Quote of the Day (Peter Bogdanovich, on the Magnetism of Montgomery Clift)

“[Montgomery] Clift had been a kind of unacknowledged leader. His performances in [Howard] Hawks’ Red River (his first movie, though [Fred] Zinnemann’s The Search was released earlier), in [William] Wyler’s The Heiress, in [George] Stevens’ A Place in the Sun, heralded a new acting style. It came to be known, inaccurately, as the Method. After Clift came Brando, and after Brando, James Dean. Clift was the purest, the least mannered of these actors, perhaps the most sensitive, certainly the most poetic. He was also remarkably beautiful. Over eight years he acted in eight films, became a teenage heartthrob as well as a popular star with older audiences. He was nominated for Best Actor Oscars three times in six years and should have won each time. He gave at least four performances – in Red River, in A Place in the Sun, in I Confess and in Zinnemann’s From Here to Eternity – that remain among the finest anyone has given in the movies.”— Peter Bogdanovich, Who the Hell’s in It: Portraits and Conversations (2004)

Montgomery Clift was born 100 years ago today in Omaha, Neb. Bogdanovich describes meeting this “most romantic and touching actor of his generation” at a 1961 showing of I Confess at a New York revival house.

As a result of a horrifying car accident three years before that wrecked his looks, Clift was on the downside of his career and five years away from his death at age 46. (I discussed that career- and life-changing incident in this post from 11 years ago.)

Bogdanovich’s narration of this encounter is profoundly poignant and moving. But to get beyond the tragic facts of his life to why we continue to value Clift’s work—the sheer labor, intensity and sensitivity he brought to each role—I recommend this post from the blog “And So It Begins” by director Alex Withrow.

This Day in Theater History (Wilder’s ‘Skin of Our Teeth,’ Comedy of Chaos, Opens)

November 18, 1942—When The Skin of Our Teeth premiered at Broadway’s Plymouth Theatre, the comedy with tragic undertones spoke directly to an America that had barely survived the Great Depression, only to find itself in a two-front worldwide war against totalitarianism. Re-reading Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play today, I was struck by its immediacy in another area: the citizens of New Jersey and Long Island experience sudden, terrifyingly inexplicable climate change (albeit, in this case, the onset of an ice age in August, rather than two hurricanes in successive years).

At the time, the public and critics might have viewed the cataclysmic climate conditions of the play simply as another biblical-style trauma in a work filled with them, rather than as a far-sighted environmental warning. On the other hand, for theater professionals who heard “storm” in connection with this production, they were likely, because of industry gossip, to associate the word with the show’s temperamental featured actress, Tallulah Bankhead, who clashed repeatedly before the opening with inexperienced producer Michael Myerberg and director Elia Kazan.

How much did the playwright use Bankhead’s bombastic persona in the play? Audiences at the time would have recognized an allusion to a prior performance by the actress (“look at me now—I…I who’ve played Rain”). When her character, the maid Sabina, addresses the audience, it could be interpreted as a Pirandellian trick by Wilder (“I can’t invent any words for this play, and I’m glad I can’t. I hate this play and every word in it”). Or, given Wilder’s habit of sending everything up, such pronouncements are all the better not to sound too preachy. In this regard, perhaps Wilder figured that Bankhead would put extra, unfeigned convention into these lines.

Starting with the title itself from Job 19:20, The Skin of Our Teeth shows repeatedly that the predicament of modern man is as old as the Scriptures. (Wilder’s Christian name came from his grandfather, a Presbyterian minister who served under Stonewall Jackson in the Civil War.) The main characters, George and Maggie Antrobus (played by real-life couple Fredric March and Florence Eldridge), had once been gardeners, “but left that situation under circumstances that have been variously reported.”  Their son, Henry (played by a young, already intense Montgomery Clift), a bit too handy with throwing stones, bears a mark on his forehead, a visible reminder to the world of his killing of his brother. Allusions to the Pentateuch continue to pile high, as the Antrobuses take in the refugee “Judge Moses,” and later, pack in enough animals on a ship to survive a great deluge engulfing Earth.

After the show premiered, a number of theatergoers were so cnofused by what they saw that they left after the first act, not returning. I think most of my readers will agree that these biblical references are so numerous that it’s hard to miss the point of the allegory.

Maybe what bamboozled the audience was the freewheeling nature of the play. Bankhead might have been a pill to work with, but she made the most of one of the most challenging roles of her career, one that called for her to act as a put-upon maid, temptress, Miss America contestant, and intermediary for playwright and audience.  She became the medium through which the play’s tragic and comic elements were kept in exquisite equipoise, and won the Critics Circle Award for her quick-change, quicksilver performance.

A silly controversy developed when a couple of critics, perhaps taking note of Wilder’s publicly avowed adoration of Finnegans Wake, accused the playwright of plagiarizing James Joyce’s novel. There was, perhaps, another influence that went largely unremarked: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The “notice” at the start of Mark Twain’s novel waggishly tries to convince the reader that this most moral of novels has nothing at all to do with such matters (“Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.”). Wilder makes a similar disclaimer—what critic Bruce Bawer, in an essay on him in the Autumn 2008 issue of The Hudson Review, called “self-referential absurdism”-- in the person of Sabina (“Ladies and gentlemen! Don’t take this play serious. The world’s not coming to an end.”)

For playwrights, The Skin of Our Teeth meant enduring lessons in how to break out of conventional forms, to show that it was possible, in the blink of an eye, to go from prehistoric times to contemporary America. For audiences, Wilder taught about the institutions and inclinations that help the human spirit endure—freedom of inquiry, curiosity, a mother’s fierce love. Every one of the seven deadly sins might afflict the human race, bringing it to the brink of extinction, but there’s a reason that the name of the Antrobuses’ suburban New Jersey town is Excelsior. Paradoxically, despite and because of human beings, their aim is always “ever upward.”

(The photo here, by Carl Van Vechten, comes from August 1948, when Wilder was appearing as Mr. Antrobus in summer-stock productions in Connecticut, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. The photo is now part of the Carl Van Vechten photograph collection in the Library of Congress.)

Flashback, May 1956: Clift Accident Scars Face, Career

In the second half of May 1956, tabloids were breathless with every scrap of information they could find about the shocking incident involving Montgomery Clift. Leaving a dinner party thrown by good friend Elizabeth Taylor on the night of the 13th, a drunken Clift--not just an extraordinarily handsome leading man but the pioneer of a new acting style on film--got into a car accident that wrecked his looks, heightened his depression, and launched him into a physical decline that culminated in a fatal heart attack a decade later at only age 45.

At the time of the accident, Clift and Taylor, co-stars in A Place in the Sun, were filming Raintree County, a movie that, with its Civil War setting, built-in audience (readers of Ross Lockridge’s bestselling novel) and steep costs, was inviting comparisons with Gone With the Wind.

MGM executives, then, were probably close to a heart attack when they learned that their male lead’s injuries were so severe (multiple facial lacerations and broken bones) that he’d require extensive plastic surgery and production would have to shut down for two months.

You can sense the duality and darkness at the heart of Clift in the image accompanying this post, taken before the career-changing accident. The good looks are there, along with the sensitivity, but there’s also depression, drawn out by the shadows on one side of the face. The photo is so piercingly, nakedly personal that you’d apologize for intruding on his pain, if only you could.

On screen and stage, that duality allowed Clift to depict characters with an inarticulate yearning for something more--and a sudden paroxysm of violence. His Oscar-nominated roles in A Place in the Sun and From Here to Eternity culminated in acts of violence. On Broadway, the 22-year-old actor had first made his mark as the Cain-like son in Thornton Wilder’s comedy The Skin of Our Teeth.

“Monty had a special kind of pain, a pain he could not release,” recalled James Jones, who wrote the novel From Here to Eternity and hung out with the actor during production of the classic movie. “He had a tragedy hanging over his head like a big black comic-strip cloud. It was so distinct you could almost see it.”

Some of the “pain he could not release” might have stemmed from a childhood dominated by a domineering mother and a distant father, but far more related to his bisexuality. He went to great lengths to hide his attraction to men--and he needed to at that time, when such revelations would not only destroy his career but leave him at the mercy of the law.

Toss in two longtime medical conditions--dysentery and colitis--and you have the makings of a mounting drinking problem. When immersed in the craft of acting, Clift impressed his colleagues with a fearless immersion in his parts (Taylor was amazed that he was actually drenched with sweat at the conclusion of a scene in A Place in the Sun). But away from the set, he became out of control.

One of the antics in which Clift engaged when under the influence was driving perilously close to other cars--close enough even to nudge them. That was the situation the night that Clift drove away from Taylor’s. Actor Kevin McCarthy, directly below him on the hill, was certain at first that Clift was pulling “one of his practical jokes” again, but the gathering speed of Clift’s car made McCarthy think he might be having a blackout. On the second turn down from the hill, Clift suddenly veered into a telephone pole.

After seeing Clift’s face—a bloody pulp—McCarthy ran back to Taylor’s house. The actress, screaming, fought off McCarthy and then-husband Michael Wilding and ran down to Clift’s car. Only her quick action--sticking her fingers down his throat and pulling out two teeth lodged there--prevented him from choking to death while waiting for an ambulance.

Taylor aided Clift in one other way. As the tabloids got wind of the accident, photographers rushed to the scene, hoping to get a shot of Clift’s bloody face. As soon as she saw what they were up to, she threatened that if they took a single picture of her friend, she would never allow them to take another photo of her. They backed off.

Doctors fixed Clift up enough so he could finish Raintree County, but his career was never really the same. His alcohol consumption continued to rise, a dangerous tendency worsened by increasing use of pills.

And then there was his face.

Friend Jack Larson (best known from his role as Jimmy Olsen on the Superman TV series) reassured Clift that he didn’t look that different after the surgery, but knew better: “His mouth was twisted. A nerve had been severed in his left check so that the left side of his face was practically immobile--frozen. His nose, that perfect nose, was bent--crooked--out of shape. He looked stuffed, that’s the only way I can put it.”

It became something of an audience game to pick apart all the ways that Clift looked different after the accident. The man who earned three Best Actor nominations in six years, who predated Brando, Dean and Newman in bringing The Method to Hollywood, was finding it harder to land leading roles.

The definitive comment on the post-crash Clift might have been made by his co-star in The Misfits, Marilyn Monroe, who described him as “the only person I know who is in worse shape than I am."

Clift would score one other Oscar nomination, in a role that made use of his mounting emotional torment: a mentally challenged victim of the Nazis in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). But the decade after the accident would become, in the words of acting teacher Robert Lewis, “the longest suicide in Hollywood history.”

Taylor, who pushed hard to land Clift a role in her Suddenly Last Summer (1959), hoped to do the same with her 1967 film, Reflections in a Golden Eye. Clift, who hadn’t acted in four years (Universal Studios had sued him because production on the film Freud became delayed because of his health problems), took the lead in The Defector to prepare to be in front of the cameras again.

The Reflections in a Golden Eye role--a repressed homosexual--might have been too close to home for the actor to handle, but we’ll never know for sure. He died in the summer of 1966 from heart problems, before he had a chance to revive a career that, for all its painful brevity, was remarkably influential.

Movie Quote of the Day (“Steel Magnolias,” on Elizabeth Taylor)

Truvy (played by Dolly Parton): “When it comes to pain and suffering, she's right up there with Elizabeth Taylor.”—Steel Magnolias (1989), screenplay adapted by Robert Harling from his stage play, directed by Herbert Ross

First she was the child star, then the adult beauty, then the star onscreen and off. But, in the end, she made the greatest public impact as friend and survivor.

Steel Magnolias was made over 20 years ago, but by that time Elizabeth Taylor had already endured nearly three decades of medical conditions that could have killed her. Her first Oscar, for Butterfield 8 (1960), was widely regarded at the time by many (including, evidently, the actress herself) as a sympathy vote, coming a mere few months after a near-fatal bout with pneumonia. Over the years she also contended with a bad back (courtesy of a fall from a horse, at age 12, while shooting National Velvet), respiratory problems, weight issues, alcohol and pill addiction, and, in the end, congestive heart failure.

Time, W.H. Auden wrote, “is indifferent in a week/To a beautiful physique.” As indicated by a rather nastily titled Doonesbury collection by Garry Trudeau from the early ‘80s--A Tad Overweight, But Violet Eyes to Die For--Taylor’s fame lasted longer than her looks.

But the fact is, amid the wreckage of so much of her life (eight marriages!), she did endure. If Lindsay Lohan wants a model of how to emerge on the other side of the worst that life can throw at you, she can do far worse than look at Taylor for a role model.

People should be remembered not simply for the sum of their worst moments, but for what they were at their best. In that light, I chose for the image accompanying this post a movie still that Taylor herself, I suspect, might have cherished. It comes from A Place in the Sun (1951), a film released when she was only 19, co-starring Montgomery Clift. Yes, it shows the looks that made women envious and men temporarily insane (critic James Agee, more than two decades her senior, admitted, after seeing her in National Velvet, that he was "choked with the peculiar sort of adoration I might have felt if we were both in the same grade of primary school"), but details so much more.

Clift’s conflicted sexuality prevented the two from ever having a physical relationship, but Taylor’s deeply felt relationship with her co-star was, in its way, as loving as any she enjoyed with any of her husbands. He died young, but knew that she would always be there for him. You might be down on your luck, but as long as Taylor was around, you were rich in friends.

Maybe it was that ability to be there for someone else that was the instinct behind her advocacy for AIDS victims (prominently including another closeted gay friend, Giant co-star Rock Hudson), including through the Elizabeth Taylor AIDS Foundation. Maybe it was through this instinct that--years after the end of a career she increasingly regarded as superficial, and years after medical problems that would have killed anyone else--Taylor lived and is recalled instantly by those who never saw her in her celluloid heyday.