol and pills Clift was taking, he was virtually uninsurable on set. But the producer, Sam Spiegel, decided to go ahead, no matter the risk.
The results were not pretty. Clift was unable to get through longer scenes, having to split them into two or three parts. The issue, which involved him assisting in the cover-up of a dead man's apparent homosexuality, must have provoked mixed emotions. Director Joseph Mankiewicz attempted to replace Clift, but Taylor and co-star Katharine Hepburn defended and supported him. Hepburn was reportedly so outraged by Mankiewicz's treatment of Clift that when the film was officially over, she found the director and spat in his face.
The decline continued. Clift appeared in The Misfits, a revisionist western best known as the last Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable film. The director, John Huston, supposedly brought Clift in because he thought he would have a calming effect on Monroe, who was deeply involved in her own addictions, with her own personal demons. But even Monroe reported that Clift was the only person I know that he is in worse shape than me. The set footage is as poignant as it is heartbreaking: it's as if the three of them are meditating on their respective declines, and there's a sad and peaceful resignation to the difference between what their bodies could do and how people wanted to remember them.
But audiences in 1961 were too close to the everyday deterioration of its stars to see the meditative genius of The Misfits. It was also a dark and melancholic film: as Variety noted, the complex mass of introspective conflicts, symbolic parallels, and motivational contradictions were so nuanced as to seriously confuse the general public, who were probably unable to cope with the philosophical undercurrents of the film. screenplay by Arthur Miller. Or, like Bosley Crowther, taking the populist slant in The New York Times, Explained, the characters were funny, but also shallow and inconsequential, and that's the big problem with this movie.
Whether morally repulsive or philosophically compelling, The Misfits bombed, only to be revived, years later, as a masterpiece of the revisionist genre. Looking back, the film had a legacy of darkness surrounding it: Gable died of a heart attack less than a month after filming; Monroe was only able to attend the film's premiere with a pass of her stay in a psychiatric ward. She wouldn't die for another year and a half, but Misfits would be her last full movie. As for Clift, the shoot was incredibly taxing, both mentally and physically: as well as having a scar on his nose from a stray bull's horn, severe burns from ropes while trying to tame a wild horse, and various other injuries from beatings and falls. , she also performed what has come to be considered one of her best scenes, a heartbreaking and forced conversation with her mother from a phone booth. Even if Clift himself was already out of control, playing a character who did the same thing only amplified the psychological toll.
Following The Misfits, Clift's Breakup continued. He was such a disaster on the set of Freud (1962) that Universal sued him. While filming a 15-minute supporting role as a mentally handicapped Holocaust victim on Trial at Nuremberg (1961), he had to improvise all of his lines. But some of the old talent remained, or at least enough to earn Clift a best supporting actor nomination, playing, in the words of film critic David Thomson, a victim hopelessly damaged by suffering. Plans for Clift to play the title role in Carson McCullers' film adaptation of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter fell through, largely due to his lack of on-set assurance, and promises of a fourth collaboration with Taylor, this time with the producer Ray Stark, were never met. Between 1963 and 1966, he faded from the public eye, emerging only to film one final performance in the French spy thriller. The deserter (1966). But before the film could be released, Clift passed away, without fanfare, at the age of 45, succumbing to years of drug and alcohol abuse. Taylor, involved in filming with Richard Burton in Paris, sent flowers to his funeral. The long suicide was complete.
Many Hollywood stars have committed versions of the long suicide. Clift's biographies posit that he drank because he couldn't be his true self, because homosexuality was the shame he had to take refuge in. But if you look at his own words, his testimony about what made him act, you will see the culprit. The eternal question he asked himself, as he once wrote in his diary, was: How to remain thin-skinned, vulnerable, and still alive? For Clift, the task proved impossible. Clift once said: The closer we get to the negative, to death, the more we flourish. He was carried off that cliff, but he fell straight down. And so he remains frozen in the popular imagination, into From Here to Eternity—those high cheekbones, that set jaw, the steady gaze: a magnificent, proud, tragically broken thing to behold.
