The Passion of Montgomery Clift

Amy Lawrence

university of california press berkeley los angeles london The Passion of Montgomery Clift The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Humanities Endowment Fund of the University of California Press Foundation. The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous contribution to this book provided by Dartmouth College. The Passion of Montgomery Clift

Amy Lawrence

university of california press berkeley los angeles london University of California Press, one of the most distin- guished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu.

University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

© 2010 by The Regents of the University of California

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lawrence, Amy. The passion of Montgomery Clift / Amy Lawrence. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-26046-7 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 978-0-520-26047-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Clift, Montgomery—Criticism and interpretation. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States— Public opinion. 3. Motion pictures—Social aspects. 4. Popular culture—United States. I. Title. pn2287.c545l39 2010 791.4302'8092—dc22 2009019423

Manufactured in the United States of America

19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 10987654321

This book is printed on Cascades Enviro 100, a 100% post consumer waste, recycled, de-inked fiber. FSC recycled certified and processed chlorine free. It is acid free, Ecologo certified, and manufactured by BioGas energy. contents

list of illustrations vii

acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

1 • The Face of a Saint 11

2 • The Bobby-Soxers’ Idol 50

3 • Actor as Saint 83

4 • Facing Persecution 141

5 • Mortification of the Flesh 177

6 • AGayMartyr 218

7 • Nothing Sacred 254

notes 287

index 323 This page intentionally left blank illustrations

Color plates follow page 150.

1. Montgomery Clift, 1948 Life photo shoot x 2. Young Clift as a “Star of Tomorrow,” 1948 10 3. Clift and , , 1948 17 4. Matt and the men, Red River, 1948 41 5. “Clift Sees Self,” Life, December 6, 1948 48 6. and Clift, , 1949 51 7. Clift and , , 1950 64 8. Clift, Borchers, and O. E. Hasse, The Big Lift 67 9. Clift and Borchers in rubble, The Big Lift 69 10. and Clift, A Place in the Sun, 1951 75 11. Clift thinks about murder, A Place in the Sun 79 12. and Clift read script of I Confess, 1953 82 13. Guileless and guilty, I Confess 85 14. Breakfast, I Confess 98 15. Clift and on the set, I Confess 102 16. Hasse and Clift, The Big Lift (Two Corridors East) 118 17. Hitchcock and Clift on location, I Confess 122 18. Logan on trial, I Confess 123

vii 19. Clift and , I Confess 127 20. La loi du silence poster 132 21. Danish program, Jeg tilstaar! 133 22. Publicity still, , 1953 140 23. Clift, , and Burt Lancaster, From Here to Eternity 160 24. Ernest Borgnine and Clift, From Here to Eternity 167 25. Clift on location, The Misfits, 1960 176 26. Clift confronts Elizabeth Taylor, Raintree County, 1957 185 27. Costume test, , 1958 188 28. Clift and , Wild River, 1960 191 29. Clift and coworkers, , 1959 199 30. Dolores Hart, Clift, and Robert Ryan, Lonelyhearts 201 31. Clift on location for The Misfits: hotel room with cowboys 204 32. Clift riding in rodeo, The Misfits 206 33. Clift on trial, , 1961 212 34. and Clift on set, Judgment at Nuremberg 215 35. Clift and Taylor, Suddenly, Last Summer, 1959 219 36. I Confess: Logan descending; Suddenly, Last Summer: Sebastian ascending 222 37. Taylor and Clift in separate dressing rooms, Suddenly, Last Summer 229 38. Clift in mirror, The Defector, 1966 255 39. Clift circa 1955 258 40. Recording for , 1964 265 41. Clift in bed in the street, The Defector 276

viii illustrations acknowledgments

I would like to thank everyone who helped in the preparation and com- pletion of this book. Those who read multiple versions and gave me much- needed encouragement and criticism include Terry Lawrence, Al LaValley, Mary Desjardins, Steve Cohan, Michael DeAngelis, Mother Dolores Hart, my editor at the University of California Press, Mary Francis, and the anony- mous readers whose contribution is especially appreciated. I would also like to thank the librarians and archivists who provided their invaluable assis- tance, especially Barbara Hall at the Margaret Herrick Library at the Acad- emy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the staª at the Billy Rose Theatre Collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, and the staª at the USC Warner Bros. Archive. I would also like to thank my colleagues at Dartmouth College for their moral support and the adminis- tration for its financial support. This book is dedicated to my mother, Nancy J. Lawrence, and to Carrie Kirshman (who should have been in the first one).

ix figure 1. Montgomery Clift in a 1948 Life photo shoot. Bob Landry, Time & Life Pictures, Getty Images. Introduction

Although fans are often said to “worship” or “idolize” stars, Mont- gomery Clift sparks reactions so extreme that his fans describe him in terms approaching religious ecstasy. Trying to articulate decades later how deeply moved they were when they first encountered the actor in films such as Red River (1948), The Heiress (1949), A Place in the Sun (1951), and From Here to Eternity (1953), Clift’s fans struggle to express the indescribable. Ac- cording to one, Clift had a “face of almost impenetrable beauty.”1 For an- other, “His beauty was so sensual and at the same time so vulnerable it was almost blinding.”2 Clift biographer states, “He was so gorgeous you could hardly look at him.”3 Rapt in their memory of a vi- sion, fans-turned-authors recall their response to the actor’s image as if it were a physical force. According to Elizabeth Taylor, the first time she saw Clift, her heart stopped.4 But beauty alone cannot account for how deeply moved fans were—and are—when contemplating images of Clift. For them, Clift’s physical beauty expresses something deeper than mere aesthetic grace. said simply, “He had the face of a saint.”5 Since his screen debut in 1948, Clift has appealed to a wide range of au- diences. Among the disparate groups who have made up Clift’s fan base during the past six decades are heterosexual men in the postwar years who admired the stoic soldier of From Here to Eternity or the cowboy who stands up to in Red River; teenage female fans who sighed for the vul- nerable, doomed romantic in A Place in the Sun or The Heiress in the early ; gay men who have redefined Clift’s image since the 1970s, identify-

1 ing the erotic potential of the idealistic young heroes of The Search (1948) and I Confess (1953), or enjoying the double entendres in Suddenly, Last Sum- mer (1959). Among these various audiences, two competing myths about Mont- gomery Clift dominate. In the first, he is a rebel icon. A young idealist indiªerent to fame and hostile to the ways of , a zealot in his unwavering dedication to acting, Clift emerges full-blown as the best ac- tor of his generation only to be cut down by a near-fatal car accident that leaves him a shattered wreck hopelessly addicted to alcohol and painkillers. The second myth presents Clift as the epitome of a gay man persecuted by a homophobic society. Repeatedly cast in his later years as a target of so- cial and professional persecution (in The Young Lions [1958], Judgment at Nuremberg [1961], Freud [1962], pop songs, and multiple biographies), Clift the tragic victim is reconfigured as a specifically gay martyr, his career a com- mentary on a closeted era. Each story is part of a larger narrative we might call “paradise lost,” a neat division of “before” and “after,” with Eden located in the years be- tween 1948 and 1954. The accident in 1956 marks the moment of irreversible loss.6 Both narratives grant Clift an active role in fashioning the first part of his career—spearheading a new style of acting, resisting the status quo, fighting to maintain his independence and the right to a private life—while confirming F. Scott Fitzgerald’s declaration that there are no second acts in American lives. Despite diªerent audiences’ varying investments in formulating Clift’s legacy, there is a striking consistency when it comes to the elements cited as essential to Clift’s appeal: his beauty (particularly his face), his devotion to acting, and the way he suªered both physically (especially as the result of the accident) and mentally (the pressure he is assumed to have been un- der because he was gay). Clift’s suªering can be fictional (part of his per- formances) or biographical (what we think we know about the actor’s life). Either way, it is central to the various narratives that purport to explain the actor’s eªect on his fans. Exceptional beauty, prolonged suªering, and enviable success followed by tragic loss are not unique to Clift’s star persona. Other pop-culture figures from the same era occupy similar territory. Clift’s costars and have the same iconic status, the same reputation for charisma and self-destruction, the same demons of insecurity and addic- tion, the same early deaths. All three suªered at the hands of a callous film industry and a voracious and often hostile press. The propensity to can-

2 introduction onize stars after their deaths is also not limited to Clift. The 1950s alone oªer a long list of the posthumously exalted: , dead almost as soon as he was famous; Elvis Presley, whose epoch-making success was fol- lowed by a long decline and tawdry death; Rock Hudson, forced his entire career to evade exposure as a gay man only to be outed by death—the list goes on. As recent works indicate (American Monroe by S. Paige Baty; James Dean Transfigured by Claudia Springer; Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith, and Im- age by Erika Doss), the sainted star is a phenomenon produced by fans pro- voked by unexpected loss.7 Death changes everything. The scales fall away and suddenly we see. What is unique about Clift is not only that his canonization preceded his martyrdom but also that the aptness of religious discourse in describ- ing the Clift phenomenon was acknowledged from the beginning, and not by fans alone. The studios that promoted him; the directors who cast him; the popular press that built, questioned, and reconstructed his public im- age; and even the actor himself repeatedly resorted to this specialized vo- cabulary to describe the eªect he produced. As an actor, Clift was well aware of how he was seen; he was also a canny observer of the position stars oc- cupied in American life. After consulting with members of a religious or- der prior to filming I Confess, Clift noted, “Their passion for saints is like ours for movie stars.”8

a scene and a phrase The idea for this book was sparked by a scene from I Confess. It was not the first time I had seen the film. I had been thinking about the ways fans use films in their lives, remembering them in fragments or coming across them by chance, out of chronological order, and regardless of their origi- nal context. It occurred to me one day that certain unresolved questions about Clift’s character in I Confess (such as why he decides to become a priest when he returns from World War II) could be answered in part by other Clift characters (especially Steve in The Search). Watching I Confess again (a film I never liked), I was impressed by the direction (as usual), struck by Clift’s eªortless grace (as usual), frustrated by the plot (ditto), when suddenly—out of nowhere—everything changed. But how to explain that moment—or my own amazement at the sheer audacity of it? Looking back, it was a simple matter: Clift read a line in a way I did not expect, shifting the scene to a diªerent level. Then he did it again—transforming the scene once more, this time with a single word.

introduction 3 That one brief moment made me want to see everything he had ever done, and read (or reread) anything about him I could get my hands on. I had been a fan of Clift’s before. Twice, in fact. When I was a child, Raintree County (1957) and Suddenly, Last Summer were particular favorites, as I recall. As a young adult, I replaced these with The Heiress, From Here to Eternity, the telephone scene in The Misfits (1961), and Clift’s support- ing turn in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961). Being a fan is a condition that, once experienced and internalized, can lie dormant for years. This is how most of us function. The active phase of fandom takes energy and time. In active pursuit, a fan has to see all the films, read all the books, and be absorbed by the topic night and day. This phase can end abruptly (seeing Lonelyhearts [1959] as a teenager put a sudden end to my desire to see all of Clift’s films). But mostly the active phase peters out as existing materials are exhausted. Revisiting works that have been written about Clift, I was struck with great force by one quotation—Karl Malden’s description, cited above, of Clift (his I Confess costar) as having “the face of a saint.” The more I thought about that phrase, the more complex it became, opening up issues of rep- resentation, of the actor as both object and artist, and of the disjunction between ethereal imagery and earthly biography. Although some aspects of it were at odds with my own experience (stressing the beauty of Clift’s face at the expense of his acting and his voice—both central to that transfor- mative scene in I Confess), Malden’s observation was the first of many ex- amples I was to encounter of people resorting to religious metaphors when struggling to describe the eªect Clift had on them. The use of terms such as adoration or awe in relation to stars is usually dismissed as embarrassing excess, the hyperbole of hysterical fans/fanatics. The very persistence of these terms, however, suggests that religious dis- course oªers fans a unique way to express an important aspect of their ex- perience. Scholars of star studies and fan culture have long acknowledged the religious strain in fandom. In her book James Dean Transfigured, Clau- dia Springer notes that references to rebel figures like Dean, Clift, and Brando are often “imbued with sentiments held in common with religious devotion; mythification, exaltation, ritual, worship.”9 In Star Gazing, Jackie Stacey divides one chapter into sections labeled “Devotion,” “Adoration,” “Worship,” and “Transcendence.”10 Through her correspondence with fe- male fans, Stacey finds that “the feelings of love and adoration towards stars are often represented through the discourse of religious worship,” or what she calls “the language of religious love.”11 While Stacey does not attempt

4 introduction