The Books: “Montgomery Clift: A Biography” (Patricia Bosworth)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Montgomery Clift: A biography, by Patricia Bosworth

I consider this book to be a high watermark in entertainment biography. I find myself comparing all other biographies to this one. In a similar way that Ron Chernow did with Alexander Hamilton, and David McCullough did with John Adams … Patricia Bosworth does with Montgomery Clift. The book came out in 1978 and there hasn’t been a big thorough biography of Clift since, because … why bother? Bosworth dominates. This is not a smear book. It is not revisionist. It is not only focused on one thing (Clift’s homosexuality – you know how so many books have one point to drive home and every story has to somehow dovetail into that point?? Bosworth avoids that) … It is the story of a life. Told elegantly, with great compassion, but without avoidance. Clift’s life was a tormented one. At the end, he was almost a recluse, drinking himself into oblivion, and cruising the docks of New York City for “trade”. Rough trade. Alongside of this was Clift’s brilliant early career, when his virtuosity stunned pretty much everyone who knew him. Bosworth is a member of the Actors Studio, a place Clift worked. At the time this book was written, many of Clift’s contemporaries were still alive, and Bosworth had great access to them. Many of them are her friends, so they obviously trusted her to do the right thing by Clift, and therefore felt free enough with her to not gloss things over. Clift was deeply loved. He had lifelong friends, people who stood by and watched helplessly as he drank himself to a premature death. His acting speaks for itself. One need only to see what he was able to do in The Misfits, when he was already a wreck of a man, to know that this man’s talent was transcendent.

The book is not an easy read. I have to admit that as we approached his final years, I began to be glad that it (meaning the book, meaning his life) was near the end. Enough pain for Montgomery Clift. Let him rest now. Let him just rest. Enough pain. It was like animal suffering, a deep chord of agony that ran through him … and finally became unbearable.

He didn’t make a lot of movies. Maybe 17 movies? But his debut was in Red River with John Wayne, and he played the lead of that film – so Clift hit the ground running, in his career. No one who knew him was surprised. He had done plays in New York where people still remembered, years and years later, little moments he had, great gestures … and were able to recall, to Bosworth, with detail, performances long forgotten, from plays he had done in the 1940s. Amazing.

The details of Montgomery Clift’s accident in 1956 are well-known. He left a party at Elizabeth Taylor’s house, and, on the curvy drive, crashed his car into a tree. His entire face was basically ripped off, he had lost many teeth, all the bones crushed in his face – he nearly died. The recovery process was agony, and Clift probably never went a day in his life since that accident without some level of pain. His face had to be reconstructed. The before and after look of Montgomery Clift is so jarring as to take your breath away.

He had permanent paralysis in some areas, the side of his mouth, his eye was different … and, more than all of that, he had lost the ease of his face, the flexibility, not to mention the extraordinary beauty. Even as a young boy, people would stop Montgomery Clift’s mother on the street to exclaim over his beauty. This was no small part of his acting career, let’s remember. To see him as a young man in Red River or Place in the Sun is to see something exquisite – not just his looks, but his looks add to the whole package. He’s a wonderful actor. Brando always considered Montgomery Clift to be his only real rival.

Clift never really “bounced back” from what happened to his face. He couldn’t recover. Now there had already been “issues” – there had been issues from the day he was born, just with the type of family he was born into, and the kind of expectations placed on him by his mother. Who knows what was going on inside Montgomery Clift half the time (and one of the best parts about Bosworth’s book is that she doesn’t speculate) – but it is known that Clift’s mother raised her children (3 of them, if I’m recalling correctly) as though they were to the manor born. They were raised preciously, like small tsaritsas and tsarinas … even though that was not their lifestyle at all. But their mother, boy, that was one strong-willed woman. And from an early age, the earliest, Clift got the message that whoever he really was would not be okay with this woman.

And so he split himself off. It’s quite tragic. There was the Mamma’s Boy, and then there was the guy cruising for rough trade. His homosexuality was not something he accepted. He was not like, say, Tennessee Williams, who never really hid who he was (and paid a price for it, often, in bashing incidents everywhere he went). Montgomery Clift (according to Williams) didn’t really like Tennessee Williams, because Williams was “out” and Clift wasn’t, and it made Clift uncomfortable. The two sides of Clift would NEVER be reconciled. He could not integrate. It was far too threatening.

I happen to think that it is that very split within him that makes him so riveting as an actor. It is not our health that always makes us good actors or writers or painters. It is the fucked up-ness that needs to be treasured, or at least not feared and rejected. (More shades of Ellen Burstyn’s “shadow side” workshop). In Place In the Sun he plays George, a social climber (more ruthless than most), who is able to insinuate himself into the upper echelons on the strength of his beauty – rich people always want beautiful people around – and also through lying, deception, and cool calculated manipulation. It’s weird, because his beauty was of a soft pin-up boy variety. He wasn’t like, say, Marlon Brando – who was sexy … Clift was beautiful to the degree that his face became a mask.

And Clift was a smart enough actor to either use the mask if it was right for the character, or completely ignore it – as though his beauty were just a freak of nature, don’t pay any attention to it. Not all beautiful actors can do that. Many of them trade on their beauty – they don’t know how to live any other way. They are congratulated for what they look like, and so they continue to perpetuate the situation. And hell, I don’t feel bad for them, people can make a lot of money that way! But Clift was a psychologist, he could adjust his persona. In Red River it’s not at all about how gorgeous he is. He’s rough, cocky, arrogant, and most of the film is action scenes, or fight scenes, his beauty is not dwelled upon. It’s just an accident that the guy looks like that, so we get over it and forget about it. But Place in the Sun makes a FETISH of his beauty – because HE does, as a character – and so do all of the other characters, who are duped by this horrible sociopath. He gets a pass – he gets in the door – because of his face, and Clift understood that power, and was able to use it in that role.

Bosworth, unlike Peter Manso, does not have a contempt for the actor’s craft. She just gets the anecdotes, and let them speak for themselves. She does not add snarky comments. People were relating stories about, oh, the day Clift played his death scene in From Here to Eternity and how even crew members cried watching it. He was so so good.

The man had demons. He was dogged by tragedy and internal agony. When he was allowed to let it out (like in Judgment at Nuremberg), the results are shattering. But Clift’s behavior in his final years was such that it’s almost like you can feel him thinking, “You know what? I’ve had enough of life. I’m outta here.”

A Hollywood press agent who knew Clift in the late 40s had this to say:

To survive being a star in Hollywood like Humphrey Bogart or Gary Cooper, you have to be sensitive and ruthless, humble and arrogant. Monty was sensitive. Period.

Bosworth’s book looms on the landscape of entertainment biographies. It’s the best of its kind.

Place in the Sun is a movie that Mike Nichols says he always watches, ritualistically, before going to work on a new picture. He watches it because he considers it to be that rare thing: a perfect movie. Perfect in construction, themes, execution, acting, set design, mood … It reminds Nichols, every time he sees it, just how specific he needs to be.

Here’s an excerpt about the filming of that movie. Bosworth refers to Clift throughout as “Monty”, and somehow it doesn’t bother me at all here, in the way it did in Manso’s book about Brando, with Manso referring to Brando as “Marlon”.

But Bosworth is a far superior writer. She weaves in quotes from people who knew Clift, who were there, with her own narrative – and it feels seamless. It’s a great book. Any book that ever comes out about Clift from now on must reference this one.

EXCERPT FROM Montgomery Clift: A biography, by Patricia Bosworth

Monty worked with such highly charged concentration and intensity as George that he would often finish a take drenched with sweat. “That’s the worst part about acting,” he told Elizabeth Taylor. “Your body doesn’t know you’re acting. It sweats and makes adrenalin just as though your emotions were real.”

Throughout much of the filming he was tense and preoccupied. Believing Dreiser’s tragic killer was essentially sympathetic, he played him with his head cocked to one side and drawn back like a turtle. “He’s the kind of a guy who has some charm, but basically he conceals and dissembles about everything,” he said. “He’s tacky and not that bright,” Monty told Robert Ryan, “but he’s overwhelmingly ambitious.” Motivated by the passion to make money and make it big in society, George, Monty felt, was also a quintessential mama’s boy. “He has no style, no sophistication.” In the film, Monty demonstrates that when he makes his entrance into the big party where he meets Angela (Elizabeth Taylor), his ideal woman – the rich, spoiled, pampered woman he’s dreamed about. Somebody asks him, “Are you having a good time?” and he answers with a perfect blend of shyness of hostility – “How should I know? I just got here.”

With Mira Rostova at his side, Monty worked out every beat in every scene in restrained and poignant detail.

In almost all his movies, “Monty, like Garbo and Brando, had the extraordinary faculty for giving you a sense of danger,” recalled Richard Burton. “You were never quite sure whether he would blow his lines or explode.”

Before completing the interior scenes at Paramount Studios in Hollywood, A Place in the Sun shot for two weeks on location at Cascade Lake, Nevada, as well as Lake Tahoe. It was near the end of October; the Sierras were so cold that snow had to be hosed off the trees and melted from the ground before Monty and Elizabeth Taylor could shoot their scenes lakeside.

Most of Monty’s free time was spent conferring with Mira Rostova or arguing over interpretation with George Stevens. Stepherd Strudwick, who played Taylor’s father in the film, recalled, “Monty came over to me after a disagreement with Stevens, shaking his head wearily and saying, ‘I’m right, I know I’m right, but it doesn’t make any difference to them. I’m right and I’ll keep saying I’m right.”

He was referring to Shelley Winters’ approach to her role. “She played it all wrong,” he told Judy Balaban later. “She played her tragedy from the minute you see her on screen. She is downbeat, blubbery, irritating.” (Earlier, Monty had fought to get Betsy Blair the part, believing her wistful, sweet quality was better than Winters’s pathos.)

He pleaded with Stevens to at least redirect Winters in the remaining scenes so that she would appear more sympathetic. If she was made more appealing it might also make the romance between himself and Taylor more bittersweet. Now, he said, the picture was very much off kilter.

Stevens told Monty he was being too sentimental. Alice Tripp, Winters’ character, was supposed to be drab and pitiful, and Shelley Winters was being just that, and giving a marvelous performance (some say the best in her career).

Later, Stevens told the American Film Institute, “The thing that interested me most about Place was the relationship of opposing images … Shelley Winters busting at the seams with sloppy melted ice cream … as against Elizabeth Taylor in a white gown with blue ribbons floating down from the sky … Automatically there’s an imbalance of image which creates drama.”

Because he wanted such imbalance visually as well as emotionally, Stevens was hardest of all on Elizabeth Taylor, who’d never really acted before. He demanded constant retakes of her scenes with Monty, and when he couldn’t get the results he wanted he would argue or bait her until Taylor, unused to criticism, flared up angrily.

She had just completed The Big Hangover with Van Johnson and was being costumed for Father of the Bride on weekends, so she felt under particular strain. Also, her mother, Sara Taylor, was chaperoning her so relentlessly she could rarely be alone with Monty for whom she felt a growing attraction. Occasionally she would sneak into his dressing room, presumably to run lines with him while Mira Rostova held the script. But often she would lounge in a chair chewing gum loudly and complaining about her mother whom she called “a large pain in the ass”.

Monty sympathized but he invariably changed the subject to A Place in the Sun. What did she think of George Stevens as a director? Why had she decided to play Angela Vickers and, more important, how did she see her as a character? Was she sweet, quiet, voluptuous, innocent?

“It was my first real chance to probe myself,” Elizabeth Taylor wrote later, “and Monty helped me … It was tricky because the girl is so rich and so spoiled it would have been easy to play her as absolutely vacuous, but I think she is a girl who cares a great deal.”

Together they went over their roles, with Monty guiding her into the nuances, the objectives of the part. Angela wants George Eastman more than anything, he would say, but she is perfectly confident she will possess him – she is always confident. Just let the character unfold within you – keep thinking of this girl, and then she will suddenly grow and bloom in front of the camera.

Sometimes Monty would demonstrate by acting the part of Angela Vickers himself. He always had authority when he performed, and when he mimed a woman, he could almost conjure up a smoldering female essence. (Michael Billings, in his book The Modern Actor, says, “There is an androgynous bisexuality that underpins great acting.” During most of his career Monty made the most positive and creative use possible of his femininity.)

His commitment to his work “affected Elizabeth almost physically – like electric shocks,” wrote her biographer Richard Shepherd. “[Monty] gave of himself in a scene to such a degree that soon she began to respond in kind and the chemistry they produced eventually illuminated the screen like heat lightning.”

Their memorable first love scene (shot entirely in close-up with a six-inch lens) is a record of how they responded to each other on film. Taylor is achingly tender and maternal; Monty presents a tantalizing paradox of a cool facade hiding great inner passions.

Stevens rewrote the dialogue for that particular scene at two in the morning. “I wanted the words to be rushed – staccato,” he said. “Monty had to let loose – he was so enormously moved by her. Elizabeth must be compelled to tell him how wonderful and exciting and interesting he is all in the space of a few seconds … Anyway, it had to be like nothing they had ever said to anyone before.”

When Stevens handed her the new dialogue, Elizabeth looked at it and said, “Forgive me but what the hell is this?” Stevens told both of them to memorize it, then they’d rehearse and shoot, but when filming he wanted them to hurl the words at each other as fast and compulsively as possible.

“Elizabeth dissolved when she had to say ‘tell Mama,’ ” Stevens recalled. “She thought it was outrageous she had to say that – she was jumping into a sophistication beyond her time.” But Stevens insisted on that phrase. He wanted to create a mood that was at once primitive and basic, “a kind of preordained meeting.”

When he edited the scene he did not use a movieola. Instead he set up two projectors and viewed the reels of Monty’s close-ups and Taylor’s close-ups simultaneously on a projector screen which covered an entire wall, then spliced the film in such a way that the camera seemed to roll from Monty’s face to Taylor’s face “thus creating a tempo – with the thing in which as fast as it could be said it was said. Monty had that kind of emotion – he got all steamed up,” Stevens said. Taylor dissolved when she looked at him and spoke. “I wanted to get the feeling of them both being totally lost in each other.”

What one finally sees on film is the almost jittery sensuality of the young lovers as they circle each other verbally, then swoon into a passionate embrace.