Today’s Tortuously Slow Yet Truly Morbid Fact!
Sometimes the path to self-destruction is tortuously slow, filled with years of agonizing self-doubts, incapacitating vices, and self-punishing acts. At some point, body and soul cannot cope with further abuse and simply give out. Such was the case with songbird Judy Garland; a similar victim was her Judgment at Nuremberg costar—the handsome, talented, sensitive, and moody Montgomery Clift. In fact, it was another legendary icon and emotional muddle—Marilyn Monroe, who had teamed with Monty in The Misfits (1961)—who said sadly of Clift, “He’s the only person I know who is in worse shape than I am.”
Montgomery was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1920, to William and Ethel “Sunny” (Fogg) Clift. There was an older brother, Brooks, and “Monty” (as he became known) had a twin sister Roberta, who was a few minutes older. Because Sunny had been adopted as a child and eventually learned that her biological forebears came of aristocratic stock, she devoted her entire later life to publicizing the blue blood of her family. The Clifts moved to Chicago in 1924, and in 1930 to New York, where William proved successful in the banking business. It allowed Sunny to indulge her fantasies of leading a refined life, frequently traveling abroad with her children but without her husband.
Monty and his twin sister Roberta
By age 12, Monty was intrigued with the theater, an improvement over the modeling career that his overly possessive mother had already chosen for him. After a few seasons of summer stock, Clift came to Broadway in Fly Away Home (1935) . Over the next decade, he sharpened his skills by appearing in such New York productions as The Wind and the Rain (1938) with Celeste Holm, There Shall Be No Night (1940) with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, The Skin of Our Teeth (1942) with Tallulah Bankhead, and You Touched Me! (1945) with Edmund Gwenn. Never in solid physical condition, the slender, darkly handsome Clift was rejected for World War II duty because of chronic diarrhea. During his young adult years, Clift was in constant conflict about his homosexuality, his feelings toward his demanding mother, and his mounting insecurities about his professional abilities. One who knew the sensitive, polite young man then said of Clift, “Monty had a fence around himself. He told you in certain ways, ‘Just don’t come too close to me.'” Eventually, Clift and his mother would become almost totally estranged.
Montgomery with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Robert E. Sherwood’s play There Shall Be No Night, 1940.
Film director Howard Hawks had been impressed by Clift on Broadway and cast him opposite John Wayne in the rough-and-tumble Western Red River (1948), for which Monty was paid $60,000. Before that successful movie about a cattle drive was released, Clift went into The Search (1948) which earned him the first of four Oscar nominations. By the time he made the period drama The Heiress (1949) opposite Olivia de Havilland, Monty was earning $100,000 per film and was considered one of Hollywood’s major new finds. Branded as “unconventional,” he insisted, “I’m not odd. I’m trying to be an actor. Not a movie star, just an actor.” By now, he had become addicted to assorted drugs and drink, which caused escalating trouble on and off the soundstages. (A lot of Clift’s bizarre physical behavior was caused by an underactive-thyroid condition, but it was often misattributed to his substance abuse.) Despite additional psychiatric therapy, Clift’s complex nature grew more knotted.
Trailer for The Search
When Monty appeared with Elizabeth Taylor in the prestigious A Place in the Sun (1951), the two began a lifelong friendship. His favorite screen assignment following this was that of the trumpet-playing boxer in From Here to Eternity (1953). He turned down On the Waterfront (1954), which won Marlon Brando an Oscar. Instead, he returned to Broadway in a revival of The Seagull, hoping to please his drama coach, Mira Rostova, on whom he had become overly dependent. The show’s failure, plus his loss of the Best Actor Oscar to William Holden in the March 1954 Academy Awards sweepstakes, filled the frightened actor with increasing self-doubt. For nearly two years, thereafter, he rejected movies and stage work, agonizing over each bad decision. He hated the movie colony—calling Los Angeles “Vomit, California”—and spent much of his time at his New York City brownstone.
Elizabeth and Monty
Finally, desperate for income, he agreed to costar with Elizabeth Taylor in Raintree Country (1957), a costumed epic of the Old South. Shooting began on April 2, 1956. On Saturday, May 12, Clift attended a small gathering hosted by Taylor at her Benedict Canyon home in Los Angeles. After dinner, a drug-addled Clift left the party and, shortly thereafter, smashed his rented car into a power pole. It was Elizabeth who, upon reaching the crash scene, pulled two dislodged teeth from Monty’s throat. Her action saved his life. Clift’s nose was broken, his jaw shattered, and the rest of his face was a bloody mess. After painful reconstructive surgery, Clift returned to filming in late July.
Monty’s crashed rental car
Though he continued making movies, his ego was more frail than ever over his lost looks. As a result, his substance dependencies deepened. He did a variation of his From Here To Eternity part in the World War II combat drama The Young Lions (1958) and was mothered by older costar Myrna Loy in Lonelyhearts (1959). He and Taylor reunited for Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). Clift was in the jinxed The Misfits (1961), which was the final movie for both of his costars, Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. In his next feature, it was a strange twist to have Monty the perennial therapy patient portray the father of psychiatry in Freud (1962). His behavior was so disruptive on the set that a lawsuit was filed against him.
Clift in Suddenly, Last Summer
With his industry reputation nearly destroyed by his unprofessional behavior and failing healthy, he went without work for four years. He resurfaced in a Cold War mess called The Defector (1966)—released after his death—in which he looked dreadfully pained and old. Over the years, friends, lovers, and acquaintances had come and gone, but Liz Taylor remained faithful. It was Liz who convinced industry investors to cast Monty opposite her in Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967), although he never got to play the part.
Monty at the end
On the night of July 22, 1966, Clift was in residence at his New York townhouse on East 61st Street. A friend who was caring for him asked if he wanted to watch The Misfits on TV. Clift answered, “Absolutely not!” Those were his last words. The next morning, he was found dead—nude on his bed. The official cause of death was a massive heart attack, although it was drugs that had helped to do him in. (In his Manhattan townhouse he had a huge customized closet/medicine cabinet to store his large drug stash.) After private funeral services at St. James’s Church in New York City, Monty was buried in a small Quaker cemetery in Brooklyn. Ironically, “Sunny” Clift would live until 1988, three months shy of her one hundredth birthday; she outlived both her sons.
Monty’s grave
It had been a long and painful trail from Omaha to that final resting place in Brooklyn. For those around Montgomery Clift, however, the inevitable finale was never in doubt. The Question had always only been “When?” As actor Kevin McCarthy, a long-time friend of Clift, summed up for a 1998 television biography of Clift: “He had the gift, the talent, but it all went to hell.”
Culled from: The Hollywood Book of Death
Sideshow “Freak” Du Jour!
AVERY CHILDS
The accompanying print was sold by Avery Childs while he was playing Morris’ Museum at Coney Island late in 1884. Avery, whose real name was George W. Barnum, came from Litchfield, Connecticut. He apparently had Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, the condition common to so-called “rubber-men.” Skin laxity is only one of a series of anomalies associated with the syndrome. Expressivity is variable; thus hyper-extensible joints, a secondary characteristic in the case of the elastic-skin man Felix Wehrle, are of primary expressivity in Avery Childs. The Frog Boy’s facial narrowness across the cheekbones is a further diagnostic of the condition.
Avery Childs was twenty-three when he posed in the Bowery studios. Eisenmann set him up on a little grass mat as if he’d just hopped down the garden path to meet the camera. The arrangement did not admit the use of a posing stand, as there was no room. The sacrifice of technical excellence was worth the expressive results
Culled from: Monsters;: Human Freaks in American’s Gilded Age
Andersonville Prisoner Diary Entry Du Jour!
This is the continuation of the 1864 diary of Andersonville prisoner Private George A. Hitchcock (see the archived version for all entries up until now).
Here’s today’s entry:
November 10th. Rain in the morning. Cold and windy at night. An inspecting officer has been taking the names of those most ragged in camp, for clothing.
Culled from: Andersonville: Giving Up the Ghost
Was George Barnum any relation to P.T. Barnum? PT was also from Connecticut.