Montgomery Clift

After he rented the duplex, Monty took on a "live-in'* lover by the name of Dino. He was Italian-born, around Monty's age, an unemployed airline pilot married to a stewardess, and worked as a waiter in a small Italian restaurant. At the time, Monty was friendly with writer Truman Capote who, with some of Monty's other friends, knew about Dino. "He was an absolute moron," says Capote. "It was quite a mystery to me what Monty saw in him. Monty would travel with him everywhere." Suddenly, many young men like Dino were hanging around, and the ones Monty seemed most interested in were those who were the trashiest. "Perhaps," Mira speculates, "Monty had been brought up among such cultivated people that he now felt he had to rebel. Or maybe he needed people around who would not question his habits."

The new lover did not help Monty's drinking habits. Dr. Silverberg asked Dr. Ruth Fox to see him since he was having no success with the drinking, and the day of the appointment Monty walked into her waiting room and promptly passed out on the floor. Dr. Fox knew simply talking to Monty would do absolutely no good now, and immediately put him into the Regent Hospital for four days to dry him out.

She attempted to talk with him after the drying-out and make him understand the problem of alcoholism, but as Dr. Fox recalls, Monty wasn't at all interested in going to Alcoholics Anonymous; he wanted to drink. The only time it scared him was when he suddenly found he was unable to function—as when he passed out in her office—or when the drinking made him sick all day. She gave him Antabuse, a drug that makes the user violently ill if he consumes the smallest amount of alcohol. Monty made jokes about it, and would disappear for a month, until he came back so sick he had to be hospitalized again. Monty never did give her a chance to help. It wasn't a cure he wanted; it was a better tolerance for the liquor

By the summer of 1952, Monty was ready to get back to work. Every director in Hollywood wanted a crack at him, despite the damaging rumors they had heard about the frustrating interference of his acting coach, and Alfred Hitchcock won out, with I Confess..

Olivia de Havilland was also being considered for a part, and one night she had dinner with Hitch and Monty to discuss the movie. Olivia remembers: "At Hitch's that evening, Monty was so different from the reserved person with whom I had worked on The Heiress. I felt he wasn't fully himself. I think Hitch was rather puzzled too. Monty was extremely nice and attentive to me that night—flatteringly, alarmingly attentive! There seemed to be something hyperintense and overexcited about him, as if he were under the influence of some form of stimulant. It seemed to me his eyes had a different look, his pupils somewhat dilated. Monty was a slow and hesitant talker, but this night he talked fast. I said to myself that either his reaction to alcohol is quite unique, or it's something else. He offered to drive me home that night, and if I hadn't had my own car, I would still have said no."

She did not find I Confess suitable for her (it wasn't), and Anne Baxter finally signed for the part.

Monty drank continually throughout the shooting of I Confess, though never on the set. Mira became alarmed. Always before, Monty had spent his evenings quietly with her, but now he was running around to bars, getting plastered, mingling with rough trade—even provoking fist-fights. He seemed to be trying to follow Dr. Silverberg's advice, to become more aggressive

Silverberg would tell Monty that this behavior was good, because it meant that Monty was reliving a carefree childhood that he had never had. Mira tried to convince Monty not to take Silverberg's advice as gospel. No, Monty said, he agreed with Silverberg. He did not have enough control over his own life. He lacked aggressiveness. He should learn to live more freely. If he wanted to hang around trashy people, he should do it. Over and over, Mira tried to talk Monty out of this new prescription for living. Monty would listen to her, then his attention would drift away.

When Monty left for Rome, he did not take Mira. Instead, he took Dino. It was the first time since The Search that Monty had not asked Mira to accompany him. Dino carried Monty's luggage, looked after him, admired his stardom, and never made much of a fuss about his drinking. He was also a fickle opportunist, and soon began cheating on his famous lover.

Stazione Termini, based on an original story by Cesare Zavattini, was to be a film about two people, an Italian named Giovanni, and an American housewife on vacation in Rome named Mary played by Jennifer Jones.

Truman Capote recalls: "Jennifer got some sort of crush on Monty, and believe it or not she didn't realize that Monty really liked fellows. When she found out she got so upset, she went into the portable dressing room and stuffed a mink jacket down the portable toilet."

Capote spent a lot of time with Monty and Dino, and recalls that Monty was drinking a lot. "I suppose there was some sort of romantic problem between them." Wolfgang Reinhardt did more than suppose. "Monty was extremely upset over Dino, and there was some kind of competition going on between Monty and Truman. It was the one personal problem that I knew Monty was having." In the end, Monty got rid of Dino.

At the time, Monty was friendly with Merv Griffin, who was then unknown. Mira remembers one afternoon Monty had promised to pick them up in his rented car and drive them all back to the hotel. He came screeching to a halt in front of them, from a furious speed thirty or forty miles above the speed limit, obviously soused. Monty told them to hop in. Mira hesitated. Griffin good-naturedly suggested that Monty let him take the wheel. Monty wouldn't hear of it. He kept shouting at them in angry, abusive language.

Griffin kept trying to change Monty's mind. Suddenly, Monty put his foot on the accelerator and took off. Hours later, he finally showed up again, in the same hostile mood as before. During those weeks in Hollywood, he often treated Mira like that

Mira could feel the chill of something beautiful turning demonic: "I was becoming afraid of the way he was behaving. I felt that his driving was getting dangerous—not so much for me, but for him. When we were together and he was in that condition, I knew that I couldn't say anything. Monty would only have gotten angry. He was becoming so unpredictable."

From Here to Eternity was brilliantly cast....Lancaster was not Monty's sort of man or actor. For one thing, Lancaster was very vain. Jack Larson tells this story. Monty had just arrived at the studio for the start of filming and was still in the process of meeting all the actors. He hadn't shaken hands with Lancaster yet, and was on one of the set telephones, when he suddenly spotted Lancaster walking over to him. Monty was always particular about the amenities at the beginning of any film, and was anxious that Lancaster would not think him rude, so he tried to catch his eye to give him a look that said, "Oh, God, I wish this phone call would end."

But Lancaster would not look him in the eye. Instead, Lancaster's eyes roamed his slender body, taking in every inch of Monty's torso with burning interest. Monty later told Larson that he realized instantly that Lancaster, far from making a pass, was sizing up the competition. During the course of the film, Monty and Lancaster were polite, but found no common ground for friendship.

Monty's drinking was beginning to affect his work on the set, the first time it had ever happened on a film. James Jones was present at the shooting of one sequence. At first it seemed that he was just being playful, but when he began losing control and running around ,Zinnemann realized that there wasn't going to be any scene. ~

Sinatra also realized it and took Monty to his dressing room. Sinatra, by now, had developed an incredible power over Monty—no one had realized exactly how much power until this incident

After three-quarters of an hour, Monty and Frank came back, ready to shoot the scene.

To onlookers, like Fred Zinnemann, the change seemed brought about by Sinatra, whom Monty worshipped during the filming as a small boy loves a baseball hero. He had never gotten close to anyone like Sinatra before. Sinatra was a lovable daredevil; vulnerable inside, but a hard-drinking, noisy, brash, self-protective soldier of fortune on the outside. Physically, he was like Monty, but in all other respects he was different. The product of a lower-class New Jersey Italian family, Frank had learned to be a street-fighter in every sense. He knew how to turn depression into drunken fun, how to fight it out with misfortune and win. Monty—at heart still the little prince of a boy who had been protected from the grit of life and jailed in a prison of wealth and a mother's idea of refinement—^was fascinated with such an obvious winner.

The attraction was entirely mutual. Every instinct in Sinatra told him that Monty was an actor's actor. From Here to Eternity was to be Sinatra's debut as a real actor, and Monty was a symbol of that sort of accomplishment He was able to achieve a oneness with Monty, onscreen and off, that would have been impossible without the symbiotic effects of a loving friendship. Monty was always there, guiding, showing him how to get rid of the extraneous. Interestingly, the film would win best-supporting Oscars for Donna Reed and Frank Sinatra— both as a direct result of Monty's influence

Sinatra, too, was causing trouble. He was a man of moods. "He was wonderful to work with," says Zinnemann, "about ninety percent of the time." The other ten, he could be quite loud and objectionable. In one scene, Monty and Sinatra had rehearsed it standing up, but just before the shooting, Sinatra decided that it felt more natural sitting down. Zinnemann didn't like the idea, but Sinatra persisted—quite objectionably. Monty, who was sober for a change, decided to follow the script, as Zinnemann wanted, and remained standing.

Sinatra slapped Monty. They were such good friends that Sinatra knew he could get away with it, though by now everyone was going bananas watching this silliness. Zinnemann placated Sinatra by agreeing to the sitting position, but then producer Buddy Adler called Harry Cohn at the Royal Hawaiian Hotel where he was dining with General O'Daniel—in charge of the entire Pacific Air Force.

The whole dinner party came roaring onto the set in an Air Force limousine. Cohn, still in his white dinner jacket, slammed the limousine door behind him and strode up to them. How did actors dare tell the director what to do? Why wasn't the director following the script? He then threatened to shut the picture down if things weren't done his way. Embarrassed, Zinnemann told Cohn he would go back to the scene as written. Minutes later Cohn was off into the night with his Pacific Air Force entourage

It was to be shot the night before the whole company was scheduled to leave Honolulu, and the scene had to be in the can that night. Monty and Frank showed up drunk —and then Monty passed out Zinnemann was horror-stricken; there was no way the scene could be postponed. Sinatra grabbed Monty, slapped him on the face, shook him. It was almost an hour before Monty began to come out of it. Zinnemann was shaken, fretting, breathing hard. He couldn't understand why Monty was letting him down this way.

Finally, Sinatra got Monty half-sober and they began the scene.

It was the first time Fred Zinnemann had been made aware that drinking would interfere with Monty's work. He may have also suspected that Monty was becoming a bonafide alcoholic. Alcoholics have work troubles because they drink beyond their bodily tolerance. Sinatra, on the other hand, had no problems with the death scene because he was merely a heavy drinker who kept within his tolerance while he worked.

....Monty idolized Sinatra. He played his records until they wore out, he kept his photography in a place of honor in his duplex, and he showed off the gold lighter Sinatra had given him on Christmas that was engraved "Merry merry buddy boy. I'm with you all the way. Maggio."

The two kept in close contact until one night Monty go very drunk and came on sexually with a man at a party in Bel Air. Sinatra witnessed the incident and he had his bodyguards thrown Monty out of the party.

On March 25, 1954, only days prior to the first rehearsals of The Sea Gull, the Academy Awards were televised from Hollywood. Monty was nervous the whole day.

The top three contenders for Best Actor were Monty, Burt Lancaster, and William Holden. Everyone had told Monty that he would get the Oscar—he simply had to. Monty wasn't one to worship prizes, but he was a movie star now and, much as he loathed to admit it, he wanted the Oscar: the prize that meant Total Approval.

Forty-three million people watched that night as From Here to Eternity walked off with all the Oscars— almost all, But William Holden got the Oscar for Best Actor.

Monty was depressed. It seemed terribly unfair to Monty and all of his friends. And it was. What had happened was a simple problem in mathematics. From Here to Eternity drew more votes for Best Actor than any other film, but since so many members voted for Burt Lancaster as well as Montgomery Clift, the votes canceled each other out, leaving William Holden the winner. It was just rotten luck.

That same night Monty called Renee Zinnemann. He sighed a lot and made despairing noises. It was more a conversation of guttural sounds than of words. Monty was fragile enough to have gone into a long, major depression over the loss of the Oscar, but The Sea Gull distracted him

By now, Monty knew everything was wrong. An hour before the dress rehearsal, he stalked off after exchanging nasty words with some of the actresses, and could only be lured back to the stage by Lehman Engel.

In desperation, Monty had Arthur Miller come to see the previews. Miller sat through the first performance.

"We could feel waves of hatred coming from the audience during that performance," says Maureen Stapleton. During the intermission, friends and relatives of the cast could hear people practically yelling that they didn't know -what was going on onstage. After they had virtually stormed out of the theater at the end of the play, Houghton asked Arthur Miller if he had any notes for the cast.

Miller stood up, an awesome six-foot-three figure. He glanced down at a piece of paper and then up at the stage, where the actors all stood limply.

"Yes," he said. "My first note is the audience can't hear." He paused. "My second note is the audience can't hear.*'He paused again. "My one hundred and fiftieth note is the audience can't hear.

He was marvelous. He stood in front of the poor actors and made a devastating postmortem : "Monty, don't be such a dumb tramp. You have to stand up straight, stop slouching around, and behave like a gentleman.".

It was like fresh air being blown into the theater. For the first time, someone with real muscle was telling the Unholy Three off, taking charge and bringing real concepts into a production that had been a mere whim, a flight of half-baked imagination.

It looked like The Sea Gull would be whipped into some sort of shape after all, but with only three days before opening night, could Miller perform a miracle?

Opening night. May 11, 1954. A star-studded premiere. The residents around the Phoenix Theatre at Second Avenue and Twelfth Street had never seen so many famous people in their neighborhood. Marlon Brando, Marlene Dietrich, Patricia Neal, Richard Harris, Fred Zinnemann, Mike Nichols, Anthony Perkins, and a host of others crowded into the theater; critics from every major paper in town lined the aisles. It was the theater event of the season.

The miracle didn't happen. There were eight different styles of acting, and a lot of it couldn't be heard past the fifth row—but everyone who saw the play insists there had never before been such a powerful Konstantin as Monty's. Even though Monty kept his voice down to Mira's, somehow one managed to hear every word he said. Mira and Kevin got the worst notices. Atkinson summed up their performances

Monty's attitude toward Mira became more ambivalent than ever. With friends of hers, like Kevin and Maureen, his attitude was one of concern for her welfare. With others, he tore her apart mercilessly. He said that he was in shock about how bad she was in the play, that she was everything she had told him not to be: selfish on stage, rigid. "I only did The Sea Gull," he told Jack Larson, "to give Mira a career." He later told someone else that the real reason he turned against Mira was that she dared tell him, when she was told she would have to leave the set of From Here to Eternity: "But Monty, you need me to perform."

Monty no longer had involvements with women by this stage of his life. His last major attempt at a heterosexual relationship—if it was really even an "attempt"—was with Elizabeth Taylor during A Place in the Sun. After that would-be affair aborted, the only woman with whom he seems to have had a physical relationship was Libby Holman, and by now that had clearly become a Platonic friendship.

Monty's sex life had become wholly male-oriented, but his homosexual relationships now contained the same destructiveness that was apparent in every other aspect of his life.

He was becoming callous about his partners. Rick, for instance, had always been loyal and undemanding. They had seen little of each other lately, The meetings were always at Rick's place. "He was getting into the habit of never showing up and not even calling to explain," says Rick. "I wrote him a long letter telling him that I didn't understand why he was doing this to me and that I didn't care if I never saw him again. He called me up as soon as he got the letter and apologized. He just said that he had gotten drunk and forgot to call." But there was more than just drunken forgetfulness.

That Sumner, Monty rented a house in Ogunquit, Maine —only a block away from one rented by Dr. William Silverberg, and near Libby's place in Kennebunkport. Monty invited Rick up for a weekend. "The night I got up there Monty was drinking and carrying on and higher than I had ever seen him before. I didn't know much about pills, but I figured he had downed something else besides liquor.

We went to bed. Suddenly Monty started slapping me around. He got his belt and started beating me. I was frightened. Nothing like this had ever happened before. I ran out of his bedroom into another and locked the door. Monty pounded on it. The next morning he was crying and asked me why I had locked the door on him. I told him and he said he couldn't remember a thing."

One day Monty saw a handsome twenty-year-old on the beach. He walked over to him and said, "You're a very beautiful boy." His name was Dickie. When Dickie realized it was Montgomery Clift who was making a play for him, he was thrilled. They made it that night, but what they had lasted barely a week.

"Monty was so sadistic that I just couldn't put up with it. I only saw him at big parties and we got very drunk. When we did get it on, I'd wake up in the morning all battered and bruised. He was rough and overly dominant. He threw me around like a toothpick. When he kissed you, he kissed you so it hurt. One time, I came away with a bloody mouth.

Dickie planned a party for Monty the night after they met. Monty said he would love to come but didn't want a crowd of people staring at him. Dickie assured him there would only be a handful, but after word got out, Dickie's friends called and begged to meet Monty Clift There were almost thirty people assembled, when they heard a loud ripping sound, and there was Montgomery Clift crashing through a screen door, just like Captain Marvel. It had the effect Monty wanted—everyone was impressed. Coming through the screen door like that was just about all the personality Monty could muster for the crowd.

Dickie says that there wasn't a thing about Monty that would lead one to suspect that he was a homosexual. At parties, his behavior was very heterosexual: he talked with the women, when he did talk, as if he wanted to go to bed with them, and not with another man.

"I didn't like that rough stuff in bed. I was young and I was into love and affection, not violence. I felt that he was angry at himself—and this was the way he showed it— for being in bed with a boy. He was doing it, but he wasn't going to accept it.'

Monty isolated himself more and more with a little family of people, each of whom filled a certain need in his life. As his drinking and use of pills got worse, he became more selective than ever before in his choice of "family" members. To simply call them friends would be to misname their true function which was to take care of Monty. They were not there to stop him from drinking. They were there to hold his hand, be sympathetic, watch his drinking.

Monty's little "family" dinners were a phenomenon. Libby, Roddy McDowall and Marge were the regulars; there were perhaps two or three other old friends, like Kevin and Augusta, along with a few relative newcomers, like Arthur Miller, Maureen Stapleton, or Truman Capote: people who were already somewhat used to Monty's habits —for one had to be used to them to be able to stand the ritual.

The scenario, most of. which was supplied by Marge Stengel and Maureen Stapleton, went something like this. Monty would greet his guests, while his cook, Elizabeth Guenster, prepared dinner. He might show some of his new guests around the duplex, of which he was terribly proud. There would be a record playing on the new stereo. Elizabeth would signal from the kitchen that dinner was ready.

It was difficult at this time to tell how much liquor Monty had already consumed, but he would still seem sober. He would sit down at the table with the others and finish a second or third drink. Then he would go to the bathroom, and come back much more wobbly than before. Suddenly, Monty would start to slur his words. He would say something about having to put on a new record, and get up and walk across the room. Then he would fall on his face.

There would be a thud and heads would turn in his direction: No one would budge. The regulars knew he wanted to be left where he was. The conversation would simply continue as if nothing had happened. After half an hour or so, Monty would get up off the floor and head up to his sealed-off, hell-black bedroom. The dinner guests would simply continue on their own.

Unless one were a regular family member, Monty's sudden blackouts would seem incomprehensible. As most of the regulars knew, however, the part of the ritual which included the obligatory trip to the bathroom was when Monty took a downer, usually Demerol. The synergistic effect of the drug and the alcohol put Monty out. No pill "accident" could happen that often. Monty knew everything about pills, and how to mix them with alcohol for the right effect. He intended to pass out when he did.

For the longest time, Kevin McCarthy and Augusta did not realize what was happening. They ascribed "Monty's blackouts" to some sort of physical ailment or emotional instability. For them, it was still all part of Monty's boyishness and his understandable need to relive a stilted childhood. Yet even they couldn't help feeling that what was happening was serious. At times, Kevin would take Monty aside and tell him directly that it was time to pull himself together

Monty would reply, "Absolutely. You're right. Thank you, thank you, Kevin. Thank you for your interest. Thank you for being my friend, because it takes a friend to tell you." Monty would sound amazed, as if he truly had no idea how bad his behavior was becoming, and would tell Kevin to just wait, that the next time they got together he would be completely sober. The next time Kevin would see Monty, it was as if the conversation had never happened.

But Kevin had his own career to worry about. After The Sea Gull, it occurred to him that working with Monty was hurting him as an actor. While Monty came out fairly unscathed, it was widely felt that Kevin's Trigorin was outrageously boring and mishandled, and that Monty had cast him in the play simply out of friendship.

Thanks. I broke my book.

And then there was that other rumor, about which Kevin had been totally in the dark. *I'll never forget the conversation," he recalled. It was in Henry Hathaway's office at Twentieth Century-Fox on Fifth Avenue. I went up to see him about doing a part in a film, and suddenly he said:

'People are talking about you. They're saying that you're shacking up with your buddy, Monty Clift.' I said: 'Jesus! Where did that come from?' He said: T don't know where it came from, but you've got to listen to it.' He meant that literally, that Monty and I were a little too close, that there was a hint of a homosexual relationship. Nothing could have been farther from the truth." Hathaway said, "Lose that guy . . . he's killing your career.

There were incidents of a different nature, as well. The McCarthys were in a play together at the Bucks County Playhouse, and Monty drove up to see them. After the play, he offered to drive them back to Manhattan. Kevin wasn't aware of Monty's new driving habits. On the highway going back, Monty's foot kept pressing the accelerator until the speedometer was practically off the dial—120 miles per hour! Kevin distinctly remembers that Monty was "sober." The passengers held their breath. At that speed, anything could happen. Still, Monty wasn't satisfied. He came alarmingly close to cars passing on the opposite side of the highway, almost clipping them, as if it were a grim prank. By the end of the ride, everyone was completely shaken. What was Monty trying to prove? Kevin wondered.

Soon after, Monty came to see them in Dobbs Ferry. Their daughter, Mary, was a year and a half old. Monty was playing with her in his arms when Kevin suddenly saw him put one hand out to grab onto the refrigerator. The other hand couldn't hold the infant and she started to tumble. Kevin lurched forward and caught her just before her head hit the stone floor. Then Monty "blacked out,** keeling over onto the floor- himself.

After Monty left, Kevin and his wife had a serious talk. They called Monty, and in the nicest way they could, explained that, for the welfare of their children, it would be better if he didn't come out to see them again. Although Monty never mentioned it to Kevin, he never forgave him.

Although Kevin and Augusta still came to Monty*s house for dinner, they deliberately began seeing less of him. Kevin virtually end his best-friend status with Monty in 1955.

During the two and a half years that Monty stayed away from films, Roddy's career was non-existent. A year or so later, he would have a Broadway success and do endless live television shows, but now he was down. Roddy had nothing to do, so every day he would come over and sunbathe on the roof, or he would look for chores to do around the house. Although Roddy was not a person in whom Monty could confide all his anguish, he nevertheless offered Monty a rare, unquestioning friendship.

For all Roddy's loyalty, however, Monty could pay him back with cruelty. He would often let Roddy know there was a dinner party afoot, then not invite him. It was as if Monty were testing him to find out just how steadfast he was.

There were other cruelties as well, but the outcome was always the same. Roddy never showed even a glimmer of bitterness or the least slackening of enthusiasm for their friendship. If indeed this was a long, drawn-out "test,'* Roddy passed it. He was the only member of Monty's "family" to remain close to Monty until the day he died

In 1956, Monty signed for the lead in Raintree County, because it meant the chance to work with Elizabeth again, and because he was in such great debt to MCA that he simply had to take this film. It was to be the first in a three-picture deal with MGM.

But Monty was with Elizabeth! No one had the effect on him that Elizabeth had. She was more than just a friend and an ex-romance: she was like a devoted sister. Working with her, spending evenings at the house she and Michael Wilding had near the very top of Benedict Canyon, was what Monty was looking forward to, not the film. He could have taken a dozen other pictures, with superior screenplays, but he accepted Raintree because Elizabeth had specifically asked for him as co-star

Naturally she had seen the big change in Monty, but she was "family" and Monty was free to indulge in "hebephrenic" behavior in front of her—eating off other people's plates, being rude to dinner guests, getting excessively drunk and incoherent. "Elizabeth saw it, but she never talked about it much with me," says Michael Wilding.

"She didn't like speaking of Monty behind his back; she was much too protective of him. And she loved him and wanted what was best for him, and I think she felt that telling Monty to stop, or any kind of criticism, was not going to pull him out of whatever doldrums he was in." Apparently she didn't know about the pills. Like many others, she and Wilding assumed it was simply liquor.

For Monty, the relationship was better than any pill. He became enthusiastic and laughed a lot. He went to the house every other day. On weekends, she, Monty, and Michael Wilding would go for excursions and have a great time. However, beneath the surface laughter, there always seemed to be a lingering depression. Not even Elizabeth's presence could cure that.

After a few weeks, the general feeling was that Monty was an oddball. There was a good deal of growing suspicion about his personal habits. At first, Monty never drank in front of people on the set, but he would come in in the mornings complaining about "headaches" and "not having slept." And then people began to notice "the gray bag." It looked liked a doctor's satchel, only a little larger. It was routine for prop men to handle actors' belongings, but Monty would allow no one near his bag.

"Everybody knew what was in it," says Eddie Woehler, the production manager. "One look at Monty's face and I could tell what he had taken. His face would be blank and his eyes open and staring. We always knew when the gray bag was coming and we all laughed about it, at least at first. Actually, no one paid the bag much mind until things started happening."

Cameraman Bob Surtees says, "It was sad. We all respected him so much in the beginning, but after a while the company seemed divided fifty-fifty in their attitude toward the gray bag. The more sophisticated felt sympathy for Monty's plight. The less sophisticated were intolerant and thought of Monty as degenerate. A lot of people like me saw the tragedy in him."

Whatever people felt about the mysterious bag and the glassy stare, almost everybody liked him anyway. He had a lost soul's craziness about him that was tremendously appealing—even when, as a result of the craziness, one wound up with a burn or a bruise. Bob Surtees recalls, Monty had this maddening habit of hitting you with a cigarette and burning your hand as he passed. I think he would forget that he was holding a lit cigarette. He would sometimes smoke it down so far that it would bum his fingers and he wouldn't feel it. The next day he'd say to me that he didn't know how his fingers got burned."

Monty had other odd habits, as well. He liked to put the weight of his body on people's feet, or lean on them, or throw himself on them like a big dog. It was a sign that Monty liked you, and that you were the kind of person that he wanted to depend on. He was not physical with other men on the set in an erotic sense—not even in a mock-erotic sense—so this habit was never misunderstood.

Monty particularly liked the assistant director, Ridgeway ("Reggy") Callow. He would throw one of his arms around Reggy's back, slouch his full weight against him, allowing his head to go limp to one side so that it knocked against Reggy's head, and let himself be dragged in this partially supported manner for thirty feet or so. It was peculiar, but nobody minded.

Meanwhile, Michael Wilding and Elizabeth Taylor were breaking up. Monty was one of the first to learn that their troubles had reached a crisis.

At the time, there was no one closer to the two of them than Monty. Since it had become pointless talking out their problems with each other, they each turned to him. One of them would come to his house one evening, spend practically the whole night talking about the desperate situation, and then leave at four or five in the morning; the following night, the other would come and talk until the wee hours.

The problem was, simply put, that Elizabeth was no longer the shy, self-conscious young girl who broke down in tears because no one would talk to her at a party, or who was afraid to voice an opinion because others would think her ill-educated. In essence, Elizabeth had outgrown her need for a cultivated father figure like Michael Wilding, and now they had little upon which to base a relationship.

Monty spent most of those nights just listening and trying to relieve the panic that they were feeling. But he was really in no shape to give up his sleep listening to someone else's troubles

On Saturday, May 12, Elizabeth called in the early afternoon to make sure Monty was coming to a dinner party she was holding that night. After the past few days of marital soul-searching, Monty told her that he honestly didn't think he had the strength to make it. Later she called back, obviously disappointed, and told him that a priest was going to be at the party, and that he was really unusual—the sort of priest who says "fuck"—and he had seen I Confess, was tremendously impressed, and was dying to meet Monty.

Monty didn't care, and kept trying to get out of the dinner diplomatically, telling her that he had already dismissed Florian and he hated driving at night, but she was insistent, and Monty in the end gave in.

That evening, he drove up to the Wildings'. In the daytime, the Benedict Canyon...It was a simple, dinner party. Kevin McCarthy was there, and Rock Hudson, and some others. Monty arrived quite sober, and drank only a few half-glasses of wine that evening. Sometime that night, however, Monty went to the bathroom and took "two downers."

No one knew about it then, but Monty admitted later that he had taken them in the hope that they would help him sleep later on—he hadn't been able to sleep for nights. It was early, only half past midnight. Kevin announced that he was leaving; he had to make a plane the next morning. Monty came out to see him off, and began to talk in a lucid and very chipper manner about the film and Hollywood in general. For an instant, there was a surge of the old friendship between them.

Kevin was just about to take off when Monty said, "Why don't I leave, too?" He went back into the house, made hurried good-byes, and came back out to the parking area. "I don't know how the hell to get home from here," he said to Kevin, so Kevin volunteered to lead the way downhill until they reached a turn into an intersection where Monty could go on by himself

"I thought he wanted me to play Tea and Sympathy with him."

Sometimes I need a reminder that even beautiful women don't get everything their way. Even the most beautiful women in the world get treated badly sometimes!

As Kevin tells the story, "We started down the hill and all of a sudden he was coming up very fast behind me. We were approaching the first turn in the road, and it was very sharp. I didn't know why he was coming up behind me so fast. At the time I thought it was a prank, since I knew he loved to pull things like that. His lights were getting brighter and I thought he was going to hit me and I was going to go right through the house, which was on the hill just beyond the turn, and off the cliff!

I turned quickly. I thought to myself, 'He'll have to put on his brakes or he'll bump right into the fence in front of the house . . . Wow! That's close. I wish he'd stop playing around.' At the next turn, I figured I had had it and I wasn't going to get involved any more in the game. I was probably down the road about a hundred yards ahead of him when I saw his lights swaying erratically from side to side, like a dangling lantern, in my rear-view mirror.

"Suddenly his car just wasn't there anymore. I couldn't see it at all in my mirror. I still thought Monty was playing a game. I waited and waited for him up on the road, and then I thought that he must have gotten stuck, that he had gotten a wheel into some soft ground and was trying to get out, because I kept hearing the roar of his motor.

Finally I jumped out of my car, ran back up there, and saw that he was smashed into a cliff and that the motor was still running . . . how I couldn't possibly have imagined. Obviously he had taken the turn too wide, or didn't see it, and scraped the cliff on one side of the road; the car veered and went over onto the other side, crashing into a telephone pole, rebounded and then smashed into the cliff again.

I'm sure that's why I kept seeing the lights swaying -back and forth like that in the rear-view mirror. The motor was making a horrendous noise. I was afraid the car would catch fire, so I reached in and turned off the ignition. And I didn't see him. I thought, 'Holy shit! He's been thrown out of the car!'

"It was dark as hell. There was nothing. I turned my car around and shone my lights into his car and saw that he had been in the car all the time . . . under the dashboard. That's why the motor was running. Apparently his ass was squashed on the accelerator. Gas was leaking. The car could have gone up in flames. I thought he was dead. I thought he was gone. You've never seen such a mess. Blood all over the place. I didn't attempt to move him. Everything might have been broken, his neck, his back. From what I could see in the light from my car, it looked like the whole head had been pulled apart. I was frantic ... it was horrifying. I remember thinking, It's all over . . . he's dead . . .

I was confused. I didn't want to leave him, because if a car came down the road fast it would hit Monty, and if he was alive he'd be hit again. I went across to one of those unfinished houses, just wondering if there was somebody there ... a caretaker, a phone, or something. No one. So I just drove up the road like mad, and called, and Mike came to the door."

Kevin was shaking. "Monty's had a terrible accident. He hit a telephone pole."

"Oh, shut up, Kevin!" Wilding laughed. He thought Kevin had come back to play a sick joke.

Then he could see, after a few seconds, that Kevin was not play-acting. He was shaking so badly that his words weren't coming out properly. Elizabeth came to the door. She didn't understand what Kevin was saying at first, but then she distinctly heard: "Monty's dead. I think he's dead."

Elizabeth rushed out the door. Wilding told the others what had happened, and left them to call Rex Kennamer and the police. Elizabeth, Michael, and Rock Hudson followed Kevin's car down to the accident site and sprayed their headlights on the wrecked car.

Within the spotlighted circle of horror, Elizabeth could just barely make out a smashed head and a body jammed into the darkness under the dashboard. Glass from the shattered windshield was everywhere. Blood gushed from Monty's head.

After a struggle the men got a door open. Elizabeth crawled in, found Monty's head, and gently lifted it away from the steering wheel. His blood ran all over her dress. He was still breathing and moaning, his body trapped under the dashboard, which was now just bashed metal and hanging wires.

There was still no ambulance, no doctor, no police. Instead, a battery of photographers arrived. At the time, there was a grotesque system in Hollywood. Members of a camera club, hungry for scoop photos, hung around the police stations waiting for emergency calls, especially those involving movie stars. When they got to the accident site, there were Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, Michael Wilding— and Montgomery Clift mangled and half-dead in the wreckage. It was a bonanza.

They rushed forward, but Michael, Rock, and Kevin formed a human wall around Elizabeth and Monty. Elizabeth's voice could be heard raging from inside the car: "You bastards! If you dare take one photograph of him like this, I'll never let another one of you near me again!"

The command was loud and clear. No flashbulbs went off; the crowd just stood there waiting.

Rex Kennamer was the first to arrive. The ambulance and police still hadn't come. After a lot of maneuvering, Kennamer and Rock Hudson, the biggest of the men, managed to get Monty out of the car, and Elizabeth again put his head on her lap. Kennamer did what he could about the bleeding, which was so profuse Monty was in danger of dying just from blood loss.

The men kept up their wall against the photographers, for Kennamer, Monty, and Elizabeth were now completely out in the open, easy targets. One dramatic photo of bloodied Monty would have brought any one of the photographers several thousand dollars. At last, after fifteen minutes, the police arrived.

Monty came to, but he was in shock, and Kennamer immediately gave him medication for pain. Elizabeth wiped the blood off his face, which was now a mass of fat, swelling pulp. He was, nevertheless, surprisingly clear-headed.

He talked to "Bessie." A tooth was hanging by a tiny bit of flesh, and he asked her to pull it out, which she did, trying not to get sick. In very clear sentences, he said, "Save it for me. I may need it later."

Then he began to panic and said, "The film . . . I've got to be at the studio . . . what about the film?" Elizabeth said, "Don't worry about the studio. We'll shoot something else."

More than half an hour passed before the ambulance arrived. The driver was terribly apologetic. He hadn't been able to find the road, he said. They got Monty into the ambulance at last, and Elizabeth went with him. As she described it: "By the time we reached the hospital, his head was so swollen that it was almost as wide as his shoulders. His eyes had disappeared. His cheeks were level with his nose."

Michael followed the ambulance in his own car to Cedars of Lebanon Hospital. Elizabeth, with the help of a sedative, had held up incredibly well. She and Michael stayed at the hospital until Monty was put under heavy sedation and the doctors could assure them that there would be no brain damage.

She had been holding everything back, but on the way home she let it all out. "She felt," says Michael, "shock, anxiety, worry, depression. But I never once saw her grow hysterical or break down that evening. Elizabeth could be remarkably strong in a crisis." Nevertheless, she remembered later that the memory of all that blood made her want to vomit. In the car, she looked down and saw her beautiful dress smeared with dried blood. The smell of it was overwhelming. She would have nightmares about that.

On Sunday, May 13, damage to Monty's person was assessed. Monty lay in the hospital bed with a head as big and orange as a giant pumpkin. He had a severe concussion. The face was bad. There were numerous cuts, especially under the eyes; his lips had been lacerated badly, and a hole gouged right through the middle of his upper lip. Whatever had caused it had also knocked out Monty's two front teeth. cracks rippled through the facial skeleton. His jaw was broken in four separate places; the nose broken in two; one whole upper cheekbone was cracked, and the cracks ran into the sinus area.

Yet there was hardly any damage done to the rest of the torso. By some prank of fate, the accident seemed only to have gone after Monty's face

All visitors were barred. Monty was so heavily sedated and medicated that he wouldn't have recognized anyone in any case. He was restless, and so fitful that he even sleepwalked.

The night following the crash, he climbed out of his bed, walked out of his room, and down the corridor, still dead asleep. No one saw him; then there was a scream. He had sleepwalked into the room of a woman with a severe heart condition. She saw this scrawny torso and giant, science-fiction head coming toward her bed, and the fright nearly killed her. The next day, when Monty found out what he had done, he begged the nurse to go to the woman to say how sorry he was.

By the time Elizabeth and Michael were finally permitted to see him, the doctors had skillfully wired both his jaws together. He could only take nourishment through a straw and he couldn't talk very clearly. He was not supposed to get out of bed because movement would slow the healing process. The doctors were pumping him with cortisone, which was also bringing down the swelling. He was not depressed, but both Elizabeth and Wilding sensed that Monty didn't want to be seen in this condition

Monty never said "don't come," but most of his friends in Hollywood sensed that he wanted to be left alone. Kevin came to see Monty about a week after the accident, and found him drinking martinis through a straw. Monty had somehow managed to get all the contraband stuff he wanted smuggled in. Judging by his uncaring attitude, he probably had gotten hold of some Demerols as well.

Naturally the doctors were under intense pressure to get Monty back into shape as quickly as possible. Libby came out and was horrified. She noted the doctors and nurses rushing back and forth; the continual injections which Monty said were cortisone and other "stuff" to keep scar tissue from forming and make him heal fast; the atmosphere around the corridor and in Monty's room was slapdash and frantic.

She told Monty that he looked like hell, and he needed to rest quietly for months, not just weeks, if his looks and health were to be restored. Monty was surprised. All the movie executives had been coming in and telling him: "Gee, you look so great."

After two weeks in the hospital, Monty went back home. Libby was around constantly and Jack Larson would visit. Monty would lie around in the sun, his head not really functioning. He drank constantly, which was forbidden because it would interfere with the healing process and was dangerous in combination with the morphine-based painkillers he was taking. He was doped up on everything—what the doctors had given him, plus the pills from his own trunk—and at night he took sleeping pills. He walked around in a perpetual stupor, which left him uninterested and uncaring.

Kevin only came to the house a few times, because he couldn't bear to see him like this. "Talking to him about taking better care of himself was like talking to a blank wall. You wondered what was going to happen to him." Kevin honestly thought that Monty was trying to kill himself.

Libby begged Monty to come East with her to recuperate at her place, where he wouldn't have to worry about going back to work. She would have nurses look after him, and he would be at peace for months. No studio executives would be stopping by to see if the face were ready yet "You must make up your mind," said Libby, like a determined matriarch, "not to go back to this meaningless film. Let them collect on their insurance."

She tried to make Monty see that all of the supposed concern was part of the studio game, that if he went back too soon and imperiled himself, he wouldn't be appreciated any more than if he chucked the whole thing and went back with her for his own good.

Libby all but convinced Monty, but he didn't want to disappoint Lew Wasserman and made up his mind to finish Raintree County. Libby was beside herself. It was as if her own son had thrown her loving advice back in her face and taken the word of uncaring strangers. She left

The six-weeks hiatus in production turned out to be more like ten. Elizabeth and Michael didn't come to see Monty much—^they were preoccupied with their own problems. A hint of a separation had already been announced in the papers.

Toward the end of Monty's convalescence, Elizabeth met an aggressive man with a peculiar genius for getting what he wanted—who told her, point-blank: "You're going to marry me." His name was Mike Todd. While still living with Michael and the children, Elizabeth became involved with the other man, the start of a complicated mode of living that was characteristic of what Monty, with his puritanism, hated most about movie stars. It marked the beginning of the end of Monty's closeness with Bessie.

Monty came back to work on Raintree County on July 23. There would be one more week of rehearsals at the studio before the whole company moved to the first location site, Natchez, Mississippi

Monty tried his best. There is no one connected with Raintree County who feels that Monty at any time after the accident began to walk through his part, but the brain-circuitry simply was not working properly. Monty had to struggle more than ever to get anything from himself.

He had to stay doped simply to get through the day, let alone attempt a performance in front of the cameras; and at night he needed barbiturates to counteract the intense restlessness that had built up during the day. In the morning, only amphetamines, plus painkillers, could get him into the makeup room.

Thanks OP. Keep 'em coming. This is what I'll be reading on my way to sleep tonight!

Like anyone who took on the responsibility of being a close friend of Monty's, Elizabeth was likely to receive shocks. Once in Danville, Monty and Elizabeth both had a day off from shooting. Monty had been at Elizabeth's rented house, but she said she wanted to be alone. When Monty resisted, they had some words, and she finally ordered him out of the house

Some time after, she decided to see how he was. Not seeing any sign of him at his house, she looked around, and in the bathroom found the glass shower-stall broken, with blood all over the place. She ran, terrified, to Millard Kaufman. Kaufman immediately called the Chief of Police, then, scared to death, drove with Elizabeth to the scene of the disaster.

Late that afternoon, Monty casually walked in. It had all been his idea of a joke. Knowing that Elizabeth would eventually come, he had broken the glass, then taken a mixture of mercurochrome and methiolate and thrown it around to look like blood.

Another episode also involved the Chief of Police. Monty's nights in Danville were agony. The mixture of pills, nerves, pain, and work pressures caused him episodic, fitful sleep and nightmares. He would leave the light on in the kitchen and bathroom; otherwise, when he woke up in the middle of the night he wouldn't know where he was and would walk around and crash into walls, thinking he was in his New York apartment. During one of those fitful sleeps, he had a nightmare so terrifying that he woke up and ran stark naked into the street.

A policeman spotted him and grabbed him. A call went to the Chief of Police, who in turn called Eddie Woehler—it was well after midnight. Eddie did his best to calm Monty, and got him back to bed. The next day, he made an arrangement with members of the Kentucky State Guard to stay outside Monty's house all night, and to call him if Monty made a run for it again.

Meanwhile, the situation between the Wildings was, to say the least, unorthodox. Not only was Elizabeth being openly courted by Mike Todd, but they practically announced their engagement while she was still living with Wilding. Monty resented Mike Todd. He was possessive, brash, showy, pushy, and uncultivated: the complete opposite of Michael Wilding.

Further, Monty's finely tuned sensors told him this dynamo not only intended to marry Elizabeth, but buy her, body and soul. With Todd around, how could there be room in Bessie's life for a sensitive soul like himself?

One day, Elizabeth came to the studio with an enormous diamond Todd had given her. The scene called for a wedding band, and she said to the propwoman, "I'll turn it around so it'll just look like a wedding band." Monty only had one line in the scene, but he blew it, take after take, for hours.

Finally, Elizabeth got sore and walked over to Kaufman and said, "What the Christ is going on here?" He said, "You want to finish this up fast? Call the prop-woman over and in Monty's presence say that the ring that Mike gave you is uncomfortable and take the thing off and use the prop ring and see what happens." She did it, and the next time around, Monty said his one line perfectly.

Jack Larson often came over and sat with him. One afternoon, Monty got up from his chair and went into the house. An hour passed; he did not return, and Jack began to worry. When he went into the house, the curtains in Monty's bedroom were drawn and, because they were black, it was too dark to see. As Jack turned to go out, he noticed the bathroom door ajar. There was Monty, kneeling on the bathroom floor, sobbing, his face buried in his hands.

After a moment's hesitation. Jack said: "Monty, are you all right?"

Monty didn't seem to hear. The sobbing continued. Knowing he could do nothing, Jack went back outside.

Some minutes later, Monty came out of the house and sat next to Jack. He reached over and gently took Jack's arm. "I know you came to the bathroom and you saw," Monty said. "I heard you call my name. I. . . had seen . . . myself in the mirror. For the first time I really . . . looked ... at my face. Jack . . ." His hand now gripped Jack's arm tightly. "... I still have a career in films."

It was one of the most emotional moments in Monty's life. No one. had known it. Monty had finished Raintree County believing, every second, that his career as an actor was over.

MONTY was still a beautiful man. From the way he secluded himself after returning from California, one would have thought he was Quasimodo. True, his face was different. It had a kind of Welsh, bulbous look now; it would strike one as a whole rather than as a collection of incredibly dazzling parts. Before, it had been a mutant, supernatural face, devastating because each part had seemed charged with a separate life force. It was now the normally imperfect face of an attractive man. It had good angles and bad angles.

The accident had caused some of the change. It had taken away whatever fine lines were left in the chin, cheeks, and nose—especially the nose. But the greatest change by far had already occurred before the accident During the period between From Here to Eternity and Raintree County, boozing, drugs, psychological conflict, and time itself had taken away the eerie glow and glamour.

The few people who had seen Monty regularly during that three-year period—Marge, Roddy, Libby, Kevin and Augusta, Rick—^had observed the gradual change. But as far as the rest of the world was concerned, Monty's glamour had been destroyed by "the accident."

Monty was a Libra

Raintree County was a loathsome three-hour bore and the critics panned it. But people flocked to the theaters. The smash-up had gotten sensational publicity. The public found the idea of being able to see the before-and-after of Monty's once-beautiful face both ghastly and fascinating. Picking out scenes which were done before the accident and after was the gruesome game that kept people from falling asleep in their seats.

Rex Kennamer says, "After Monty's face healed, the residual damage was mostly dental. Many people who went to see Raintree County came away saying, 'Oh, what a terrible thing happened to his face.* But that was because the Montgomery Clift they remembered was the one in From Here to Eternity.

A great change came over him in the three years after that. I know that there were parts of Raintree County shot before the accident that people attribute to after the accident."

For months, Monty was solitary and depressed. He told a friend that he thought himself so unattractive that sex was out of the question. Rick called several times, but Monty always made an excuse. One no longer saw young, attractive males at the duplex—^though they certainly would have come if Monty had felt secure enough to send out the right signals.

The Clift family was also barred. Brooks and Mrs. Clift made attempts to see Monty, but it was useless. Monty's personal habits were not really so different now, except that he had become far more careless about maintaining his body.

He never went to Klein's gym anymore. His major exercise was walking up and down the stairs of his apartment. His eating habits grew worse. He would decide that he liked a certain type of smoked fish, or raw chopped meat, or liver, and would eat nothing but that one food all day long for days. His main excitement came from pills. His body lost muscle tone and grew sluggish.

Monty particularly loved the indoor activity of the telephone. It gave him a way of conmiunicating with the outside world without actually having to trek into it. He called Rex Kennamer constantly to ask things like: "My dentist wants to do a root canal on the lower molar. Do you think I should let him?" Sometimes he would call Kennamer for no other reason than to say: "I'm going to the dentist. Is that all right?"—like a small boy asking a parent for approval. Indeed, all of Monty's closest ties at the time turned out to be parental in nature.

In 1957, Monty emerged from his cocoon to sign for another movie. It was The Young Lions, and his co-star was Marlon Brando and Dean Martin

Monty became in a sense, Martin's coach, helping him with all their dramatic scenes together. He was completely taken with Martin, particularly his sense of wit. Monty was overjoyed and smitten with Martin.

Monty's attentions did become a little excessive. Very late one night, Brando's close friend Carlo Fiore walked into a cafe and spotted somebody trying to hide his face. Suddenly the somebody called out and said, "Carlo, come here." It was Dean Martin. Carlo asked, "What are you doing here?" Martin replied, "Having a drink alone for the first time today." Monty wanted him all to himself.

Monty and Brando had no scenes together. They probably could not have worked together if they had. Monty was methodical, always knew exactly what he wanted, and gave everything he had on the first take. If anything went wrong, technically, he would have to stop by take three or four, rest, and come back fresh. Brando, on the other hand, had to feel his way. It was typical for him to require as many as forty takes before he really knew what he was doing. He used up film as a chain-smoker uses cigarettes.

Yet they indeed admired one another and, in a peculiar way, liked one another—if only from a distance. The old days when the two of them stumbled around each other, a little irritated and awed by the threat of the other's talent and individuality, were over. They had each settled into their own worlds of accomplishment

Before Brando received his Academy Award, he had regarded Monty as the Master Teacher, After From Here to Eternity, he often called Monty to ask him things like, "What did you think about my last picture?'* Once he asked, "Did you see me in Guys and Dolls'*? **Well," Monty said, hesitantly, "I was watching the picture, and . . . you know what I saw? ... I saw . . . this big. . . . .. BIG . . . fat-assl"

Brando had a fit. "But what did you think of my performance?** Monty said, "I don't know. I couldn't see it. Your ass got in the way." It was his way of telling Brando he had given a mediocre performance in a mediocre picture. But Brando kept calling.

Brando, as well as everyone else, knew that Monty was boozing most of the time. Brando had his demons, too. He was, according to Carlo Fiore, heavily on amphetamines and Seconals at that time. Yet, as Fiore says, what Brando took tended to "straighten him out," whereas Monty stumbled around like a drunk in front of the crew.

During the day, Monty would walk around with his eyes like pin holes, and pretend that it was just fruit juice he was drinking from his thermos. E>uke Calahan, the cameraman, remembers that they used to try to get finished with Monty before lunch. By afternoon, he would start to giggle and treat the whole film as a joke. He would crouch in comers, rolled into a ball; use his hands like monkey-paws, moving them awkwardly and uncertainly, with much touching of the face, lips, and cheeks; or slink around on two legs, like a four-legged animal forced to rear up.

"When I first met Monty I thought he was a spastic,** Carlo Fiore recalls. "His movements were so uncoordinated. He'd have a weird posture, slouched; his pelvis would be thrust forward, hands in his back pockets. He was really tied up in a knot, and if he started to move, he seemed to have to untie himself."

By the end of August, the company moved to Hollywood to finish the non-military interiors, and most of Monty's work was with Hope Lange. He took her through the usual joy and agony of scene-probing while simultaneously leaning on her for emotional support. Those who didn't understand Monty's habit of transfiguring his leading ladies into love objects and mother figures thought that there was something between them—even though she was happily married to Don Murray at the time.

There was romance, but only in Monty's adolescent sense of the word. Lange had never worked with Monty before but, like so many others, she quickly learned how to mother him and cope with him. During one scene, they had to sit on a couch, supposedly toasting each other with champagne. Monty spat all of the champagne in his mouth onto Lange's face and dress. For a second, she was appalled. Then she laughed, changed her dress, and did a new take as if nothing had happened.

Monty took to the screenwriter, Edward Anhalt—which is no startling revelation: Monty took to all writers. Anhalt liked Monty as well, and was probably the first one to discover the exact nature of the mysterious "fruit juice" in Monty's thermos. "I remember sitting in Monty's trailer, drinking some of that junk of his. 'What the hell is this stuff?' I said.

He told me, 'It's a mixture of bourbon, crushed Demerol, and fruit juice.' I began to feel weird; Demerol and liquor are both depressants. Monty drank this all the time, but I don't think it affected his performance much. There were a few times when he sort of OD'd, and then he would become impossible. As I remember, he only went out like that twice while I was around. They just shot around him while they poured him full of coffee."

Monty's drinking and consequent behavior stimulated widespread speculation among the crew about other eccentricities—including the rumor that he was homosexual. This was the first time that there was ever open talk around Monty on a set. The talk was not nasty, however, but oddly sympathetic and analytical.

Duke Calahan says, "There was a good deal of discussion among members of the company and the consensus of opinion was that Monty was a homosexual. The theory was that when he was sober he fought it, and when drunk he submitted to it. But there was nothing overt about Monty's homosexuality. It was just something we felt." Monty didn't make passes at the crew men, study the bodies of young boys in the company amorously, or camp. It was simply that he "gave himself away"; that he couldn't help "being honest." He communicated it without words, without any conscious effort Everybody knew—and everybody understood

Fox had gotten Monty a cottage at the Bel-Air Hotel in Hollywood. Edward Anhalt recalls that cottage well, because at the time Anhalt had a young, attractive secretary, newly relocated from the Midwest, who broke into Monty's apartment and tried to force him to have sex with her. She had been crazy about him for years. Monty attempted to reason with her, but when she began attacking him, he finally had to call the management. She screamed, and yelled when they dragged her out. Monty never mentioned the incident to anyone, but somehow the word got to Anhalt. When he brought it up, Monty only shook his head and said, "Gee, she scared the hell out of me."

The premiere was scheduled for early April 1958. On Saturday, March 22, only weeks before the opening, Mike Todd's plane. The Lucky Liz, crashed in the Zuni mountains of New Mexico en route to New York City. Elizabeth Taylor Todd became a widow.

Monty flew to Chicago to attend the funeral, but Elizabeth wouldn't see him. Rex Kennamer stayed with Monty for a while, and he could see that Monty was deeply hurt. Monty waited in his hotel room all day, but no call ever came from his "best friend."

Kennamer explains: "Their friendship didn't end on a bad note; it just petered out. Elizabeth had an active life, God knows, and there just wasn't any room anymore for Monty. And with Monty, part of the relationship was that you always assumed a certain responsibility for him or you just didn't hear from him. It happened that way with many others like Elizabeth—eventually they just didn't have the time to assume the responsibility."

John Springer remembers what happened next: "After the movie, everybody came up to Monty and said, 'Oh, Jesus, it was such a great, beautiful performance and I was so thrilled,' and Monty was very pleased, because he loved his performance. Then we went on to the party at the Waldorf. Don Murray and I kept leaving to see if the papers were out with the reviews yet. When we finally got the Times, we found that Bosley Crowther had destroyed the movie and was particularly vicious to Monty.

By this time, Monty was in seventh heaven. Everyone had told him how moved they were by his performance and he was on the crest of the wave. Don and I immediately hid the paper so that neither Monty nor Hope would see it, but Hope suspected something, and we finally told her. 'Okay, it's a bad review in the Times, and Crowther was particularly nasty to Monty.' Her eyes filled with tears. From that point on, we were determined to protect Monty. People came up with the paper, and we'd say, 'Put it away!' Or they'd start to say, *Gee, it wasn't that awful . . .' and we'd gesture frantically for them to stop. Monty said, 'Shouldn't the papers be out

By now, the News review was out, and it was great, but the Times was always the most important one. Around four a.m. we left the party and went to Reubens, on Fifty-eighth Street. Monty would say, 'Gee, there must be a paper around here somewhere!' And one of us would say, 'Oh, my God, there's so and so. There's Maureen Stapleton! Maureen . . . !' Anything to distract Monty.

He had to go to the John, and Don and I jumped up to go with him and try to prevent him from seeing the mound of papers that were on the way. But Monty saw them. He read the review. I never saw a face fall like that. We got him back to the table and he said, 'I don't understand it . . .' Then Hope began crying and Monty said, 'That's all right. They don't understand. That Crowther! Who cares about him?' trying to comfort her—and she was sad for him! Later, when we were alone, he just crumpled. *Oh, my God, my God . . .'"

Before the accident Monty drank continually, but he was not always drunk. Now he was—day and night. Shortly after the completion of The Young Lions, Marlon Brando paid a call. He had been talking with Maureen Stapleton, and they both thought Alcoholics Anonymous could help Monty, as it had Maureen and many others they knew.

Brando sat down with Monty and said, "Look, Monty, you're killing yourself." Monty protested that he wasn't an alcoholic. Brando said, "I'll go with you to AA. I'll go with you to every meeting . . . We'll sweat the whole thing out together. I'll do anything, Monty." He went on for quite some time. All the while Monty drank vodka, pouring himself whole tumblerfuls, as if to show Brando how senseless the visit was. Brando left.

Jack Larson tried, too, suggesting that Monty dry out in a sanitarium. Monty looked at Jack tearfully, and then began to shake his head slowly. •*No, Dr. Silverberg thinks I shouldn't He says that I don't have a drinking problem."

It worried everyone. How could Monty be seeing this psychiatrist every day in his perpetual condition, without Dr. Silverberg's acknowledging either to his patient or to anyone else that Monty had a drinking problem as well as an equally severe addiction to drugs?

They called him, and his reaction was always the same. He had no idea what they were talking about Marge Stengel says: "The shoemaker on the comer knew that Monty was full of drugs when he went to see Dr. Silverberg, but when I called Silverberg, he would say, *How did I know that Monty was full of drugs? Would I make him a list of what Monty took "

Monty bragged on several occasions that Dr. Silverberg even let him drink during the sessions with him

Friends made certain assumptions: that William Silverberg had found himself a gold mine; that he was going to continue working it by keeping his patient dependent both on the bottle and himself; and that, as perpetual bait, he would keep telling the patient only what he wanted to hear.

They also suspected that Dr. Silverberg was attracted to Monty homosexually. Kevin says: "Silverberg is a strange case. Monty used to go up and visit him in his place in Ogunquit I heard that Silverberg was a homosexual and Monty was his young prince. I doubt if there was actually a physical relationship.'* Marge: "I think that Silverberg was in love with Monty.** Mira: *There was talk about Silverberg being homosexual and that he liked Monty for that reason.'* Dr. Silverberg was divorced from his wife in 1936 and never remarried. Someone who lived near him in Ogunquit remembers the doctor living with another man of his own age. Dr. Ruth Fox, Silverberg's friend and protege, today verifies Silverberg's homosexuality—though,at the time, it was merely a good guess among Monty's friends

Monty simply would not listen to any criticism. He talked of Silverberg as if he were some sort of intellectual god, and sprinkled his descriptions with such expressions as "charming," "brilliant," "a man of great wisdom," "rare,** and '*witty."

Fearing that he would wind up dead from a hepatic and/or sleeping pill coma, friends would call Monty's other doctors, asking them to lure him away from this rare man. "People would try to convince me to use my relationship with Monty to get him into other hands," says Dr. Kennamer.

At one point a little conspiracy was arranged against Dr. Silverberg, with Marge, Roddy, and Dr. Arthur Ludwig as chief accomplices. Monty was told he looked so awful that he was probably suffering from some virus.

Dr. Ludwig went through the theatrics of blood tests and what-not, and told Monty that he had hepatitis. Since Monty was promiscuous, it could well have been true; he was so high on pills and in such perpetual discomfort that he could not easily distinguish one malady from another. Dr. Ludwig put Monty in Mt. Sinai Hospital, giving strict orders—because of Monty's "hepatitis"—that the patient was to be forbidden even a drop of liquor. It was all a ruse to get Monty to dry out for several weeks.

But he got his booze anyway. One of his friends felt "sorry" for him and sneaked bottles of liquor into the hospitaL

Bill Gunn, today a fine screenwriter and playwright, met Monty when Bill was a mere twenty, newly arrived from Philadelphia and anxious to find a niche for himself as a black actor in a theater world that had little use for blacks. Monty liked him, recommended him to Mira, and would help Bill with his scripts, going over every line, painstakingly discussing motivations and choices almost word by word

Bill saw Monty regularly. Monty had a rather singular attitude toward this young black. It was quite rigid. He had made up his mind that Bill had had a deprived life and thus had to be nurtured and protected from harsh realities—to Monty, all blacks were spat upon, all Jews superior, all writers flawless miracles. The fact that Bill came from a middle-class, family did not make any difference

One of the harsh realities of this world from which Monty felt he had to shield Bill was Monty himself. "Monty's bisexuality was practically legendary. —just about everybody felt they had a chance with him. I didn't really understand what his interest in me was, and I expected that he would eventually make a pass. Monty was affectionate with me. He was the kind of guy that when he saw you, would throw his arms around you and kiss you right on the lips. But there was nothing sexual about it It was just a gesture. We got so close, and it could have happened. But Monty never let it"

That Dr. Silverberg sounds like an incompetent jackass.

But Clift also sounds like the kind of person who'd keep doctor shopping until he found an incompetent jackass who'd tell him what he wanted to hear, and be generous with the perscriptions.

His evenings with Monty were, putting it mildly, different As soon as he arrived, Bill would have to rush right to the bar and make himself a gin and tonic, because he knew Monty was already drunk and there was no way they could talk unless Bill had a few himself.

Then Monty would begin talking and Bill would listen and watch. And more and more liquor went down, Monty might become sad about something he had read in the paper that day—a world problem, the trouble that someone was in. Monty was, after all, talking with an **underprivileged" black, and it was right and reasonable for him to break down at the thought of a sorrowful world.

Then the tears would start streaming down Monty's face as he talked. No matter how much vodka was in him or how much he cried, however, Monty was always lucid. If the slightest hint of disgust appeared in Bill's eyes, Monty sensed it immediately and grew tense. It was all, in the best sense, an exquisite performance. The tears seemed timed, yet natural.

If the crying went on too long, Bill would tell Monty that he wanted to leave. Monty*s immediate response would be, "Oh, no. Don't go. We'll do something else." The crying would suddenly stop. Sometimes, he would go upstairs and bring down parts of a children's book that he was writing and read sections aloud. The worst thing in the world was for anyone to leave him alone before he was ready to pass out.

Sometimes, they would go out to a nearby Italian restaurant for dinner or more drinks. Monty would inevitably act badly, they would go home, and Monty would collapse. Bill would carry him up to his bedroom, undress him and put him under the covers. Often he would stay, because Monty would break out into a sweat and start talking so wildly that Bill felt he had to be there to make sure that Monty made it through until the next morning.

He would himself undress and slip under the covers, but there was little chance for sleep. Monty's antique bedroom clock rang "ding . . . ding . . . ding" every half hour, and the air conditioner was inevitably blasting away, making a terrible racket. Monty made noises at night—frightened gasps, thunderclaps of sound, words without apparent connection . Suddenly his body would spring to a sitting position, eyes open saucer-wide, and * he would cry out as if he saw something terrible.

"Monty, are you all right?" Bill would cry. It was like a fever delirium. Sweat would pour down; he would be griddle-hot in the ice-cold room. Finally, things would settle down. But an hour later. Bill would open his eyes and find Monty gone. Bill would find him, naked, opening up doors and cabinets in the kitchen, still half-asleep. Bill would put him back to bed.

Eight o'clock the next morning Monty would suddenly jump out of bed, run into his bulging clothes closet to grab some things, and lock himself in the bathroom. He would be in there quite a long time. Meanwhile, Bill would look around. The night before, Monty's clothes had been thrown on the floor, and now they were gone. Someone had come in and hung them up before Monty and Bill opened their eyes. Monty always threw his clothes on the floor, but by morning they were always mysteriously back in the closet.

By the time Monty came out of the bathroom, he would be jumping with energy. Marge would be already at work in the study, answering phones, typing. Monty's frantic day had begun. If Bill brought up the previous agonizing night, Monty would say, "I don't remember."

Bill would sometimes remain after the previous night, and would notice the constant tension in the apartment on Monty's behalf. Monty would leave the room, saying he was going to get something to drink, and the next thing one heard would be a crash in the kitchen—but Monty would come walking out of the accident site as though nothing had happened, perhaps with an additional mark on his face.

Or he would come tumbling down the stairs, bouncing from step to step on his buttocks, because he had slipped on the first step. Someone would come running over to him and ask him if he was all right, and he would think nothing of it. Or he would fall in the shower, on the bathroom floor, and in countless other places. It was rare for Monty not to have a Band-Aid around his finger, or on his face, or an extra bruise the next time one saw him

During the day he would be a madcap of energy, totally preoccupied with work. Then, in the evenings, his emotions would catch up with him again, and he couldn't bear to be alone. He made endless phone calls in the wee hours of the morning. Bill Gunn got them.

"I would be asleep and Monty would call. After half an hour or so he would say, T woke you up, didn't I? Why don't you just hang up on me?' And then I'd say, *No, you hang up. I don't want you saying that I hung up on you.' And Monty would say, 'No, you hang up.' Finally I'd say, 'Listen, Monty, this is silly. I'm wide awake now and I won't get back to sleep for hours. Why don't I just come over?* Monty sometimes liked the idea—'Great, come on over'—or he would recoil and tell me I mustn't do that. I never knew why he would sometimes have me on the phone for hours like that rather than have me over. It could be he was protecting me from something he didn't want me to see. So we would talk and talk for a few hours and then suddenly there would be this silence on the other end . . . and then the sound of snoring. I'd quietly hang up."

Monty often walked the streets along Third Avenue near his apartment The creatures he picked up ran the gamut from nice young boys to violent hustlers. Monty didn't want to be discriminating; that would have meant involving his whole psyche in these adventures.

He wasn't good sex when he was drunk, and one hears accounts of unsavory types messing up his bedroom and walking out in anger. Monty would not know who they were, and it would startle him, waking up in the middle of the night, to find some stranger sleeping next to him or walking around the apartment.

Bill Gunn called him from Maine, once, and Monty said that someone was in the apartment and he was frightened. He had been at Libby's that evening, gotten very drunk, and on the way back, met someone.

"He*s still in the house," said Monty, "and I don't know who he isl"

"Well," said Bill, "call a friend ... call the police . . . call Kevin ..."

"No, no. I don't want to call Kevin. I'm afraid. You've got to come."

"But Monty, I'm m Maine."

"Where are you in Maine? Let me write it down."

Monty took down the name of the small town, and hung up. Bill was in a play, and after the performance that night, a driver waited for him at the stage door. "Mr. Gunn," he said, "I'm to take you to Mr. Clift's." Bill packed a bag and the driver drove him to a small airport where a private plane waited. The plane flew him to New Jersey, where another car and driver waited. By 3 a.m. Bill was in front of Monty's house. He banged on the door; nobody answered. Totally confused and frustrated, Bill went into Daly's, across the street, and called the house. The phone rang and rang. At last, someone picked up and a fuzzy voice said, "Yeah?" Bill said, "Monty! It's me, Bill."

"Who?"

"Bill Gunn."

*Where are you?"

"I'm downstairs at Daly's."

**What are you doing in Daly's? I thought you were in Maine."

Bill was going nuts. 'Who is in the house? Is anybody in the house?"

"No, I don't know what you're talking about."

The next morning, Monty said he hadn't the slightest idea what had happened. He remembered making arrangements to have Bill flown down from Maine, but didn't know why. He arranged to send Bill back by car, helicopter, and plane.

The street was not the only way Monty met partners. A mere look or word of kindness from some young, attractive bellhop or cashier might move him to offer dinner or an evening at the ballet. During these more lucid encounters, Monty went to great pains to find common ground for communication.

Monty once picked up a handsome young Puerto Rican who worked at an airlines counter in San Juan. "He was very kind and affectionate," says the man. •*He wasn't good in bed, but I didn't care. He was a sad man. He talked a lot about other people taking advantage of him because he was so famous. He said that it was hard for him to find love."

Monty needed love, but so much love that no human being could have gratified the need. How many people had Monty told, "I don't feel loved"? How many had attempted to make him feel loved and failed?

After The Young Lions, he met a young Frenchman by the name of Jean. Jean put up an incredible campaign to win Monty, calling maybe a hundred times and writing long love letters.

He became Monty's first lover since the two-year disaster with Dino, which had ended some five years before. This time, however, Monty did not make the mistake of having Jean move in with him. He was extremely discreet about being seen with him or talking about him to friends.

But somehow Jean managed to be around quite a bit, staying with Monty at night, doing things for him around the house in the day, and generally making a great fuss about his well-being. Those who knew Jean and Monty together were convinced that Jean was mad about Monty, although how Monty felt never seemed that clear. One writer, who knew them both, put it this way: *I didn't feel that Monty loved Jean. He was an attractive, pleasant young man but shallow. I think, with Monty, it was like a man having a pretty girl whom he would be sorry to lose only because she was such a dish."

The word "girl" is used loosely, for Jean wasn't effeminate, although he had a superficial elegance and a streak of hysteria which was easily activated. He once called Marge during a quarrel with Monty and told her that he had taken a whole bottle of aspirins to end his life because he couldn't live without Monty. He could break down in tears quite as easily as Monty, but for utterly different reasons and in a much more womanly way.

Jean was in his mid-twenties, had dark hair, spoke with a heavy accent, and claimed to be the offspring of a well-to-do and well-known French family, the cousin of a celebrated countess. No one really knew if Jean was full of baloney, but the story he told was fairly consistent and convincing. He was, he said, an American citizen now; his respectable French family, unable to bear the shock of his giving up his French birthright, had cut him off without a dime. That was why he was struggling as a dress designer in the garment district.

Jean was used to better sex than Monty offered and would stray, yet he never flaunted it in Monty's face. He was timid and exceedingly careful in such matters.

It is, however, uncertain whether Monty really needed Jean and whether the relationship was, on the whole, good for Monty. If anything, Jean's personality seemed to aggravate Monty's drinking and pill-taking. The addictions that Monty imposed upon Jean and that Jean seemed to intensify in Monty, may have wrought more destruction in the long run.

....Billy Wilder's Some Like It Hot was about to go into production in another part of the Goldwyn studios. Monty had been aching to meet Marilyn Monroe ever since he had seen her brilliant performance in Bus Stop in 1956. As with so many other opportunities, he had turned down the male lead in that film. At the time, he had thought Marilyn nothing more than a sex commodity—but when he finally saw her in the movie, he felt wretched that he had missed a chance to appear opposite her.

Rex Kennamer had known Marilyn and contacted her about a dinner meeting with Monty. Coincidentally, Montgomery Clift had been her idol for years. Monty was like a god to her.

It was a strange evening. Wildly insecure, Marilyn couldn't talk to Monty, nor he to her. While Marge and Kennamer carried the conversation, Monty downed one straight Scotch after another while she drank pretty pink rum cocktails with flowers floating on top. "They were both getting bombed," says Marge. "Poor Rex! Oh, here were these two strange people trying to communicate! At one point Rex had to take Monty for a walk outside while I sat with Marilyn !. What an evening!"

But soon after, they crossed the barrier. In no time, Marilyn would come into Monty's dressing room and the two of them would hug and kiss so much, people would think they had known each other for years. Monty was a kindred spirit Marilyn could bitch and laugh and feel as uninhibited as she wanted around him.

One day, she complained bitterly about the rushes of Some Like It Hot: *I'm not going back into that fucking film," she said, **until Wilder reshoots my opening. When Marilyn Monroe comes into a room, nobody's going to be looking at Tony Curtis playing Joan Crawford. They're going to be looking at Marilyn Monroe.'* (Her instincts were right. After Wilder reshot the opening, it was much better than before.)

Shortly before they met, there was a good deal of talk about the two of them co-starring in the film version of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Although Monty had turned down the Broadway play, he would have jumped at the excuse to work with Marilyn, but producer Pandro Berman axed the idea. He didn't think Monty could make it through.

Well thank goodness Clift wasn't in "Some Like It Hot"!

He had no sense of humor, and if he'd tried to bring his usual pathos to a farce, he'd have dragged down all the comedy.

R58 Clift turned down Bus Stop Not "Some Like It Hot"

Bob Thorn was one of the regulars, but after six months he stiU had to learn the peculiar ropes of being Monty's friend. One night, he drove Monty back to the Bel-Air.

Learning the 'ropes'* with Monty also meant getting used to listening to endless recordings of Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald. There were no other records in his collection. At the New York apartment, the voices of Frank and Ella dominated every gathering. Bob dared suggest that there were other singers. Monty looked utteriy surprised. "Who?" Bob was on dangerous ground. When it came to questions of taste, Monty didn't hold opinions, he held truths. "Billie Holiday."—-"Oh, oh," said Monty, tormented at the very idea. "How can you listen to her and still go on living? That pain." Bob found himself feeling cheap as Monty registered agony all over his body and face.

One night, while the voices of Ella and Frank filled the cottage, Bob came to pick Monty up for dinner. Monty was nearly gone by the time he arrived, and Bob suggested they call it off. No, Monty said, he would be fine after a shower. Bob heard the shower running. When he next looked up, a dripping wet, fully naked Monty was doing a forty-yard dash through the living room, out the door, and into the night. Bob rushed after him and brought him back in.

Monty often saw the Zinnemanns. After a while, Ren€e began to serve dinner at home, because Monty would behave so badly in restaurants. Aside from his silliness with food, he had a habit of greeting waiters with such gracious remarks as, "Hello, fuckface."

Emotionally and physically, Monty was bottoming out For those who cared, the fact that his work was suffering and his career all but wrecked was less important than the ever-present danger of sudden death. The pill-taking and drinking had reached unbelievable proportions.

Back in New York, just after Lonely hearts, Maureen Stapleton came to one of the "pass out" dinners. Monty went on and on about his milk-glass tabletop, delightfully exuberant; ten minutes later, his face hit the thick brown rug and he just lay there. Maureen began to cry. It was particularly hard to bear when just minutes before Monty had been so charming and lively. She looked at Roddy. He said, "There's nothing any of us can do. You can only hold his hand to the grave."

Libby, who possessed more tolerance for Monty's suicidal habits than most, stopped seeing much of him after her engagement to painter Louis Schanker in late 1958. Monty's relationship with her became more nostalgic than current, A year later, he would talk of her as if she were merely an old, dear friend who had existed in the distant past

Other people, too, drifted away from him—Myma Loy, Elizabeth, Kevin and Augusta.

The editor of that book was a gay man who posts on Datalounge.

Worry over Monty still pervaded every comer of Marge Stengel's life, however. It was a great strain. She had her eyes on him every second, to make sure he did nothing dangerous. When Marge first went to work for him, in 1954, she was naive about anything more stupefying than a Bloody Mary. She found herself thrust into a world crammed with multicolored little capsules and tablets and hypodermic needles filled with depressants. She found out the difference between Nembutal—the most common sleeping pill, which Monty hated —and Demerol, the depressant he was most fond of. She found out about amphetamines, whether Monty was on an •*up" or a "down"

"When it came to drugs,** says Marge, "I did everything I could to shut every door that Monty would open. He would find a new drugstore that would supply his pills. They would call me to come down and pick up the stuff, and I would tell them that before I did, I would have to call Monty's lawyer to find out if it was legal. Oh, that would stop them cold. They would just tell Monty, after that, that they couldn't supply him anymore. I don't know if Monty ever knew that I was doing that, but if he did, he never mentioned it to me. But Monty always found new doctors to prescribe his pills and new drugstores to give him his stuff without prescriptions.

It was the same with Marilyn Monroe, when I worked for her just before she died. Her apartment was littered with half-empty pill bottles—made out to my name, her name, friends* names. Some doctors will just do that for you, if you're rich and famous enough.

"It was just so easy for people like Monty to get pills. I never knew who those doctors were—certainly not Rex or Dr. Ludwig—^but I did know the drugstores. Some of them would charge unbelievable prices for the most inexpensive drugs. I guess they just figured that, well, here's this rich movie star who doesn't give a damn.'

If Marge read about a new drug in Time or Newsweek, invariably she knew Monty had already tried it. He loved visiting doctors, but he also loved to diagnose and treat himself. He had a shelf full of medical books and would sit reading them for hours, the way others read novels. There were hundreds of different drugs in the apartment He had an enormous jug full of "reds"—sleeping pills— which he would give out to friends or acquaintances, telling them the exact dosage like a doctor giving out samples to complaining patients. He always carried his bag when he went visiting, and if someone complained of a headache he would snatch a codeine tablet from the bag and offer it with sincere medical advice

Arthur Miller, Truman Capote, Arthur Laurents, Norman Mailer, and Bob Thorn came to Sixty-first Street. Before their eyes, a magnificent creature writhed in pain, and forced others to feel it in themselves. Monty may have been failing in front of the cameras, but in front of intelligent eyes, his ability to captivate, move, and change was even greater than before—for, of course, the audience was smaller, the contact more intimate.

Each writer saw something different in Monty. Arthur Miller, inclined toward social questions of morality and guilt, saw a man struggling with a certain "problem" "I think he was struggling with his homosexuality," says Miller. 'He was extremely sensitive on that score, This struggle that he secretly fought caused him great guilt. He never discussed it with me but I could sense it, because he wasn't that inscrutable. That was what was so moving about him sometimes."

Arthur Miller says, "I would try indirectly to help him, to be supportive of him. There would have been no bottom to it. I didn't want to get in a position where I would have to support him totally. After all, I wasn't his father or his brother. I couldn't promise what I couldn't deliver. I wasn't prepared to become his nursemaid. And he sort of liked the idea that when he was with me he'd have to control himself. Because I would let him know that he couldn't use me as he did other people."

Arthur Laurents agrees with Arthur Miller, but adds to the analysis his understanding of Hollywood's effect: "Monty was miserable. He was tremendously guilt-ridden about his homosexuality. The time Monty spent out in Hollywood only made it worse. It said to him, *You are a pariah if you pursue what you want.' That was a tremendous problem for him. Hollywood brings out all kinds of fears and guilts and very false values."

Bob Thorn found deep responses in himself for Monty's brand of cruelty. At one point, he would tell his analyst by day how much he hated Monty, and at night wind up dutifully at the duplex for more torture.

Bob and his wife Janice Rule were just leaving Monty's one evening, when Monty took Rule's face in his hands with devastating compassion, as if he were going to kiss her. He said, softly, "I don't understand how you can be so beautiful and not have any feelings." Rule was then at a low point in her career, and the way Monty said this, as if it flowed from him only out of love for her, made the wound cut even deeper.

At the time, however, all Bob could think of was Monty's cruelty. "I'm never going to see you again'* he yelled into the phone later, sandwiched between a lot of four-letter descriptions of Monty's character. Monty claimed he was drunk and couldn't remember what he had said.

Monty called Bob again and again, apologizing profusely each time, and—what else?—Bob and Janice were back at the dinners. But they had already established a pattern which involved cruel truth-games. With Monty, the original basis of a relationship seldom changed.

Everyone was abused by Monty, with the exception of Marge, with whom he usually treated carefully. During dinner, he would aim hurtful remarks at the sorest spots of those around him. He probably loved no one better than Nancy Walker and yet, in front of nine or ten dinner guests, he would hurl monstrous comments about her looks. She would be visibly hurt, but neither she nor anyone else would retaliate.

If one wanted to be around Monty, one had to suffer along with him. He forced that

Toward the middle of 1959, Monty finally did receive an offer to do a decent movie, through the intercession of Elizabeth Taylor, Suddenly Last Summer, from Tennessee Williams* one-act play. She told Columbia and the producer, Sam Spiegel, that she had to have Montgomery Clift as her leading man.

Spiegel agreed, providing the insurance company would back him. Monty accepted immediately. He loved the idea of playing with Elizabeth and Katharine Hepburn.

With the exception of Mankiewicz, Monty evoked the company's sympathy. During the day, he developed the sweats and shakes. He drank his "orange juice." Monty, sitting or standing around with the sweats and the he looked as if he were a man with a fever suffering from a violent chill. Mercedes McCambridge, who played Elizabeth Taylor's mother, had battled alcoholism herself and knew exactly what Monty was going through.

One day, when Monty seemed extremely disturbed and ill, she went over to Elizabeth and asked: "Is there anything that you can do?" Elizabeth answered: "I don't know. I've tried to get through to him and I just can't."

Elizabeth was obviously deeply concerned, but at this point in her life, Elizabeth didn't have the time or the emotional means to help Monty. Her personal life was a shambles. She had just made the supreme mistake of marrying Eddie Fisher, whom she didn't love. Neither Fisher nor Elizabeth felt secure. She forced herself to parade her new husband around the studio, making a spectacle of her affection for him. In the evenings, she holed up with Fisher in a big house in Surrey, to which Monty did not come and from which she did not stray.

Besides Elizabeth, the strongest influence on Sam Spiegel to retain Monty was Katharine Hepburn. She practically became his nurse. "Katie has a brisk appearance," says Spiegel, "but under it is an extremely soft heart . . . She really spread her motherly wings over him." She sat with Monty, ran lines with him, and attempted to rebuild his confidence as she had often done in the past with Spencer Tracy.

There is a story that Katharine Hepburn spit directly into the face of director Joseph Mankiewicz. It is true, and so embarrasses him today that he prefers to say that she spat at the floor. It happened on the last day of shooting, after the very last take at Shepperton was done. "Are you quite sure we're finished?" she asked Mankiewicz several times, and each time he told her, perplexedly, that they were quite finished. Then she spat into his face.

She felt that Mankiewicz had mistreated both her and Monty. It's hard to say whether Mankiewicz, an accomplished artist who had proven himself countless times prior to this film, deserved such contempt. "At the time," says Spiegel, "Mankiewicz was anxious to court friendship with Elizabeth, who later rewarded him for it by insisting that he direct Cleopatra (which became his punishment instead of his reward). He was downright disrespectful to Katie. To please one girl he was disrespectful to the other."

After the film, Mankiewicz was blamed for his treatment of Monty, but those closest to him on the set were aware of his particular situation. He could not, in all honesty, find it in himself to act fatherly and warm toward Monty—because he didn't understand Monty's problem.

More than once Monty had told people that, of all the directors he had ever worked with, EUa Kazan was the one he most admired and respected. Kazan had already offered him a number of exciting scripts—among them: On the Waterfront and East of Eden —^which Monty, for one reason or another, had turned down. It was a pity that the movie they finally did turned out to be one of Kazan's lesser achievements and a commercial loser: Wild River

Kazan preferred Marlon Brando over Monty because, he said, "I can't work with a drunk." Brando's unavailability made him choose Monty, but not before he got a promise from Monty that he would stay dry. Monty's respect for Kazan gave substance to Kazan's order. He did not exactly dry out for Wild River, but as the weeks of production went on, he drank less and less and became stronger. Kazan, who knew how much Monty needed to drink, was impressed by Monty's reliability. Charles Maguire, the assistant director, cannot remember seeing Monty inebriated once.

The first time Gadge introduced Lee Remick to Monty, Monty's only response was: "God, she's so young!" She loved him from the start—what woman didn't love Monty from the start? Says Lee Remick, **His body was bird-like. He was very thin and all bones. He was practically not there. If you put your arms around him, you were practically hugging yourself . . . He was a slight man with a beautiful face and gorgeous eyes. And he was so sensitive. I would stop myself from saying things like, *You need a haircut,' because he would take it as a sign that maybe you didn't like him. He did inspire in me, as he did in most women I suppose, the feeling of wanting to look after him. He was like a wounded bird—so vulnerable. He was clearly a troubled soul. He made me feel needed."

Remick says, "Insofar as Monty was incapable of being the dominant partner in a male-female relationship, my character always ended up literally above him. In every love scene, his head would end up on my shoulder. It was the way he was. Instead of forcing Monty to play a dominant male, Gadge went along ... I think in the end, the film showed a very different kind of relationship than what one usually sees."

One exceptional scene—a scene personalized, as it were, for Monty—^was completely improvised in rehearsal. At the end of the movie, Albert Salmi beats Monty in a fight and Remick pounces on Salmi's back so hard that she, in effect, saves Monty. Then, while she is tending his wounds, Monty says: "Damn it! Can't I just win one fight?" Remick replies, "I don't care if you ever do. I just want you to marry me. I'll defend you for the rest of my life." The dialogue and action were based on the relationship that Monty and Lee had developed in previous scenes

Monty began to drink again. Donna had gone home for Christmas and hadn't returned. The film was dragging. On many days, because of snow, there was nothing much to do but sit around. Monty was restless and worked on his thermos. It was late in the film, so it presented no major problems, but Kazan did become upset when, three days before the film ended, Monty walked up to him to say hello and fell flat on his face.

Kazan spent six months cutting his movie, which Twentieth Century-Fox released in July 1960. A number of critics admired it, but it was not financially successful

The tenor of Monty's relationship with Marge began to change—subtly but steadily—the day that Jean became a permanent resident He began to take over some of her functions around the house: answering phones, bringing things to Monty as she would have, even typing. There was a pushiness about Jean that one could only notice after knowing him for a while. Marge was aware of it and found herself resenting having her duties usurped.

But her concern went deeper. She knew of Monty's weaknesses and, without interfering, could serve as a buffer. Jean, on the other hand, was even weaker than Monty. Instead of buffering Monty, he tended to exacerbate his problems. If Monty took too many pills, Jean reacted by taking pills himself. If Monty was drinking, Jean would begin drinking. Marge knew that was exactly what Monty didn't need.

Although Jean may have wanted to become Monty's helpmate, his tendency toward hysteria made that impossible. One day. Marge saw Monty at the top of that high, steep staircase. She thought he was simply going to walk down. When she looked up moments later, he was hanging by his toes from the top of the stairwell! Marge wondered later how Monty could have gotten himself into that insane position in so short a time.

Jean saw Monty at the same time Marge did. He began to cry and scream. He was paralyzed with fear. Marge instantly ran up the stairs, grabbed Monty's legs and pulled him up, somehow managing to get his limp body over the banister. Jean was still sobbing hysterically.

Jean's continual presence was only one of the things that made Marge begin thinking of leaving. Monty's was such an all-engulfing, consuming personality, that Marge confessed to some of her friends: "It's either his life or mine. I've got to leave before it's too late." She began to prepare Monty by slipping little side comments into their conversations. "You know," she would say to him, "I won't be here forever."

In June 1960, a month before Monty was to fly to Reno to start The Misfits, Marge told Monty that she would be going. She said that she was glad that Jean was there because Monty would have someone to look after him and take care of things as she had in the past. She did not explain, but when Roddy and Libby begged her to stay, she told the truth: There would soon be nothing left of her life if she didn't leave. She could not bear to go on living in Monty's nightmare world. "What will become of him without you?" Roddy asked.

Monty pleaded with Marge to come to Reno with him. She insisted she had made plans to visit relatives in California. She gave him her number. After Monty checked into the Mapes Hotel in Reno—^where most of the cast was staying—^he called Marge in Los Angeles. Wouldn't she stop by Reno on her way back to New York? "I told him I couldn't," says Marge. "I wanted to, but I knew that if I stopped off, I would have been done for. I would have been right back in the same situation. When you finish a thing, you just finish." A whole year passed before Marge Stengel thought it safe to talk to Monty again.

Jean's continual presence was only one of the things that made Marge begin thinking of leaving. Monty's was such an all-engulfing, consuming personality, that Marge confessed to some of her friends: "It's either his life or mine. I've got to leave before it's too late." She began to prepare Monty by slipping little side comments into their conversations. "You know," she would say to him, "I won't be here forever."

In June 1960, a month before Monty was to fly to Reno to start The Misfits, Marge told Monty that she would be going. She said that she was glad that Jean was there because Monty would have someone to look after him and take care of things as she had in the past. She did not explain, but when Roddy and Libby begged her to stay, she told the truth: There would soon be nothing left of her life if she didn't leave. She could not bear to go on living in Monty's nightmare world. "What will become of him without you?" Roddy asked.

Monty pleaded with Marge to come to Reno with him. She insisted she had made plans to visit relatives in California. She gave him her number. After Monty checked into the Mapes Hotel in Reno—^where most of the cast was staying—^he called Marge in Los Angeles. Wouldn't she stop by Reno on her way back to New York? "I told him I couldn't," says Marge. "I wanted to, but I knew that if I stopped off, I would have been done for. I would have been right back in the same situation. When you finish a thing, you just finish." A whole year passed before Marge Stengel thought it safe to talk to Monty again.

The story of a divorcee and a group of has-been cowboys—all losers looking for some kind of dignity through love or work— The Misfits had been tailor-made for Marilyn Monroe. For several years, she had been the center of Arthur Miller's life and work. It also appeared to those who knew of Miller's long-time friendship with Monty that he had written Perce Rowland with Monty in mind.

Perce is a mama's boy, awkward with girls and masochistically self-destructive. In the opening scene, he tells his mother that his face has been smashed up; and in another scene, after getting banged up in the rodeo, he has his head in bandages, is drinking, and doped on morphine.

In a piece which appeared in Esquire after Monty's death, Bob Thorn wrote: "How ghoulish of the cold-blooded Arthur Miller to have Monty, in the telephone scene in The Misfits, say to his mother that she would not recognize his face, it had been so badly beaten up." Arthur Miller, however, vehemently denies that the thought of Monty even entered his head when he delineated Perce Howland in the script. "I had known cowboys like Perce. Casting Montyln the part was strictly an afterthought"

Monty wasn't much interested in the question. He told James Goode, "I have no misgivings about this character. Someone said, *My God, it's exactly like you.* Now it's just a question of can I do it? It's a wonderful part and if I don't do it justice, I'll shoot myself."

The parallels between Monty and Marilyn were strong and visible, but only on a certain superficial level.

*They were similar and yet different in many ways,** observes Arthur Miller. "Neither one of them was capable of dealing with the situations they were in. They were terribly sensitive people. They never knew when and how to make the compromises that had to be made in the movies they appeared in. So they would make drastic compromises at the wrong time and refuse to make the ones that would have been helpful at the right time. But Monty was less paranoid than Marilyn. He was a little better capable of running his life and could continue to work, no matter what the conditions. He was far more advanced as a technician, and could be more objective about his performance because of his theater background.

"Marilyn had never been on a stage, had never learned the discipline he learned. She was a native talent who was trying to find some way of rationalizing it and controlling it . . . The Actors Studio disfigured a lot of her working time. It didn't support her. It didn't make her feel secure with her talents. It always left her with a feeling that she wished someone were there to tell her what to do . . . After all, before the Studio she was a very good comedienne. In The Misfits, her performance as a dramatic actress was extraordinary, but I'm not sure if all that torture was worth the result—all that agony. It's not worth anything . . .

"I was never sympathetic to the Actors Studio. I just didn't like the way the training cut the actor loose from his obligations to what he was doing and made the whole performance a question of his feelings. Monty disliked a lot about the Studio also. He had a powerful awareness of the need to get the scene done, and never thought of himself as using the Method. He thought that Studio people were self-indulgent, and he fought that part of himself which was self-indulgent." Miller continued

There are places for posting entire passages from books. This is not it.

"Marilyn always pitied Monty—she recognized a kindred soul, as he did,'* says Miller: "all sad people." Marilyn herself said to a reporter: "I look at him and see the brother I never had and feel braver and get protective."

John Springer, who knew both of them, said to writer Lyn Tomabene: "Even to Marilyn, the most vulnerable person in the world, Monty was someone who needed protection. You should have seen them together. They were like two babes in the woods.'

Marilyn gave Huston trouble all through the film with constant line-blowing and retakes, but in her most difficult scene—a five-minute take with Monty- she behaved like Hollywood's most experienced professional. In Huston's book of credits and debits, this was obviously another big credit for Monty.

It was obvious that Monty and Marilyn not only comforted one another, but intensified each other's concentration and work. Shortly after her death, Monty was to say that of all the people he had worked with in twenty-eight years, Marilyn gave the most and with all her soul. "Working with her was fantastic . . . like an escalator. You would meet her on one level and then she would rise higher and you would rise to that point, and then you would both go higher."

The Millers had all but split up by the time of The Misfits, and were simply waiting until the end of the filming before announcing the divorce. Halfway through, Miller even took a separate room at the hotel. When Monty socialized at all, it was usually with Marilyn alone, and one reporter, who happened to walk in on Monty and Marilyn in a litttle club near Reno, overheard her confiding her marital problems to him. The whole thing was later overblown by the fan magazines, which fabricated tales of a romantic liaison between them. Like the romantic stories that had linked him to Elizabeth, he rather enjoyed reading these concoctions and kept the magazines.

Most evenings, he locked himself in his hotel room and prepared for the next day's shooting. He drank night and day—grape juice and vodka—but only moderately, which, as any alcoholic will confess, takes great strength of will. When he was sufficiently motivated, he had tremendous will power. No one thought of him as a drunk. A

Stanley BCramer approached him to appear in Judgment at Nuremberg...Monty was having great difficulty—not only with the actual words but with the delicate timmg. He missed cues. Several times during the struggle, Monty went to Kramer and said: "I don't know if I can do this thing." And Kramer, whose bedside manner was excellent, would reply: "Well, what you're doing is all right until you find out how to do it better."

Monty's pathetic shaking and uncertainty got to Spencer Tracy who, more than anyone else in the company—^because of his own past alcoholism—understood what Monty was going through. He said to Monty: "Just look into my eyes and do it. You're a great actor and you understand this guy. Stanley doesn't care if you throw aside the precise lines. Just do it. Do it into my eyes and you'll be magnificent." And Monty did just that: he looked into Spencer's eyes.

Judy Garland and Monty became close during their few weeks of contact during the film. "Everyone," says Kramer, "felt compassion for Monty and got along well with him, but I think Monty and Judy understood each other best. Both of their careers had reached a low point, and they were each struggling to find their ways back. They both had incredible problems, and in this there was obvious camaraderie."

Is this Google Books?

In Hollywood, Monty didn't seem all that anxious to be with Jean, whom Kramer didn't know. "Whoever it was that Monty had brought with him from New York," says Kramer, "Monty was basically lonely. He hung around us all the time."

Monty finally returned to New York—and immediately upon arriving, made one of the worst decisions he had ever made

JOHN Huston—irrationally, perhaps even perversely— had decided that he wanted Monty to play the lead in Freud. By now Monty was having his greatest successes with shorter appearances. There was every indication that he could not undertake a long, demanding role. If Huston couldn't see the evidence himself, there were many others who did.

It is easier to understand why Monty was so anxious to accept. Here was the chance to prove himself; he would revive his career with his first deeply intellectual role. It must have seemed tailor-made. He had been seeing Dr. Silverberg since 1950, had long been involved with Freudian theories, and fancied himself a doctor of sorts.

He believed his failing mind, body, and spirit would somehow find the strength to get him through; this was the film. But it was sheer folly. The filming of Freud destroyed whatever was left of Monty's life. When the five months of celluloid grotesqueries were done, Monty was a walking cadaver.

Up until then, Huston had had only positive feelings about Monty. He had seen him behave beautifully on The Misfits.

Huston had already heard that Monty was homosexual, but refused to believe it. He considered it simply malicious gossip. Hearing gossip is one thing, however; seeing with one's own eyes is quite another. The evening of Monty's and Jean's arrival at the castle, they talked about the film for hours, and then the two guests retired to one bedroom and the host to another. Early the next morning, Huston opened the door of the guest bedroom without knocking.

Reinhardt, to whom Huston told this account, describes the rest. "John surprised Monty and Jean and was aghast at what he saw. John said to me, after we met in Munich, *Did you know this about Monty?' *Yes, of course I knew/ I said. *I think it's disgusting! Why didn't you tell me?* he asked. But why should I have told John? It wasn't his business. After all, Monty behaved like a normal man.

I really think that John would have fired Monty on the spot if Universal's backing hadn't depended so much on John's casting a major star like Monty in the role, and who else could John have found at that late date?"

Reinhardt feels that this incident, aggravated by Huston's growing subconscious horror of the material he was filming, made Huston despise Monty from that moment on.

Monty flew to Munich in early September with Angela Allen—the script girl Huston had used for years—and a Miss Kennedy, a pretty secretary Monty had just hired. It was wisely decided that Jean was not to come to the set. During the flight Monty drank, but was not obnoxiously drunk, as the German papers reported it that evening.

The next day, Reinhardt and Monty went over to Huston's suite in the Four Seasons. Huston had just read the papers and wanted to straighten Monty out before another day passed.

Huston, Old Testament style, began to lay down the Law. Monty was not to behave in a homosexual manner, or to have any kind of homosexual relationships while he worked on the film. He was to behave in a normal manner. He was not to drink or take pills. He was not to have dependent friendships with older women.

Monty was stunned both by what Huston said and by his brusque manner. Nevertheless, he agreed to the demands. He still respected Huston, and believed in him, but this was the first time he had gotten any hint of Huston's drastic change in attitude toward him.

A few days later, Monty was to give a rather long lecture to more than a hundred extras dressed as physicians. Suddenly everyone heard Huston tell Monty that he had to do the scene without notes. Over and over, Monty tried to give the lecture without looking down, and every time he'd falter, and Huston would yell, "Cut Try it again, Monty." Monty was perspiring, and embarrassed at the foolish figure he was cutting. The take wasn't made that day. By the next day, Monty had memorized the speech, but Huston kept yelling, "Cut" at the slightest deviation from the text. That morning, too, went by without a print.

During lunch break, Monty confessed to Doris that Huston had yelled at him the night before about his not being able to deliver his lines; it had seemed to him that Huston only did this to wreck his confidence.

That afternoon, Huston finally got the take he wanted, but Monty was thoroughly shaken and plagued by the idea that Huston was out to get him. Monty wasn't the only one who felt that.

By now, the company of Freud had become polarized into separate factions: those who saw Monty as Huston's victim, and those who believed Monty to be a disintegrating, brain-damaged alcoholic who was devastating Huston and his important film

The factions seemed to divide by nationalities. Almost to a man, the English were on Monty's side. The Germans were generally for Huston. The Americans, who included representatives of Universal, tended to be for Monty privately, but against him publicly.

The English have always had a weak spot for Monty and his introverted brand of vulnerable, suffering masculinity. British women love to mother, and British men recognize Monty's type among their species and extol it

Huston insisted that the script be revised. Hours before a key scene between Monty and York, he would meet with the two actors and his producer for a conference. "What does this mean . . . well, that just doesn't work," he would say, and either Huston or Reinhardt would start rewriting on the spot.

Reinhardt says, "It was terribly hard for Monty to leam these rewrites given to him just hours before photography. Monty had already told John that he was a slow study. He was the sort of actor who needed to ponder and study; and, remember, these were complicated psychiatric terms. Some actors of Monty's stature would simply walk off the film if scripts were handed to them in that haphazard way."

Often Monty didn't seem to understand Huston's directions and was incoherent when he tried to explain himself. The production was slowed to a crawl. Huston was out of his mind with impatience.

One day, Reinhardt was sitting in his office when someone rushed in and said to him, "You must come at once.** As he lurched through the door, he could hear loud, high-pitched noises coming from Monty's dressing room. By the time Reinhardt got there, the commotion was over. Monty came walking out, saw Reinhardt, and said, "I pity this man."

What Reinhardt saw as he peered into the dressing room chilled him—mirrors were broken, every chair smashed, the couch torn apart, broken glass all over the place. In the middle of it all stood John Huston "I sure taught that little bastard a lesson," Huston said. "I had him trembling in a comer. Maybe he'll start to remember his lines a little better now.'* He finished with a stream of four-letter words.

Thanks book poster, very enjoyable, obviously some people haven't been here long enough to recognize your threads.

Reinhardt left Huston in the middle of the wreckage and went in search of Monty. When he found Monty, upset yet surprisingly lucid, Monty's verbal account differed widely from Huston's.

"He came into my dressing room and told me to take my choice. Either I'd remember my lines or he'd break every bone in my body. I just stood there quietly— didn't raise an arm—and told him, 'Why don't you hit me? Why don't you strike?' " According to Monty's account, Huston looked totally disarmed at the dare. Monty kept asking, "Why don't you hit your leading man?" and then Huston, in frustration, began demolishing the room, destroying one piece of furniture after another as if he were destroying pieces of Monty. There was no trembling; he calmly observed John Huston revealing the beast in himself.

It was here that whatever authority Huston had had with Monty vanished. From then on, the two barely spoke, a bizarre situation since Monty was in nearly every scene. Now one could never be sure whether Monty truly couldn't remember his lines, or if, in a campaign of passive resistance, he simply hadn't bothered to learn them.

On October 26, the day before the company came back to Munich, Monty was slapped in the face in a scene and accidentally hit in both eyes. Soon after, he began to complain about blurred vision and saw a physician in Munich who told him the accident had caused cataracts, but that they were not very serious. Universal's executives in Munich insisted, however, on their own doctors, and they changed the diagnosis to long-standing bilateral cataracts having nothing to do with an injury. He was told that he might go totally blind. At Monty's insistence, Reinhardt sent him to London to see another specialist.

When Reinhardt's telegram from London confirmed the diagnosis of a serious cataract condition, there was ghoulish happiness outside of Monty's camp. The set was abuzz about a big insurance claim. Monty's own makeup man. Bob Schiffer, who had now joined the opposition, told Doris what "good news" it was that Monty's troubles were too serious to have been caused by a slight accident.

Susannah York spotted John Huston and some yes-men assistants laughing. Wanting to be included in on the joke, she asked, **What are you laughing about?" Huston replied: "Oh, we're getting ready to save up to get Monty a guide dog for Christmas." York began to cry hysterically and couldn't go on with her scene

Huston and his followers were convinced that something had been wrong with Monty long before the film started, and now that "something" had been found—a debilitating condition caused by Monty's anxiety over the prospect of going blind, which was preventing him from learning lines. It had nothing to do with Huston or Freud or Universal It was obviously all Monty's fault

It’s what I’ve always suspected:

John Huston IS Noah Cross .

Yes, R87, I agree about Houston.

Thank you, OP, for this interesting, informative piece. I always find myself reading your postings through to conclusion, even when they might not be something that initially interested me.

That said, I can sympathize with Montgomery Clift's obvious mental issues, but he really did seem like a total asshole.

Monty Clift was a total loser, I find it hard to sympathize with him.

^Exactly. The way he abused people and they just kept placating him and coming back for more is nuts. These weren't all sycophants either. They were accomplished, successful, famous actors themselves. They didn't need to put up with his shit.

I can't imagine anyone in my circle of friends entertaining behavior like this:

[quote] After a while, Ren€e began to serve dinner at home, because Monty would behave so badly in restaurants. Aside from his silliness with food, he had a habit of greeting waiters with such gracious remarks as, "Hello, fuckface."

What a vile insect.

I don't understand the root of his self destructive behavior, he was a privileged child who grew up to be a young beautiful man who had everything, talent, success, looks, loving friends and money. He ended up as a pathetic loser.

Continued :

Monty refused to leave Munich. He kept Jean there for weeks and drank himself into a near-coma. Doris Langley Moore, who had finally left Freud for good at Christmastime, called Monty from London and, alarmed at the news of his binge, sure he would wind up dead in the streets, called him again and again to ask him to come to London. Three weeks later, he finally did.

Monty did not stop drinking. After everyone had left or gone to bed, he still sat in the living room drinking whiskey and playing the record player very loudly. Doris knew that Sabina, the au pair girl whose bedroom was directly beneath, could not possibly be able to sleep.

"Won't you please come to sleep?" Doris begged.

"I will not," said Monty, like a silly three-year-old.

"But the records are keeping Sabina awake."

Monty's response was to jump up and down on the floor.

Monty could be charming when he was sober, but that wasn't often during those weeks at Doris' house. His presence began to upset her, and it hurt her because she truly loved Monty. In the daytime, he sat around the house drinking whiskey, while Jean drank champagne and fine wines. In the evenings, he pressured her into throwing parties for him and inviting all her celebrity friends.

"After Freud, he wanted excitement, and we had to be continually on the go, receiving people and taking Monty around. So I got Michael Redgrave here, and Vanessa, and everyone I could think of who was interested in him and likely to interest him. He was pushing me to do this, for things to be going on every evening. It was very hard on a hostess with only one au pair girl. And Monty was always late for meals; he'd never turn up when she'd prepare something special for him. It was a hostess' nightmare.

It was impossible to get Monty to go to sleep at night. He was mixing drugs with his alcohol again—amphetamines—and Doris would hear him wandering around the house at night. She would get up and quietly ask him to go back to sleep. Sometimes he would be quite docile and say, "Oh, my dear, I'll go to bed," and other times he would simply keep walking around the house. "One time I was awakened in the middle of the night and I found him just wandering stark naked up and down the staircase.'*

Jean was also overdoing the drinking, but only because Monty drank too much. He loved Monty, so it was necessary for him not to show Monty up. Interestingly, he seemed to find Doris a rival for Monty's attentions and showed hostility toward her. Doris responded in kind. She seemed to feel, as so many others felt that he was a bad influence on Monty—perhaps because by his perpetual presence he fed Monty's guilt about his own homosexuality.

There was a strange duality these days in Monty's simultaneous openness about Jean and his persistent attitude that his homosexuality did not exist Says Doris: "There was a deep puritanism in Monty because he would much rather talk to me about his affairs with women than his affairs with men. He knew that I knew that he slept with Jean, because they slept in the same double bed in my bedroom, but it wasn't as if he would ever talk about it I believe all this made him self-destructive'

Around this time, Desmond Davis went with Monty to a performance by Ella Fitzgerald, Monty's idol. Suddenly, Monty vanished from his seat. Davis just assumed Monty had gone to the gents, but a minute later, Monty walked right onstage in the middle of one of Ella's songs. "Heaven knows why Monty did it," says Davis.

There was no mistaking Monty's condition. Ella stopped singing, and was polite but visibly upset. Monty gave a little smile to the audience, and Ella said, "This is a great surprise to us. We have to introduce you to Mr. Montgomery Clift." The audience gave him a friendly round of applause and a member of the management quickly escorted him off the stage.

Monty could still behave when he wanted to. During a side trip to Bath with Jean and Doris, he stopped drinking and proved a model of deportment, as charming and magnetic as at any time in his life—but once back in London, the whiskey demon took over again. He was once more the haunted, drugged creature prowling her house at night. There were terrible scenes.

Finally, Doris told Monty that he simply must stop—it was wrecking her household. They argued back and forth, and then it was over. Doris' daughter. Pandora, finally told Monty, "Look, wouldn't it be better if you moved to a hotel?"

That was all Monty had to hear. He assumed that it was Doris' wish. The same day, he and Jean took all their baggage and moved into the Savoy. Doris couldn't bear the thought of Monty being turned out of her home, but at the same time she knew that Pandora was right. Perhaps it was even best for him; maybe he would drink less.

But Doris underestimated Monty. He stayed as drunk at the Savoy as he had been at her house. He made no effort to call her or speak to her again before he left London, and she did not call him. In only a few months, Monty and Doris had undergone a process that usually took him years to live out with other friends.

After Universal sued Fireman's Fund Insurance Company for $628,213.52, Universal lawyers had to support their claim with extensive sworn depositions of what had happened on the set of Freud, It took months to collect them. Those willing to swear that Monty was the cause of all the delays were John Huston, his assistant. Lad Von Ronay, and George Golitzin.

Doris Langley Moore, her daughter Pandora, actress Rosalie Crutchley, Desmond Davis, and Angela Allen also gave depositions for Fireman's Fund and, in essence, for Monty, who stood to lose both his career and what was left of his reputation if the insurance company lost

As soon as Monty read Doris' deposition, he was moved to call her from New York, filled with gratitude for the detailed, beautifully written account of the film's atmosphere and events. He was also filled with misery over the way he had behaved in her home. "I feel awful," he said. "Awful. How could I do that to you in your own house?" The relationship was on again, but Doris could not help noting that Monty had only called her after he had read the deposition.

In the middle of 1963, Universal was forced to give Monty's his money, because despite Monty's admission of deliberately ignoring the script, the overwhelming evidence was in his favor. Ultimately, however, he was the loser.

For nearly four years following the completion of Freud and the announcement of Universal's suit, he was not offered work in a motion picture. He was uninsurable. It was a great defeat for him at a time when he so much needed the sense of an ongoing career. There was nothing else in his life but his work. Without it, a deep and empty chasm opened before him. The demons were free to come at will, and stay as long as they liked.

MONTY stayed with Jean for a little more than a year after returning from Europe. The year 1962 was bleak. Monty underwent three operations for cataracts, as well as a serious operation to correct a hernia—the result of his sado-masochistic bout of rope-climbing with Huston. During 1962 and into the following year, he entered Mt Sinai Hospital seven times, each hospitalization lasting from one to two weeks

It was a vicious circle. The lack of work sent Monty into a depression which made him sit stone-silent for hours, and the depression, which often made him impossible to conr tact, robbed him of any chance to resume his career.

Jack Larson came to stay with Monty now, although because of his own busy writing career and personal life, he left Monty pretty much to himself—especially since Monty seemed determined to wallow. Oh, Monty did put on a great display of friendliness and forced enthusiasm for Jack's sake,

He recalls: "Monty had to pretend everything: interest in people, interest in life, in the very words he spoke. Sometimes, I would pass Monty's bedroom, The television would be on, and Monty would be sitting on his sofa, crying, not paying a bit of attention to the television

That's how Monty spent his days. He didn't want to go out He didn't want to see anything. Once, I brought him to a play, and right in the middle, Monty fell asleep. He woke up suddenly with a start, and yelled out, 'What do you mean?' Everyone, even the actors on the stage, heard him. It was really the last sentence of some dream conversation, but it sounded as if it were directed at the actors."

Sometimes Monty would feel a need to reach back into his past to feebly rekindle a friendship that had died. He made those long, late-night phone calls again to people like Bill Gunn. Bill was living with a girl now, however, and when Monty broke down on the phone and asked Bill to come over to see him through the night, Bill's girl became upset.

The two of them would rush over to Monty's at three in the morning, just as Monty was ready to pass out, and Bill would tell her, over her protests, that he dared not leave Monty alone. Eventually, she became so distraught that she told Monty, when he called one night, not to call again. Bill heard and did not stop her.

"It had gone too far," he says. "Monty's pathetic crying and carrying on— I just couldn't take it anymore. Monty wasn't the same as he had been. He needed the kind of help that I couldn't give him, and my trying to cope with him was breaking up a good relationship that I had Monty didn't call me anymore and I didn't call him."

Jean was making Monty worse. He was drinking and drugging as much as Monty. He became prissy and pretentious, an outright bore. Monty only put him on display when they traveled. They seemed to have degenerated into a pathetic passivity, neither one strong enough to offer substance to what had become nothing more than a drinking partnership. They could not even achieve the free-spirited spontaneity that drunken sprees, for whatever they are worth, usually offer. Sexual passion was put of the question. Monty would glide from his gin and tonics into sexless oblivion

He was too powerless, too drunk, to make Jean move out of the house. Both of them were getting too sick to take care of themselves or each other. Neither of them ate enough.

It was toward the beginning of 1963 that Monty began to see his mother again. Over the previous ten years, her calls to Monty had been unending. Marge Stengel remembers that the entire time she was Monty's secretary, Monty saw his mother no more than seven times, despite Mrs. Clift's pleadings. His attitude toward her ranged from total indifference to outright nastmess.

The word he used most often about her was "calculating." He simply didn't trust her and her motivation for calling him. Once, Nancy Walker said that she would love to meet his mother, and he just shook his head with a large sigh and said, "Don't even bother." Nancy said, *That bad' Monty said, "Yes."

On October 1, 1962, a tragic storm hit the Clift family. Suzanne Clift, the twenty-one-year-old daughter of Monty's brother Brooks, killed her boyfriend, twenty-seven-year-old Pierro Brentani. For four days, the New York Daily News headlined the story. Brooks could not afford to pay for the defense of his daughter, and his wife's family, still bitter over then- daughter's marriage to Brooks in the first place, refused to help. Poor Bill Clift nearly went broke. The messy trial left the family emotionally, as well as financially, drained. Suzanne, pregnant by her boyfriend, was convicted, and later had her child in prison.

The tragic scandal brought Monty and his family together again. Mrs. Clift came over to the Sixty-first Street town house now, terribly grateful once again to see her son. She could see how he was living and wanted to help. She was not possessive or domineering, but quite relaxed, and Nancy Walker remembers that Monty remarked to her, during that time: "Not bad, Nancy. Not bad." He was surprised that he no longer felt hostile toward her.

Bill Clift also became reconciled with his son. When he found out what Monty had become—added to the immediate tragedy of his granddaughter Suzanne's conviction— Bill's spirit broke. He saw Monty and Jean together, and knew what it meant. Maria says, "For the longest time Bill refused to admit to himself that Monty was gay, but in the end he knew. He never came out and used the word, but he said he was disturbed at the kind of men his son hung around, and I knew immediately what he meant"

The thing that Bill and Ethel wanted most, now that they were seeing Monty again, was to help him survive. His drinking and his deteriorating health were the most obvious problems.

FUN FACT: The oft-referred-to Jack Larson, Monty's long-time friend, was best known for his role as cub reporter Jimmy Olsen in the 1950s TV show, [italic]The Adventures of Superman.[/italic]

Jean's galloping alcoholism hospitalized him in mid-1963. Ethel called Billy LeMassena and told him that she was worried: Monty was all alone in the house now. Billy, who had remained close to the Clifts but who had not been in Monty's life for many years, told Ethel, "I'll take care of Jean when he gets out of the hospital. I'll take him to my place. But we've got to get someone to take care of Monty."

The two of them went to see Dr. Arthur Ludwig, who said he would try to find a male nurse. Elizabeth Guenster, who had left Monty's employ in 1960, was now back with him as his cook, doubling as a sort of nurse, but that was only in the daytime. Monty needed full-time care.

Dr. Ludwig sent over a pleasant-looking black man by the name of Lorenzo ("Larry") James. Mrs. Clift and Billy hired him immediately, and he stayed with Monty twenty-four hours a day. Billy says, "He was a godsend. He would put Monty to bed, massage him and make him feel comfortable, and get him to sleep. He would make sure that Monty took his medicines. Monty had become helpless." Lorenzo had his own apartment, but he spent most of his time at Monty's house

While Jean recuperated at Billy's apartment, Billy told him bluntly, "You and Monty just can't see each other anymore. You're dangerous for one another." Billy told him that he would have to get his own apartment and that Monty didn't want him back. Monty acquiesced to it all with childlike surrender.

For months, Jean fought the enforced separation violently. He went to Monty's and tried to get in, but Lorenzo James came to the door and coolly told him that he had orders not to let him in.

That approach failing, Jean tried telephoning, but Lorenzo would not allow Jean to speak to him. Finally, Monty changed his telephone number. Meanwhile, Jean was drinking and mixing barbiturates more heavily than before, and becoming hysterical. One night, he called the fire department and told them Monty's house was on fire, then went to the house hoping that in the confusion Monty would come out and he could talk to him.

Monty did, eventually, see Jean. Several times, late at night, while Lorenzo was sleeping , Monty let him in. But by then, even Jean knew that it was over. He dropped out of sight completely. Perhaps he went back to live with those **wealthy" French parents of his.

Every once in a while, Billy would get a call from Kennedy Airport, Jean's drunken voice would say, "Beel, I'm going to Paris. Beel, I love you .. ." Billy would laugh and say: "Stop drinking, Jean, and get on the plane."

Occasionally, Roddy McDowall and Nancy Walker saw Monty, but basically Monty did not have one steady friend left. He spent all of his time with Lorenzo, and went to movies. Billy would sometimes take long walks with Monty and try to behave as if things were the same as in the old days.

Monty was feeling depressed about his whole life and everything he had tried to do, much of their talk centered on Monty's gripes against the friends he had made in the business. He was down on Mira Rostova, down on Kevin, even down on a good, present friend like Roddy McDowall

Billy would come over for dinner, and they would get into one of their old conversations about ethics and logic. The logic and lucidity of the old days would quickly get drowned. "Billy, Billy," Monty would say, tearily, "they're all corrupt —except you. You're the only really decent, honest person I know." Billy, stewed, would protest and confess to Monty all the hypocritical things he had done. Monty would shake his head. "No, it's true. You're the only honest person I know."

Then Billy would take a good look at what the two of them were doing, and suddenly say:

"Why are you trying to kill yourself?"

"I'm not trying to kill myself."

Billy says, "He always denied to me that he knew he was trying to kill himself. I don't see how he could have been that naive, not to realize what he was doing—but maybe he didn't It's just that he wanted to remove life, to anesthetize himself against it. I used to get so mad at Dr. Silverberg because he would tell Monty that it was okay to drink. Psychiatrists who do that ought to be electrocuted."

Mrs. Clift got mad at Dr. Silverberg, too, but after thirteen years with the same analyst, Monty was not to be talked out of seeing him. Mrs. Clift, never one to concede defeat, decided to arrange a summit conference. The scene was a lofty one. Ethel, Jack Clareman—Monty's lawyer— and Dr. Ludwig sat in a circle in Dr. Silverberg's office, staring militantly at the sixty-six-year-old psychiatrist. The big question was launched.

What was he doing about Monty's drinking?

Dr. Silverberg asked the imposing trio: "What drinking'

That ended the big summit conference.

Those who remembered Monty as he had been only ten years earlier were now overcome by an uncomfortable, tomb-like chill, Ralph Zucker recalled: "I saw him in 1964; his face had been altered by the terrible car crash he endured in 1956, his once lithe body was rigid, his movements constricted. And the face was a mask; the eyes were dull. He could hardly walk. A friend led him by the elbow. His hand trembled. He stumbled slightly as he moved along. He seemed as if he were in a trance, as if he were no longer with us, as if his overwhelming personal isolation were irremediable. And I remember thinking: he's a dead man."

This "deadness" was something Monty tried to fight; but the more he tried to force a sense of being alive, the more chillingly dead he seemed. He would encounter old friends in public places and make ludicrous scenes, in an effort to show that he wasn't yet embalmed. He had only been an occasional friend of Norris Houghton's in the past, and yet when he ran into Houghton at the City Center he shouted and screamed and threw his arms around him, as everyone looked up to see what was going on. Houghton was embarrassed.

Lehman Engel, who also had not seen Monty for years, ran into him one afternoon in a chic barber shop in the basement of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. "When I got there Monty was in a chair in the middle of a haircut, sheet around him, all covered with hair. He made the most terrible, the most embarrassing, the most awful scene

Everybody knew who he was and was watching. He saw me in the mirror and he got out of his chair in the middle of a haircut, with this sheet around him and all this hair on him, and he came to the door and he took me by the arm and said, 'Mon vieux, how are you?' I said: *You're acting like a baby.' He said: *No!' and then he said to the barber, Martin, 'Mr. Engel is much busier than I am. You take him and I'll wait, because I'm not busy at all today.' I said: 'Now come on, Monty. Martin will be through with you in ten minutes. Please sit down.

* Monty*s voice was slurry. Between Martin and me, we got him seated in the chair, and I stood there keeping him. occupied with conversation until Martin could finish. Then he was staggering all over the place while he took out his money. When he got out the door I just wanted to collapse: I felt so incredibly sad, but relieved that he was gone."

Lorenzo suggested that Monty rent a summer place near the ocean to get some sun and revive himself, and to that end took a house in The Pines community on Fire Island. The house was a simple, three-bedroom affair, set quite a distance from the ferry landing and therefore from the hordes of homosexual young men who dominated the community.

Monty's "walking** with Lorenzo—a half-carrying process—became a legendary gossip item during the three seasons Monty was there. He kept the house mainly for rest, but hated to be alone there with Lorenzo—especially during his bad depressions.

He fraternized with the local homosexuals, but not indiscriminately. Monty was incapable of sexual pleasure, even if he could have drummed up the strength for it; his main reason for going to some of the gay parties was sheer boredom. Almost universally, they looked upon him as a Boys in the Bandy sunken-ship type: a man, a famous man, who had destroyed himself over the guilt and disappointments of homosexual life.

He became popular as an icon for all the self-indulgent semi-alcoholic gays who loved to gossip about the big movie stars who "were," and what they had done to themselves as a result. It was moronic, vacuous talk, unfair to the man Monty was and had been. They reduced him, in their own minds, to just another sad fag*ot.

Bob Evans used to invite Monty to his parties on Fire Island. There was always a lot of liquor. Monty would sit on the couch drinking, and then suddenly fall on the floor in the middle of a crowd heavy with homosexual chitchat. Someone would pick him up. He would fall again. This would happen three or four times. Eventually, the guests just let him lie there, stepping over him as if he were a sleeping dog

A new acquaintance of his, Ray Buckingham, whom he had met through Lorenzo, half mimics, "Monty spoke very . . . very slowly ... it was almost like ... a ... considered act . . . when . . . he . . . spoke. He would emphasize it with his finger. But it was so incredibly slow it was unbelievable. I think it was an act, but may not have been conscious; that was his only way of delivering everything.

The only time I ever saw him not be like that was one time when he was very depressed, and then he spoke at a normal speed. The rest. . . of . . . the . . . time .. . it. .. was always . . . slow. I think what he worked out for his acting, he carried out for his life, his method of communicating, his everything. When he was going to confront someone, he was going to confront them with a design: like . . . I . . . will . . . do . . . this . . . when . • . I . • . say . . . hello .. . to ... Raymond."

In 1964 and early 1965, Monty did make two timid ventures out of the film world. In 1964, he played Tom in a Caedmon Records recording of The Glass Menagerie opposite Julie Harris, Jessica Tandy, and David Wayne. It was no small feat for the director, Howard Sackler, to get Monty to do it. For two weeks before the recording date, Monty complained that he wasn't ready to do it and perpetually threatened to go off on a sudden trip.

On February 24, 1965, Monty's father, Bill Clift, died of a heart attack at New York Hospital at the age of seventy-eight. After the funeral, Monty told Billy that he hated himself for having treated his father the way he had all those years. "He always thought of Bill as sort of weak and helpless compared to his mother. I don't think he much regretted not having seen her; Monty thought of her as strong and self-sustaining. But toward the end he had a lot of regrets about his father."

Well at least we're at the point when they're trying to turn him into a top instead of straight.

The days, weeks, and months dragged. Monty remained in stasis. By mid-1965, he hadn't worked in films for a full three and a half years, Lantz always sent him plenty of scripts, but Monty complained that they weren't right for him. Most of them were degrading vehicles. One such was The Last of the Late Great Jelly Bellies, a "freak" genre film about a neurotic who falls in love with a fat whore, which Shelley Winters had agreed to do.

Monty never would have done it, but he had so much time on his hands that he kept tantalizing the young screenwriter with the idea that he would do the picture if the right revisions were made. The poor writer made the revisions, imagining that Monty and Winters would elevate his freak film into possible box-office magic, and then Monty rejected the revisions.

The "big plan" to move into the theater was clearly chimerical. In 1965, he actually had a chance to go to London with Lee Strasberg's fine production of The Three Sisters, but he turned it down. He could hardly get up in the morning without Lorenzo carrying him to the shower to wake him out of a semi-coma caused by sleeping pills. How on earth could he have flown to England, gone through rigorous Chekhovian rehearsals, and then given eight performances a week? Monty knew it was impossible.

I wonder if there was some brain damage with the car wreck. Sounds like they had to put his whole head back together.

R111 I doubt it, Monty was crazy way before the accident.

One summer afternoon. Ray Buckingham and Monty took Ray's boat for a cruise on the Long Island Sound. Coincidentally, Frank Sinatra used the same boat basin for his cruiser,

Once on the sound, Ray said, "Let's go swimming." Physical exercise? Appalling. "No, I don't want to go in swimming. I'm not wearing a bathing suit." Ray insisted. So who's watching? Take your clothes off and jump in." Ah, come on . . ." Monty whined, stripping to the skin. Ray pushed him in. "Now swim for ten minutes and I'll let you back in'*

Monty had been complaining about feeling groggy before Ray pushed him into the breach, but after the swim he felt wonderful. He stood naked on the boat: "He had the physique of an Indian fakir, almost suffering from malnutrition. He did not weigh much more than a hundred pounds. His bones stuck out. There was no muscle tone left." It was not at all surprising: Monty now ate nothing but a piece of nearly raw meat once a day and some canned baby food

Monty's depression lifted dramatically when, in the early months of 1965, he found out that Elizabeth Taylor, whom he considered just another ex-friend, had made a surprisingly loyal gesture. She had not closed her eyes to Monty's desperate situation. For several years, she had known he was trying to get back into films, and had never given up on him, even after he made several unfriendly remarks about her to the press.

As John Springer, her friend and publicist, notes, "It's hard to become Elizabeth's friend, but once you are one, Elizabeth never forgets you." Rex Ken-namer corroborates: "If you ever got into Elizabeth's small circle of friends, you always stay there."

After Cleopatra, Elizabeth, a freelancer, had more power in Hollywood than any studio head. Warner Brothers wanted her for their multi-million-dollar production of s' Reflections in a Golden Eye, a sensitive story about two neurotic Southerners—a colonel, who is a suppressed homosexual, and his dissatisfied wife. Elizabeth had played enough crazy Southern ladies and didn't want to do Reflections, but the part of the sexually terrified colonel seemed absolutely perfect as a comeback part for Monty.

She agreed to do the movie, if Warners would agree to casting Monty opposite her. Naturally there was an uproar. John Huston had already been chosen as director! Suppose Monty could not get through Reflections? What company would insure him? And yet, without Elizabeth as box-office insurance, Warners could lose its shirt on such a strange mood piece. Warners and Elizabeth ping-ponged over Monty's casting until she finally ended the hassle by making one of the most magnanimous gestures ever made by a star of Elizabeth's caliber.

She offered her own fee, her usual one million dollars, as insurance for Monty. Monty was cast It was a part so perfect for his present skills that he could easily have walked off with another Oscar nomination, and certainly a completely new career.

Had a brief affair with James Arness.

Monty felt totally overwhelmed by Elizabeth's act. It was as if some old friend had found and rescued him from a solitary life raft on which he had been adrift for three and a half years. He told everyone what Elizabeth had done. He talked of her goodness, her generosity, how unfair the public had been to her during the ordeal of her marriage to Richard Burton.

No one dared breathe a word against her now, even though Monty himself, in the just recent past, had moralized self-righteously about her succession of marriages and divorces.

Elizabeth had three other movies to complete, so Refleotions could not begin until September 1966—more than a year and a half away. The waiting was murderous. Now that Monty felt wanted again, he longed to get out of that town house and prove himself instantly. He would call Elizabeth long-distance to make sure that Wamert hadn't changed their minds, and she would tell him that they had nothing to say about it; this was her deal. If they wanted their film, he had better be in it.

Monty became childish with frantic enthusiasm and insecurity, but she patiently put up with all of his calls. As far as John Huston went, she said, he would not dare treat Monty with anything but cultivated kindness while Elizabeth was around. Oh, Monty was excited, and for the first time in years, he felt loved.

The Burtons came to New York in August 1965, and checked into the Regency with a platoon of secretaries and half a dozen enormous trunks of clothing. In those days, they had more money than royalty, and certainly lived more lavishly. Monty came over to greet them. Burton liked Monty, just as Michael Wilding had; Monty, of course, could speak of nothing else but the plans for Reflections.

He sat in their bedroom, going on and on about the movie, while Elizabeth got under the bed with Burton to try and retrieve their little dog. Monty became fidgety and frustrated. For her, it was just another film, but for Monty it was St. Peter's gate. He left the hotel feeling upstaged by a dog.

Between 1964 and early 1966, while Monty played the waiting game, he began to see a plastic surgeon named Dr. Manfred Graf von Linde. The operations were infrequent and minor, such as removing the bags under Monty's eyes, and were designed to get rid of his sickly look.

Monty's main interest in Manfred von Linde however, was not medical. He was Lorenzo's friend, an eccentric, blond six-footer, and a poseur extraordinaire. There were insidiously criminal overtones to his character which Monty, living in his prison of boredom, thought just wonderful. Manfred had been tossed out of the Army on grounds of homosexuality, performed illegal abortions, was being sued by actress Jo^nn Dixon for a botched-up double breast-lift, and claimed to be a wealthy German count , forced to leave Germany because of the Nazis. His real name, however, was Robert Dent, and his birthplace was Birmingham, Alabama. He had replaced a Southern cracker accent with a German one, and rounded out his act with hammy "genteel" manners

By the time Monty met him, the whole charade of von Linde's life had already been exposed to the public. All the New York papers had had splashy headlines about his possible indictment for the murder of a wealthy widow, Mrs. Lucille Rogers.

One wonders why Monty was not more wary of him. Monty was worth well over half a million dollars, but God knows what von Linde thought he was really worth. Monty still talked indiscriminately about how much he was going to leave this person or that person in his will.

Monty and Lorenzo spent many evenings at von Linde's house and Monty's, and sometimes Billy would join them. Billy liked von Linde, too—he was such a complete poseur and raconteur, still claiming to be a "Graf," despite the fact that whenever anyone addressed him in German, he could not understand a word.

But Elizabeth, Monty's cook—^who had seen a lot of perverse goings-on in Monty's house and had learned to take these things in her stride—did not trust von Linde's interest at all.

Von Linde, however, was only a symptom of Monty's disaffection with people who judged and tried to change, him. The colorful doctor was at least sympathetic to Monty's indulgences and accepted his dissipation without a thought.

Another such was a woman by the name of Irm-gaard "Ischy" Gassier, who had met Monty while he was filming Freud, and who had made several trips from her home in Salzburg, Austria, to seek him out and declare her undying love. She was quite a silly character, gushing with schoolgirlish romance, and at any other time in his life, Monty would never have paid any attention to her.

Ischy's pursuit, however, and her flood of love letters, must have been at least a break in the monotony. She took him out to dinner and plays, and even proposed marriage, though Monty had made it clear that he had no interest in taking a woman to bed. In the end, Monty wrote to her in Austria and told her that he had to "break it off." Even in his current state, he was capable of humoring somebody

Monty also became deeply involved in astrology. He and Lorenzo visited the famous astrologer, Maria Crummere, and Doris Langley Moore sent Monty frequent reports on his horoscope from a friend of hers. (Monty was a Libra, a balanced but undecided type, just on the cusp of Scorpio, a complex, often tormented sign.) When the horoscopes started portending doom, however, Doris immediately stopped forwarding them. Monty shuddered, yet begged Doris not to protect him from the "ugly truth."

Meanwhile, Monty waited. And waited. It was killing him. Toward the end of 1965, Jack Larson visited him and saw that something had to be done, so he called Monty's old friend Salka Viertel, who now lived in Switzeriand, and told her about Monty's state of mind. Monty, he said, was feeling good and he wasn't drinking, but he needed to work—otherwise he was liable to come apart. Salka was moved. She met with her friend, Flemish director Raoul Levy—famous as the discoverer of Brigitte Bardot and the director of most of her biggest-grossing films, including And God Created Woman —and suggested Montgomery Clift for his new spy film, The Defector.

Salka already knew the movie was going to be dreadful; As soon as Monty read the script, he knew exactly what he was in for. Yet he needed to work, and right away, so when Raoul Levy came to New York, Monty told him that he would do the film, as long as he could rewrite his part. Levy agreed.

Monty should have made up his mind simply to give the movie the amount of effort it deserved: to fly to Munich, learn his lines quickly, shoot the scenes fast, and forget it immediately. Other top stars have made such garbage without significant damage to their reputations.

But Monty couldn't do that. Jack listened to Monty talk about the script and he could see the problem. **I couldn't see how Monty was ever going to memorize his lines, he was so interested in the minutiae of lines and words and what emotional truths he was going to reveal. Working with him on The Defector script was like working with a small child: He wanted to talk about little words and things, instead of just learning his cues. And so I knew that the only person Monty could work with was Mira. The same evening that I brought it up, Monty called her."

Monty hadn't seen Mira Rostova for several years, and she had not actually worked with him on a film since I Confess in 1952. Mira had never held a grudge against Monty for dropping her. When he called to ask if she would come with him to Munich, she instantly agreed, as if all the trouble of the intervening years hadn't happened

By the time Monty arrived in Munich, forty-three-year-old Raoul Levy was apparently on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Roddy McDowall, who had a few scenes in the movie, felt that Levy behaved like a "comic opera idea of a movie director." Mira says, "He was no director—he was a joke."

Levy's main problem was his floundering romance with the young, married script girl, Isabel, who lived with the rest of them at the Ambassador Hotel in Munich. He simply couldn't keep his mind on the work. Well after shooting had been wrapped up, Isabel was about to leave him to go back to her husband; Raoul became hysterical and went to her door at the hotel with a double-barrel shotgun and yelled, "Isabel, I've got to see you. I've got a gun." Then he began to pound on the door with the shotgun, but instead of pounding with the barrel he pounded with the butt and the barrel lodged in his chest and blew his stomach wide open.

Levy was just a part of Monty's mounting troubles. He also suffered from a bad case of "comeback fright." He would blow one take after another. He couldn't get his voice to operate properly. He stood near-paralyzed in front of the camera. Levy was too disconnected to be of any help, and Mira, seeing Monty's state, abandoned all interest in trying to rework the script, or even in attempting to improve his performance. All she cared about was having Monty memorize his cues and blocking well enough so that she could get him home

But Monty was driven by fear. After Warner Brothers-Seven Arts had agreed to his casting in The Defector, solely as a "test" for Reflections, they were anxious to hear reports about his reliability to allay their worries about how he would do in Reflections. Monty was well aware of Warners' interest. He was also aware of how bad he looked in front of the cameras, and that he wasn't functioning properly. If reports got back to Warners about his blowing lines and his sickliness, they might use the opportunity to dump him. He had to get through the film, no matter what Levy told him to do; and in the end, through sheer force of will, he made it.

By the end of May, The Defector was finished, but Monty had to spend several weeks in Paris dubbing lines that he had either blown or misread in the film. When Mira parted from Monty in Paris for a little trip of her own, she had no idea that she would never see Monty again.

When Monty and Lorenzo returned home at the beginning of July 1966, the self-loathing that had been building inside of him over his failure in The Defector, and his worries about Warners reneging on the Reflections deal, surfaced into a cavernous depression.

At the house in The Pines, Ray Buckingham and his wife Ann had never seen Monty so down. All he would say about The Defector was: "Nothing went right. I had never been through such a bad time in my life." He looked slightly heavier than he had before leaving for Munich, but it was a "bloated," edematose heaviness; it was not a healthy look.

Monty and Ann walked on the beach near the house. "While we were walking, I had the distinct feeling that he just didn't want to stay around anymore, that he wanted to leave his body. He was so distant." It was as if everything was dying simultaneously: the sun had begun to turn into a smoky corpse, the ocean to disappear from the shore into the shadows, and Monty's voice, no longer alive with that calculating, slow hesitation, drifted on in an odd, monotonous way. They walked slowly; he talked, saying little.

When they came back to the house, Monty approached Ann and Ray from behind and hung over their shoulders. It was suddenly frightening. Monty said to them in a voice that wasn't his own, "I do love you. You know that, don't you? I love you both." Later, Ray told his wife what a shudder went through him when Monty addressed them both like that

Monty did not want to be alone. Ray and Ann were supposed to come to Fire Island the next weekend of July 16, too, but they had just had a quarrel, and Ray called Monty to cancel their date. Monty called back and started to cry. "I wish you'd come out here. I was looking forward to it . . ." Then he lapsed into a sorrowful monologue. He kept Ray on the phone for two solid hours. Ray says, " He was obviously desperately lonely and afraid . . . Suddenly, I realized I had to try to pacify him and we ended up making a date for the following week"

Monty returned to the city and talked with several old friends the next week. Rick called him, and they made a date to have dinner the following Wednesday. Nancy Walker had not talked to him in months, and when he picked up the phone, she screamed, "You creep! This is the first time I've known how to get you since God knows when!" She said she was going out to Fire Island, and Monty was happy and said he would meet her there when he went out during the weekend.

Friday night, July 22, Monty drifted off, quite late. On Saturday morning, Lorenzo tried to wake him in the bedroom of the town house. Some hours later, Lorenzo told the police and a member of the Medical Examiner's office: "I was watching television at five a.m. and then I went to check on Mr. Clift because he had a habit of falling asleep with his glasses on and also because he hadn't been feeling well." Monty had been getting sick from his liquor again.

Monty, indeed, was still wearing his glasses when Lorenzo found him naked in bed at 6 a.m. He didn't seem to be breathing—but then Lorenzo was used to Monty's comatose states in the morning. It seemed to be taking a very long time to get Monty's eyes open and Lorenzo finally said, "Come on Monty, let's go to the showers!"—the usual ritual when Monty wouldn't awaken.

He scooped his charge up and started toward the bathroom with the light, limp body in his arms. But something was terribly strange. Before Lorenzo got to the showers, it suddenly struck him that Monty had never been this bad. He carried him back to the bedroom. He checked the pulse. It was gone.

A stunned Lorenzo tried to call Dr. Ludwig, but he was out of town. Dr. Kline, Dr. Ludwig's associate, received the frightened call and rushed over to the town house. He examined Monty, who still had his glasses on, and pronounced him dead.

Monty had died sometime during the night.

Xfinity - TCM - "Red River" starring Montgomery Clift and John Wayne tonight at 8pm

Thanks again, OP. Great reading!

By 3 P.M., a private ambulance had brought the still naked boby—except for the eyeglasses—^to the Medical Examiner's on the Lower East Side. Dr. Michael M. Baden started the autopsy at four, because the family was anxious to get the body back. He found no evidence that Monty had died of "convulsions due to alcoholism." Instead, there was every indication that Monty had died of a heart attack.

There was no evidence of foul play or drug overdose. Many of Monty's friends were suspicious of the infamous Dr. Manfred von Linde and thought he might have sneaked into the house while Lorenzo was unaware and pumped Monty full of something. Hadn't Lucille Rogers and Aunt Polly died mysteriously? But no traces of liquor or pills were found in his body. Monty had died of indisputable natural causes

The Clifts made a to-do about the funeral arrangements. Whenever the subject had come up, Monty had explicitly said that he wanted nothing more than a simple Quaker service, no pomp and fuss. Mrs. Clift told "Roberta** and Brooks that she also wanted what Monty had wanted, but Monty's twin, paralyzed with grief, shocked at the very idea of not having a wake and a church service with minister, flowers, pews and eulogy, would hear no arguments. She took over and made all arrangements with Lorenzo.

The family—Mrs. Clift, Roberta, Brooks, others members—sat in the first row, with Lorenzo James conspicuously among them. How odd that Monty had cut most of his family off years before with the lame excuse that they were "bigots," and here they were sharing their most intimate grief with ebony-black Lorenzo—almost a living portrait of their desire to appease Monty's tormented spirit.

Libby Holman sat at the very back, next to her grown adopted sons, Tony and Timmy. She had suddenly grown very old. Her face, always prematurely wrinkled, was now that of Methuselah. She wore a dried-up, painted expression, entirely uncharacteristic of her, throughout the ceremony.

Billy LeMassena sat, of course, with the family. Jerome Robbins and Jose Quintero sat alone. Ray Buckingham found himself next to a weeping Lauren Bacall.

In a way, the scattered, alienated, uncommunicating nature of the audience was a striking reflection of Monty's life. Nancy didn't know Billy, Billy hardly knew Ned Smith, Ned had never met Mira Rostova, and so on. Monty could only relate to individuals, not to a group, and so his friends, old and new, found themselves in a church full of unspeaking strangers

The absentees were conspicuous. Not present were Elizabeth Taylor, who was in London; Kevin McCarthy, out of town in a play; Roddy McDowall, who had to fly to Hollywood to finish a work commitment; and Rick, who simply couldn't bring himself to come. Elizabeth sent two bouquets of large white Chrysanthemums .

I assume that the above post is the end. Thank you once again, OP. Now, perhaps we may engage in some polite debate pertaining to the exact reasons this man was self destructive and hell-bent on killing himself. I'll start. Are there any known or at least alluded traumatic events during his childhood? Perhaps something dark happened to him then, and maybe it's something only he knew about. Just throwing it out there.

The service lasted barely half an hour. There was no eulogy, only a few prayers and a benediction.

The Clifts owned their own plot at the Friends Cemetery in Brooklyn's Prospect Park. Mira, who did not show her emotions easily, could not stop crying. In the manner of Quaker burials, no headstone was placed to mark the grave. To find the place where Monty is buried, you have to ask the cemetery caretaker. Says Nancy Walker, "His grave was so like him.'

Films whose stars die right after shooting always gross better than they would ordinarily. But it was such a dreadful way for Monty to be seen for the last time. Critics went out of their way to be kind to it and to him, but kind words could not hide the deathly scarecrow they saw on the screen. His lines were gasped, not spoken; his manner, disconnected. The film served as a reminder more of what Monty had become than of what he had achieved

He left half a million dollars: approximately sixty percent to his twin sister and forty percent to his mother. He also left $12,500 to his brother, Brooks; $2,000 to Mira Rostova; $5,000 to Marge Stengel; $3,000 to Lorenzo; and 500 each to Anne Lincoln and Elizabeth Guenster. It wasn't a lot of money, in view of Monty's fame. But then Monty had never in his life worked for money.

R125 I'm also wondering what was the root for this self loathing and self destruction.

Some said it was his conflict with his homosexuality.

Deborah Kerr said in Patricia Bosworth biography on Clift "He wanted to love women but he was attracted to men, and he crucified himself for it,"

Others said that Monty's strong domineering mother who insisted on an isolated strict aristocratic upbringing for Monty and his brother and sister was the source of his troubles.

I'm not sure if any of the above was the real reason of his self loathing.

Monty's brother, Brooks claimed that Monty was bisexual, had affairs with women and his girlfriends had abortions!

I think one of Monty Clift's problems was that he took acting and himself way too seriously.

Does anyone think he was a male BPD? A borderline? Maybe a borderline and a narcissist?

The extreme worshing then devaluing of people in almost each relationship in his life reminds me of what I have read about those with BPD.

Also, like what R129 said—he was *way* too involved in/intense about acting and what was running through his mind at any given time; it was like he had no sense of a core personal identity.

I believe I read that borderlines have no sense of a core identity and it’s one of the reasons they are always an emotional mess....

Monty Clift was vain intellectually as well as in his looks, his friendships seemed very one-sided, with all energies being directed towards him at the beginning because he’s so promising and pretty, and at the end because he’s a fucked up black hole.

I remember reading in Patricia Bosworth's book that Monty was once arrested for soliciting a male teen for sex .

Seems very plausible R130

There is a very recent ridiculous documentary about Monty Clift made by his nephew (Brooks's son) and his wife intending to whitewash Monty's image and debunk the so called lies in Monty Clift biography books, It portrays Monty as a proud and open bisexual, who had many meaningful relationships in his life (yeah, right!!) , the most silly ridiculous thing in the documentary that Monty's depression mainly started after Freud film and his feud with director John Huston!

I think Monty's nephew and his wife are capitalizing on the fact that the new generation don't know anything about Monty Clift and they want to rewrite history.

Real or fake?

Fake

It appears that Monty Never romantically loved anyone whether female or male, it seems that he only selfishly wanted to be loved, cuddled and indulged and had no problem giving up his attachment with close friends very easily.

Over rated pretty boy. He was the same in every role he played.

Kevin McCarthy on Montgomery Clift :

"Even at that time – this was before his accident in 1956 – something was going wrong. By 1953 or 1954 he was trying not to see too much of me because he felt uncomfortable. He was pursued by all celebrities, magazines, authors, he had a huge following and, at times he’d be drinking a too much and fell down a little too often. He always talked about himself and never asked you what you were doing. All the conversations he was involved in, all had something to do with his perceptions, about what he thought, what he was doing. That kind of personality was emerging, so I felt uncomfortable too. Looking back, I must say that losing that friend and that friendship was a landmark in my life. "

In the hidden hours of Monty’s life he cruised Third Avenue, picked up guys at the underground gay bars and had a string of highly volatile affairs.

“He’d pick up guys and bring them to the duplex,” said Bill La Massena. “He’d sleep with them and that would be that. He’d get bored. Once he told me ‘I don’t understand. I love men in bed but I really love women.”

Deborah Kerr put it more succinctly: “He wanted to love women,” said Deborah Kerr, “but he was attracted to men. And he crucified himself for it.”

On rare occasion, Monty would accidentally forget himself and let the two sides to his personality intersect, as for instance what happened at a party given by Frank Sinatra. Monty got very drunk that night and came on to a fella at the party. Sinatra saw it. He promptly had his bodyguards throw Monty out.

Truman Capote, a friend of Monty’s, recounted in an interview with Andy Warhol something Monty said one night while they were having dinner. “The check came and Monty insisted on paying the check, so he just wrote his name on it. [The waiter] said he was very sorry but Monty didn’t have a charge account and he’d have to see some identification. Monty looked up absolutely stupefied and said the saddest line I’ve ever heard in my life. He said: ‘My face is my identification.’”

From Richard Burton diarirs :

Saturday 24th Things that happened while these pages were blank:

Monty Clift, possibly E's greatest friend and with whom she was about to start Reflections in one month from now, died of a massive heart attack in NY. He died in his sleep. [...] The news was told to E by phone from NY by Roddy McDowall. He said, to E's horror, that the death was caused by a combination of drink and drugs. This turned out to be totally untrue.143 Little Roddy, even when he loves someone, loves their attendant disasters almost as much. He, Monty, left E anything of his possessions in his will. She chose something I don't know what. His companion, nurse and major domo very kindly sent E his (Monty's) handkerchiefs which he had only recently bought in Paris and which he loved, delicate white on white.144 And to me – Monty's favourite soap! Should I use it or keep it? E was very upset and still cannot believe he's dead. A little Monty Clift cult has started since his death. It would have been more useful when he was alive. He couldn't get a decent job for the last 5 years of his life. Poor sod. I didn't know him very well but he seemed like a good man. [...]

From Eddie Fisher : Been there, Done that book

Another night we were with Monty Clift and a priest who was the cousin of a friend of ours. By dessert the priest was playing with Monty under the table. It was so outrageous it actually reminded me a little of Mike Todd. Elizabeth didn't care what Monty did because she was crazy about him; if he had been as interested in women as she was in him, who knows what would have happened.

I liked him too, but he was deeply, deeply troubled. When I was with him I could almost feel impending doom. There was a storm in his eyes. It seemed like he was always either drunk or on some sort of pills. When Elizabeth was making Suddenly, Last Summer and we were living in a London hotel suite, Monty would visit us and get very drunk or stoned and sit on the ledge of the terrace, maybe a few inches from falling to his death. I stood close to him, ready to grab him if he leaned back too far. That was my lasting image of Montgomery Clift, always wobbling a few inches from death.

The terrible car accident he had leaving Elizabeth's house one night disfigured him, but long before that he was struggling with life.

Monty Clift gave me my second acting lesson. When Elizabeth forced the producers to give me a part in Butterfield 8, Monty volunteered to help me with my lines. We were living at the Park Lane Hotel and Monty arrived promptly at nine o'clock in the morning. I handed him my script to look over and went inside to change clothes. A few minutes later I smelled smoke and ran back: Monty had passed out and his cigarette had set the script on fire in his hands. At my first acting lesson Stella Adler chased me around the room; at my second lesson Monty Clift set fire to my script. Acting was certainly a tough profession for me.

Classic Borderline Personality Disorder:

[quote]it seems that he only selfishly wanted to be loved, cuddled and indulged and had no problem giving up his attachment with close friends very easily.

and...

[quote]He always talked about himself and never asked you what you were doing. All the conversations he was involved in, all had something to do with his perceptions, about what he thought, what he was doing.

R144 Interesting, I guess it's very possible he had Borderline Personality.

I'm sure it was very painful to be his friend but it seems his friends always felt sorry for him and protective of him and indulged him at least for a while.

^Those are the BPDs minimum requirements for friendship. You must always protect, coddle and indulge them. Never call them out on their bad behavior or you will be cut off in an instant. They are experts at playing the victim so that people will feel sorry for them. Nothing is ever their fault or their own doing. They are always tortured and misunderstood souls.....magnets for "bad" people who do them wrong. Their perception of others is very black and white. You are either an angel or a demon. Angels (friends) become demons (enemies) when they eventually get sick of being used and set some boundaries.

R146 You just accurately described what was described in the book about Monty's behavior, He not only cut off his friends when they got sick of his actions and advised him, he considered them enemies and talked down on them. Even Elizabeth Taylor, he later bashed her to friends, Only when she gave him a job in Reflections on Golden Eye movie, he had soften his views and liked her again.

Her feet are bent upward using the heels for bracing his weight - totally supporting him though it may have pained her a bit. Pic speaks volumes. I still don't understand why this man was so self destructive. Aye, we must remember the times. It was a time when not a lot was known concerning the horrendous damage drug abuse could incur. A time when doctors prescribed all sorts of pills at a whim. Everyone smoked cigarettes, and a doctor visit might involve a doctor smoking throughout the examination (Forrest Gump). Monty was an addict. I do believe that he fucked women here and there though his preference was for men. He was a Libra male who are known for their dual sexuality. In the end, he was a major drug and alcohol addict and suffered the consequences. Compelled in his flirtation with disaster. He should have done much better with the gifts he was given, but I don't pass judgement on him. SOMETHING was seriously wrong and always had been wrong.

R148 "I still don't understand why this man was so self destructive. "

I guess, we will never know, Even his closest friends and family didn't know and could only speculate. I don't pass judgment, but after reading more about him, I am sure addictions made him the person he was - I just couldn't like or sympathize with him.

A quote from Patricia Bosworth book about Clift says it all - " Monty was more loved than loving".

R92, he was obviously mentally ill and self-medicated with booze and pills and wanton sexual encounters. Anything to give him fleeting bits of euphoria or to tune out the negative thoughts. While reading all these passages, I'm reminded of Vivien Leigh, whose mood swings, irratic behavior, alcoholism, blackouts, promiscuity, etc., were also due to a severe mental illness.

Interesting to see him as himself and not a movie character. Here's an interesting interview.

For Tasteful Friends, his UES town house.

Monty Clift could be very cruel to other people Even before his drug/alcohol addiction ... The Bosworth book has an anecdote from his teenage years, where Monty was admiring himself in the mirror and his dorm mate, I think, who was suffering from very bad acne, passed by, and Clift said to him, "You're terribly ugly, you know that?"

^Perhaps, but we all have our own asshole moments, right? Especially when we are young and have much to learn.

Monty said that before the accident, he knew he could get away with murder because of his good looks (he was very vain and had mirrors everywhere in his house, he took them down after the accident)

But after the accident, he said, Now I know the way everybody else feel and being treated because i'm not beautiful anymore.

R154 True, but it seems that insulting people's looks and making cruel remarks about less fortunate looking people was a recurring theme in Monty's life after he fucking grew up.

From R65 "He probably loved no one better than Nancy Walker and yet, in front of nine or ten dinner guests, he would hurl monstrous comments about her looks. She would be visibly hurt, but neither she nor anyone else would retaliate. If one wanted to be around Monty, one had to suffer along with him. He forced that"

From R60 "After a while, Ren€e began to serve dinner at home, because Monty would behave so badly in restaurants. Aside from his silliness with food, he had a habit of greeting waiters with such gracious remarks as, "Hello, fuckface."

Okay, R156 - I'll agree. He was a drunk asshole. He drank over taking fucking DEMEROL! Dude was probably never in his right mind. Dinner guests said he'd get up to get something and fall flat on his face passed out. They learned to ignore it, waiting for him to come to on his own. And yet they kept coming back for more.

R157 I believe that while being drunk, all your inhibitions are gone and you just show your true self (Like Mel Gibson and his anti-Semitic comments when he was drunk)

I'm not saying that Monty Clift was an evil person or cruel all the time, he just had a cruel streak in him.

I'm shocked that so many people kept him around. If I had a friend who did the things @ R156, plus got so black out drunk he routinely fell on his face, I would dump him. I don't GAF how handsome, rich or famous he is. A loser is a loser.

R159 Totally Agree

I think these movie stars have that kind of effect on people, Marlon Brando, though TOTALLY different case from Monty, would abuse his closest friends in many different ways and they usually stuck and kept coming back.

All I'm saying is that if Monty Clift was drinking hard liquor after having taken Demerol, then that dude had built up one hell of a tolerance to the drugs he was taking for years. I mean he had to have one hell of a whole bodily system to have withstood that combo as often as he apparently did. In the book passages upthread, it's mentioned that the woman he was staying with woke up in the middle of the night to find him stark naked and doing nothing but walking up and down the stairs again and again - he was probably trying to keep his heart pumping. It's really fantastically crazy if you think about it. Demerol is no joke. Michael Jackson wrote a song about it. Like to hear it? Well here it go:

I had IV Demerol following surgery and while it really is an amazing pain reliever I was so fucked up on it that I can't imagine functioning in any way outside of an inpatient setting.

[quote]He probably loved no one better than Nancy Walker and yet, in front of nine or ten dinner guests, he would hurl monstrous comments about her looks.

This is the intersection of drunk and personality disorder. It's a terrible place and the only thing you can do is remove yourself from it so you don't end up a victim.

R13 I had a friend who was like this.

R164 Is he dead now??

Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Early thirties.

Monty's town home (I'm sure it's been updated)

He must have pulled in only the best cock when he was in his prime.

See R152, R167.

The thing I found most remarkable about Clift's saga was his relationship with his incredibly dysfunctional and abusive psychiatrist who may or may not been in love with him. Dr. Silverberg saw him almost daily, permitted drinking in sessions, but denied Clift was an alcoholic and was an enabler extraordinaire. If Clift's friends gently confronted him about the drinking and drug abuse, he'd pull the "my shrink doesn't think I am" card out of his pocket. His friend and family took the extraordinary step of staging an intervention through the psychiatrist only to have the blank Dr. Silverberg respond "What drinking?"! Who hears of such a thing in these days of HIPPA confidentiality laws? So many mental health providers are more diseased than their patients. Silverberg certainly qualified. Either that or he was a jaded sociopath who needed Clift's session fees rolling in on a daily basis.

^Sorry for the duplicate Monty house posting - somehow I skipped over the first. I'll agree with the notion that Silverberg was hustling Monty for steady cash flow - no doubt. The man saw an advantage and took it.

From Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars :

Someone else who was in many ways like Jimmy Dean was the actor Montgomery Clift. Monty was a temperamental, moody queen with a surprisingly vicious tongue. He wouldn’t hesitate to hurt or offend anyone. He was hard to please and was very dismissive of people. Like Jimmy, Monty always acted a little superior—“grand” is a better word—and hard to get. He was unbearably snobbish.

Both he and Jimmy looked down their noses at people, no matter who they were. To them I’m sure I was nothing more than a simpleton bartender and, therefore, worthy of scorn. The difference between the two of them was that Monty relied on me for many of his tricks, whereas Jimmy always had a bevy of boys and girls chasing after him. I guess it would be accurate to say that Jimmy was bisexual whereas Monty was completely gay. Monty was painfully fussy about his lovers. He was extremely fastidious about who he took to bed with him, often for the strangest reason.

“His prick was an inch too long,” he once said to me after I had gone out of my way to find the perfect trick for him. On other occasions if it wasn’t that a prick was too long then it was an inch too short, or the guy’s hair was not parted properly, or his feet were too small, or his toes too bony. There was always something wrong. Monty was never satisfied.

I continued to provide him with tricks until he finished filming Judgment at Nuremberg with director Stanley Kramer, in 1961, after which he left L.A. to settle in New York. I cannot say that I regretted seeing him leave town.

Liz Taylor had somewhat distanced herself from his towards the end, a lot of people couldn't take his behavior anymore, which seemed psychotic. Even before the accident he behaved like a madman . Monty Clift was severely mentally ill. A writing expert examined his handwriting and told him "you're the most disturbed man I've ever seen"

In 1949, Monty was arrested on 42nd Street in New York for soliciting, but his film studio intervened to ensure that the charge was dropped without publicity.

Clift would have been well advised to die young.

And yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if he had a Cluster B personality disorder, but he was so fucked up in so many ways that you can't point at one thing and say it was what ruined his life.

Although if one thing ruined his life, it's probably the substance abuse, and I do regard that as a separate thing from any possible personality disorders or issues with his sexuality. Some people are just more prone to addiction that others and it's not clear why, and I don't think it's due to life circumstances; if you find one person who says that a personal trauma drove them to drink and/or drugs, you can find a hundred different people who survived the exact same personal trauma and wasn't drive to drink and/or drugs. It's still not clear why some people are more prone to addiction than others, but I think it's obvious that Clift was as prone to addiction as a human being can be.

BUMP!

True, R174. Hard to tease out addiction from mental illness. Each causes and exacerbates the other.

Of course, R176, it's all moot if you've got an incompetent doctor who tells you it's perfectly okay to destroy your body with substance abuse and treat other people horribly.

I wonder if Clift searched the world over until he found a worthless excuse for a doctor who was okay with his drinking and generous with the prescription pad, or if he got lucky early in the game?

Dr. Silverberg :

Monty was like an excited kid about seeing the doctor. This wonderful man was going to help him. They talked every day about Monty's "not living well" and "not being as aggressive as one should be" as a young man. Monty turned down every film offer in order to see him, and continued to do so for the next two years.

But he did not get better. Indeed, as the months progressed, the drinking got worse. People would try to be supportive and tell him, "You can pull yourself together again.'* Kevin remembers once saying to him at a party, " 'You've gone so far in the direction of control, and self-possession, and definition . . . You're just sort of fatigued with it and you've gone in the other direction awhile.' You see, it seemed that it never occurred to him to drop this very studied approach to life and work, to just say, 'What happens if I go to work tomorrow and do that scene— just to see what's in me?' He said he wanted to explore what hell was like, and then come back. '

As best she could, Mira tried to find out from Monty why he had changed so. It always seemed to come back to Silverberg. Monty insisted on using a code when they discussed the psychiatrist in public, because Monty was paranoid about reporters overhearing; they had to refer to him as "Victor," his middle name. It seems Monty would describe his crazy behavior to "Victor" in New York, and Silverberg would tell Monty that this behavior was good

When Monty sobered, the two of them would sit and talk, with Monty again quietly respectful of Mira's sensitivity and concern. It was only then that she communicated her fears to him. Would he consider maybe not seeing Dr. Silverberg so often, and perhaps consult with another psychiatrist? Monty contritely listened to Mira*s gentle exhortations. He told her he knew that something was wrong, but he didn't know what. He didn't know if she was right about Silverberg. It was always a touchy subject.

Monty had begun reevaluating his whole relationship with Mka. Dr. Silverberg wanted him to "stand up" to her and drop her; Mira wanted him to drop Silverberg. It was really a dispute over who would get Monty, and he was torn between his need for her and his growing anxiety that her presence would weaken him as a man.

He asked Fred Zinnemann if it was all right for Mira to come on the set after they began production, and, of course, Monty already knew what Zinnemann's answer would be. It was such a devious way to get rid of her. Mira returned to New York before principal photography began

Shortly after she left, Monty called her long distance. "I want you to go to see Dr. Silverberg," he said, but gave no reason, simply saying that he wanted Mira and his psychiatrist to get to know one another. Perhaps the opponents could talk it out and reach some sort of truce on the question of whose advice Monty was to take. Mira did call Dr. Silverberg at his office.

As soon as he heard her name, however, he grew hostile. He was much too busy to see her and said that, in any case, it would be unethical for him to discuss his client with her. As Mira struggled to make the doctor understand that Monty was in great danger. Dr. Silverberg countered abrasively with: "What drinking? I don't know what you're talking about," and "What dangerous driving?"

Mira was unable to make the doctor admit that anything she said had validity, and his tone consistently put her off. It was clear that he was not about to let anyone interfere with his relationship with Monty. Mira sensed a tremendous selfishness and destructiveness, and became more convinced than ever that she had to get Monty away from him

Mira's temporary "replacement" in Hollywood was a young actor by the name of Jack Larson. Jack was then playing Jimmy Olson on the popular Superman television series, and he really had that "Gosh, Supermanl" quality about him, which was tremendously appealing. Monty had met him the year before, during the filming of I Confess, and their friendship developed into a close one lasting for years.

Jack Larson tried, too, suggesting that Monty dry out in a sanitarium. Monty looked at Jack tearfully, and then began to shake his head slowly. •*No, Dr. Silverberg thinks I shouldn't He says that I don't have a drinking problem."

It worried everyone. How could Monty be seeing this psychiatrist every day in his perpetual condition, without Dr. Silverberg's acknowledging either to his patient or to anyone else that Monty had a drinking problem as well as an equally severe addiction to drugs?

I believe Monty was a narcissist , He fulfilled almost all of Narcissistic personality disorder's criteria

Narcissistic personality disorder is characterized by the presence of five (or more) of the following symptoms:

Has an inflated sense of self-importance

Is preoccupied with fantasies of success, brilliance, beauty or ideal love

Believes that he or she is “special” and can only be understood by other special or high-status people

Requires excessive admiration

Possesses a sense of entitlement

Takes advantage of others

Lacks empathy

Behaves in an arrogant, egotistical or haughty way

In short, people with NPD might be described as being very self-absorbed or egotistical. This self-absorption rises to the level of a clinical disorder because it significantly interferes with relationships, occupation or other important domains in life. Many experts believe that this egotistical style is actually the NPD individual's attempt to deal with an underlying poor sense of self-worth.

Some sort of personality disorder for sure. R180 might have pinpointed it, though I believe it was a mixture of disorders + his insane good looks and talent sadly didn't help, as people became manipulated by them and could no longer help. I was a major fan for a long time. I knew of his alcoholism. Even read a (depressing) biography once, written by an ex of his. Maybe the Jean guy, or another. Can't remember. Fact is I can no longer stand people like that. They lack character. And still, The Search, A Place in the Sun, Stazione Termini, those are probably my favorite performances ever by a male actor. But the persistent self-destructiveness and the lack of respect for those who loved and supported him... That I can't stand. I will be watching The Defector to get a full picture and then I'll be done.

R180 "Believes that he or she is “special” and can only be understood by other special or high-status people

That's why he worshiped his incompetent joke psychiatrist (because he considered him God) and was obsessed with Jewish people, worshiping them because he considered them "Superior" who can do no wrong.

Examples from the book :

He talked of Silverberg as if he were some sort of intellectual god, and sprinkled his descriptions with such expressions as "charming," "brilliant," "a man of great wisdom," "rare,**

"He would tell Billy about Israel, and about the Jews, and about how they were going to save the world. Jews were better than everyone else! He would rant about Lew Wasserman, head of MCA, as an example of those superior Jews who would lead them all to glory. "

"To Monty, all blacks were spat upon, all Jews superior, all writers flawless miracles."

Could it be possible that Monty Clift also suffered from a 'martyr syndrome'??

R181 his insane good looks and talent sadly didn't help, as people became manipulated by them and could no longer help

On the contrary, I think his good looks and Talent were advantage for him, If he was an ordinary man, non of his friends or people around him would have accepted his psychotic behavior for as long as Monty's friends did.

He most likely did, R183, and that's part of what made him so appealing.

From Patricia Bosworth book :

1950, Monty didn't approve of Merv Griffin, He spoke of him contemptuously as that 'band singer' and Merv sensed that. 'They once got into a wild nasty pie throwing fight" Blaine said "It's funny Monty could be really shitty, this was the first time i realized I had to separate the artistic life from his private life - He was a great actor but it didn't mean he was always a great person - not by a long shot"

The more I read about Monty Clift, the more I dislike him.

Damn. Silverberg wasn't just diseased. He was a monster and sociopath who got off on his attempts to destroy Clift and simultaneously extract money from him.

R169

Google

The Right Profile The Clash

Say, where did I see this guy? In 'Red River'? Or a 'Place In The Sun'? Maybe 'The Misfits'? Or 'From Here to Eternity'?

And everybody say, "Is he all right?" And everybody say, "What's he like?" And everybody say, "He sure look funny" That's Montgomery Clift, honey!

New York, New York, 42nd Street Hustlers rustle and pimps pimp the beat Monty Clift is recognized at dawn He ain't got no shoes and his clothes are torn

And everybody say, "Is he all right?" And everybody say, "What's he like?" And everybody say, "He sure look funny" That's that Montgomery Clift, honey!

I see a car smashed at night Cut the applause and dim the light Monty's face is broken on a wheel Is he alive? Can he still feel?

And everybody say, "Is he all right?" And everybody say, "Shine a light" And everybody say, "It's not funny" That's Montgomery Clift, honey!

Shoot his right profile

And everybody say, "Is he all right?" And everybody say, "What's he like?" And everybody say, "He sure look funny" That's Montgomery Clift, honey!

Nembutol, numbs it all But I prefer alcohol

And everybody say, "What's he like?" And everybody say, "Is he all right?" And everybody say, "He sure look funny" That's Montgomery Clift, honey!

He said go out and get me my old movie stills Go out and get me another roll of pills There I go again shaking, but I ain't got the chills ARRRGHHHGORRA BUH BHUH DO ARRRRGGGGHHHHNNNN!!!!

And everybody say, "What's he like?" And everybody say, "Is he all right?" And everybody say, "He sure look funny" That's Montgomery Clift, honey!

I think Monty liked the BBC

Monty on "What's My Line."

From Montgomery Clift: A Biography by Michelangelo Capua‏

David Holman, Libby Holman's nephew stated that, although he was very young , he had a crush on Monty and he slept with him "Monty was so drugged and drunk all the time, I never saw him when he wasn't drunk. Morning, noon or night....We had a room next to one another at my Aunt Libby's. I found it unsatisfying. He just needed someone to hold and hit. He was passive in a way. He never had an erection. My Aunt Libby would kick him out of the bedroom.

David continued "She prevented him from doing great, good movies....He didn't understand how dependent upon her he was, jealous of his fame, she prevented him from doing good movies, and he listened to her and they would talk ten times a day on the phone, when he wasn't at the house. She'd read the scripts for him and say "You don't want to do this crap! One thing for sure, my aunt wasn't good for him.

David Holman second from left next to Libby in background

R192 "One thing for sure, my aunt wasn't good for him. "

A lot of Monty's friends also thought Libby Holman's influence over Monty was bad and destructive, and that she introduced him to drugs. But it seems that Monty himself was attracted to bad destructive people like his psychiatrist or Libby.

R192 Among the good scripts Monty turned down during the time of his close involvement with Libby Holman (1950 - 1955) were Sunset Boulevard, On the Waterfront and East of Eden.

So Monty was a bottom?!

Montgomery Clift home movies

According to Monty's costar, Susannah York, John Huston kept asking Clift about the Freudian concept of "represssion", obviously alluding to Clift's repressed homosexuality.

Isn't he the one who liked to have cigarettes put out on him?

No, that was supposedly James Dean

The above answer meant for R199

R10 says many famous people were at the star-studded premiere on May 11, 1954.....Marlon Brando, Marlene Dietrich, Patricia Neal, Richard Harris....

Who is this Richard Harris?

Not the 24 year old broken-nosed Irish drunk?

Last month, I watched Monty's last movie "The defector" and I felt Very sorry for him, he looked so thin, emaciated and fragile. It's a pity the way he destroyed himself.

^ Is The Defector any good? Should I put it in my Netflix DVD queue?

I agree he had the Narcissistic Personality Disorder. And being an addict on top of it. Addicts always display narcissistic traits.

Obviously he was as prone to addiction as any human being can be... but I don't think he had NPD on top of that. Narcissists tend to destroy other people, not themselves.

I think he's a better fit for Borderline, they tend to be horribly self-destructive and dependent, and Clift seems to have set world records for self-destructiveness and dependency.

R117 Dr. Manfred Graf von Linde ... an eccentric, blond six-footer, and a poseur extraordinaire

R204 The Defector is on youtube.

[quote]the day of the appointment Monty walked into her waiting room and promptly passed out on the floor.

That's real commitment to drinking.

I wasn’t aware that political pundit Eleanor Clift was his sister-in-law.

I can't stress this enough - it wasn't just the alcoholism, it was also the drug addiction. His favorite alcoholic beverage seems to have been "whiskey mixed with fruit juices AND CRUSHED DEMEROL PILLS!" They guy wasn't just drunk all the time - he was totally shit-faced wasted.

R204 As someone above mentioned, the movie is on Youtube, If you are Monty's fan, watch it (out of curiosity to see his last movie) but you will feel sorry and VERY SAD for him.

Somewhat, I can see why his friends stuck around for as long as they did. There is something vulnerable and very fragile about him, that you feel you want to help and protect him.

[quote]Dr. Manfred Graf von Linde ... an eccentric, blond six-footer, and a poseur extraordinaire

In that picture of the good doctor at R207, he looks kinda like Mr. Humphries in [italic]Are You Being Served?[/italic]

Everyone was supposed to circle the wagons and figure out how to save poor, pitiful Monty. I like the quote upthread about how he wanted his friend to meet his quack "doctor" so they could figure him out together, like a project---discuss him, his problems and what course he should take with his life. LOL. What a BPD asshole. But that's what they do. Play victim and expect everyone else to fix them.

Did he ever take that kind of interest in anyone else? Was he even aware that his friends might have had problems of their own.

He must have been exhausting to be around. Especially to work with.

Work maybe was okay. Friends, forget it.

R214 "Did he ever take that kind of interest in anyone else?"

I don't think so, Regardless of his sexuality, I feel he never really deeply connected with anyone male, female or even an animal. I think that he never even grieved the loss of his long term friends when they distanced themselves from him. He was totally absorbed with his own thoughts, problems and demons.

I think there were times before the accident when he showed interest in other people, his friendships with Taylor and Frank Sinatra at least weren't entirely one-way, wasn't he fascinated with each of them? And with Libby Holman?

Of course, after the accident, he probably met all the criteria for Dependent Personality Disorder (see link), but I don't think he started out that way. The accident and the way it exacerbated his substance abuse sent everything around the bend.

A very young Monty with Alfred Lunt on Broadway.

According to Kevin McCarthy, Monty went down to Mexico while doing "There Shall Be No Night" in Los Angeles in 1940, ate something bad, and caught chronic amoebic dysentery, which caused him excruciating gastrointestinal pain throughout much of his life. Kevin remembered him being in pain even before the car accident, and Monty would go down to the drugstore and charm the clerks into giving him painkillers.

Marlon Brando to Monty Clift :

"He told him: "In a way I hate you. I always hated you because I want to be better than you, but you're better than me - you're my touchstone, my challenge, and I want you and me to go on challenging each other . . . and I thought you would until you started this foolishness."

Friends? Lovers?

R222 Monty was gay, Brando was bi But i don't believe they were lovers. I think they respected and liked each other, but not close friends.

R223, I'd bet they had sex at least once, and I'd bet more than they left it at once or close to once. Brando could find better lays.

And there's no way they could become close friends, Brando was totally not there for a person who needed caretaking and coddling, he was one narcissistic bastard, a textbook case of NPD.

R224 I totally agree with the 2nd part of the comment, but i highly doubt they slept together.

What a pity Clift and Brando made just one movie together. And it was an unmitigated TURKEY!

Clift was haggard and crumpled as a self-loathing jew.

Brando was playing another weird caricature as a blond German (just like his inept caricature role in 'Mutiny on the Bounty').

And there were was Dean Martin hopelessly out of his depth plus two American female bimbos one of whom had the improbable name of 'Hope Plowman'.

The only relief in this turgid 3 hour long grimness was the gorgeous Maximilian Schell in a supporting role outshining the American stars. He unfortunately had to share one ludicrous scene where he and Brando were having a petty spat on the back of a motorcycle.

The author of this biography "Monty: the unnamed A Biography of Montgomery Clift" was somebody called Robert Laguardia.

And he was obviously keen on the word adjective 'suddenly' because my word-checker tells us that he uses the word TWENTY-SEVEN times in the extracts given here.

Have any of you known chronic alcoholics in real life? They're impossible, and there's no psychological mumbo jumbo explaining or excusing their behavior. They end up jobless and friendless except perhaps for a family member or two who will tolerate them. People have much longer fuses when it comes to celebrities. Clift was an impossible alcoholic/drug addict , who if he were just an ordinary person, would have died destitute and alone before he reached 40.

Elizabeth Taylor Talks About Montgomery Clift

Interesting review of the book - 1977

I've read somewhere that the book's author Robert LaGuardia has died from AIDS, Is it true or a rumor?!

Robert LaGuardia suddenly died from excessive hysterical hyperbole.

Suddenly 'Dickie' rang up complaining that his quoted words were taken out of context, R12.

And then LaGuardia suddenly realised the emptiness of fabricating private (or non-existent) conversations supposedly made half-a-century ago.

I'm sceptical of the fabricated conversation that Taylor told Columbia that she had to have Montgomery Clift as her "leading man" in 'Suddenly Last Summer', R66.

Clift got third billing but he was definitely in a supporting role in this fabulous black and white movie.

He was important to the plot as a handmaid or Rosencrantz & Guildenstern.

Frank Sinatra Talks about Monty Clift

Olivia de Havilland didn't have an easy time working with Monty

God I love Olivia.

Robert La Guardia, at 26:10, was a goodlooking guy.

I believe Taylor's intimation that she got jobs for Monty - that's something she WOULD do for him. She did it on Suddenly, and then again on Reflections, but of course Monty passed on before filming began.

He died before Reflections, Reverend. Died, dead.

Montgomery Clift Documentary

Marlon Brando Talking About Montgomery Clift

From Marlon' memoir "Songs My Mother Taught Me"

Another friend from that era who died sadly and prematurely was Montgomery Clift. We were both from Omaha and broke into acting about the same time. We had the same agent, Edie Van Cleve, and, although he was four years older than me, we were sometimes described as rivals for the same parts. There may have been a rivalry between us—in those days I was a competitive young man determined to be the best and he was a very good actor.

We met while I was in Truckline Cafe. By then Monty had been in several plays, and I was curious about how good he was and went to see him in The Searching Wind. He was good, and after the play I introduced myself and we went out for dinner. Since we shared a lot of similar experiences, there was a lot to talk about and we became friends, though not close ones. There was a quality about Monty that was very endearing; besides a great deal of charm, he had a powerful emotional intensity, and, like me, he was troubled, something I empathized with.

But what troubled him wasn’t evident. Later on, I went out with a girl he had dated, and she said she thought he might be a bisexual or a homosexual, but I found it hard to believe. I never asked him and never suspected it, but if he was a homosexual, I imagine he was torn asunder by it. Whatever the reason, he was a tortured man, and to deaden his pain he began drinking chloral hydrate and then became an alcoholic

At the time I didn’t understand what was happening or why Monty wanted to destroy himself, but it was tragic to watch. By 1957, when I was in The Young Lions, nobody wanted to hire him, but I encouraged the producers to give him a job. It had been hard for him to find work after being injured in a bad car wreck not far from my house, and his upper lip was paralyzed. He’d had plastic surgery, but the doctors hadn’t been able to repair the damage completely. He could smile with his eyes, but his upper lip wouldn’t move, giving him a twisted, confused look. He had always taken great pride in his looks, and he was self-conscious about the injury.

When Monty showed up in Paris for The Young Lions, he was consuming more chloral hydrate and alcohol than ever. His face was gray and gaunt, and he had lost a lot of weight. I saw he was on the trajectory to personal destruction and talked to him frankly, opening myself completely to him; I told him about my mother’s drinking and my experiences with therapy and said, “Monty, there’s awful anguish ahead for you if you don’t get hold of yourself. You’ve got to get some help. You can’t take refuge in chemicals, because that’s a wall you can’t ever climb. You can’t get around it, you can’t drive through it. You’re just gonna die sitting up huddled in front of that wall.”

I gave him the name of a therapist I thought might be able to help him, encouraged him to join Alcoholics Anonymous and talked to him for hours trying to persuade him to stop taking dope and alcohol. But when we shot the picture, he often slurred his lines. I tried to shore him up and did the best I could to get him through the picture, but afterward his descent continued until he died in 1966 at the age of forty-six.

I do not know for a fact that Monty was a homosexual. Afterward, some people told me he was, but I have heard so many lies told about myself that I no longer believe what people say about others. I do know he carried around a heavy emotional burden and never learned how to bear it

R241 Marlon produced a memoir called "Songs My Mother Taught Me"?

I'm sure it wasn't as pretty as Elizabeth's.

I make this my screensaver for a week or so each summer.

^ pretty face, tiny body.

Did he have no connection with his twin sister Eleanor?

I understand his cutting off his psycho stage mom, but it seems like he cut off his entire family (twin sister, brother, dad, nieces, nephews, cousins, etc.) for decades.

That is a bit odd. Does anyone know why?

I think even nutty Brando stayed in touch with his fucked up family and his mother, sister, etc.

*Ooops, his twin sister Ethel Clift (not Eleanor)

I am amazed how many beautiful young men like much older guys, at least 20 years older than themselves.

R246, Roberta "Ethel" Clift married Bob McGinnis in 1945, and moved to Austin, Texas to raise their five children and work for the Red Cross, the Cerebral Palsy Center, Child and Family Services , and the Volunteer Bureau. I think she was much too busy to tend a needy, self-indulgent, showbiz prima donna. And unlike her twin brother, who died prematurely at 45, Ethel lived to a ripe old age of 94, dying in 2014.

She probably couldn't stand the sight of him.

He sounds exhausting.

Eleanor married his brother.

I dunno. In that courtroom scene in Judgment At Neuremburg, he's talking (borderline slurring) and gesturing like any long term drunk/opiate addict. If the character was supposed to be semi-retarted, Monty didn't have to work very hard to portray it. He seriously reminds me of some of the junkies I've seen lurching along the streets in that scene.