Montgomery Clift: A Small Place in the Sun

MONTGOMERY CLIFT: A SMALL PLACE IN THE SUN

He was a victim without a cause—and he died for it

MARCH 1967 ROBERT THOM

M

onty, the boy (the child—seeking again the oceanic peace of infancy), was the father of them all, all the groping, anguished, forever-adolescent actors of that time, that place, father of Marlon, of Jimmy Dean, of Dean Stockwell, of Michael Parks (the latter a child of Monty’s old age—forty being old, forty-five being very old . . . if you were Monty). Monty’s bastards (half Monty, half John Wayne) included Paul Newman, Steve McQueen and George Peppard; some said Tony Perkins (half Monty, half Valentino).

Monty suffered and suffered and died—too late. Jimmy Dean died at the right moment—before Elvis Presley, with his hip, groovy sexuality, before the Beatles, with their wit, laughter, command, swept away all the displaced Holden Caulfields of the Fifties. (What an anachronism Michael Parks—so sensitive!—is! What an unfortunate, fat and senescent baby Marlon Brando, unable to find a new image, unwilling to remain an aging Wild one, seems to have become!)

Monty was beautiful and he started it. (I will not tell the cruel stories about Monty without also saying that he was the first and, possibly [cf. Brando], the best.) America emerged triumphantly from its second European war and demanded an image. A hero? Another John Wayne? No. We were the strongest country in the world—we had an atom bomb. No one else did. We actually thought the Russians couldn’t make their own atom bomb without the help of the pathetic, none-too-bright Rosenbergs.

The age demanded an image—and Monty was it. Why?

What difficulty they had shooting Raintree County, Monty told me. (He never spoke of the real, dollars-and-cents, Hollywood, how-to-cope-with-an-alcoholic difficulties.) In part of the film, he wore a beard. “I just couldn’t grow a beard without looking like—” “Who, Monty?”, knowing all the time. “Without looking like—” “Who, Monty?” “J.C.” But in the words of the Rolling Stones, who should, justly, have been his furies (that new and hungry generation treading him down), he “tried and he tried and he tried!” But, of course, he did look like Jesus, our Sunday School, Methodist Jesus, in Raintree County. When he was making The Young Lions, Monty, securely, was playing the persecuted Jew. (Can you imagine Hollywood allowing a Jew to play Jesus, to play a Jew, to play Anne Frank? Millie Perkins was brilliant and glowing, but a Catholic girl certainly.) Monty had, at last, the hounded, the despised, the perfect Jesus part—or so he thought. Brando thought otherwise. Brando turned the Nazi he was playing into a dear, searching, driven pilgrim. When this wanderer, this heartwarming Nazi met his end, ripped into by Roman bullets, Marlon wanted to tumble downhill (Monty’s story: I cannot testify to its veracity) and arrive at the bottom, arms outstretched against the barbed wire, crucified. Monty, or so he said, told the director he would walk off the picture if such a shot were made. What he didn’t say, but might have, was that one Jesus per film was quite enough. Marlon was muscling in on his, Monty’s turf.

The age demanded an image. The image was that of a boy-man, a man-child, born into a world he never made. Monty suffered everything: Beauty moved him as quickly to tears as cruelty and pain—but tears, of course, that were not shed, not on screen. A Boy Scout cries, if ever, only when he is alone. Humphrey Bogart did not cry at all.

Monty’s favorite description of himself: A photographer had told him, “You are as sensitive as litmus paper.” Jimmy Cagney would not have been pleased.

“I love anyone who stutters,” Monty said once—anyone, that was, who found it difficult to communicate.

That was the theme of every serious play and movie in those postwar years: how hard it was for one human being to reach out to another, find, hold, comfort another. If it wasn’t the author’s message, one could depend on every young actor (Monty’s children) to make it so—at whatever cost to the script.

In 1957, I had written the Broadway adaptation of Compulsion. I first met Monty backstage at that play in Roddy McDowall’s dressing room. Monty liked the play and liked Roddy in the play—enormously. I use the word “enormously” in, I think, a quite literal way. Sometimes, one wondered why anyone put up with Monty; his behavior, public and private, was frequently painful, embarrassing, monstrous.

He would eat steak with his hands in the best steak houses, having drunk so much he was unable to manipulate knife and fork. Crossing a street with him, you would save his life maybe once, maybe twice—it wasn’t easy. His personal secretary would present him with a stack of letters she had typed for him and somehow he would manage to spill orange juice across the lot of them.

One put up with Monty—not just because of his extraordinary talent—but because he liked, loved enormously. He said: “You were good,” to Roddy, “Jesus, you were good! I couldn’t do anything like that! Wow! Wow!”

He said: “You were good!”—and you felt more than that you were good: you felt you were the Master Builder, the Lord God on the Seventh Day, you felt loved, adored. Sure, he was making a production of it. You knew that. But, also, you believed him.

In Roddy’s dressing room that night, there was a young actor named Dennis Hopper. He, too, was a Monty creature. It had been six or seven years since Monty had made A Place in the Sun, the film that turned on a whole generation of soul-searchers. (What man under forty has not been in love with a woman who first loved Montgomery Clift as Dreiser’s tormented hero? And is there any male who, deep in his heart, because of Monty, has not wanted to murder Shelley Winters ever since?) It was Dennis Hopper’s first meeting with Monty. Instantly—as if the picture had just been released the day before—Dennis told Monty how moved he had been by his Clyde Griffiths. Monty was taken aback, aghast really. You do not ignore an actor’s five most recent films. You do not ignore seven years’ work. Of course, Monty’s time—and the Fifties were Monty’s time—was drawing to a close. Dennis Hopper’s praise was not unlike an epitaph. He had come to bury Monty.

The age demanded and Monty delivered. In A Place in the Sun, Monty loved Shelley Winters and then loved Elizabeth Taylor. But he loved as no screen hero had ever loved before. Did he want to make it with Shelley Winters or did he want to mother her? Was he stirred to desire by Elizabeth Taylor or did he desire that she mother him?

Monty was eventually mothered by Elizabeth Taylor—Bessie, as he called her, after everyone else had gotten the hang of not calling her Liz and remembering to call her Elizabeth. Bessie, who, I’ve been told, always gave Monty credit for being the first person who taught her to respect her profession, to think of acting as more than just a Hollywood bit, a cruddy cop out, Bessie, in the end—in the days after Freud when no insurance company was willing to cover him for a film—Bessie tried to rescue Monty. Elizabeth Taylor had promised to do Reflections In A Golden Eye because of Monty. With Elizabeth Taylor, at this moment in history, anyone is bankable. She was also, one is told, instrumental in launching Monty’s last film, The Defector. That Marlon Brando should replace Monty in Reflections In A Golden Eye is entirely predictable.

Director George Stevens, Clift, and Elizabeth Taylor on the set of A Place in the Sun, 1951.

It is necessary to remember that Monty was (and wanted to be, despite his denials) a movie star. As a matter of fact, he was, for a time, what is known in the trade as a Super-Star (circa: From Here to Eternity, A Place in the Sun, etc.). In the movies he did make with Elizabeth Taylor, it was Monty who received top billing—until disaster had overtaken him and Suddenly Last Summer was the best he could do. The legend is that Monty’s decline began with The Accident. No question about it—The Accident was bad. He left a party at Elizabeth’s during the shooting of Raintree County and smashed into a tree. He lost teeth, broke his jaw, destroyed his nose. He was, unlike Jimmy Dean, put back together again.

That accident, The Accident, was the worst, but Monty had accidents every day. Monty fell down flights of stairs. Monty slipped in the shower. Monty could not pick up a knife without cutting himself. I don’t think I remember ever seeing Monty that he didn’t have a Band-Aid on his face, a bruise, a new scar; and Monty had started life with one of the world’s most beautiful faces. (Just as the fan magazines used to say: he and Elizabeth Taylor were meant for each other—at least in that way.)

He pretended to hate being a movie star—cf., Brando, Dean, Parks, all the fine young men. He pretended the face was disreputable, commonplace, nothing. “A face like yours—” he would say to you—and sigh. “Oh, my God!” he would say and become speechless—presumably with wonder. And yet. . . .

I remember a night we went to Trader Vic’s, a Polynesian restaurant, located then in the Savoy Plaza. I think it was Trader Vic’s first night in New York. The waiters were nervous, the headwaiter edgy. We ate. To my knowledge, Monty never let anyone pick up a check. He lay waste his substance, always. He was one of the sponsors, I believe, of Trader Vic’s, and, as was his custom, when the check arrived, he signed it. His signature was Babylonian, undecipherable, foothills falling away. The waiter was troubled, disappeared, returned. He asked Monty if he had any identification. It was a bad moment. Monty was shaken, I think. He took off his horn-rimmed glasses, gazed up at the waiter. “Only my face,” he said. The waiter was at a loss. He conferred with the headwaiter. The headwaiter was equally bewildered. He did not want to offend a patron, but he didn’t know who Monty was. I knew who Monty was—or so I thought: “You’re a son of a bitch,” I told him. “Don’t embarrass the poor bastard. Tell him who you are, or let me pay the check with cash.” No. Finally, a cashier or a manager supplied the right words, the name. Apologies were made and we left.

His only identification: His face— and his face he had systematically destroyed.

I make Monty sound humorless. It wasn’t true. Unlike the dozen latter-day Montys, he actually had wit, intelligence—dulled, thrown out of whack by alcohol—but nonetheless genuine. When asked the whereabouts of a particularly obnoxious leech-like director, Monty’s response was: “He’s down at the bottom of the garden—picking brains.”

A young actor complained to Monty once of his leading lady. She was disgusting. She was impossible to work with. He mentioned one of Monty’s less attractive leading ladies. “How,” he asked, “could you ever have looked at her, Monty, with such love in your eyes?” Monty was angry. “Look,” he said, “if you’re playing Romeo and your Juliet is a pig, you find something you can love about pigs!”

Monty could love everyone—but he didn’t. (Scratch a masochist and you find a sadist—or read the old saw the other way round.) When Monty chose to be cruel, he was devastating—particularly so because his most evil lines were delivered with saintliness, compassion. I was at Monty’s home for dinner one night. The woman I was with at the time was a young actress, well-known for her beauty. She had had one enormous hit on Broadway, but that was several years past. She worked, but her career was in trouble. She was gallant, seemed cold, played Zelda Fitzgerald. As we were leaving, Monty took her face in both his hands (what strange, uncoordinated hands they were!) and, tears in his eyes, as if he were filled with pity, a doctor recognizing an incurable disease, said tenderly: “I don’t understand it . . . how can you act . . . when you don’t have any feelings?” It was some time before I saw Monty again. He called and he called and he apologized and he apologized. I told him my exact feelings—in words that, I think, are still unprintable. Eventually, I saw Monty again. . . .

The amazing thing is that Monty lost very few friends—even when “his day was past,” his behavior abominable, his future unthinkable. He meant something to us. What? Let me try to answer the question again.

When Monty was twenty-two (young even by Monty’s terrifying time sense; it has been reported to me that he spoke of himself as an “old man” when he was thirty)—young, truly young, he played in The Skin Of Our Teeth. Michael Myerberg, the producer of that play, recalls that when Monty, gazing down into the orchestra pit where Tallulah Bankhead had disappeared into a tent with an amorous lifeguard, said the line, “Mama—he knows her real well!” Monty brought the house down. Monty left the play early in its run. “No one else could ever get that laugh,” Michael said. “With Monty, it was one of the great moments in the play. With anyone else—it was only another line.” It’s easy to guess why. Monty was innocent. Or, as Tammy Grimes said of him: “He was always brand new.” It was true of him until the very end—despite madness, meanness, the smell of death. It was why he was the perfect victim, Adam-Jesus, the perfect postwar hero. Monty helped to wash the blood off our hands, redeemed us, just as Richard Barthelmess had redeemed an earlier postwar generation.

Brando superseded Monty. He was the more powerful, although perhaps less honest, actor. But what is the obligatory scene in a Brando movie (it is something of a joke): Brando must be beaten up—badly. Give him that—and he will probably do your script. Think of On The Waterfront—the blood, the broken nose, the makeup. One-Eyed Jacks—the flagellation, the blood, the makeup. Mutiny On The Bounty—did Clark Gable play a death scene? No. But Brando was burned, bleeding and, in makeup, died. The Chase—kicked, stomped, broken—gore and much makeup. One need catalog no further.

The point is, Monty did it without makeup. Oh, yes, there were beating scenes too, but they were rare. And, finally, Monty needed no makeup. His “accidents” took care of that for him. He was living the part—terrifyingly so!

When Monty accepted the role in Alfred Hitchcock’s I Confess, the script had it that the priest he played was hanged in the end, later proven innocent. The Hollywood censors insisted that it would offend Roman Catholics to see a priest executed and the ending had to be shabbily amended. Alas—the poor Catholics—Monty was playing Jesus for them, but they did not know it, or, as Dostoevski suggested, they didn’t really care that much for Jesus to begin with.

I Confess, 1953.

In the Twenties and Thirties, in Hollywood, it was generally accepted that Garbo alone was allowed to die. All other screen stars had—most of the time—cheerfully to survive, conquer all, make it right. Only the mysterious Swede (A Woman of Affairs, Flesh And The Devil, Karenina— twice—Mata Hari, Camille) was encouraged, nay, urged to perish. Monty’s record of dying or being defeated was equally remarkable, if somewhat more brief. If he did not actually die (as in A Place in the Sun, From Here to Eternity), he at least played the despised Jew (Judgment at Nuremberg, Freud, The Young Lions) or, in any event, was thoroughly wiped out (The Heiress, The Misfits, Lonelyhearts). The age demanded a sacrifice, and Monty was willing and anxious. (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.)

Monty’s acting style (although it was imitated by a thousand tortured young men) was unique. His master, if he had any, was Alfred Lunt. Monty appeared with the Lunts in 1940 in There Shall Be No Night. He was their boy. They thought of him that way ever afterward—and it was entirely fitting. If you make allowances for the fact that Monty had a tin ear and an extraordinarily charming and awkward gait, you can hear and see Alfred Lunt in all of Monty’s performances.

Monty’s semi-deafness and his once strong, but ill-coordinated, movements have become the hallmarks of an entire generation of American actors. No American actor under the age of forty can run across a field in a straight line; they must roll on the balls of their feet, their hands must hang heavy, their shoulders must slope, perilously aslant. They are graceful and wounded apes. Address them and they will look at you as if they could not quite make out what you’ve said; their brows will contract, trying to understand. This was Monty. Let it be said, also, that it had nothing to do with his drunkenness. Monty didn’t drink at all until he was almost thirty. (Scott Fitzgerald, post-War One, did not plan to live past thirty. Neither, I think, did Monty, post-War Two. “I’m an old man. I’m an old man.” He would smile his crooked smile when he said it, but he meant it, and he would return to the theme over and over again.)

Monty was not modest. (Show me the actor who is modest and I will show you an actor acting.) Monty could bestow praise, but he was uncomfortable hearing it bestowed upon others, particularly if those others were his contemporaries or—God forbid!—younger. I saw Monty the day after A Touch of the Poet had opened. I described in detail for him what I believed to be one of the great performances of our time, that of Kim Stanley, an actress whom Monty also, of course, admired. I made the mistake of saying: “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a performance that was so complete, so moving.” “You mean you’ve never seen me act?” Monty said, and it was a full moment before he smiled.

One of the conditions of seeing Monty in those years was that you were willing to listen to the voices of Ella Fitzgerald and Frank Sinatra —endlessly. There was always a five-inch stack of their LP records on the phonograph. Sinatra and Monty adored each other in theory, but I don’t think they spent very much time together. How could they? Caesar’s world was not the world of Jesus. (A friend told me that Sinatra always meant to phone Monty, but didn’t. Had Monty phoned him, Sinatra would have rescued him from anything; he would have sent his plane for him immediately. But had he, of course, Monty would have forgotten the plane was coming, missed it, disappeared.)

It always seemed to me that Sinatra, too, although he was hardly one of Monty’s “children,” learned a great deal about acting from his contact with Monty in From Here to Eternity. Oddly—because there were no other such mementos in Monty’s house—there was, for as long as I can remember, in Monty’s study, a photograph of Monty with Sinatra: Sinatra’s death scene in From Here to Eternity. (Is Caesar mortal? I don’t think Monty could ever bring himself to believe it. Sinatra did not have to grow old, did not have to suffer, would not die . . . and yet, there was the photograph: Caesar dying.)

If Sinatra absorbed elements of Monty’s style, certainly Monty copied in many ways the mannerisms of The (temporal) Leader. Monty’s speech was filled with nightclub-jazz-mafia hipsterisms. But, oh, what a sea change! Again Monty’s strange rhythms, hoarse and ancient voice, his tin ear prevented him from sounding—even in the midst of, “That’s a gasser, Man!”—like the original.

Fond as one might be of Ella and Frank, one eventually had to suggest to Monty that there were other singers. “Who?” he asked with beauteous innocence. The first few names I mentioned brought expressions of pain to his black brow. He was deeply disappointed that I could be so mistaken, so taken in by performers who weren’t artists, who were charlatans, dishonest. Irritated by that, I went straight to The Lady. “Billie Holiday,” I said. At which point, Monty raised a sigh so piteous and profound that there seemed no question but that it would shatter him, end his being. “Oh! Oh! Oh! I can’t listen to her. How can you listen to her?” Billie’s suffering was so vast and exquisite, so moving, that surely only a hard-hearted soul could listen to her laments and not drown—utterly. Suddenly, one felt coarse. Monty was the only person I’ve ever known who could play that kind of scene and make you believe it. Billie Holiday’s voice would inflict pain on him, quite literal pain, just because she was so very great an artist. (Madame Verdurin he was not. All others, under similar circumstances, were—and are.)

It was not that Monty had a monopoly on pain. He didn’t, of course, and, as I’ve indicated, he was quite capable of inflicting pain upon others; but, always, it will seem to me that Monty came into the world more “naked” than you and I, and, on one occasion at least, he begged the world quite openly to recognize his condition, see that the heartache and the thousand natural shocks the flesh is heir to were, in his instance, multiplied, it seemed, a thousandfold. He was filming Lonelyhearts. He was living in one of the cottages in the Bel Air Hotel. Monty was in deepest trouble at the time. His career was going thoroughly awry. In Lonelyhearts, he was playing Nathaniel West’s (or Dore Schary’s) cub reporter, a naïf in a corrupt world, the part he had always played; but when Myrna Loy had, in the film, to speak to her husband, Robert Ryan, about Monty’s youthfulness, innocence, it made more than one spectator cringe. Youthful? But the hands shook and the face was old and battered, far beyond repair. The eyes, as to the end, were still Prince Myshkin’s, but they were trapped in a body that was without hope, a fretting cadaver. Monty knew it. He had not been able to grow up and he had not been able to remain young. He was drinking, and drinking badly, to protect himself (after such knowledge, what forgiveness?) and, of course, to destroy himself.

Lonelyhearts, 1958.

I was to pick him up for dinner. He had dismissed his chauffeur and I was to drive. I didn't look forward to that, because Monty, now, frequently panicked while driving. A speed of more than fifteen miles per hour, unless he were in the back seat of a limousine, could make him cry out in fear, although he would not acknowledge this possibility in advance and so one had to take him on. (One didn’t have to, of course, but one did.)

I was depressed that night about Monty for yet another reason. Monty’s agent was an enormously powerful figure in the film industry; Monty had, in his better years, been this agent's pride, joy, father and son. I was working on a film script at M-G-M—it was one in which Monty could and should have played. (Probably, however, he would have refused to do so in any case, because the role allowed, at that time, for just such a man as Monty, a man in a desperate state of disrepair, mentally if not otherwise.) I had talked to the producer of the film about approaching Monty and he had agreed that it was a good idea. He had then spoken to Monty’s agent. Monty assumed that this particular agent would guard, guide and solace him forever. What Monty didn’t know was that, on the contrary, the agent was advising people not to use him, was warning them that Monty was trouble now to work with, a loser.

When I arrived at Monty’s cottage, which was tucked off in a dark corner of Bel Air’s expensive and manicured jungle, I found Monty, of course, was not ready. He was still in a bathrobe. Sinatra was on the phonograph. Monty was blind with drink and with agony. I suggested we have dinner sent in, but Monty assured me he was in good shape, wanted to go out. He would take a shower and then he would be all right. And with that he disappeared.

I heard the shower running. I sat reading The New York Times (how precious it is in California)—trying to read it—against Sinatra, against the fear that Monty would stumble and fall, injure himself in the shower. I scarcely saw him—he ran so fast through the room—and out into the Bel Air night. Naked. It was several moments before I overtook him and brought him back.

The Lords of Hollywood live in Bel Air. Monty was their child, their man-child. He had set the style of an entire decade for them—by showing his needs, his wounds, his love, by going naked before them. He had made many millions for Hollywood. Now, he was no longer needed. He had been meant to play at suffering. That he genuinely suffered, that he had truly laid bare his soul—what could one do? When the curtain comes down, Hamlet must disappear. The actor must recover, rejoice. Monty couldn’t. (Nijinsky had the same problem. When the curtain came down and the other dancers left the stage, Nijinsky had to dance his way out of a part. It was ten, fifteen, twenty minutes before he could cast off even the movements of Petrouchka or of Schéhérazade’s slave.)

There were many who tried to save Monty. They tried because of his deep talent, because they loved him, and because, when you were with Monty, he made you feel you were the most important person in the world, that your talents were limitless. He both unsettled you, made you reexamine yourself—never had you lived up to your potential—and, also, he made you know that that potential was significant, vast.

Like others, I told Monty what trouble he was in, what drastic, medical commitments he must make if he were to survive. His response was, predictably I suppose, that I was infinitely cruel. Perhaps I was.

Marlene Dietrich said once that she always felt she was capable of anything. If she had had to swim the Atlantic with a child on her back—to save the child—she could do it. (And I believe that Marlene could.) But, she added, Monty she couldn’t help.

I remember Monty coming to my home one day when I was alone with one of my infants. The baby needed to be changed and Monty was astonished when he discovered that I—a man!—was capable of performing that simple operation. “You can do that?” I’ve forgotten what else he said. I remember his eyes watching me, fixed in disbelief, awe. He was remote and tremulous. I remember thinking, “Poor Monty, he’ll never have a child. He has to stay a child himself—forever.”

But I was wrong. Monty had many children—not only a generation of movie actors, but also a generation of young moviegoers, who learned from him and from his professional descendants, some measure perhaps of compassion, an idealism, however unarticulated, and a way of not being the complacent conquerors of the world. Monty’s children are everywhere today—whether they are aware of it or not.

© 1967 Esquire