“For a long time, I was a caretaker — until finally I wised up.” — Patricia Bosworth

“One must know a bad performance to know a good one. You can’t be middle-of-the-road about it, just as you can’t be middle-of-the-road about life. I mean, you can’t say about Hitler, I can take him or leave him. Well, I can’t be middle-of-the-road about a performance, especially my own. I feel that if I can vomit at seeing a bad performance, I’m ahead of the game.” — Patricia Bosworth

The great Patricia Bosworth died from Covid-19 within the first month of quarantine. She was 86 years old. At the time, she was working on a new book. So far it hasn’t come out.

Bosworth was an actress, journalist, professor, writer. She wrote the best actor biography ever written, and I would also argue it’s one of the best biographies period – and I’ve read a ton: her biography of Montgomery Clift: Montgomery Clift: A Biography is a masterpiece. Compellingly detailed, based on first-hand interviews (she knew all the players: everyone talked to her), Clift emerges from the pages as a three-dimensional living breathing hurting soul, with a delicate yet powerful talent, and a fragility which overwhelmed him. The final section, where she lays out his rapid decline, is one of the most harrowing things I’ve ever read in any biography. His pain exhales from the page, expressed through Bosworth’s compassion but also her willingness to tell the truth. About all of it.

“In close-up, Monty was absolutely riveting. One was practically absorbed into his eyes, which were clearly formidable and perhaps his best asset as an actor. Large, grey, infinitely expressive in his beautiful but rather deadpan face, they could register yearning, intelligence, and despair in quick succession.” — Patricia Bosworth, Montgomery Clift: A Biography

I met her many times at the Actors Studio, where she was a lifetime member. She studied with Lee Strasberg back in the heady excited 1950s. Arthur Penn was the first to cast her in something and it is how she began a career, not really knowing what she was doing (it happened early for her). She learned on the job.

When I met her, I had already read her Clift biography. It made me a fan for life. I have read everything she has written since, including her fascinating biographies of Jane Fonda and Diane Arbus. (Here’s an interview with her about Diane Arbus.)

Her small biography of Marlon Brando, an entry in the Penguin Lives series, is a necessary corrective to all the bullshit that’s out there about him, written by people who know nothing about acting. Read it: Marlon Brando. Bosworth knows about acting. She’s sensitive and specific about what he is actually DOING. I rely on that biography a lot in my own writing.

Patricia Bosworth, her mother Anna Gertrude Bosworth, brother Bartley Crum Jr. and father Bartley Crum.

Bosworth approached her subjects understanding that life is complex and so are people. She didn’t put people on pedestals, and so she didn’t feel the need to go around tearing them down. Her father and her brother committed suicide. Her father was an attorney, famous for defending the Hollywood Ten and other victims of the HUAC so-called “red scare”. For this, he paid a price, lost most of his clients and status. Like so many other victims of that horrific period of un-American ANTI-American persecution, he eventually couldn’t take it. Even more horrific, his son committed suicide committed suicide six years earlier, during his freshman year at college. The family never discussed any of this, and Patricia Bosworth said that she never said a word about ANY of this for forty years.

Bosworth’s first memoir is about growing up in those HUAC years, at the epicenter of it in her father’s home. She got married when she was 17. “I was a child bride,” she said. She was flung out onto her own. She was an actor. She was a bohemian but also a wife. (The marriage didn’t last. Shocker!) It was New York, early 1950s.

She saw, without a shadow of a doubt because she lived it, that some people are, let’s say, more special than others when it comes to being artists. It’s not a level playing field. And that’s just the way it goes. And so let’s dig in to WHY someone is special. This goes against the grain of many biographers who look for the chinks in the armor, or highlight the controversies, rather than dig into the art. Bosworth digs into why. She asks: What made Clift stand out as an actor? What was it about him? Everybody felt it. It was undeniable. She was interested in how people worked. She understood the problems of the creative process, she understood what it meant to try to be a good actor, and she understood that understanding “how someone works” is essential and you have to get a handle on it if you want to be a writer.

You always feel like you are in good hands when you read something by Patricia Bosworth.

Her two memoirs are wonderful, not just for her writing about her personal life, but for the portraits they give of long-gone eras. She knew and interacted with so many of the famous players, because of the family she was born into. She writes about herself in the way she writes about her other subjects. She is honest. She does not flatter herself.

Teenage Bosworth in her hideout

The first memoir, Anything Your Little Heart Desires: An American Family Story, was about the impact the Hollywood Blacklist had on her family.

Her second memoir has the evocative title The Men in My Life: A Memoir of Love and Art in 1950s Manhattan. She puts you back into 1950s Manhattan with so much vividness you can practically taste the sugary Coca Cola. It’s the kind of book I would love to someday write.

Bosworth was a famous writer and journalist but I knew her as the white-haired woman at the Actors Studio who was so nice to us newcomers. I am so pleased, in retrospect, that I got to tell her in person how much her book about Montgomery Clift meant to me. I read it in college, when I was studying acting, and seeing as much as I could of the “old” actors. Her book was such a good guide, and I told her how much I learned about acting just from reading that book. She was so gracious. I’m sure so many people came up to her over the years saying the same thing, but she seemed as touched and moved when I said it as though it was the first time. This is the kind of person she was.