Montgomery Clift had the most earnest of faces: big, pleading eyes, a set jaw, and the sort of immaculate side part we haven’t seen since. He played the desperate, the drunken, and the deceived, and the trajectory of his life was as tragic as that in any of his films. A car crash in 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 about him today. But for 12 years, he set Hollywood aflame.
From the start, Clift was framed as a rebel and an individual. When he first arrived in Hollywood, he didn’t sign a contract, waiting until after the success of his first two films to negotiate a three-picture deal with Paramount that allowed 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’d have to give him what he wanted—a power differential that would go on to structure the star-studio relationship for the next 40 years.
When the press talked about Clift, they talked about the skill and the beauty, but they also talked about what an offbeat, weird guy he was. He insisted on maintaining his residence in New York, spending as little time in Hollywood as possible. His apartment, which he rented for 10 dollars a month, was described by friends as “beat up” and by him as “terrific.” He survived on two meals a day, mostly combinations of steak, eggs, and orange juice, and he eschewed nightclubs, instead spending his spare time reading Chekov, classic works of history and economics, and Aristotle, whom he praised for his belief in happiness, or the “gentle art of the soul.” When he wasn’t reading or exhausting himself in preparation for a part, he liked to go to the local night court and attend high-profile court cases just to watch the humanity on display.
Clift cared nothing for appearances: the Los Angeles Times called him the “Rumpled Movie Idol”; he infamously owned only one suit. When he came to visit storied fan-magazine author Elsa Maxwell at her home, she had her maid darn the elbow in his jacket. His beat-up car was 10 years old, and his best friends were all outside of the movie business. He was, in his words, nothing more than an “ordinary, second-class wolf.”
These anecdotes, and dozens like them, would establish Clift, along with Brando, as the embodiment of 50s youth culture, rebelling against conformity and all that postwar Americans were supposed to embrace. Yet Clift would come to hate the image that constrained him, just as he hated the suggestion that he was a slob, unfriendly, or loathed in Hollywood: after the story of his bare closet came out in the Saturday Evening Post, he worked arduously to set the record straight, underlining the ways in which publicity takes a kernel of the truth and expands it into legend. In his words, “I learned that most writers don’t need interviews to write about me. They seem to have their stories all written out beforehand.”
Clift’s private life was boring—he didn’t date, he didn’t flirt, he didn’t hang out in public. His image was, more than anything else, confusing—unmalleable to Hollywood’s preexisting star categories. But he was handsome and beguiling on-screen, creating an appetite for confirmation of that same Clift off the screen. So the fan magazines got creative: the August 1949 cover of Movieland, for example, featured a grinning, suited, respectable-looking Clift paired with the tantalizing 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 yet possessively brutal; pleading, but demanding all. . . .”
It was a flimsy speculation built on shaky evidence, but with no sign of any “real” lovemaking in Clift’s life, it was all the fan magazines had. Indeed, it was his apparent lack of romantic attachments that confounded the gossip press the most. He had a close friendship with a woman named Myra Letts, whom the gossip columnists tried arduously to frame as a love interest. But Clift’s rebuttal was firm, emphasizing that they were neither in love nor engaged—they’d known each other for 10 years, she helped him with his work, and “those romantic rumors are embarrassing to both of us.” He was also close with stage actress Libby Holman, 16 years his senior, who had become a notorious feature in the gossip columns following the suspicious death of her wealthy husband, rumors of lesbianism, and her general practice of dating younger men. Clift was so protective of Holman that when offered the plum role of the male lead in Sunset Boulevard, he turned it down—reportedly to avoid any suggestion that Libby Holman was his own delusional Norma Desmond, using a handsome young man to pursue her lost stardom.
Clift was unperturbed by his apparent lack of a love life: he told the press that he would get married when he met a girl he wanted to marry; in the meantime, he was “playing the field.” When another columnist asked him if he had any hobbies, he replied, “Yes, women.” But as the years passed, it became more and more clear that Clift wasn’t just picky. He was, at least in the press, something approaching asexual—the title of a Motion Picture article, “authored” by Clift, declared simply, “I Like It Lonely!”
The unspoken truth was that Clift was gay. The revelation of his sexuality did not emerge until the 70s, when two high-profile biographers, one endorsed by his close confidants, revealed as much, rendering him a gay icon within the span of two years. Today, it’s impossible to know the specifics of Clift’s sexuality: his brother, Brooks, would later claim that his brother was bisexual, while various writings from within Hollywood indicate that Clift’s sexuality wasn’t entirely a secret. In Truman Capote’s unpublished novel Answered Prayers, for example, the author imagines a dinner party between Clift, Dorothy Parker, and flamboyant stage actress Tallulah Bankhead:
Other testimonies to Clift’s gayness abound: early in his film career, he had purportedly been warned that being gay would ruin him; he was so conscious of being seen as feminine or fey in any way that when he ad-libbed a line in The Search, calling a boy “dear,” he insisted that director Fred Zinnemann reshoot the take.
Clift’s sexuality, like those other 50s idols Rock Hudson and Tab Hunter, was carefully concealed from the public. But that didn’t mean that the gossip press didn’t hint at something different, something queer, 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,” “Montgomery Clift’s Tragic Love Story,” “Is It True What They Say About Monty?” “Who Is Monty Kidding?” “He’s Travelin’ Light,” “The Lurid Love Life of Montgomery Clift,” and, perhaps most flagrantly, “Monty Clift: Woman Hater or Free Soul?”. Benign to most but, in hindsight, highly suggestive.
Whatever relationships Clift may have had, he was circumspect. Unlike Rock Hudson, whose affairs were very nearly exposed to the entire nation by Confidential, Clift never made the pages of the scandal rags. He was “lonely,” yet with the help of his refusal to live in Los Angeles or participate in café society, he was able to keep his private life private.
Clift earned best-actor Oscar nominations for 1951’s A Place in the Sun and 1953’s From Here to Eternity; both times he lost to older actors (Humphrey Bogart and William Holden, respectively), and established his reputation, alongside Marlon Brando and James Dean, as a young outsider whose talent intimidated Hollywood. After Eternity he dropped out of Hollywood for several years, and signed a three-year contract with MGM in 1955 to make Raintree County, which re-united 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 re-unite with Elizabeth Taylor, and that, it seemed, was enough to pull him out of semi-retirement.
Taylor had married British actor Michael Wilding in 1952, but by 1956, their marriage was in decline. During the filming of Raintree County, Clift and Taylor seemed to have rekindled their is-it-or-isn’t-it relationship; according to one of Clift’s biographers, “Some days he would threaten to stop seeing Elizabeth Taylor—then, the thought would make him burst into tears.” Other apocryphal legend has Taylor sending Clift piles of love letters, which he then read aloud to his male companion at the time. It’s impossible for us to know what happened—or if the two even had a relationship that went beyond the platonic—but it was returning from a party at Taylor’s house, mid-filming for Raintree County, that he smashed his car into a telephone pole.
Moments after the accident, actor Kevin McCarthy, driving in front of Clift, ran back to check on him, seeing that “his face was torn away—a bloody pulp. I thought he was dead.” McCarthy ran to fetch Taylor, Wilding, and Rock Hudson and Hudson’s wife, Phyllis Gates, who all raced to the site of the accident. What happened next is somewhat fuzzy: one version has Hudson pulling Clift from the car and Taylor cradling him in her arms, at which point Clift started choking and motioning to his throat, where, it soon became clear, two of his teeth had lodged themselves after coming loose during the accident. Taylor opened his mouth, put her hand down his throat, and pulled out the teeth. True or not, the resilience of the story is a testimony to what people wanted to believe about the bond between the two stars. According to this version of the story, when photographers arrived, Taylor announced that she knew each and every one of them personally-- and if they took pictures of Clift, who was still very much alive, she’d make sure they never worked in Hollywood again. Regardless of the veracity of this story, one thing remains true: there’s not a single picture of Clift’s broken face.
According to Clift’s doctors, it was “amazing” that he was even alive. But after an initial flurry of coverage, he retreated from public view entirely. Months of surgeries, rebuilding, 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 smash, if only because audiences would want to compare his long unseen face from before and after the accident. In truth, his face wasn’t truly disfigured. It was, however, much older—by the time Raintree County made its way to theaters, he’d been off the screen for four and a half years. But the facial reconstruction, heavy painkiller use, and rampant alcohol abuse made it look like he’d aged a decade.
And thus 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 journals, and by August 1955, he was “drinking himself out of a career”; on the set of Raintree, the crew had designated words to communicate how drunk Clift was: bad was Georgia, very bad was Florida, and worst of all was Zanzibar. “Nearly all his good looks are gone,” Isherwood wrote. “He has a ghastly, shattered expression.” And it wasn’t just in private record: in October 1956, Louella Parsons reported on Clift’s “very bad health” and Holman’s attempts to clean him up. His decline was never explicitly evoked, but with his visage in Raintree County, it was there for all to see.
While filming his next picture, Lonelyhearts (1958), Clift lashed out, proclaiming, “I am not—repeat not—a member of the Beat Generation. I am not one of America’s Angry Young Men. I do not count myself as a member of the ripped-sweatshirt fraternity.” He wasn’t a “young rebel, an old rebel, a tired rebel, or a rebellious rebel”—all he cared about was re-creating a “slice of life” on the screen. He was sick of being a symbol, a symptom, a testament to something.
In The Young Lions (1958), released just two years after the accident, the pain and resentment seem almost visible. It’d be his only film with Brando, even though the two barely shared the screen. Taylor, at last free from her long-standing contract with MGM, next used her power as the biggest star in Hollywood to insist that Clift be cast in her new project, Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). It was a huge wager: since everyone knew how much booze and pills Clift was on, he was virtually uninsurable on set. But the producer, Sam Spiegel, decided to go forward, no matter the risk.
The results were not pretty. Clift couldn’t get through longer scenes, having to split them up into two or three chunks. The subject matter, which involved him assisting in the cover-up of a dead man’s apparent homosexuality, must have sparked mixed emotions. Director Joseph Mankiewicz tried to replace Clift, but Taylor and co-star Katharine Hepburn defended and supported him. Hepburn was reportedly so incensed by Mankiewicz’s treatment of Clift that when the film officially wrapped, she found the director and spat in his face.
The decline continued. Clift appeared in The Misfits, a revisionist western best known as the final film of Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. The director, John Huston, supposedly brought in Clift because he thought he’d have a “soothing effect” on Monroe, who was deeply embroiled in her own addictions, with her own personal demons. But even Monroe reported that Clift was “the only person I know who is in even worse shape than I am.” The pictures from the set are as poignant as they are heartbreaking: it’s as if all three were meditating on their respective declines, and there’s a sad, peaceful resignation at the difference between what their bodies could do and how people wanted to remember them.
But 1961 audiences were too close to the day-to-day deterioration of its stars to see the meditative genius of The Misfits. It was also a dark, melancholy film: as a review in Variety pointed out, the “complex mass of introspective conflicts, symbolic parallels, and motivational contradictions” was so nuanced as to “seriously confound” general audiences, who were likely unable to cope with the philosophical undercurrents of the Arthur Miller script. Or, as Bosley Crowther, taking the populist slant in The New York Times, explained, the characters were amusing, but they were also “shallow and inconsequential, and that is the dang-busted trouble with this film.”
Whether morally repulsive or philosophically compelling, The Misfits bombed, only to be recuperated, 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 from her stay at a psychiatric ward. She wouldn’t die for another year and a half, but Misfits would be her last completed film. As for Clift, the shoot was incredibly taxing, both mentally and physically: in addition to acquiring a scar across his nose from a stray bull’s horn, severe rope burns while attempting to tame a wild horse, and various other rough-and-tumble injuries, he also performed what has widely come to be regarded as one of his best scenes, a stilted, heartbreaking conversation with his mother from a phone booth. Even if Clift himself was already spiraling out of control, playing a character that did the same only amplified the psychological toll.
Following The Misfits, Clift’s disintegration continued. He was such a mess on the set of Freud (1962) that Universal sued him. While filming a 15-minute supporting role as a mentally handicapped victim of the Holocaust in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), he had to ad-lib all of his lines. But something of the old talent remained—or at least enough to earn Clift a nomination for best-supporting actor, playing, in the words of film critic David Thomson, “a victim irretrievably damaged by suffering.” Plans for Clift to play the lead in the film adaptation of Carson McCullers’s The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter fell through, in large part due to his uninsurability on set, and promises of a fourth collaboration with Taylor, this time with producer Ray Stark, never came to pass. Between 1963 and 1966, he faded from public view, emerging only to film a final performance in the French spy thriller The Defector (1966). But before the film could be released, Clift passed away, wholly without fanfare, at the age of 45, succumbing to years of drug and alcohol abuse. Taylor, caught up in filming with Richard Burton in Paris, sent flowers to the funeral. The long suicide was complete.
Many Hollywood stars have committed versions of the long suicide. Biographies of Clift posit that he drank because he couldn’t be his true self, because homosexuality was the shame he had to shelter within. But if you look at his own words, his testimonies about what acting did to him, you’ll see the culprit. His perpetual question to himself, as he once scribbled in his journal, was, “How to remain thin-skinned, vulnerable, and still alive?” For Clift, the task proved impossible. Clift once said, “The closer we come to the negative, to death, the more we blossom.” He took himself to that precipice, but he fell straight in. And so he remains frozen in the popular imagination, circa From Here to Eternity—those high cheekbones, that set jaw, the firm stare: a magnificent, proud, tragically broken thing to behold.
From Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of Hollywood Cinema by Anne Helen Petersen, to be published by arrangement with Plume, a member of Penguin Group (USA) LLC on September 30, 2014 © 2014 by Anne Helen Petersen.
