Montgomery Clift documentary

no one had ever seen an attractive man who was so vulnerable who was saying and it was cultural importance of clift is that you can be a man and you can still cry and you can still be sweet and and vulnerable and like a wound and it was very very appealing [Music] I find that it would be very difficult for me to separate you know the the actor and man and the brother I think they're all intertwined but I think you could say mostly he was an actor and everything that he did had to do with his craft anyway maybe I should go back to our beginnings when we were kids and there were three of us I was the oldest and then 18 months later came the twins Ethel and then Montgomery a few hours later his mother sunny Clift had been born an orphan she'd been with foster parents and found out at the age of 18 that she was really the the child of aristocrats her real father was Colonel Robert Anderson who commanded Fort Sumter and her other grandfather had been Abraham Lincoln's secretary anyway she spent all of her life trying to be recognized by her real family and she never was but she was determined that Montgomery Clift and his sister brother be raised to the manor born be raised as aristocrats our early years were spent in Bermuda and France and st. Moritz and Minchin and Vienna and also Milano and Napoli you were tutored everywhere we went in French and German it was interesting maybe psychologically that why we lived in Europe [Music] my mother always dressed this like triplets we had the same short pants the same haircut even my sister looked just like my brother and me [Music] money gave his first acting performance at the age of 8 in our little Swiss apartment near cigarette before an audience that included his mother and our tutor and nurse while we were travelling our father was back in the United States working very hard trying to become successful whatever that means but he was completely wiped out by the 1932 stock market crash and we had to return to the United States so when we got here we were real misfits but we had our French bicycles which saved us from all the neighborhood children who couldn't really understand what we were about and why the girls seemed to like us and I still don't know why why the girls in Chicago would like some very weird people from Europe who didn't speak English very much after a while we went to Florida and then my father got back on his financial feat and we moved to Connecticut my sister and I went on to college but my brother always hated to be forced to learn so it was very lucky for him that he got a part in a summer stock play which was fortunately successful and then went to Broadway where it ran for six months so he became an actor a child actor and Sonny Clift was the the archetypical stage mother for taking him to auditions telling him how to speak coaching him she always had a limousine take him to and from the theater she spoiled him and pampered him and but always told him that you were the greatest you're the finest year you are an aristocrat he didn't know by the way anything about his mother's background until I think he was about 21 years old he didn't understand why it was being raised this way why was being kept so isolated until he was about 21 or 22 and his father finally told him and mati just couldn't believe this mother had had done it for that reason for her own reasons really because she wanted to to find her family and to to get her get an identity for herself I first met Monte when he was a pupil of mine around 1940 it must have been because it was right toward the end of the group theater had already started teaching and directing although I'd been an actor in the group theatre for ten years at that time and one of the play agents that the group dealt with was a woman by the name of Janet cone and she had a house in Pound Ridge New York and she was very friendly with Monte and persuaded Monte to take a little red barn and Pound Ridge so he had this little Country Place and I used to visit Janet and visit Monte incidentally and so when I did a play on 1942 play called Mexican mural I had a lot of people from my class in the cast Monty was one kevin mccarthy was another Libby Holman and mierda or Stover and we got to be friends almost instantly we had something in common whether it was taste or a common taste you know what I mean it was a sharing of some kind we all shared something and and I do think it was we thought that we knew better than other people how things should be done we were eager to Stickle enough to believe that most of the things we saw were not well done most of the acting that we were asked to respect we thought not very highly of we thought that we were better than they were or that we could perform or act better and we thought our our taste was better and therefore in some way I suppose that says we thought we must have assumed that we were more intelligent more cultivators more something I don't know what he was a remarkable person and the fact that he was interested in us and liked us so much was flattering possibly to us because he seemed the personification of a young prince of all the best qualities he wanted to attain some sort of heights of to be the most fruitful person he used to say I want to be the most I want to live the most fruitful life well it's unfortunate that in some way and the fruitfulness was a dark fruit - rotten food finally in the end that's how I was married to Kevin McCarthy well we became we all became friends and then I got to know him much better the following summer when Kevin had just gone into the army was drafted that's 42 and I had a job in the summer stock company and Cape Cod and mighty been on tour for you and he came up there and we did a play called The Pursuit of Happyness and he played he was always a lot of jokes of a lot of I don't doing things as a lark and so he put on blackface and he played the slave the black slaves that comes into the play the odd thing about him is that both men and women both sexes loved him there was an extra quality about him it really was exciting and fun and dear he was a wonderfully dear and personal I had been not well I'd had a miscarriage and I was staying out in the suburbs with my mother and I was very depressed and felt very alone and I called Augusta to talk to her and she said she and Monty were together and it was a Sunday afternoon as I remember and she said can you get on the train and get in I said yeah but I can't walk very well I'm weak and she said that's all right don't worry about that Monty will help you so I got on the train and came in and they met me in Grand Central Station and I remember him very well when I first saw him he was very slight and very slim and incredible-looking alive by Marla's face and somehow they just got me out of Grand Central Station and got me to Augustus apartment 2/4 like walk up and I said I can't cuz no way he just picked me up like a rag doll and just not walk ran four flights over and he was not breathing hard at the top he's incredible physical condition and we talked he was alive he was so funny not funny that's a wrong word for him he was zany mad wild crazy way about him and witty very really the combination of the two was just sheer wonder sheer delight sheer I forgot that I had lost a child I forgot my husband was flying a plane I forgot I mean you just were you became alive he just he made everything alive I think everybody in a way felt it when when you were Wiz Monty it was I've never had that experience since in my life there was something very special and he really treated everyone I mean individually I don't mean in a group but as though one was of great value to him I remember that mardian August and I went to Cuba I believe it was before 1947 I've seen those photographs as we ran they ran those pictures again and it was so beautiful we went to Havana we went to the out to the gambling this is before of course before de Castro this is of the time of Batista was still in power and you could go to Cuba easily and and there's a scene in there where we were throwing coins to the these little native children that seemed to be you know poverty-stricken natives along the malecon there and Monte was fascinated by all these faces that's Ron Dee's shooting of the film and I'm throwing the coins rather than me we took pictures of each other we were doing a lot of pictorial stuff and we've never known anything like it Monty was always there and he was always with us and wanted to always to be there and wherever we went he would come or wherever he went he sometimes would invite us every every girl one was crazy about Monty and he seemed to be in love with all of us individually however he had he had girlfriends and but there were two or three of us that he was really very fond of we were very very close but I don't think it's a coincidence that each one of us was married and so that the you know the relationship was protected by the fact that I was married a couple of other people who he loved very much they also were married and they weren't going to be divorced nor would he wanted it I don't think I really think the protection was what made our relationship so nice so Fred had to report back to the newspaper that he worked for you had a year to go back to your job after the war and so we drove in Molly's car which was a Buick and I have no idea of the year of it which he loved dearly and called it Beulah and Beulah was a person and we drove across the desert the southern route because it was still very cold and March and we ended up in New Orleans because Monte had had an amoeba he'd had an amoebic dysentery and had been in New Orleans many times at a hospital there and he wanted to make a quick stop because he always checked in with that doctor whenever he could or needed to or whatever and it was hot in New Orleans and we would go into the French Quarter every night and eat and silly things would happen money sat on a chair and the bottom fell out of the chair and he went down through the chair and we were hysterical and they literally practically threw us out it was a wild and wonderful five or six days there was one one night I remember very well.when Maddy said very quietly and very gently I'm going in by myself fred was delighted fred was pleased he was glad to go to bed and I said can't I come no he said I want to go by myself and then because he never wanted to hurt you he did later hurt is terrible but he never wanted to he just patted my face and he said I need to be alone he said you understand that I said I understand it but I remember feeling like a child left behind his playmate I wasn't going to be allowed to come play looking back on that night I recognize that that probably was something that I was to see a lot later on and not know what to make [Music] Manti was one of the most exciting actors of his period it's hard to imagine today how thrilled people were teenagers went wild about him they screamed when they saw a Montgomery Clift movie Monty was a true seminal influence in the movies and in acting what's fascinating about his whole technique is that that mysterious quality in his mannerisms his his eyes he moves in a very lumbering manner one wonders what is there about him you almost want to go in and sort of and sort of help Monte out he was the first actor male actor ever to have this plaintive quality about him he was he wasn't only a sex symbol he was kind of like a mothering symbol people wanted to mother him and it was the most amazing debut for any any film actor and his influence still pervades it's very beautiful Elizabeth Taylor is she beautiful you're both working in a place on the Sun [Music] when I came home one day and there he was talking with my father and I never forgot that he was a mercurial fascinating enigmatic man smoked like a chimney was interested in everything and I I just never forgot him and at that point he was considered one of the top actors in the United States he just been nominated for the Academy Award for the search which was a movie that Fred Zinnemann directed after that I saw him periodically for about two years and that my father helped him he was he wanted to see how a a person goes to their death in a in a prison he was playing this guy who was put to death and so my father who was a lawyer helped him stay overnight at San Quentin prison in the death house and I remember he came back and told us all about it walk walking back and forth across our living room talking about what it was like to be in a condemned row [Music] his relationship his friendship with Elizabeth Taylor was an extraordinary when it went back to when she was 18 and he was I guess 27 and making place in the Sun and she fell in love with him and he sort of fell in love with her and they had a romance Monty would go just so far in their relationship and then he would bring a boy under the set when I say boy I mean he would bring a young man onto the set and this would be a rather obvious young man and Elizabeth meant of course to show Elizabeth what was really going on in his life and Elizabeth's would say later on that she didn't know why Monty did that was was was she she's supposed to feel what she's supposed to say it's okay Monty you or was she supposed to pat him on the back and say it's fine with me what she finally did was to go over to Monty and say anything you want to do anything you want me for is all right and I will be here we are the three of us the four of us travel and we flew to Rome and we spent about I think it was five weeks six weeks in Rome and then we went down to well we went through Positano but what's then I can't remember now what's the what's the town below a mouthy that's right [Music] mirakl oh our mallanna was being shot money and I went up to Milan to meet vittorio de sica it was wonderful to have a few moments in the streets of Milan where some of that was being shot it was through Monti of course and the interest of the Italian directors and producers that we met people like to seek it and I remember an incident in or two in Rome where we were taken to a parties because of course lukina Visconti was hoping that marty would make a film for him I believe but they would have to take us if they were gonna take my T someplace so we all went together and we even know we had a wonderful luncheon and least gone to his beautiful house and then we were all to go on to this costume party we didn't have any costumes really but we stopped in to the headlights of a car and somebody burned a cork the whole thing made up of faces and put bend down as a glass and everything we all went to this wonderful dance but the thing about being was money really was that everything was was height heightened and it was always fun and you always were kidding and laughing and sometimes at people's expense but usually it was pretty here a good nature but it was sort of you felt very special because because we had such a good time together was it about this time I think it began we began to be aware that something wasn't quite right he some turn began to take place in Maadi he was a daredevil he'd try anything he wanted a challenge the edge whether it was death how close to danger he could come and somewhere that probably has got a lot to do with what happened to him maybe I remember when we were in PNG in Florence it was there that we were staying at a hotel along the arno and then Monte would get out in the balcony and hang there literally six or seven floors above the street that runs along the arno there by his fingertips dangling and then pull himself up literally he did this from time to time he would challenge his body to be able to make this sort of daredevil exploit when we were returning from Italy we were on the Queen Mary there was a hurricane or a storm very heavy storm sometime the liner at the Queen Mary had literally made no headway for 24 hours was just holding its own against in the city's very heavy season winds Monte said why don't we take a terrific picture I'll go down and get in our cabin I'll get the porthole open somehow and maybe the other hat and a in a briefcase in possibly an umbrella and I'm gonna be hanging out of the porthole saying I'm getting off I said I'm not going look I'm not gonna look I would refuse to watch because I was absolutely certain he was going to kill himself I was just turning 18 I guess and mati was then 32 and he had just finished making a place in the Sun and he was Montgomery Clift which was of course an extremely romantic thing in my eyes he was very much like an older brother in many ways because he was extremely generous to young people he was a person who I think all of us who were friends of his in those days and have spoken about that time with him had a sense of him guiding us to the best of ourselves it was a very special generosity in relationship you had had a lot of fun but Judy was a very close friend Judy Balaban and we used to spend a tremendous amount of time together I think they were very close very much in love a taffetta for a while yes we were in love I certainly was very much in love with him and I think he with me we we spent almost a year together seeing only each other her father was a very important guy in the motion picture industry but are you I thought for a while there they were going to get married but I don't think Monty was going to marry anybody we did but we did speak about getting married but as I look back on it when we spoke about it it was more in a sense of playfulness and the way that you sort of fantasized what what could become of you both later I was just turning 18 as I said Monty was very conscious of the difference in our ages Monty also because he was a person who was deeply concerned about choice in life made me conscious that I really had only begun the process of making choices about my life and perhaps because I was 18 I thought I knew everything and that if I loved him I should marry him and that would be that he never said no but it was clear in the way that we talked about it that he was simply allowing me the fantasy really in a way it was clear to me in those days that there was a kind of energy inside of Monti that as much as it was responsible for his joy it was also responsible for something that was another on the other side of him because the role was so much he being the older one and he being generous to me about guiding me to grow into the fullest part of myself he was very reluctant to share that with me as though it were some sort of burden that he would carry and it was his responsibility I wished when I got older and we were still friendly I look back on the time and wished I had been a little more mature and had understood that a little better because perhaps I could have given him something more than I did he was always having to hide he leave he led a double life you know he he he went out with women he had he had affairs with women but he also had affairs of men and he had to keep them very quiet and I think this was very hard on him I don't think he liked to hide and he went and you know they made very elaborate elaborate kinds of defenses and protections for this kind of double life and he even talked about hating to lead this double life so I think that was why he was he was tremendous and he perhaps sought escape in in alcohol and and drugs he had gone to see a psychiatrist and was under some sort of psychiatric guidance if you want to call it that and something was happening to him that well I don't know enough about it but whether he was seeking help or whether he got the wrong kind of help from his psychiatrist there's been a lot of talk about that that might have been be what happened to him the innuendo was that that Montgomery Clift's latent homosexuality was allowed to appear you know he was an analysis for many years with his doctor Silverberg who who was a homosexual himself and who supposedly couldn't help him about that so it was a it was a difficult and dark kind of secret for him and at that time of course he was a major major movie star hounded by people on the streets everywhere you went Monty was a person who didn't go to big premieres you know he stayed do because social life was a little less glamorous than that but I guess because it was paramount and my father was then head of paramount and we were together that he decided that he should go to the opening of a place in the Sun because he wasn't seeing that much at that kind of thing the fans around the theater absolutely mobbed him it was insane and we were I mean the car was almost overturned when we arrived and so on I must say it's a pleasure to be here and I suppose one of the places is that I come to an opening night performance of my own and I don't have to get up there and do it again so we got into the theater it was decided that in order to get us out safely that we would leave we were sitting in the lodge upstairs and that we would leave just a bit before the film was breaking so that we could be sort of escorted by these guards out and back to the car and it didn't work exactly because they saw Monty getting up and people started swarming again and it got very much you know like a sort of a riot it had a very uncomfortable feeling we had gone to a restaurant and we were sitting here talking and it was quiet there was only one other couple sitting in the booth right in front of us and the girl very sort of carefully in and of Vienna produces white turned around and looked at us and during the course of the dinner she got went to the telephone and what had happened is that we were trying to get down to the Italian Street Fair to downtown and we'd stopped to get something to eat so we finished the dinner and we started out we got to the sidewalk and suddenly he said Ron and I turned and I don't know how much how many people it was but it seemed as though they were at least fifty people rushing toward us well fortunately I don't know can't get a taxi in New York usually but there was a taxi I jumped out swung over the door and so one of the cab accepted us because he flung himself in the cab shot across the cab I jumped in slammed the door and the crowd hit the side of the cab and cracked and broke the window right and we found out later put a dent in the cab so of course the cab driver he had explained to the cab driver it wasn't charged for it or anything like that but it was that sort of thing you know trying to keep in touch was a life-and-death game and that could very well have been instead of the side of the cab it could have been him and he called one day and he said they'd shut down the shooting and that he needed a rest and he wanted to go to Mexico and would we go with him and I said money you know I said the babies and he said hire somebody I'll pay for just hire somebody and please I need you I want to go so we drove to t1 and parked the car got an errand Ollie's Reforma and we went to Baja and we went to La Paz which is a little tiny used to be a pearl fishing place not a resort did not want to go to a zoo because six hours in the bloody plane and Fred who had been a pilot we hit fog and they had no instruments and Fred I thought was going to go through the plane by the time we got there we were a nervous wreck and it was late at night and body was beside himself so we went to bed and I was awake because I was disturbed by some quality that I felt in him he didn't look well he didn't act well he was edgy there was no fun there was no play it was she was just so I heard the door of his room open and closed and I heard him go downstairs I think I was I it's not important but I think I was not yet undressed or I pulled on a pair of pants and a shirt anyway I followed him downstairs without him seeing and there was a little bar in the hotel and he had just gone to the bar to sit and I remembered saying to myself come off you know you are not his mother you are not his wife you are not anything whatever I mean he's maybe is looking for a woman or a man I don't know what the hell he's looking for but it's none of your business go to bed and shut up and leave him alone so I went back to bed I didn't sleep and it must have been around four or five in the morning and I heard this sound on the stairs and I went to the door and opened the door and it was Marty on all fours the stairs trying to get up the stairs falling dead drunk destroyed the shovel had vomited just destroyed and not I don't mean that he didn't hurt but he was just crazy I woke fed we picked him up bodily Fred carried him we took him to his room I washed him off a little and we put him to bed and I think we spent three or four days there and he drank but not like that and we really stayed with him we didn't let him out of our sight because I was at that point aware for the first time of the extent of what was going on I had not known I knew he was drinking I knew I heard stories of what was happening on the SATs I knew there were problems but I didn't know it was this bad and it was bad and it was a devastating thing because that trip there was no magic there was no play there was no crazy zany stuff there was a deadly serious [Music] haunted kind of quality and for me it was the realization that there was something really terribly wrong it was not a temporary thing but there was something seriously wrong with him Lombardi was drinking for a reason and it began it began to I began to wonder because it looked dangerous and I be I suppose I began to wonder why well I began thinking back in those years when he was so totally free of any necessity for drugs of any kind and what could possibly have happened and I thought he used to question me endlessly about some courses that I had had in New York University involving social ethics morality particularly social morality and he would keep asking me he used to ask me questions while I was no scholar I know philosopher and wasn't then but I would tell him what I knew and the subject of ethics morality it's constantly coming up in Monty's mind and I thought oh this may be somewhat the key to what is happening to Marty my feeling is if he was one of those men who take the sins of the world unto themselves and seemed to be compulsive in that they become the sole Redeemer if he saw a child being abused or an animal being abused he took the suffering he was incapable of coping with the world so this led to anesthesia via alcohol and possibly stronger drugs but there was a terrible suffering going on and it it was constant and it occurred in things that his dearest friends might do or that I might do or that his mother and father might do or his brother might do they all hurt too much It was as if his entire nervous system had been exposed if you've taken a scalpel and just cut the arms open and cut the whole nervous system open and then thrown sand the sands of the world at it or the salt of the world into the into this open sensitive person it had always been his real wish to have a home he needed a home and I think he knew by then that he couldn't always have a home with us or with the macarthy's because it wasn't he needed his own so he bought a beautiful brownstone on 61st Street he called us and said come Fred remodel it for me gene you can do the decorating or help me with the decorating so again we had children and we had obligations but we dropped everything you see there's this this continuing theme that you tended to drop your own life and go when money needed you or wanted you you went anyway Fred went back wrecked the inside of the brownstone by then I mean to god Walt took out a staircase took out a fireplace rebuilt and then Fred came back and I went with money to start picking out carpeting and during the time that Fred and I were there together Monty became was a whole other side of him he became frequently the boss he became authoritarian he told such things as I paid for your trip here and I want this and I want that and I want it now and this is taking too long Fred I think was not ever able to forgive that ever yes he paid for our trip but no he did not pay Fred for working 17 hours a day and knocking out and so forth Monty bought theater tickets one night for Augusta and Kevin and me and Mira and on an overall there was not a ticket bought for Fred because fred was to stay there and finish a job and Freddy really never forgave him for that I didn't really forgive him either but I fought back I said you know I'm here but I had some sort of feeling I was here as a friend and I'm not going to finish this today I'll take care of it tomorrow during the work on the brownstone I would often wear an old sweater an old shirt of Mahdi's or an old jacket you know the place was cold and it was whatever and I'd put on a little jacket a night of Kleenex I reach in a pocket and I'd pull out a handful of pills blue gray red some of them I recognized some of them I didn't have any idea what they were but they just be loose in his pocket along with tobacco and whatever so it became very apparent and I don't know whether we were reluctant to look at it or what that it became terribly apparent that he was on you name it he was on it he was drinking heavily and the combination was dynamite we put him to bed many nights sometimes I would go in and have to shake him awake and he would be absolutely slugged with femme fatale Seconal whatever there were bottles apothecary bottles of 500 men do talk 500 Seconal we lived in libby Homans townhouse which was up the street because the brownstone was not livable and Fred would have to go back to California and I would stay on and Monte and I you know quotes lived together in the sense that we both stayed at Monty's friend's house but there was never we were not in any other kind of a relationship he was at that time deeply in his relationship with Libby Holman Monty seemed to have a great need for a relationship with an older woman there had been several in his life Libbie at this point was in her mid to late 40s and she had had several tragedies oddly they were with younger men about the age of Monti her first husband had commit soot committed suicide her second husband had committed suicide so by the time she had met Monti she had seen a great deal of life and she was very sophisticated no one really knows exactly the intimate details of Monty's relationship with with Libby Holman but one thing is clear that she she was extremely possessive of him there was much speculation about what what her presence in his life meant there were those who said that she absolutely destroyed Monte that her and that she introduced him to pills she introduced him to strange sexual habits and none of this has been verified she might have been absolutely wonderful for him when I came back to California we were to see him very little we finally moved out on the west side of town [Music] Monte would sometimes show up at 2 o'clock in the morning and banging on the gates and we would tear downstairs and he was drunk and wanted to talk and rave and we finally had to put a stop to it I remember Fred telling him one night Monte don't ever do this again just don't do this to us Marty had indications that we had ignored of his being not just a daredevil but also accident-prone and he did things that were unusual my sister Mary McCarthy thought that Monte I remember a long time ago she said there's something a matter with her Monte is his behaviors infant I was like e between expensive Fania this return to infantile behavior you take the steak off the plate and carve it on the floor the way my little daughter would like to eat her food you know her little highchair not on a plate not for the spoon but just shove it into her mouth and Marty would do the same he's doing that period and I don't know what he was feeling at the time that new Elizabeth Taylor well she was married to Michael Wilding and he called us and said he wanted to go out to dinner with the Wildings with Elizabeth Michael and would we come up and meet them at the house so we went up and Elizabeth was in tears was locked in her bedroom we never saw her money was very drunk and ugly really ugly in a way that it's difficult to describe he became like an animal and we knew we couldn't go out to dinner no way were we going to allow him to be in public and so we just said well let's fix dinner here we were fred and i are both good cooks michael said go into the kitchen help yourself whatever's in the kitchen he was I guess angry I don't know so we went into the kitchen all we could find were eggs and I think some mushrooms or whatever and we decided we make an omelet and Monty was furious he was enraged we were going out and if I'd said no we're not going out we're gonna eat here and Monte finally said all right but if we're going to eat here I'll make the eggs and he took the eggs away from Fred and he started beating them and he spit into them over and over again just spit into the eggs and I thought you know this is crazy what are we doing what are we doing up here what is this about so I said you know Freddie let's get out of here this is insane this there's no life you can't there you can't be with him that's not possible to be with him he wanted to reform himself and beat redeem get his body back to where it ought to be in his mind and clean himself up and he needed somebody to go along with as I was saying to someone I wonder what Monte saw in Augusta and me and I decided maybe he saw us as being healthy I think Augusta and I were probably good middle-class Americans that seemed very healthy and perhaps we were believable in hopeful images of some kind to it at any rate that night I went up to this party up on Beverly Estates Drive that at this beautiful house that that Liz Taylor and Michael Wilding we're living in and found that Marty was on the wagon he was emulating my teetotaling and was not taking anything to drink of any kind and was on his best behavior that night I left early because I had to go up to San Francisco I said I was saying goodbye to him he said no no wait wait I'm gonna leave too and we went out in the little parking area outside Liz's house and we talked for a while and he talked about how tough it was to work in films now you just it was as though there was a gap between his understanding of what happens when you act and the Hollywood imagination what happens when you act and what you do and how you are when you when you are he really was depressed by his experiences in front of the camera here talk a little bit about that and we got in our cars and I started down and it was quite a steep descent and as we were as we were proceeding down it was about 11 o'clock at night I would guess and that time the Beverly stage drive was not built up was a fairly lonely road and there were a couple of very sharp hairpin turns in the hill going on I became aware that Monte's car was coming up very close behind me the headlights were much too close and I was getting a little bit nervous and there was a turn coming I thought if he should bump me I'm gonna go right through that fence there and down into the canyon below so I tried to pull away from his car by speeding up a little bit and I made the turn very quickly but on the next turn I was watching in my rearview mirror I saw the lights going his head I could even see a cloud of dust flailing back and forth and suddenly there were no lights in my rearview mirror there was nothing there I turned my car around assuming he was stuck and I drove back the 150 or 200 yards to the point that he seemed to be as I came up I could my my headlights disclosed that his car was smashed up the front end was all battered and bashed and I looked in and Monty's body was crunched up underneath the dashboard somehow how he got down there I don't know but evidently as he came around that last turn or as his car was swinging around he either blacked out and faded out and he had some sort of experience of blacking out I'm told our I heard later after the fact and the impact of these turns as the car was hitting one side and another along the embankment and there was a telegraph pole involved there somewhere I believe - a telephone pole and I I reach in tried to open the door you couldn't get the door open - see I got I think I went back and got my car drove it up closer to throw a little more light into the interior and as I looked in I could see what looked like face all ripped apart blood and no sound of any kind I I assumed that I guess I was afraid that he was dead there seemed to be no alternative but to leave him and go back and that's what I did I drove back up to the house and alerted Michael and there's of what had happened and we got back down there and looked into the car and Monte was moving a little bit and Liz I said we can't get to him that the doors are jammed and she went through the act or see summer sees climbed over the seat and she somehow got down into the car and was able to somehow cradle Monte's broken battered head and he said my teeth are and his evidently his teeth had been knocked out his front teeth and they were stuck in his throat and she reached into his mouth and pulled those broken teeth out of his throat right after during his recovery Lybian live in Libby Holman came out and stayed with him and I always spend the weekends and any afternoon I was off working and they had a serious break in their relationship because Mon Monte he decided to go back and finish the film and he looked really bad and he had been healed quickly I don't know what had gone on medically but he healed with what he called colloidal tissue his head hit the windshield of the car and his upper that was broken his jaw was snapped off on both sides and his teeth were knocked down and he just really looked very bad but he healed he was in terrible pain and was taking an immense amounts of painkillers and and anyone libby said he must not go back to work that they should go back to New York spent a long time recovering and heal slowly but the studio wouldn't appreciate it and indeed they didn't he decided to go back to work and she left she said that she couldn't help him [Music] Monte did go back to work was nearly finished shooting the phone and I was there one Saturday with him by this swimming pool and he disappeared he had this bedroom that he put up black curtains it was like a sick room and he was gone and he was gone and he was gone and I got worried about him and I went into the house and I heard this noise I realized it was Marty weeping but just weeping so anyway I left he didn't see me and I went out and sat back outside and the Sun slowly set and Madhi came out after I like about another hour you could see he'd been crying it and he said when he went into the house that he looked at himself in the mirror for the first time since the accident he said you know I still think I have a career I still think I can work again and I realized that he'd finished his film Raintree County thinking he had no career that he'd never work again but he just finished it out of this obligation to finish it looking way did [Music] it made a movie this after the accident call the Young Lions and he called me and said there was going to be a showing of it and would I come because he he really felt that his work was very good in that and I was more surprised that he would say such a thing he had never said such a thing of himself for his work so indeed I did go to see it and while his work was of course very good as always the change physical change and it was so startling to me I just it was like she said before and after it's like another because he'd been you know supremely beautiful and that was why he was still terribly moving and good as an actor I had to get used to the a change one side of his face was paralyzed so he couldn't move it so we had to learn how to use his face in a new way a different way I mean an actor's faces is his destiny is that's what he works with it's his instrument and particularly in the movies and Montgomery Clift could only really use his eyes if you notice his movies after the accident it's his eyes and the way he uses his body but not the way he uses his face his mouth etc because he couldn't move his mouth but he actually learned how to use his face in a different way but he was so upset by it about the loss of his his beauty that he took all the mirrors down in his house he had mirrors all over the place because he was very vain in fact he told somebody that he realized he'd gotten away with murder being so handsome and now I know the way everybody else feels I'm being treated this in a different kind of way because I'm not so beautiful anymore the courage of this man was incredible I never heard him actually complain about pain physical or mental city-bred fella and a country girl living on a hunk of land in Tennessee that the government was going to take away from them but there was this very very strong sexual pull between these two people but money was not in any way an overtly sort of capital em masculine man he was far more sort of tender and gentle so that everything that came out of rehearsals everything that that film has in it really came from him as an original way of dealing with this love story it it had a he had a strange kind of magnetism which was different than what one usually sees and we would we would rehearse and he very often just would improvise that the scripted in any case was very very short and most of the work in it was fleshed out with cousins guiding hand behind both of us [Music] he had no confidence in himself at all as an actor as a man as a person with friends although he had many friends who loved him a lot but his lack of self-esteem I thought was very touching very moving very sad and there was an element of sadness in him all the time but whatever was troubling him or or whatever his demons were you just tried to be as supportive as be there when he needed you do whatever you could for him because he didn't outwardly ask for help he didn't didn't he would joke about it even so that it was hard to do anything except be there you know but he was always even in in the first scene in in The Misfits when he's in a telephone booth laughing talking to his mother I guess it's I don't you know how you you can't describe superb acting anymore than you can describe how fresh air I mean I don't know how to say how it is except that that scene was extraordinary whatever his gift was that was almost their money had invited me for dinner with Marilyn Monroe he was out here they were I guess still making the misfits and he'd come from Vegas to Los Angeles was staying at the bel-air hotel and he asked a couple of friends to go to dinner with her when I showed up at the bel-air hotel Monty was in his cups it was he'd been drinking and there was no question he shouldn't have gone out and I said kid the dinners over you know you just can't go out and unfortunately he had a limousine and a driver and he could go out and I left and another good friend of his Jim Bridges left and buddy went on to that dinner it's not Marilyn Monroe's fault but he did go on and it was apparently it's a famous dinner that was the debye call that I'm smiling because I know I had accounted to me and she was apparently very sweet about it the Monty decided to feed her fried shrimp and Rumaki with his feet and in the in the beachcombers it apparently took off his shoes and socks and dipped the hors d'oeuvres in the sauces and and she ate them I believe and was very sweet to him his relationship with Marilyn Monroe was was a very special one in his life he absolutely adored her they were like children together I think they recognized this incredible vulnerability in each other or if you want to say weakness they were insomniacs chronic insomniacs and they were always talking about how do you fall asleep neither them could sleep in fact when The Misfits was being made Maudie had his own bed set out to Reno which is sort of unusual day your bed set out when you're doing a movie but he and Meryl would talk about how they fell asleep mati would Francis call people all over the world on the phone and just talk all night until he fell asleep and malnourished she had a special masseuse who would come in massage her but they still couldn't sleep so of course they took finally took pills once I think Meryl Monroe said Montgomery Clift is the only person I know who's was sicker than I am I was out there in Munich and in Vienna for five months and it was a terribly torturous time actually it was a very very difficult subject of course and Monte I had no previous Monty to compare him to I just knew he was a wonderful actor and I Norma still liked him right away and he was extremely generous and extremely forthcoming but I didn't understand much about drinking drugs I suppose and and I not a lot about mental illness owed as I was very green on the subject this was a film that starred Montgomery Clift it was called Freud and you know you can blame John Huston for having cast him in the film because anyone seeing Monty would think he couldn't make it he just absolutely couldn't make this film he was fine and The Misfits because he had a small fairly small part but to be on camera constantly could this man who who fell into the shakes every afternoon and had the DTS could he have you know done a major film but Huston as he said later on was fooled by Monty's great performance in in The Misfits and his scene energy in the film during the making of of Freud Houston saw that that Monte's energies were waning early and I guess he had such enormous hopes for this one project that he he just he and Monte just could not get along any longer the relationship with John Huston was terrible it was terrible they were just so utterly opposed as people Houston was a great big bear of a man it's a great big sort of corinthian column type person and intolerance and impatient and [Music] hard and [Music] cruel and Monty had a was was just totally other it was just just totally other it was to people who just were not in any way there was no point of meeting any for them Monty I think was an incredibly difficult person a very very difficult neurotic man to deal with he pressured Monty Monty forgot his lines things would go wrong eventually Houston had to put lines on what they call idiot card so Monty to be able to to say them then there was this constant rewriting process it went on for months meanwhile the the company I believe was Universal lost a fortune in Freud and Monty terrible things were happening to him he developed cataracts what had happened was that there's a scene at the very end of the film in which one of the extras had to come up and say dirty Jew and Tippy's hat and he was an extra and he wasn't probably very technically efficient and I think at one point he I believe this is what happened he hit Monty in the eye Mangia always had those amazing eyes I mean you could just really really go into his eyes but the river and they were very very sensitive anyway he was I think he'd had cataract trouble already and this gesture of the extra had aggravated the situation and he'd taken fright and gone straight off to London which angered John Huston very much he came back to work the next day and you know he was very very frightened of getting a cataract I mean he worked all through this film with the fear he had this kind of more fear that he was gonna lose his sight he was he was very ill he had a strange kind of hyper thyroid condition which caused him to age prematurely his hands gnarled at the age of 40 and his hair started falling out and he got cataracts this condition is is the condition of the old and he got it at the age of 40 he was absolutely a loner he was completely an individual very selfish as most artists are but with a enormous regard for truth and for putting the best of himself into what he was doing his work but I should think his I mean at great cost to his personal relationships often particularly not to relationships I mean I did used to sometimes come back feeling once or twice I didn't make a lot of weekends back I usually only got one day anyway but to London but I used to sometimes feel as if I was dried out bleached bones on a plane to be left by Monty but you know I have got huge energy and huge stamina but I guess for people who hadn't and I think people who became [Music] well certainly people who would become involved in a love sexual relationship and it must have been very hard Monty but no doesn't that didn't have to be so I mean his friends inland he used his friends like crazy but then I happen to think that's what friends are for probably what was the major reason that my brother died was that John Huston brought a very unfair law suit against him which Marty eventually won but he couldn't get insurance to do another movie so he went for four years without making a movie and for money not working was terribly depressing that's of course when it had when the terrible years began he was stuck in his house he couldn't even make it make it when to visit his agent you know the the high point in his day might have been a visit to the dentist and it was an evening and I don't really remember the circumstances except that Fred found him he had gone up the fire escape and he was on the roof of his brownstone in his pajamas drunk and on pills of whatever I don't know what was in his system and he was literally walking the the parapet just staggering and Freddie just picked him up and by then money you see this Barbara's body it's incredibly strong physically fit body was just shot there was nothing left and Fred he just picked him up and threw him over his shoulder like a bag of flour brought him down the stairs and put him to bed and I remember I think that was one of several times but it was one last time and it really I think as I remembered it was my goodbyes to him I held him he was not really totally conscious but he couldn't go to sleep he was just I don't know what to say it was like he wasn't able to let go and I held him in my arms as I had done before and I literally rocked him and I smooth his hair and I talked to him and I could feel him alive and I remember he went to sleep in my arms just cradled and I put him in bed and covered him up and I really as I think back I know that I said goodbye anything he had to have the attention round the clock of I don't know what to call him Larry guy named Larry who came in just almost lived with Marty 24 hours a day it was a godsend that we were able to find somebody like Larry to take care of Monte and he seemed so devoted to Marty that Marty had to have someone with him almost all the time the nurse would walk with him on the street and support him as he walked it was just nothing one could do about him he became almost a legend in those days of the fall and movie star and you'd see him on the street and people would say oh there he is you know he's just what's happened to him Oh God we finally just didn't see him anymore it became too painful because there was nothing ready to be done he didn't seem to do anything except he became obsessed with his own deeds and doings his own thoughts he had difficulty finishing a sentence they would always wander it isn't that he would stop but they would you know there were so many byways down which advised would turn that no sentence ever seemed to be finished gradually one after the other just turned their backs on him because of what they felt was behavior that they couldn't put up with and it is true that he used to do some pretty weird things sometimes but he had given them so much friendship for so long and then when it looked like to me because I was around then when he needed them the most they weren't there it was not possible to have any kind of relationship you couldn't be his friend we recognized that we had taken care of him we really we had grown up we knew what we've been doing and we had to look at why and we had to give him up and let him go and there was nothing that anybody could do no one could help them he was way beyond health and I had him come to the studio and I set up the lights and he had very definite ideas of how he wanted to be photographed he wanted to be very brooding he asked me if it would be possible if I could catch him with the tear in his eye and then he asked me if I had any little pin spots little tiny lights that I could put near my camera that would hit him each eye because he felt very strongly that eyes and eye contact with the camera said more than words and if he looked at any of the scripts he had he would have pages of dialogue totally eliminated where he would tell him just come in and take it close-up on my eyes or just come in and take my hands his secret to acting was omission getting rid of extra things that didn't matter that you could do away with he knew cameras he knew that if you came in for a close-up he could give you something with his eyes that two paragraphs of dialogue wouldn't do as well while I was taking the photographs of him I realized that there was no way I was going to be able to give him what he wanted it was just a self-destructive look that he felt he wanted to hurt himself this the idea of see if you can catch a tear in my eye gives you an insight into what he thought of himself at that period in his life [Music] Monti was very upset about the deaths of Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe he talked to a friend of his about it at one point of dinner he said deaths always come in threes he didn't say I'm gonna be next but he was obviously very concerned it's a sort of theatrical kind of prophecy or prediction when three people or two people in a cast die there's always going to be a third actors always believe that anyway Monty did and as it turned out he was the third member of that cast to die at the very end when he was desperate to get back into the movies his old friend Elizabeth Taylor did try to help and she did a wonderful thing she was at that time receiving a million dollars per picture and she was slated to go into a film called reflections in a golden eye and she said I will only appear in this film if my co-star is Montgomery Clift now what Elizabeth asks her Monty and they they the objected they said that Monty was not bankable you know they would lose their shirts she said well I will put up my entire salary which of course was a million dollars to insure Monty and that's when he realized he had to show everyone that he was insurable and he did do this one film the defector do to salk of your town who had seen him and knew that he was in wonderful shape and assured the director Raoul levy that he would be give no problems and he didn't give any problems and it isn't a very good film but it would have been good for him even if it wasn't a good film because it must have shown that he could work well and he went to Germany with his nurse his mail and Mira Rostova his former acting coach and somehow got through the the filming and it was just a guinea for him to get through these these days he would be exhausted halfway through it he would try too hard he was he was his attitude was almost that he was making From Here to Eternity all over again and Mira kept telling him you know just get through it Monte it doesn't matter she just wanted to live and and he did things like in the defector he would jump into the Danube in the freezing water everybody else on the bank was wearing fur coats then the current to swept him away and he had to be picked up by grappling hooks and that hurt his shoulder and his back again after the defector it was like a new life for him it was like a rebirth because he had showed everybody that he could remember his lines contrary to what Houston had said the future was like just beginning it was as if he was about to make his first movie but he had a calcium deficiency and he loved his stakes too much so the cholesterol built up and then he was also in in pain you know four years from his automobile accident so I have to think that maybe his premature death was maybe for the best because it was very painful to live the last day of his life he did spend alone in the house although Larry was there he really wanted to be by himself he didn't want to talk with Larry at all so Larry let him be by himself and had the door of his bedroom was closed and at one point late in the evening Larry realized that The Misfits was going to be on television he thought maybe mati would like to see it and he knocked on his door and he said The Misfits is on do you want to see it and money said no absolutely not and that was the last thing that Larry heard him say he he died that night died of a heart attack the that's what the coroner told me a man whom I know whose name I won't mention he's a man in show business came up to me at a very large party as I walked in and was saying hello to everybody very happily and gregarious about the evening he came up to me and I'll never understand this to this day sort of smiling said to me hey did you hear and I said what and he said Maddy click died well not only was I shocked by what he was saying but the fact of a person who had such a smile on his face I don't think he meant to be cruel but there was such an insensitivity to that and so much the opposite of what Monty was for a person to tell you about another person's death as though it was a piece of hot news that you would just go oh well no wow I didn't hear that I would never forget that I think it's it's one of the strangest moments in my life it's funny at the funeral people tend to tended not to know they were all sitting in isolated parts of the the church they just sat there not talking and it said so much about his his particular his life and his relationships with people that he could not really organize his entire life and make it one he couldn't introduce friends to one another he had so many different problems introducing some trashy friend to some movie star friend you know that kind of thing one of the most perceptive eulogies after his death came from the Vatican's Observatory Romano which said in an editorial that there was in his solitary life an example to remember the example of his integrity as an artist of his contempt for success without problems or for wealth without scruples hmm was as though there were two sides of money there was this lovely beautiful incredible human being and there was another darker side to him and his whole life was a battle was his fight his inner fight and that side killed him that side one of the self-destructive money destroyed the other person and it was a tremendous tragedy but I look back on all of it and I can only say that I feel blessed that I knew him I feel that it was a gift I have you know this recurring dream that my brother is alive and we we meet in a bookstore and we sit at a counter and we talk and he asks me how I feel about his resurrection and I answer I well I guess you never died and I think that's really true I don't think he ever will thank you [Music] you [Music]

Channel: lachambreverte

Views: 104,023

Rating: 4.7565923 out of 5

Keywords: Montgomery Clift, Monty Clift

Id: yr0p-J4FC5g

Length: 86min 39sec (5199 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 12 2017