Clift said, “All of these scripts are shit. There’s nothing exceptional.”
“I’d sure be glad to accept some of your sloppy seconds,” Jimmy said.
“Paul Newman said the same thing,” Clift said. “And you and Newman aren’t even in the pecking order. Here’s how it works: After I turn down a script, it immediately goes to Brando.”
Jimmy engaged in repeated dialogues with Clift about his performance as the doomed young social climber in A Place in the Sun (1951) opposite Elizabeth Taylor. Complimenting Clift, he said, “No one ever depicted a troubled young man as great as you.”
Clift confessed that for months, he had carried around a copy of a glowing review of that film, as written by critic Andrew Sarris. “It’s the kind of review I dream about someone writing about me one day,” Jimmy said.
He was referring to Sarris’ observation that Elizabeth Taylor and Clift had been the focal points of the most beautiful couple in the history of cinema. “It was a sensuous experience to watch them respond to each other,” Sarris wrote. “Those gigantic close-ups of them kissing was unnerving, sybaritic, like gorging on chocolate sundaes.”
Later, one of Clift’s biographers, Patricia Bosworth, wrote: “Then, of course, there was Monty’s cruising swagger, which Brando and Dean picked up on. Few audiences in the 1950s were aware of the meaning of that androgynous swagger—it was very subtle and Monty did it for a few seconds in the film—but it was almost as if he were telling millions of women who swooned over him—‘You think you’re beautiful. Well, I’m beautiful, too, more beautiful than you. So who needs you?’”
Kazan, Tennessee Williams, and dozens of others, noted the weirdness and inappropriate behavior of both Jimmy and Clift. According to Kazan, “When it came to weirdness, Dean was an amateur; Monty, who was perhaps certifiably insane, had him beat. Brando might have been crazy, too but he at least hid his eccentricities better. Whenever he risked revealing too much through words, he evaded suspicions with acts that included mooning you.”
Clift and Taylor, as they appeared together in A Place in the Sun, a blockbusting adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. They were breathlessly heralded as “the two most beautiful people in America.”
Author Graham McCann wrote:
“Clift could behave as a child, trying to embarrass his parents. He would get drunk at parties and pass out on the floor, eat exclusively off other peoples’ plates at dinner, drive his car at reckless speeds, and wander through movie executives’ offices shouting expletives at no one in particular. It was a directionless rebellion, irrational and intensely repugnant. Sometimes, he would invite his friends to his room, and they would arrive to find him hanging from the window ledge by his fingertips thirteen floors above street level. It was a bewildering mixture of self-inflicted masochism, spoiled child attention-seeking, self-centeredness, and outrageous experimentation.”
As time went by, whereas nearly every critic noted Jimmy’s debt to Brando, many also acknowledged the debt he owned to Clift, particularly in how Jimmy found meaning and motion in the space between words, and then filled in nuances of emotion through small, sometimes minute gestures.
One night, Stanley Haggart invited both of the Clift brothers (Monty and Brooks), along with Jimmy, to a private dinner at his luxurious apartment. At the time, Brooks was at the center of a burgeoning career as an advertising executive who frequently employed Haggart as a set designer for the television ads produced by his ad agency.
After the other guests were assembled, it became obvious that Clift had failed to show up. As the evening progressed, over dinner, and after a few drinks, Brooks spoke candidly about his brother.
“My brother is a bisexual,” Brooks maintained, “not a homosexual. He’s already gotten two girls, each of whom I’ve met, pregnant. He was never exclusively one thing or the other. He swings back and forth. Both of us were raised in Europe, where homosexuality is more easily accepted, and he never felt ashamed about it until much later, after his adult years in the U.S.”
“Monty dislikes effeminacy, and he used to ask with amazement why some straight men are so effete and why some gay men are so masculine.”
Clift’s physical attribute that most impressed Jimmy were his eyes, which Elizabeth Taylor likened to green diamonds. “When you look at me, you seem to have X-ray vision,” Jimmy told him.
After Brooks left the party that night, Jimmy confessed to Haggart, “I’m not with Monty because of the sex. Actually, he’s a lousy lay. He likes it rough. His kisses turn into bites that hurt and sometimes draw blood.”
Haggart remembered several follow-up conversations with Jimmy about Clift, whom Haggart knew mainly through business links to his brother, Brooks.
“I find Monty more troubled than I am,” Jimmy confessed. “But we’re troubled in very different ways, and I’m not sure which ways. When we’re together, we’re nothing but a lot of confusion and contradictions.”
“Monty lived his early life as a homosexual,” Haggart said. “As a bisexual, he’s a late bloomer. He has been known to go to female strip clubs, and he’s had affairs with women. He lives in desperate fear that his homosexual meanderings will be exposed, something he believes would destroy his film career.”
“He objects to having to hide his true identity and pretend to be something he’s not,” Haggart said. “Actually, he’s an honest person with a high standard of ethics. He feels he’s living a lie, and that disturbs him greatly.”
“Well, maybe the same thing can be said for me, too,” Jimmy said.
***
When Jimmy learned that Ruth and Augustus Goetz had written their screenplay for The Heiress with Clift in mind as the actor who would portray the weak-willed arriviste, he engaged the actor in some animated dialogues about how he’d interpreted the role.
[The Heiress (1949) had been inspired by a novel, Washington Square, written by Henry James in 1881. At the time Jimmy was pumping Clift for information about it, the Ruth and Augustus Goetz were adapting André Gide’s French-language novel, The Immoralist, into an English-language stage play, a role which had already been assigned to Jimmy.
Jimmy had gone to see the film version of The Heiress three times. In it, Clift played a gold-digger romancing a plain girl, as depicted by Olivia de Havilland, despite the strident objections of her father (Ralph Richardson). More than any other film, Clift’s involvement in The Heiress elevated him into a bona-fide movie star.]
“What is stardom like?” Jimmy asked.
“For one thing, I was presented to the Queen of England at a command performance,” Clift said. “I stood between James Stewart and Tyrone Power. Power propositioned me. Stewart did not. I felt like a fool, but I received calls from both Marlene Dietrich and Noël Coward. Marlene propositioned me. So did Coward. I turned both of them down. Being famous is like belonging to a very exclusive club. Just ask Elizabeth Taylor. She once told me she couldn’t remember a time when she wasn’t famous.”
As Jimmy moved deeper into Clift’s world, Kazan issued a warning, urging him—even though he had initially encouraged it—to break off his relationship.
According to Kazan, “I ran into Dean after he’d spent a drugged out weekend with Clift. There were bags under his bloodshot eyes, and he looked like shit. He’d been smoking a lot of marijuana, and he’d consumed a lot of the pep pills he was getting from Clift. I felt that Dean was just one step from becoming a heavy abuser of drugs, and I knew that would destroy his career before it had even begun. I warned him that Clift might bring him down with him during his free fall, which seemed inevitable.”
***
Through the intervention of Roddy McDowall, Jimmy was invited to Treetops, the lavish country estate of Libby Holman. It lay midway between Greenwich and Stamford, Connecticut. Its grounds were legendary for the one million daffodils whose cultivation had been organized by Holman. They greeted the arrival of spring with a riot of yellows.
Olivia de Havilland a
nd Montgomery Clift in The Heiress, adapted from a novella (Washington Square) by Henry James. The vehicle which propelled Montgomery Clift to stardom, it was one of Jimmy’s favorite movies,
McDowall was the only member of Clift’s entourage that Holman liked. She referred to him as “Roduary,” and he had nicknamed her “Lipsy.” She was particularly amused by McDowall’s humor, referring to it as “witty bitcheries.”
It was only because of McDowall’s urging that Holman relented and allowed Jimmy to join the house party she had organized at her estate.
After her first introduction to Jimmy, she told him, “I have a venomous distaste for fakery, snobbery, egocentricity, fawning, pomp, social climbing, cleverness, and fashion. If you possess any of those qualities, you can leave at once. If you have none of those qualities, then a bedroom awaits you upstairs.”
“I’m moving in,” Jimmy answered.
When Alec Wilder heard that Jimmy wanted to visit Treetops, he called Libby and urged her to include him among her guests. He was one of her closest friends, and he’d promised he’d arrive “as a chaperone.”
To round out the party, she also invited her sometimes lover, Tallulah Bankhead, but the star called with regrets. She encountered Wilder in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel:
“When Libby isn’t licking my pussy, she’s always chasing after some young homosexual like Monty. Now perhaps Jimmy Dean. I predict she’ll get him to fuck her before Sunday night. Libby and I go way, way back, and, as you know, Monty and I appeared on Broadway during the war in The Skin of Our Teeth. I’ve already bumped pussies with all three of them—Libby, Monty, and Jimmy. None of them is better than they should be. They’re each rotten to the core.”
Wilder characterized the mating of Holman with Clift as “a match made in hell.” He was called “the dark Adonis,” and she was a rather unattractive singer sixteen years older, with a face prematurely wrinkled because of excessive exposure to the sun.
Although Holman had insisted that she’d be able to cure Clift of his homosexuality, she continued to discreetly pursue lesbian affairs. Her biographer, Jon Bradshaw, described their coupling as “an extraordinary alliance: A young homosexual who claimed that he loved women, and a middle-aged millionairess with a latent penchant for women.”
Wilder had been in the audience of a Broadway theater in 1929 when Libby got her first big break as a performer in a revue, The Little Show, which co-starred Clifton Webb and Fred Allen. Spectators were thrilled during her delivery of a simmering blues number, “Moanin’ Low” by Ralph Rainger. After drawing a dozen curtain calls on opening night, she adopted it as her signature song. Wilder always remembered her appearance that night in a low-cut dress in a dark shade of cerise: “I think Libby virtually invented the strapless gown,” he said about her, years later.
The day after her Broadway debut, columnist Walter Winchell proclaimed, “Broadway has a new star, a kid with misery chanting in her tropical voice.”
“She’s a freak,” Wilder said: “So dramatic, such daring… She’s got balls.” On the night of her opening, he had wandered backstage to meet her, and from that night onward, they shared a “to-the-death” friendship.
Holman’s life had followed a scandal-soaked variation of the rags-to-riches legend, thanks to her widely publicized affairs with various young men and women, including the modernist writer, Jane Bowles.
Lesbian adventuress Libby Holman was Montgomery Clift’s companion.
Her most famous longtime liaison was with DuPont heiress Louisa d’Andelot Carpenter. She also maintained a hot relationship with the doomed but legendary Hollywood star, Jeanne Eagels.
In time, Holman was pursued by Zachary Smith Reynolds, the closeted gay heir to the R.J. Reynolds tobacco company. Despite the seven-year difference in their ages, the couple married in 1931, over the ferocious objections of his mother.
Reynolds was fatally shot at the couple’s home in North Carolina under mysterious circumstances in 1932. A coroner’s enquiry ruled that it was murder, and Holman was indicted. Motivated by their aversion to an enduring scandal, the powerful Reynolds family suppressed the case and eventually, Holman was freed, leaving North Carolina with $7 million, a staggeringly huge fortune during the depths of the Depression.
Libby’s murdered husband and prey, tobacco heir Zachary Smith Reynolds.
Libby immediately fled to Manhattan, where she became the risqué and avant-garde darling of café society.
Her friendly house party at Treetops, as described by Wilder, “developed cancer. Monty, formerly the estate’s ‘Golden Boy,’ became jealous of Jimmy for moving in on his turf. Apparently, he spotted Jimmy leaving Libby’s bedroom, partially undressed, at 3AM.”
According to Wilder, “Monty, on occasion, had fucked Libby, but he didn’t make a habit of it. She was rather oversexed and had to face weeks of dry spells with Monty. Libby was also jealous of Jimmy because she knew that he was sleeping with Monty. Frankly, Monty wanted to be relieved of having to service Libby. He had hoped that their romance would segué from a sexual relationship to a deep friendship, like the one he had established with Elizabeth Taylor.”
A few weeks after her house party at Treetops, Holman accompanied Clift to the Actors Studio, where Jimmy was scheduled to perform in a skit with Kim Stanley. At the last minute, Stanley had called in sick, and Holman had agreed to learn the lines and perform the skit in the role of Jimmy’s mother.
A fellow studio member, Billy La Massena, reported what happened that afternoon: “I saw Jimmy do a scene from Caligula that was hair-raisingly wonderful at first. I remember that he had on G.I. clothes. Libby Holman played his mother. In one scene he had to haul off and appear to kick her in the face. She was lying on the floor. The scene was so daring and real. Jimmy kicked her in the stomach real hard, and she screamed in pain. We thought he was seriously injuring her.”
“Clift rushed onto the stage and shoved Jimmy backward. He fell on the floor. Then Clift rescued Holman. ‘Are you a fucking lunatic?’ Clift shouted at Jimmy. ‘Get away from her and away from me. I don’t want to see your fucking face again.’”
Holman told Wilder, “Dean is hysterically jealous of me. He knows Monty loves me more than he loves him, if he loves him at all. He wanted revenge on me. He used that god damn skit to act out his hostilities toward me. I didn’t know how much he hated me until that afternoon. He’s a dangerous little psycho, and Monty shouldn’t let him get near any of us ever again.”
Jimmy also expressed resentment, based on his belief that he was being used as a pawn associated with unresolved issues between Holman and Clift.
“After that, Jimmy’s friendship with Monty flickered out like a firecracker on July 4th,” Wilder said. “It was a violent parting. Two souls had come together seeking love and comfort and finding neither. After that, they pursued their separate paths to self-destruction. Monty, of course, took a hell of a lot longer to get there than Jimmy.”
***
At the end of the summer of 1955, Holman and Clift were living together in her Manhattan brownstone as aftermath to their three-month tour together through Europe. One morning, he slept late, recovering from a hangover.
Abruptly, she shook him awake to tell him, “Jimmy Dean is dead! His car crashed in California. He was recklessly speeding in his silver Porsche.”
Clift later confided to Bill Gunn, one of Jimmy’s closest friends, “The instant I heard the news, I vomited. I don’t know why.”
***
Clift’s own life was forever altered. On July 23, 1966, Elizabeth Taylor pressured him to attend a party at her hilltop house in Los Angeles during the course of her marriage to Michael Wilding. Clift’s driver had been given the night off, so reluctantly, Clift agreed to maneuver his way, alone, up the steep hill to join Elizabeth with close friends who included Kevin McCarthy and Rock Hudson.
At the party, Clift drank bottles of rosé wine and took some “downers” before driving home, alone, in his car. Kevin McCart
hy, driving his own car, left the party at the same time.
Clift soon lost control of his vehicle. His car went off the edge of an embankment, crashing into concrete pillars. The steering wheel shattered his face. Elizabeth Taylor remembered, when she recovered from the shock, repositioning one of his eyeballs back into the socket of his pulverized face.
He never really recovered. Plastic surgeons could never restore his former beauty.
Throughout the remainder of his life, he struggled through sinkholes of depression, drug addiction, alcoholism, and ongoing guilt about his homosexuality, a context which he never managed to accept with grace.
Kazan later recalled the shock he experienced upon seeing Clift after his recovery and its (unsuccessful) restorative surgeries. “His head had been knocked out of shape, and he didn’t look like Monty Clift any more. He was no longer handsome, and there was a strained look about him—even, it seemed, in his effort to stand erect.”
Robert LaGuardia, author of a respected biography, released in 1977, of the doomed actor, claimed that if Montgomery Clift had died after the release of From Here to Eternity (1953), at the age of thirty-two, he would have become an even greater cult figure than Dean.
As it was, a great deal of the world had forgotten about Clift before July 13, 1966, when he died.
Right before that, Elizabeth Taylor had persuaded Warner Brothers to hire him for a key role in the film adaptation of Carson McCullers’ novel, Reflections in a Golden Eye. It had been arranged that he would interpret the role of a closeted, deeply tormented, army major. The part went to Brando.
It was later learned that his long time African American companion, Lorenzo James, had come into his bedroom to tell him that on The Late Show, The Misfits (1961) was being shown. That was the last movie that his co-stars Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable ever made.
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