(gentle music)
- This isn't really a story about man.
It's about what his life was allowed to mean.
Remember that.
♪ I took each word he said as gospel truth ♪
♪ The way a silly little child would ♪
- I'm Montgomery Clift's youngest nephew.
If you're like half the people who learn this about me,
that statement doesn't mean anything to you.
So let's get caught up before we go any further.
- I must say it's a pleasure to be here.
- For audiences of classic Hollywood,
Monty was one of the most famous,
most beautiful faces of a new style of acting.
He was nominated for four Academy Awards
and starred opposite actors like Elizabeth Taylor
and Marilyn Monroe.
He's frequently lumped in with Marlon Brando and James Dean
for portraying a type of masculinity Hollywood
had never before put on the screen.
Vulnerable, sensitive, emotional men.
But for all that,
Monty's not really remembered for his acting.
His name became synonymous with gay tragedy.
The slowest suicide in show business.
A man who had everything and lost it,
because he was so tormented by his attraction to men,
that he destroyed himself.
A beautiful loser.
Those two words have always struck me
as an unfair summary to a life.
I saw where it came from.
I read and watched the same books and TV about Monty
as anybody else.
But I also grew up with little anecdotes
that suggested there was something more to his story.
What that was?
It's complicated.
♪ Can't we be ♪
♪ Friends ♪
(projector whirring)
- I never actually met Monty.
He died in 1966
and I was born in 1974.
My father Brooks was his older brother.
He died in 1986.
It's always a little awkward talking about Monty
with my family, and my father has a lot to do with it.
- Back in the studio here with Montgomery Clift's brother,
Brooks Clift.
Brooks, you've got a couple of artifacts I'm dying
to ask about and I didn't get to it, but I want to now.
What have you got there?
- Well, this is my brother's flask.
- Oh my gosh.
- E-M-C.
And here is a very marvelous
memorabilia which is the barrack's bag
which Robert E. Lee Prewitt carried
in From Here to Eternity.
- Oh, no.
- My father kept everything.
My family thought he was too focused on Monty
and I can see why.
There's the normal stuff.
Clippings.
Scrapbooks.
Home movies.
But then there's also these audio reels
where he recorded conversations with my grandmother Sunny.
- Hello?
- Hi, dear.
- Hello, dear.
- And Monty's most prominent biographer.
- Hello?
- Is Patti Bosworth there?
- Yes, hi!
How are you?
- Monty himself.
- Hello, Boofy.
- Hello.
- And Lorenzo James.
- Hello, Larry.
- Hello, this is the first chance I've had to get back.
- Well that's all right.
- Lorenzo is basically my uncle through Monty.
He's really my only living relative who knew him well,
but it's hard for him to talk about Monty
and he didn't want to appear on camera.
- I won't do it.
I just cannot do it.
- So he pointed me to somebody whose role in Monty's life
hadn't really been acknowledged in the past.
Jack Larson.
Jack played Jimmy Olsen on the original Superman TV series.
- Who'd want to bother me?
- He met Monty on the Warner Brothers lot
when Monty was filming Hitchcock's I Confess.
- Merv Griffin took me and introduced me to Monty.
His next film was gonna be From Here to Eternity
and he was looking for a mouthpiece
for a trumpet.
(upbeat trumpet music)
It was important to him to have what James Jones described
as a quartz mouthpiece
on the trumpet.
He said, would you go with me one Saturday
and we will look around for these
and see these old music stores.
So I said of course
and Merv heard this and imposed himself,
said well I will drive you both. (laughing)
So anyway, we didn't find the quartz mouthpiece,
but Monty had a suite at the Hollywood Roosevelt.
So we were there back after this jaunt
when Merv had to go to the bathroom
and Monty came over and just grabbed me
by the back of my head
and gave me this extraordinary kiss. (laughing)
I mean, just grabbed me and he-- (laughing)
It was like something from A Place in the Sun.
I was astonished.
I didn't--I was just astonished.
- Right, right.
- And it never occurred to me that he liked guys.
And then he said, can I see you later?
Like, when you get rid of him! (laughing)
The thing about Monty was,
is that he wasn't anything like people think he was.
He loved to have fun.
He was very
a clown himself.
He had a great sense of humor.
As a person he was nearer to Jerry Lewis on-screen
than he was to Montgomery Clift on-screen. (laughing)
- I don't know what I was expecting to hear from Jack,
but it wasn't that.
The idea that Monty could have been funny
felt downright radical compared to the Monty
of public memory.
- His extraordinary talent earned him the respect
of movie-goers and critics alike,
and his exceptional good looks captured the hearts
of millions of women.
I mean, even Elizabeth Taylor was in love with him.
The guy had everything to live for,
so why did Monty Clift end up an emotionally tormented,
drug-addicted alcoholic living in self-imposed hell?
Because Monty Clift had a secret he couldn't live with.
A secret that haunted him until his dying day.
- When you put it that way,
there's not much room for a sense of humor.
And that's just one of many biographies detailing Monty's
downward spiral of closeted self-loathing.
(upbeat music)
- Fame brought him every script in Hollywood,
but he couldn't control his personal demons.
- It all went to hell.
- This guy was very self-destructive.
- Friends had urged Clift to go into psychoanalysis,
to confront his inner demons.
- The drinking was fairly well known,
and I think the origin of it was the conflict
over his sexual identity.
- This narrative comes mainly from two major biographies
from the 1970s.
The first was Robert LaGuardia's Monty,
then came Patricia Bosworth's Montgomery Clift, a Biography.
(beeping)
LaGuardia framed Monty's life through a distinctly
pop-Freudian lens, starting in childhood.
You see, Monty, my father, and my aunt
had an unconventional upbringing.
They spent a good deal of time in Europe traveling
with their mother and being privately educated by tutors.
For LaGuardia, Monty was too close to his mother
for his own psychological good.
- There was nothing obvious about his life
except for the very obvious Oedipal Complex
that I believe he had.
It can be sort of traced back to his early years
and his close relationship with his mother.
He didn't really have a strong ego foundation.
And when he tried to finally become a person on his own
he wasn't really a person.
- Basically, LaGuardia argued that Sunny made Monty
a gay, non-person.
But just Monty.
Not my father or my aunt.
LaGuardia thought Sunny pushed Monty
toward a painful future.
- That might have driven him to this kind of breakdown,
almost, this functional breakdown.
It was always a part of him that I think he wanted to kill.
That's why someone, Bobby Lewis,
called him the slowest suicide in show business,
because half of him wanted to live
and half of him was so perfect,
and the other half of him really wanted to die.
♪ Baby your mother like she you babied you ♪
♪ Back in your baby days ♪
♪ Maybe your mother is lonesome and blue ♪
- As you might expect,
my grandmother wasn't happy with this book.
- You have read this book haven't you?
- Well I haven't read it, you know,
- Well you read the
second chapter. - Completely, thoroughly
or anything. - Well you've read it.
I wanted to know what your reaction was.
- Well, I don't think it's as bad as it,
as I thought it would be.
- Oh, well, I think it's worse than anybody thought.
I want to know, have you any inclination to write
a contradiction of it?
Your writing is superior to anything else.
Because it is so full of untruths.
There are accusations in there, Brooks
that are so absolutely flagrantly lies.
If I hadn't gone to the extreme in doing things for Monty
I probably wouldn't feel it quite so hard.
It's tough.
- (Brooks sighs)
- I gave everything I had.
- I know you did.
- You see, Monty was a homosexual very early.
Oh, I think he was about 12 or 13.
- He wasn't homosexual. He was
bisexual. - I mean a homosexual.
- You mean a homosexual?
- Exactly!
- Well he wasn't homosexual,
because he also had women so those
are not called homosexual. - Well whatever he was.
- Bisexual is what we call it.
- (sighs) Anyway, his book crucifies me all right.
But
maybe sometime you'll
write something which'll
cancel it out.
- If you
want to counteract
this book,
I would do it in a letter to Patti Bosworth,
because her book is going to be
a fabulous book of the month club thing.
This is your last chance,
if you really want to do anything effective.
- My father didn't trust LaGuardia from the beginning.
And the reviews of the book bore out his suspicions.
It was considered to be largely salacious gossip.
Patricia Bosworth, on the other hand,
made a much better impression on my father
and he urged family and friends to talk to her for her book.
- I think he wanted somebody to write a biography
which treated Montgomery Clift seriously as an artist,
and tried to place him in the pantheon
along with Brando and Dean,
who were already more famous in a way,
you know, more legendary.
And he knew that he could do that.
- Did you get, dear,
a copy from Clareman of Larry James'
letter to LaGuardia?
- Yes.
- You did. - Did you get it?
- Yes. - Yes.
I think-- - I thought it was very good.
- I think it is very good.
I think it is the best review of LaGuardia's book. (laughs)
I mean in a nutshell, that is a review of the book.
(typewriter keys clicking)
I think it's a very eloquent
statement. - And he read it to me
over the phone before he sent it.
And I said, Larry, nobody could have said it any better.
I think you really are--
it's a wonderful letter.
By the way there is tremendous excitement about the book,
my book, as opposed to the other one, Brooks.
It's a very funny thing.
There's been a kind of,
it's generated an enormous amount of interest in Monty,
of course, the other one.
- Yes, right.
- But interest for my book, because still in all,
with all the publicity about the other book, Brooks,
he doesn't answer any questions.
He doesn't solve the mystery of Monty.
You know what I'm saying?
- Yes.
- For my father, the answers were in Monty's work.
His approach to acting and his choices were what mattered.
(projector whirring)
- I find that it would be very difficult for me to
separate, you know,
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.
- Monty made his professional theatrical debut in 1935
at the age of 14.
He didn't start making films until he was 28.
He was in touring companies and on Broadway.
During rehearsals Monty clicked away.
(camera clicking)
He photographed co-stars in their dressing rooms,
and action on stage.
(camera clicking)
They went on tours of surrounding areas in their off time.
My favorite photos are the ones he took of himself.
A series of self-portraits from long before his face became
a bankable property.
One of the film canisters has $300 stuffed in it.
I imagine a young Monty hiding his early earnings
from Sunny. Or maybe more likely, my father.
Monty's photos also speak to his training as an actor.
He learned from some of the biggest names
in the history of American theatre.
Tallulah Bankhead,
Fredric March,
Thornton Wilder,
Lynn Fontanne,
and Alfred Lunt.
- Well Monty and other people,
they're lumped into this publicity thing
of the Actors Studio and Strasberg,
which is bull.
He had quite a bit of contempt for the Actors Studio
and Strasberg and what they were doing.
- The method, as such,
I must say I'm baffled myself.
I don't know what it means
because any good actor uses the principles of Stanislavski.
No matter what they do.
They do it unwittingly, but they do it.
I'll never forget a long while ago,
I was playing with Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne
in There Shall Be No Night,
and someone else had a speech about so long,
and she said to me,
while this person is talking you might answer any point.
Well, you could call that method.
I don't care what you call it but it's absolutely truthful
and every time you find a truthful actor,
you find someone who bears out all the,
not theories, but some of the realism
that Stanislavski bothered to put on paper.
- But yours is really an instinctive, a natural--
- You mean a naturally great talent?
- Yeah. - Oh, thank you.
- Remember you said that.
- I did not say that.
- Well, what I meant, Mr. Clift.
- Don't call me Mr. Clift. - And don't leave. (laughs)
- I'm just gonna go, how did you know? (laughs)
- Hey, that's what I meant.
That's the instinct.
No, but...
- Monty's talent as an actor became widely recognized,
and Hollywood took note.
As early as 1938,
the studios saw him as a potential child star.
He was offered the lead role
in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
He turned it down.
- Well, each time I was offered a role,
I'd be offered a better contract.
I felt, I was so young in those days,
I don't know, let's say they started when I was 16.
Then another offer, a better one at 17.
Another offer, better one, when I was 18.
Another offer when I was 19.
And all of the offers,
although the money was better each time I was in a play,
but, at that age I would have had to sign a contract
where they would tell me what I was going to play
and I figured my career would be over.
We wouldn't be sitting here today.
My family was saying, you know you can make money
and salt it away.
But you can't salt it away
if you cut off your potential of income.
Can you?
And I've always trusted myself enough.
I must say, I'm willing to gamble on my own tastes
in selecting a role.
It's one thing to get a good contract,
it's another thing to do a good picture.
(clicking)
- Monty refused the standard seven year contract,
which would have put him at just one studio
playing the roles assigned to him.
Saying no just wasn't done.
The late Robert Osborne put that decision in context for me.
- At an era when everybody was under contract to a studio
he didn't go under contract to a studio.
He remained a freelancer,
and the studio system kind of hated him for that.
And other actors, I think, were thinking,
my God, how can he get away with this?
But he could, because he was that talented.
And people wanted him.
Montgomery Clift had been offered the role
of Greer Garson's son in Mrs. Miniver by William Wyler,
but he turned it down.
He wanted a better part for his first part in films.
He so stood out from the crowd
that I think everybody knew
that he was gonna be important in films.
Either he already knew it or somebody gave him advice
that you know, you hold out for the very best.
You have enough talent to get the very best.
(clicking)
- Monty turned down roles in films
like The Bridge on the River Kwai,
East of Eden, On the Waterfront.
Big roles.
Oscar-nominated roles for some of the people who ended up
taking his place.
Did he ever express regret in some of the parts
that he turned down?
- No.
He expressed satisfaction in (laughs)
that he had turned them down.
See, he'd done these two great successes at Paramount
and they developed Sunset Boulevard for Monty.
The story was that Monty turned it down
because of Libby Holman.
She was something else.
She'd been the greatest star possible on Broadway.
Torch singer.
♪ Poor little sweet man ♪
♪ With all his faults ♪
♪ He's a good man to have around ♪
- They were having definitely a relationship.
I'm talking about a sexual relationship.
Under the sheets. (laughs)
And Billy Wilder thought this affair with Libby Holman
it wouldn't look good for Libby,
an old star.
That wasn't the case.
Monty didn't think he'd be good in the part.
He said, and William Holden was much better in the part
than he would have been,
than Monty would have been.
- Monty's choosiness frustrated his agents.
Like when he turned down 14 films in one year.
But for every Cal Trask,
every Terry Malloy,
there were probably 20 roles
that could have sunken Monty into obscurity.
Monty waited 10 years to transition into film from theater.
His first contract was a single-picture deal.
Starring opposite John Wayne in Red River.
- Tired men don't run away.
- You can't keep 'em this wore out all the rest
of the drive.
- I can't stand John Wayne.
He described my uncle as an arrogant little bastard.
- Won't anything make a man out of you?
- But I'm with Monty.
John Wayne's masculine posturing was so forced.
- Well they whip kids to teach 'em better.
- And so unnecessary.
- ...sad, you can join your friends here.
All I want is...
Where are you going?
- I'm gonna sit down.
- When I watch Monty's movies,
I take sides.
Audiences did too.
People were ready for an alternative
to the typical male lead,
brutish and out of touch with his emotions.
- I am a perfectly normal man
with perfectly normal instinct.
- In Monty's performances,
there was something more to being a man.
(child crying)
- Hey, hey, hey, hey.
Come on.
Don't cry.
It's all right, lad.
(child crying)
All right, cry.
- I want--
- No, don't say anything.
I know.
- Monty's arrival on-screen marked a shift in movie-acting.
He created characters that moved and mumbled
like real people.
They were willing to be tender.
- The second happiest
- And his characters were comfortable with their beauty,
with being looked at.
Soft-focus shots like this were typically reserved only
for the women of Classic Hollywood.
And then there was this scene,
which is about as Brokeback Mountain
as it was going to get in 1947.
- That's a good-looking gun you were about
to use back there.
Can I see it?
Maybe you'd like to see mine.
- Off-screen, Monty was also expanding ideas
about what an actor could be.
He leveraged his popularity to require script
and director approval in his contracts,
as well as the ability to work at rival studios.
He fought resistant writers and producers
to become a creative collaborator,
like on his second film, The Search.
- Monty rewrote half that script.
The picture did not get finished in the time allotted to it.
- Contract ran out, didn't it?
- The contract ran out so Monty was able to blackmail them,
in effect, into-- he said,
"Oh, I'm going home, my contract's finished."
Then they had to agree to change it so that it was
the lines were communication instead of,
kind of, moralistic.
- What good is a number to a tracing bureau?
(paper rustling)
Can't you say anything except, I don't know?
Ich weiss nicht.
Can't you say, yes?
No?
Anything?
They must have taught you yes or no in some language.
Parlez-vous francais? Non, il parle pas francais.
Italian! Italiano, huh?
You wouldn't be holding out on me, would you?
- Monty fortunately had a clause in his contract
in which he had the permission to change dialogue,
which he did.
And Monty did rewrite his own lines
and to some extent some of the boy's lines.
Otherwise it would have been total disaster.
- The film ended up being nominated for two Academy Awards
for writing, and one won.
- Richard Schweizer and David Wechsler for The Search.
(audience clapping)
- Monty was not credited as a writer,
but he did receive his first of four Oscar nominations.
- Montgomery Clift in The Search.
- Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun, Paramount.
- Montgomery Clift in From Here to Eternity.
- Montgomery Clift in Judgment at Nuremberg.
- Monty was, by all accounts, a movie star,
but he wasn't in films for the stardom or the fame.
Over and over when fan magazines asked
why he as so elusive,
why his clothes weren't nicer,
why his apartment in New York was so small,
why he wasn't dating,
he was remarkably consistent.
He cared about his work.
And I think part of what made his acting so interesting
and new is that he approached it kind of like a director.
- Somehow in working, I see the scene as a whole.
I'll fight harder to have a line eliminated
for somebody who's playing with me, for their sake,
or to have it added to or changed,
than I can fight for myself.
That's what I think my...
as one gets into one's later years
- That's pretty close, though, to what you are doing.
I mean, direction is,
- Yeah, one does direct oneself, let's face it,
under certain circumstances.
- So, we know where we stand, don't we kid?
- I know where I stand.
A man don't go his own way he's nothing.
- Monty's commitment to craft was what my father
wanted people to remember.
His brother was independent
and took stands to do the work he believed in.
When it was time to memorialize Monty,
my father chose to work with Patricia Bosworth
because he believed they were on the same page
about what was important to Monty's story.
(typewriter clicking)
And his independence did make it in there.
It just didn't end up being her main focus.
- I mean, this was a new kind of hero in the movies.
The alienated guys, the rebels,
the idealists who went their own way,
and this is what he exemplified.
That's one of the things that I wanted to write about,
but of course I wanted to write a picture of him,
yes, somebody who had to lead a double life,
because he was gay.
So all these things I wanted to get into the book.
I was really in love with this guy.
That's why, one of the reasons I did the book.
- Tell me about that.
So at fifteen-- - Well I met him
when I was 15 years old.
He was in our house.
My father was his lawyer briefly,
and he came to the house and I came home from school one day
and there was Montgomery Clift lying on the floor
of the living room talking to my father.
And this was at the time of The Search, Red River,
he was just about to make A Place in the Sun.
He'd been on the cover of Life Magazine.
He was very famous and he was so gorgeous.
I practically fainted.
I went in and managed to control myself and shook his hand.
Actually I curtsied to him and he curtsied back.
- That's great.
- Which is of course typical of what he used to do.
He was funny and full of life,
and as I say absolutely beautiful, so drop-dead gorgeous.
I was just, as I say, I fell madly in love with him.
I even saved his cigarette butt.
And I also decided that I would take him to a school dance.
Have I told you this story?
My fellow students at school did not believe
that I knew Montgomery Clift.
I said well I'm gonna prove it to you because I am gonna
bring him to the school dance.
They said, oh yeah, sure.
So I decided that I would convince Monty
to take me to this dance by doing the following.
I put huge falsies on and I made,
I put a lot of makeup on, I was like 15 or 14.
I came down and I said Monty I want to ask you something.
He said, what are you wearing?
Why are you wearing those falsies?
I said, well, I just am, (laughing) or something.
He said, what do you want to ask me?
I said I want you to take me to the school dance.
And he said, take off those falsies, take off that makeup,
then come back down and ask me again.
So I rushed upstairs, I took off the makeup,
took off my falsies, ran down the stairs again.
I said, now will you take me to the school dance?
And he said no.
I said why not?
He said I am too old for you.
I'm 28-years-old.
I said please take me to the school dance.
He said I'm gonna tell you something.
Don't wear falsies anymore.
Just be yourself.
You look terrible in falsies.
So I never wore falsies again.
But he didn't take me to the school dance. (laughing)
- (laughing) He didn't?
- No!
♪ In spite of my tears ♪
- Meeting Patti was complicated.
I liked her.
She's been our de facto family historian,
and she's had a tangential spot in all of our lives
since she turned her love for Monty into a best-seller.
Her book is on the shelf of every one of my family members.
But I've always been warned that her book is reliable
only up to a certain point.
I've looked to her book for names, dates, anecdotes,
but the details give me pause.
Take Judy Balaban for instance.
She dated Monty for a time and we interviewed her.
The story she told us about meeting Monty,
and the story in the biography matched for the most part,
but then took a turn.
- Monty went to Nassau and joined Barney Balaban
and his family at their hotel.
Monty revered Balaban,
the tough-talking, energetic 65-year-old president
of Paramount Pictures.
- My dad met Monty and he was very, very taken with him.
And it was unusual, because though my dad was president
of a large movie company for almost 30 years,
he really didn't have any friends who were actors.
And then, because he liked Monty so much
and never liked anybody I was going out with
in my teenage years,
would always say, well why can't he be like Monty?
I didn't know what he supposed to be.
He didn't want to be an actor.
I didn't know what he wanted "like Monty" meant.
But it was very annoying to me.
I was going out with somebody who was going to Nassau
with two of his best friends,
and I thought, oh, well if I could go at the same time
this would be just great.
So my parents said they wouldn't let me go alone at 18,
so they would instead go to Nassau with me for a week.
The day before we were to leave for Nassau,
my father came home from the office
and he said Monty Clift came to the office today
and I invited him to go to Nassau with us tomorrow.
- She and Monty met in the hotel bar
around 3:00 in the afternoon.
- It was just an automatic, immediate connection.
- After that evening,
Judy and Monty spent most of their time together swimming
and playing tennis and walking on the beach,
while Judy's boyfriend sulked.
- Jack Adler and his two friends were on the terrace.
Monty and I were on a terrace,
some other people were on the terrace
and I went off to the powder room.
And I came back, and Monty and Jack Adler
were having a fist fight.
(men scuffling)
I have no idea to this day,
neither one of them would ever tell me,
who said what or how it, I don't know.
All I know is I didn't see much of Jack Adler after that.
(laughing) And Monty and I were sort of joined at the hip
from then on for,
maybe January and until probably the next autumn.
- Judy Balaban was then 16.
A beautiful, wise-cracking redhead.
- I should note here that Judy was 18, not 16,
when she met Monty.
A small detail, but an important one.
- I was already so much younger than he was
when we were going together that if I'm 16,
I sort of sound like jail-bait.
16 would not sound good.
- When I first read that,
it did not sound good.
And it was all the more significant
because it was not an isolated creepy detail.
- Herman Citron recalls Hedda Hopper phoning MCA,
shortly after Monty had been nominated for the Academy Award
for The Search.
- Hedda Hopper speaking.
- Is it true Montgomery Clift has been arrested
for pederasty in New Orleans, she demanded.
- Citron told the gossip columnist, no.
That is preposterous.
As soon as he hung up the phone,
Citron phoned the police in New Orleans
and discovered Monty had been detained briefly in jail
for drunkenness and then released.
However, not long after that,
he was arrested on 42nd Street
for trying to pick up a young boy.
- When I read that as a young boy myself,
it felt wrong.
I couldn't put my finger on it yet,
but that feeling was reignited when I heard Patti describe
that same incident differently in a later interview.
- At one point I think he was arrested for cruising,
or arrested for picking up a man.
This was all hidden and kept from the press.
- A man versus a boy is a pretty important distinction.
I can't help but think of the once wide-spread panic
that gay men were preying on the nation's children.
- What Jimmy didn't know was that Ralph was sick.
A sickness that was not visible like small pox,
but no less dangerous and contagious.
A sickness of the mind.
You see, Ralph was a homosexual.
A person who demands an intimate relationship
with members of their own sex.
- So were we talking about pederasty or homophobia?
I went back to Patti's research notes
at the New York Public Library to figure it out.
Her notes from interviewing Monty's agent
include gossip Hedda Hopper heard
about Monty "molesting boys."
Citron took that crude rumor as it was meant.
As a question about Monty's sexuality,
but Hedda Hopper said boys, right?
Sure, so did Monty's other biographer, Robert LaGuardia.
But he was careful to explain himself
to an unfamiliar audience.
- Monty would go just so far in the relationship,
and then
he would bring a boy onto the set.
When I say boy I mean he would bring a young man
onto the set.
- That clarification didn't happen in Patti's book.
In draft form, she took the mention of boys
on its literal face in introducing pederasty.
And then by the time it went to print,
the word became part of a direct quote attributed
to Hedda Hopper.
So when in the same paragraph Patti says,
- Not long after that he was arrested on 42nd Street
for trying to pick up a young boy.
- "Young boy" can only be read in one misleading way.
Now that's not to say Monty couldn't have been arrested
for picking up a man.
He could have been.
- At that time it was a criminal offense
and you could be sent to prison.
And a lot of people's lives were ruined.
I had a cousin who was on the vice squad,
three generations of LA cops in my family
and I know what the police's attitude
towards homosexual acts.
But big movie stars who ran afoul
of the Los Angeles Vice Squad,
but Monty was not like homophobic or worried
that anybody would think--
He was very private but I was very surprised by him.
He was one of the most affectionate people I've ever known,
and he was affectionate in public.
I was certainly more inhibited than he was.
- Lorenzo told me something similar.
- Monty's personal life didn't bother him
as much as people thought it did.
See people felt that,
because of his moods and things like that,
that he couldn't take the fact.
But that's not true.
That I really want the people to know.
And he was really not that closeted.
You know, with contracts, like a Brando or like a--
you know, you get married.
Even Rock Hudson.
You get married.
Even though the marriage doesn't work out.
But he said I refuse to sign a contract
that would put me under contract
because it wouldn't work.
He knew this, Monty knew that.
It was his own independence.
It's very important that Monty be independent.
- Monty was able to maintain his artistic
and sexual freedom by navigating the studio system
the way that he did.
Insisting on his privacy in public meant that he could live
out of the closet.
- He was much more assured
about his homosexuality.
Today it would be his gayness. (laughing)
And yet, Monty had affairs with ladies.
He did have affairs with ladies.
- I remember Lorenzo mentioning some of those affairs
when my brothers and I were younger.
That question of who Monty might have slept with
was a point of adolescent fascination.
Did you ever ask Lorenzo if--
- I just asked him one thing.
I said, did Monty ever sleep with (laughing)
I think I, Marilyn Monroe.
- And Elizabeth Taylor.
- Or Elizabeth Taylor.
I can't remember which one I cared about the most.
But I said did he ever sleep with (laughing).
It's like, yeah. (laughing)
And he said yes.
So I think it was Elizabeth Taylor I must have asked about.
- Why was that the big question?
- Just because I think she's hot, I don't know.
I don't know, I just wanted to know.
Because there's the rumors that she was in love with him
but he wasn't ready to settle down.
But was it Marilyn Monroe or was it Elizabeth
that I cared about?
- I have to tell you I thought it was both.
You told me the next day,
told me the next day and it meant a lot to me
because I had just read a story in the New York Post,
the guy who did the autopsy on Monty,
told the New York Post about the autopsy
and his penis and he wasn't circumcised
and he had a small penis.
Right, I was just coming into my,
I was just going into puberty. - Yeah, exactly, yeah.
- And I was in a school where everybody was circumcised.
- Yeah. - Right?
And I was worried about my penis size.
You know and so I'm like oh my god!
This runs in the family.
(Eddie laughing)
So when I heard that he slept with not just Elizabeth Taylor
but Marilyn Monroe, - and Marilyn Monroe.
Yeah, that's pretty darn good.
Exactly. (laughing)
Exactly, that's kind of what I wanted to know, too.
(laughing) Now I can be a real man.
(projector whirring)
- It's a little embarrassing to think
about how my young sense of masculinity got tied up
with who Monty slept with.
And anyway, Lorenzo might have been telling us these stories
just to make us feel more confident.
Or maybe he worried what we might think
about Monty without them.
My father talked about Monty's relationships with women too.
I used to fear it was because he
hadn't fully accepted his brother
but in hindsight I think he was rejecting
the way that Monty's sexuality had been turned
into some type of tragedy.
- As I understand it he was bisexual.
And I'm wondering,
Bosworth mentions that he was extremely tortured
because of these two identities they gave him,
when he was always
attracted to-- - Well
I think that's a marvelous thing to say in a book
to try to sell the book.
- Yeah.
- I never found that to be true.
- I see.
- It never seemed to bother him at all.
- So much of the mythology around Monty is built
on that conflict over his sexuality.
He was confused, a friend recalls.
He was tormented,
says a co-star he never shared a scene with.
He loves women, he has sex with men.
The Monty of Bosworth's writing never gets
to have a fulfilling relationship
because there's always something missing.
Why all this dismantling of his meaningful relationships
with men and women?
Sells books.
- Sells books.
- But, (laughing) even with you
I can see you're digging in for something
that you don't have to dig for.
- What do you think I'm digging for?
- It's mostly about him
sexually.
You're digging.
It's still digging.
Like there is something that's hidden in this,
his approach to sexuality and everything,
that you feel you're not getting, but ("no" sound)
- And that's the thing.
It's important to talk about his acting,
but his image is so tied to this self-hating,
repressed homosexual idea. (Lorenzo scoffs)
- The self-hating,
he didn't hate himself!
It's amazing the words that we grab in order
to describe an individual.
- And all of that over everything else he did.
So the only way to re-remember him
is to throw that shit out the window.
Like it has to be
deconstructed. - Well throw it out.
Clear it up.
I see your point, I do.
Believe me.
And I'm sympathetic and empathetic about it.
But, (laughing) no.
Just leave it.
- That's been my family's attitude for a generation.
Monty's sexuality got framed as a destructive force
in his life instead of a mere fact of it.
And as far as anybody could tell,
that happened on my father's watch.
He had worked with Patti Bosworth and urged everyone else
to do the same.
- You know he was very much a part of the book, as you know.
Brooks Clift really helped me more than anybody.
He was there all the time for me.
We talked constantly.
I mean, I really couldn't have done it without him.
- But all through his notes on the book are disagreements
that my family didn't see.
I think my father saw bias
in this book he'd given so much time to.
In his taped calls with Patti,
I hear him struggle to explain that this Monty
wasn't the man he knew.
There are hours of him going over galley proofs with her,
line by line making corrections and questioning conclusions,
like when Sunny is once again cast as too close
for Monty's proper development.
- To page 56, "Brooks suspected Monty probably discussed
the whole business alone with his mother.
He and Sunny had a secretive relationship
which Ethel and I never intruded upon."
I don't understand that sentence.
- You don't believe that he had sort of
a private relationship with his mother?
Or a secret relationship?
- No, I don't.
- No?
- My father also chafes at the idea
that Monty's relationship with their mother
is somehow interfering
with his ability to connect with others.
- On 106, you say "whenever Monty was home visiting,
Mira would phone breaking into their dinners"
and in the same paragraph you say,
this is just semantics with you,
Monty says "oh, Ma, when I'm with Mira I have
to make Mira feel important."
Then your next sentence is,
"Already Monty was more loved than loving."
I think if he's trying to make,
if he has the sensitivity to make Mira feel important,
it is a loving thing.
- (sighing) Okay. - I'm being very,
I mean this is just semantics, darling,
to you.
I just feel it, when he is that considerate,
when somebody is that considerate of someone,
they know their mother can take it
because she's not gonna get offended,
but shy little sweet Mira,
it is a very loving thing to me.
- After we learned that Monty was more loved than loving,
Bosworth continues that Monty felt guilty
about his extravagant charm and beauty,
and his inability to fulfill
both the men and women who loved him.
To give back some of what he was taking,
he could not accept their love without paying a price.
Monty was so used to being alternately loved and punished
by his mother that he felt uncontrollable urges
to be very, very good or very, very horrible.
In the span of two pages,
the stage is set for Monty to have a lifetime
of conflict rooted in his sexuality
and it all comes from taking a phone call at dinner.
- Are you making notes?
- My father had a set of typed notes tucked into one copy
of the book which he summed up in two lines.
Need to consider the man as the devoted artist he was,
rather than as such a psychological mess.
Need more of his philosophy of growth, limits,
and the devotion to the creation of art.
He wanted changes.
But it was too late for the first printing.
- Have you got, on the second printing,
have you made the corrections that we talked about?
- I've made as many as were able to be made.
- Have you seen the second printing?
- No, I have not.
- I mean, they've got to change some things.
You promised me that the second printing would
have the corrections
that we went over-- - Brooks, I know.
I did promise you and I meant it.
- And I also, you promised me credits on the pictures.
- (groaning) Shit, Brooks.
- There are no credits. - All I can say is,
it was done, I don't understand this.
I would like you to talk to my editor,
because I feel that it's his final responsibility,
in that I tell him the corrections,
I show him where they should go, right?
Then he works in the copy.
- I mean that's passing the buck to me
to talk to your editor. - I'm not telling you.
I'm telling you what I would do.
- Yeah I know, I know. It's just impossible for me.
How can I talk to your editor and get anything done?
I get a lawyer to talk to him?
What the hell am I supposed to do?
If you promised me something I rely on you.
- I know you rely on me and I--
- And I've always relied on you.
- And I rely on him to put it through.
- Well that's the end of that.
(typewriter clicking)
- I'm not sure if anybody in my family really understood
what my father was going through.
The book was moving forward in a way
that he hadn't imagined.
His implicit stamp of approval was going to be all over it.
This was going to be the story that the family approved.
In a rare aside in his tapes,
I could hear his disappointment.
- The net result of all that was that nothing was changed
in the second printing, and
if anything very little in the third.
So, by then I realized I'd just been had, basically.
Nothing I could do.
And then she's always saying,
that was just another one of my continuous fights
with my editors. - With my editors.
- Not terribly honest.
My comments to her, I realized that a great deal
of what I said was just futile and
I had a tough job containing my
frustrations and
anger but I think I did pretty well.
I kind of tempered my profanity
by saying dear and darling
instead of what I really would like to have said.
- Ultimately, Bosworth's book went into a number
of printings and never incorporated much
of my father's feedback.
My father found himself in the position of family pariah.
- You have absolutely, for your own gain,
benefited yourself at the expense of everybody,
collateral, direct, and otherwise, in your whole family.
- Well read the first page in her book
and she says, oh so much etc., I got from Brooks Clift.
- Well that's just like LaGuardia acknowledging
he got all this invaluable help from you.
- From me?!
- He says that on the first page of his book.
- From me?
I never told him anything.
- Alright, so that's how much that means
if you never told him anything.
I mean, you just have to realize what I said
is not what is in that book.
You don't know what wasn't in the book also.
You don't know what Harcourt Brace Jovanovich editor's
exorcized, and you don't know all the corrections
that I made, that I tried to put in.
I went to New York two times
to have corrections made.
- Well I hope you see what she is by now, dear,
so you don't make any more mistakes with her.
- Okay, no I'm not going to, dear.
- But my father wasn't ready to leave it.
He spent time in his office on the third floor of our house
continuing to field requests from writers
and documentary filmmakers.
♪ (Singing in French) ♪
- Those are some of my earliest memories of him.
Up there listening to Edith Piaf.
- When I was five, a Washington Post reporter
came to the house to write a profile on him,
and what she ended up calling his shrine to Monty.
- She interviewed Brooks
and wrote a major Style section piece
on the "shrine" on the third floor.
And I came to work at Newsweek
and my bureau chief, Mel Elfin,
asked if I wanted to take the day off.
He saw that as something that would be,
I don't know, of major concern to me.
- Was it?
- Well, I found it a little embarrassing.
She portrayed Brooks as sort of living in
Monty's shadow
and it was not a flattering portrait of Brooks.
- I think my father was a little bit caught up
trying to define the image when the popular reading
of Montgomery Clift had its own momentum.
You know, you're one person against the whole media machine.
There's only so much you can do.
I guess I always felt he was a little bit like Sisyphus,
battling the myth-making apparatus.
- Still, my father persisted.
After my parents divorced, he moved out to California,
research in tow.
There he met writer Mollie Gregory
and told her about a new project he wanted to work on.
- I met Brooks when a friend of mine called me
and asked me if I would meet for lunch
with some guy called Brooks Clift,
who was Montgomery Clift's brother.
Brooks wanted
to write
a book,
there had been several books, obviously for years.
The latest one I believe was Patricia Bosworth's.
At any rate, Brooks did not agree
with almost all the books written about Monty.
So I agreed to meet.
Brooks' portrait of Montgomery
as he described him to me
in our conversations,
was far more complex than anybody else's could have been,
because there's so much more detail
if you grow up with somebody and talk to them every day
on the phone for 47 years.
It's just bigger, more livelier.
More complicated.
(phone ringing)
- Hi old man.
- Hello.
- Hi.
- How are you?
- All right.
- Yeah?
- I called a couple of days ago.
- I've been trying to understand my father's impulse
to record for a long time.
I knew about the Monty tapes before any of the others,
and it would have been one thing if it was research,
but the tapes start at least 20 years before he decided
to try writing a biography about his brother.
The obvious question is,
what was he planning to do with all these tapes?
Did anybody know that he was recording them?
- I called Sunny and she didn't sound as if she'd seen you.
- She hadn't. - Oh, okay.
- But I got a fabulous tape from her.
- Oh, really?
- (laughing) it's astounding.
Jesus it's sick.
- I must say, I called today and asked her
did she want to come over.
God I wish I could record that conversation
so you could hear it.
- Part of me thinks, or hopes,
Monty might have known the tapes were running.
But maybe I'm just trying to let my father off the hook.
This part of his life is opaque to me.
I either wasn't born yet or was very young
when he was making all these recordings.
Did Brooks tell you he was taping the conversations?
Did Monty know he was taping the conversations?
- He should have known,
because if he knew his brother at all,
Brooks taped everything.
- He did?
- He did, yeah.
- Why?
- I think he always just wanted to keep records.
It was kind of what he did.
- Testing,
one, two.
Testing.
This is Brooks Clift.
(drowned out by static)
- So in World War II,
he was part of the information gathering team
that maybe went in ahead and found out information
about where they were going.
He did say to me it was a torturing experience
for him to see the prison camps in World War II.
And he used to have a knife that was
liberated from the Nazis
when they freed,
I don't know what camp.
He wouldn't talk about it.
- He did tell me a couple stories,
like one time he drove a Jeep up to some building,
and right when he was about to get out of his Jeep,
or stop the Jeep and walk in, the building got bombed,
and he pretty much just kept going. (laughing)
- You know, I was kind of at the age of,
you had guns and you were the good guys.
He said I only used my gun once.
I shot somebody and it was not something
I was very happy about.
- Then after the war was over,
Brooks stayed on in counter-intelligence.
The hunt was for where are all the
SS officers?
We've got to find,
because they were just bailing out everywhere.
It was a tracking thing.
Brooks could be tenacious as a badger.
He would have been good at this,
but he gave me these as an example so I could see.
- So this is someone that,
this is someone that he arrested
or this led to this person's arrest?
- I have no idea.
- Okay. - Yeah.
- So my father was a trained intelligence officer
and maybe a Nazi hunter?
Old spy habits must die hard
because he was definitely recording everything.
From random radio programs...
- In 49 of the 50 states,
the law allows regrooved tires to be sold
without being labeled as such.
- ...to my parents' divorce...
- I feel very reluctant to talk on the phone,
because I might as well say I've discovered
that he's been taping my phone conversations.
And I really don't know whether he's got it on now or not.
- ...to ambient noise.
(tape clicks)
And apparently, me and my brothers, too.
- Woody and Rob.
- Really?
- I want to say it says porn discussion to love.
- We talked about porn.
He recorded that?
I've been trying to figure out what he said.
I used to think I knew,
but he actually recorded that?
- I had no idea!
- I feel totally violated.
(laughing)
- I'm ambivalent about my father's recordings.
Some are innocuous, like home movies of birthday parties
and trips to the beach.
Some are decidedly less so.
But they are a wealth of information,
even when they're a bit shady.
It was much later that I learned that recording
was a family trait.
Monty did it too.
- Listen, dear, I must go because I'm not even dressed yet.
- Well, would you give me an hour sometime?
- Yes, any time you want, dear.
- Because there are things-- - Any time you want.
Tomorrow's a busy day. - So is it for me.
- So why don't I call you sometime Thursday?
I have to go to Brooklyn to my dentist, (laughs)
which I look forward to.
- Cheer up, you have a good one dear. You're lucky.
- So I try to choose the days
that I have an errand like that to do,
to do every errand I have.
- Who doesn't put the kind of caps on your teeth
that make you look like horse teeth. (laughs)
- Oh no dear, he's just filling in the decay of my soul.
That's all.
(woman laughs)
- The main difference between my father's recordings
and Monty's is that nobody knew about Monty's.
They were at the bottom of a box of music reels.
Unopened for more than 50 years.
My father never released his tapes
but some of them found their way to a television documentary
after his death.
And the parts they released made it sound like my father
was recording Monty to make him look bad.
(dramatic music)
- Just 42, Montgomery Clift seemed ravaged
in body and spirit by the accident and his addictions.
In an addled late-night rambling,
he confided to his brother that perhaps all would be right
in the world if his portrayal of Sigmund Freud
won him an Academy Award.
- Now I really would love to have, this year
- More than ever, yes. - This year I would
love to have the Academy Award.
I've been nominated four times,
which I must say is rather good,
but now I want it.
Because I want to show them all
that-- I don't know what I'm up against.
I don't think I'll ever get it.
I mean, in my lifetime, I don't think I'll ever get it.
But, boy it would sure be wonderful.
- That year, he wasn't nominated.
- Now that I've heard the tapes in full,
I realize how much context is missing.
Monty's performance in Freud was at the center
of a legal dispute after the film's release.
Universal Pictures and John Huston were blaming Monty
for production delays,
saying he failed to memorize his lines.
It all had serious professional
and financial implications for Monty.
So when he talked to my father about the Oscar,
it wasn't about recognition,
it was about leverage.
- I'd love it if I got the Academy Award
and the jury had to rule on the fact
that I couldn't memorize lines.
Because I can memorize lines in one second if they're valid!
If I believe them.
And the whole insurance people have said
they're gonna cut of my salary because they say
I wouldn't memorize lines.
In other words, I sat back like a naughty child
and said I won't memorize the lines.
Isn't that something? - That's ridiculous.
- What are the insurance people gonna do
if they're talking to the jury (both laughing)
and I've got the Academy Award for the performance?
- If Monty caused delays during shooting,
he certainly wasn't solely responsible for them.
John Huston racked up a good number
of expensive production delays all by himself.
He repeatedly changed costumes and sets,
hired hundreds of extras and never used them,
and he constantly re-wrote the dialogue.
Monty was being handed multiple, new versions of the script
while preparing for scenes.
- Everybody was the victim
of last minute things
and five different changes of script.
We'd get the white and then we'd get the yellow
and then we'd get the pink.
And then we'd get the blue
and then we get the onion skin.
And then still one hadn't talked to John about the scene!
I mean, like a scene between Susannah York and myself.
- Cecily.
- Do you know we were up until four o'clock in the morning?
I averaged four hours sleep a night.
And you know-- - And here you're doing something
on your time with no help from the director.
- None.
- Who you needed.
- And you have to face the camera
and he can have bags under his eyes
because he's out fucking and drinking.
- Yeah.
- But one has to look well! Now how do you do that
and stay up until four in the morning?
- What is the matter with Huston?
Why is he such a nut?
- He's a sadist.
He takes delight
in needling.
And he's like Dostoevsky says.
You know Notes from Underground?
- Yes.
- He's refined the point of needling.
- What was Huston like on The Misfits?
- Fine.
His problems were Marilyn and Clark.
As far as he was concerned I was a dream.
- And you remembered all your lines and everything?
And you were no problem.
- Remember the first scene in the phone booth?
- Hello, Ma?
- Yeah.
- That was scheduled for two days,
we did it in two hours.
- Well now isn't this part of your whole personality?
Why, if he liked you enough to use you again,
then this can't be true about you.
He must have known it when he hired you.
- He knows it. - if you're such
a lousy actor.
- He knows it.
Why did he hire me?
He knows it.
- Monty was re-writing lines and improvising,
like he always had.
So what changed between The Misfits and Freud?
Huston's biographers suggest it had something to do
with the night they both spent
at Huston's castle in Ireland.
Huston had learned that Monty had engaged
in sexual congress with another man - in his house.
I had my nose rubbed in it, Huston said.
He found Monty's behavior simply revolting,
and said that he didn't want to touch anything
his lips were near.
Is it fair to pin Huston's animosity toward Monty
on homophobia?
Maybe.
My father and Monty entertained another possibility.
- Still, it's so insane that he can be doing this
which is damaging himself. It's damaging the picture.
How does he expect to get box office
with this kind of an attitude?
- I don't know.
I don't know.
I agree with you. - It's more than sadism,
it's masochism. (laughs)
You know, his producer oughta spank him or beat him.
Who makes the money on the movie?
- You see, he has,
he's going with the money.
He has four more pictures to do for UI.
So he's just playing a game.
So he says "Monty didn't know his lines."
Boy, that's something when you see the film.
See, he has to go, apparently,
he feels he has to go along with that.
- I find it difficult to give Huston much of a pass.
He went right along with scape-goating Monty
for the film's problems
and even though Monty won the lawsuit,
the accusations stuck.
Huston's autobiography includes a litany of them.
He describes Monty as brain-damaged.
Petulant.
Obstinate.
The male equivalent of Marilyn Monroe,
who put on a little boy act.
Impossible.
Non compos mentis.
No longer able to contend.
You couldn't talk to my father about the problems
that Monty faced late in life
without also talking about John Huston.
- Probably what
was the major reason
that my brother
died was that
John Huston brought
a very unfair lawsuit
against him,
which Monty eventually won,
but he couldn't get insurance
to do another movie.
So he went for four years
without
making a movie.
And for Monty, not working was
terribly depressing.
- My father saw the Freud lawsuit as an inciting incident
for Monty's isolation, despair,
and increased chemical dependencies.
But reading Monty's biographies,
one would think things started going south much earlier.
For Patti Bosworth, it all started one night in 1956,
during the filming of Raintree County.
After leaving a dinner party at Elizabeth Taylor's house,
he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed his car.
- Should I just read this then?
The whole-- - Yeah,
just the section on the accident.
- When Elizabeth and the others reached Monty's car
at the foot of the hill,
they saw the automobile crushed against a telephone pole.
There was broken glass and blood everywhere.
Blood spurted onto Elizabeth's silk dress
as she crawled over the front seat
and cradled Monty's head in her lap.
She looked down into his face,
which was a bloody unrecognizable pulp.
He stirred in her arms and moaned.
He was alive, but his nose was broken,
his jaw shattered, his cheeks severely lacerated,
his upper lip split completely in half.
Montgomery Clift survived that night
and lived for 10 more years,
but his real death occurred as he lay bleeding
and half conscious in Elizabeth Taylor's arms.
Nothing would ever be the same for him after that.
- It's a compelling story.
So much so that it's always been hard for me
to watch his post-accident films.
But Monty didn't die that night.
He made just as many films after the accident
as he did before it.
And as for how the accident changed his acting?
- He Liked himself better.
I think that he was relieved.
He liked his performances better.
When he did The Young Lions,
I mean I thought my God,
I never thought he'd look that good again,
and he was looking wonderful.
Then he did this thing that absolutely threw his face off.
He put, he decided he wanted his ears to be,
he was a salesman at Macy's or Gimbles or something,
and he decided he'd put gum behind his ears.
But he did that
and it pleased him,
and I think his performances pleased him
more once
he wasn't just so extraordinarily handsome,
which he was.
- How many pictures have you done now?
- I don't know.
I'd have to count them.
- Any favorites?
- You mean of my performance?
- Yes.
- Yes, the Young Lions and Judgment at Nuremberg are my two.
- Both of those performances were after the accident.
The body is an actor's instrument,
and Monty's wasn't destroyed.
It was different, and that difference allowed him
to stretch and expand into new kinds of roles.
- He once said to me,
you know I don't think that I could have done
Judgment at Nuremberg as a young actor.
I said, with your acting ability you could, very well.
But he said, oh no, no, no.
You have to have experience with life.
- It is hard to imagine George Eastman
as Rudolph Petersen.
But that was the part that Monty wanted now.
This character with intellectual disabilities
who had been sterilized by the Nazis.
He was originally offered the part of Lawson,
the American prosecutor,
for his usual $300,000 fee,
but he told his agent he didn't want it.
- (sighs) God, the part was uninteresting.
I mean, to say the least! (laughing)
Let's face it, it was dull and shit.
- He wanted the cameo role,
but his agents wouldn't let him do it for less
than his minimum fee.
So he went around them and told director Stanley Kramer
he'd do it for free,
as long as they agreed on a couple of points.
Number one, cut Monty's first scene from the script.
- One thing I think is absolutely eliminatable,
- Yeah.
- It's only a page. Before the trial,
where he says yes I'll go through with talking
about the castration.
I think the camera and you
can play so much better
on the fact that here is practically a surprise witness.
- Would evidence on sterilization be admissible
if there were a witness?
- The real shock value is the fact
none of them think that anybody's gonna come up
with some son-of-a-bitch who's gonna say
he was castrated.
- Yes.
- Thank you.
- But then it seems to me that we wouldn't have to tip
the situation.
I'm just wondering whether we don't lose a great deal
by the idea of telling him,
if he can't do it, don't do it,
without saying what it is.
- Well I think - it's a matter of taste, obviously -
but I think it's a tremendous mistake
if we have it going the other way.
- On that I would agree with you 100%.
- I'm not saying you should agree with me.
I mean it has to do with the difference
between whether I play the part or not, you know?
- Kramer was persuaded.
The scene was cut.
Point two, how to play this sensitive part.
- One thing, just to think about.
And that is the scene when he talks about his mother
and her not being feeble-minded.
We have to be very careful with that if we do it.
You and I have to agree on it,
because that's a very sensitive point.
I think the most moving thing about this particular part,
God, I start crying thinking about it.
I think the most moving thing is his dignity,
and he holds onto himself.
And he holds onto himself in spite of himself.
You know what I mean?
- I know, I honestly know.
- I don't want him in melodrama
and I don't want to play him in melodrama.
- Despite Monty's creative input,
despite his Oscar, Golden Globe, and BAFTA nominations,
the story that lived on about this performance
was that it wasn't a performance at all.
(militaristic music)
This was a man having an actual nervous breakdown.
- They had already made up
when I walked into the court,
they had made up their minds.
They had made up their minds!
They put me in the hospital like a criminal.
I could not say anything,
I could not do anything.
I...
I had to lay there.
- Bosworth described him as panicked before shooting,
and fluffing take after take
because he couldn't remember his lines.
The story goes that Spencer Tracy had to tell him,
fuck the lines, just play to me.
Like the performance could just then pour out
of some reservoir of Monty's own terror
and unhealed suffering.
But Monty's script notes suggest otherwise.
- I want to show you.
I have here her picture.
I would like you looked at it.
I would like you to judge.
I want that you
tell me,
was she feeble-minded?
My mother!
Was she feeble-minded?
Was she?!
- I feel it is my duty to point out to the tribunal
that the witness is not in control
of his mental processes.
- I know I'm not.
Since that day.
I've been
half I've ever been.
- I hate that I spent so many years seeing this pain
as Monty's, that whatever theories people had
about his personal life could obscure his work.
- I want it to start without you knowing it.
- Sure, I see the thing going around. Great.
(piano music)
♪ Dancing in the dark ♪
♪ Til the tune ends ♪
♪ We're dancing in the dark ♪
♪ For it soon ends ♪
♪ We're waltzing in the wonders ♪
♪ Of why we're here ♪
- The idea of Monty's brokenness
has persisted all these years
and I don't know if it can ever change.
Hollywood has threatened to do a Monty biopic
every few years since the 1980s.
And if they ever pull it off,
I'm afraid it's just going to be the same old story.
- It is a tragic story.
At the core of that is not the homosexuality
that did him in,
it was the fact that he had to hide that aspect of his life.
In his own personal life he had to live that lie,
so just the torment in that.
I think the drugs and alcohol just become a manifestation
of those demons.
They're not the cause, they're the effect of it.
And there's no shying away from it,
there's not being timid about it.
This is the life he had.
- It has to do with what drama comes through
in the story and the character Monty on the page.
What makes it interesting is not even that it's a biopic,
that just makes it challenging.
But what makes it interesting is that it has real conflict
and it's in an interesting world
that can take an audience to another place.
Then the fact that it's all true
adds another layer of that to make it compelling.
- I never show him acting in it,
because it don't think that's what made him who he was.
Rather than just doing a factual thing,
I was able to get somewhere
where I was really comfortable with sort of an understanding
and then drawing my own experiences of the business
and how surreal and how perverse
and how incredibly lonely it is.
So some nights I would just go,
I want to feel like the loneliest person in the world.
So I would maybe drink a little too much,
and then I'd start walking the streets of New York
late at night and go,
I wonder if this is how it felt for him?
I never tried to force anything.
I really want to believe,
without getting too existential, that
it was him speaking.
And I just waited for the words to come.
- Well that's one way.
- When you can't sit across from the table
and have a conversation with what were you thinking
when this happened,
and how did it feel when this happened?
It's-- you're interpreting it.
We're all in a business,
so I think it's frankly finding the entertainment value.
You're reading this source and you're reading that source,
and you're looking for this interview,
and you're talking to this person
and putting all those pieces together in something
that's cohesive and inspiring and interesting is difficult.
- It is difficult.
Even a big name like Sidney Lumet
couldn't get a Monty biopic off the ground.
- Sidney optioned my book the day after it was published.
I've never forgotten it 'cause it was a big deal.
And he wanted to make a movie.
He said I want to make it like Godfather I and II.
I want it to be Montgomery Clift I,
Montgomery Clift and His Mother,
and Montgomery Clift: Tragic Beauty,
you know, after his face was destroyed in the car crash.
And the two Montgomery Clift movies
were supposed to be hugely expensive
and Warner Bros. decided they didn't want to do that.
So the option was dropped.
I've had other options since then,
but movies,
a movie has never been made.
I had many options.
- Why?
- I don't know.
I wrote two screenplays myself.
I even thought of writing a movie
that would be about me, not me literally,
but a character like a young girl,
who has all these experiences with Montgomery Clift
and gets to know him
and I was going to use me as a character,
in either a play or a movie.
I haven't gone beyond that idea.
I haven't written it.
And then I have another idea,
which I'm actually gonna talk to a producer about
but I don't think it will happen,
of Montgomery Clift just at the end of his life,
in the brownstone with the black male servant,
and just the end of his life.
Almost like a Sunset Boulevard,
and then flashbacks of earlier life.
(melancholy music)
But again, I don't--
It's never happened.
I've talked to so many producers.
So many people have liked the book
and wanted to make it into a movie.
- I can't say I want that movie to be made.
It effaces someone important in my life.
That so-called black male servant Patti mentioned is Lorenzo
and if anybody knows how a few misplaced creative liberties
can impact real life, it's him.
- Early on the morning of July 23rd,
Clift's nurse found Monty dead in his bed.
- There was a rumor going around that he'd been murdered.
- Why do you think that is?
- I don't know.
They didn't understand
what was going on in that house,
you know, there's a black male servant,
a gay guy, I don't know.
- I was supposed to have something to do
about Monty's death. It was floating around.
I've even stopped me in the--
- People have stopped you in the street?
- And said that I had something to do with his death.
- Do people try to correct that?
Did people...
- People don't like to correct things like that.
And they did not want to put me in the position
that I had with Monty.
You understand?
And it all had to do with the racial thing.
Here's this black man with Montgomery Clift.
How dare he?
I'll tell you.
Arthur Mitchell said, he was in this car
and he heard about Monty's passing.
And he told the man, turn around,
I've got to go to see about Lorenzo.
So when he got to the house he said to me,
I know you're in trouble.
This black man in this house and Montgomery Clift.
'Cause he knew.
He had met Monty.
But he said I know you're gonna have trouble.
Psychologically I haven't gotten over all of this.
How would I kill a man
or have something to do with his death?
- Monty died from a heart attack
at what my father called the ripe old age of 45.
He wasn't murdered.
He didn't have some combustive inner conflict.
Monty was, ultimately, mortal, and his heart stopped.
It's not the death we crave for somebody of his stature.
But Monty's death, like his life,
didn't fit into what he frequently called
a neat little pigeon-hole.
- As I told you,
you can say I'm a shit, but I think it's bad for you
that you say, you lead a murky life.
That sounds so fucking dismal.
I must say. I can't say I am just melancholy
or I am just sad,
or I am just anything.
It's a part of one's life if you're a worker.
- Do you think you're destructive as a person?
Are you aiming
for destruction? - Toward what?
- Well, firstly of yourself.
- No, I do not think I'm aiming toward destruction.
- You don't want to destroy yourself?
- No I do not!
- You're quite sure of that?
- Aside from me killing myself,
I wouldn't think of destroying myself.
- I'm not kidding, Monty, seriously.
- I tell you what.
I enjoy jokes too much.
You know, they say, this pocket-edition psychology,
accident-prone, wants to hurt himself,
wants to be...
Nothing!
They don't know me at all.
I have, I would say offhand,
a rather large capacity for life.
And I ain't gonna give it up.
- If I'm turning the Turner Classic on,
and I see Monty I flip to another station immediately,
because Monty seems alive.
I just cannot do it.
Being with Monty was like standing in front
of a fireplace in dead of winter,
and you get all of this wonderful kind of sincerity.
It's a pity that
everybody,
and I would have shared Monty with everybody,
did not get some of the medicine
that Monty was brewing.
He'd give off a glow.
- The people in my life who loved Monty lost him twice.
In his death and then again when they couldn't find him
in the stories that followed.
But they held onto their missing pieces.
Making this film, I've collected them.
In doing so I've thought a lot about Monty's life's work.
Giving us human characters, both unknowable
and relatable in their complexities.
In mystery, dignity.
And I think we owe that back to Monty.
- Well, anyway.
I won't keep you any longer,
but listen I would love to talk to you again.
Okay?
- Okay.
- All right, dear sir.
I hope I haven't kept you up. - No.
- Okay. - Okay.
- Good night.
- Good night, dear.
(phone clicks)
(ambient music)