Elizabeth Taylor’s true love revealed ...and it wasn’t Richard Burton
The screen icon married eight times in a life filled with passion and painkillers. Yet her most enduring, heartbreaking (and unconsummated) ardour was for Hollywood star Montgomery Clift
IT WAS a scene that could have been torn from the pages of a Hollywood script. Her white dress drenched in blood, Elizabeth Taylor cradled Montgomery Clift’s shattered head in her lap. “He was bleeding so much that it looked like his face had been halved,” she recalled. Clift’s wrecked car was wrapped around a telephone pole just yards from Taylor’s home and, as she held him, he began choking to death.
Without hesitation, Taylor reached into his shattered mouth and pulled a handful of broken teeth from his throat, clearing Clift’s airway. “She saved his life, without a doubt,” says Charles Casillo, author of the new book published later this month revealing their enduring secret love.
That crash 65 years ago next Wednesday was a turning point in the long-lasting passion between one of the most beautiful couples in Hollywood history, screen legends who starred together in three films including the classics A Place In The Sun, and Suddenly, Last Summer.
“Taylor married eight times in a life packed with passion, yet her most enduring love was for the man she never married or bedded: Montgomery Clift,” says the author of Elizabeth And Monty. “They were Hollywood’s greatest unrequited love affair. Their love was never consummated, but it shaped both their lives, and endured as long as they lived.
“Taylor loved Monty like no other man, and he loved her more than any other woman he knew. They were soulmates.”
Taylor, who died in March 2011 aged 79, confessed: “We loved each other with all our hearts. Not sexually, but romantically. Monty was my inspiration.”
Secretly gay, Clift admitted: “Liz is the only woman I have ever met who turns me on. She feels like the other half of me.”
Cast as lovers in A Place In The Sun, when she was a voluptuous 17-year-old and Clift 11 years her senior, “you could see them actually falling in love on screen,” says Casillo. “Their chemistry was intense, and it changed the course of their lives.”
Clift was one of Hollywood’s original method actors alongside Marlon Brando and James Dean, earning four Oscar nominations
with films including From Here To Eternity and Judgment At Nuremberg.
“Elizabeth credited Monty with teaching her how to act,” says Casillo. “She knew how to learn her lines, look good and hit her marks, but Monty taught her to inhabit a role with real emotion.
“She fell in love with Monty, and launched a full-out campaign to seduce him, begging him to marry her.
“But Monty was secretly gay, and tormented by having to hide his true self from a society that criminalised homosexuality.
“Monty confessed that he loved her, but he was incapable of a continuing sexual rela
tionship with any woman. His rejection drove Taylor into her disastrous first marriage with playboy hotel heir Nicky Hilton.”
A gambler and mean drunk, Hilton physically abused Taylor. After one attack caused her to miscarry, she filed for divorce. Taylor turned to Clift for a shoulder to cry on, nursing him through his drunken blackouts and depressions as his inner demons drove him to booze and drugs.
The Oscar-winning star of Butterfield 8 and Who’s
Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? tolerated Clift’s male lovers, but confessed: “When I hear of him with a woman, I just go to pieces… because he’s mine.”
Clift’s acting career soared, but his continued rejection of Taylor’s sexual overtures drove her into a second marriage with elegant British star Michael Wilding.
“Wilding was bisexual and offered Taylor all Monty’s sensitivity, but also sexual passion,” says Casillo. “But her love for Monty was undiminished, and they grew closer than ever.” Taylor persuaded Clift to co-star with her in 1956 American Civil War epic Raintree County, but he was often drunk on set, perpetually carrying a bag stuffed with pills and syringes. Half-way through filming in 1956, Clift dined with Taylor at her home high in the Hollywood Hills, departing around midnight dazed by booze and pills, “not feeling too gorgeous”. Moments later he crashed his car, shattering his jaw, right cheekbone and nasal cavity. His upper lip was torn in half, and a severed nerve immobilised half his face. Racing to the scene, Taylor risked her life by crawling into the wreckage through the devastated rear window, holding Monty until an ambulance arrived.
“Monty was robbed of his beauty, which was his fortune and his shield in Hollywood,” says Casillo. “And Elizabeth was forever changed. After Monty’s accident she embraced life with gusto and abandon, as if each day could be her last. But at night images of blood haunted her dreams.”
The studio lost millions as filming on Raintree County was shut down for three months, but when producers tried to hire a replacement for
Clift, Taylor dug in her heels. “She said that would kill Monty,” says Casillo. “She forced the production to wait for his recovery.”
When Clift eventually returned before the cameras, barely healed and tormented by pain, he survived on painkillers, booze, and Taylor’s undying affection.
“They spent hours in each other’s hotel rooms, sometimes sleeping in the same bed,” says Casillo. “On some nights Monty showed up drunk and she would shower him, dry him and tuck him into bed.”
As Taylor struggled to save Clift from his demons they remained intimate friends, through her marriage to abusive film producer Mike Todd, her ill-fated union stealing Debbie Reynolds’ husband, crooner Eddie
Fisher, and her impassioned marriage to Cleopatra co-star Richard Burton.Yet Burton told Monty: “She likes me, but she loves you.”
But as Taylor became Hollywood’s highest-paid star, earning $1million a movie, Clift’s self-destructive addictions saw his career fade.
“He was unemployable, and lost in deep depression,” says Casillo. “No one would insure him for a movie. It was Elizabeth who saved him yet again when no studio would hire Monty.”
WHEN Taylor signed to star in the 1959 drama Suddenly, Last Summer, it was on the condition that Clift played her neurosurgeon lover. But Clift did her no favours, repeatedly forgetting his lines, his face twitching, sweating profusely on camera. Despite this, when producers tried to replace him with Peter O’Toole, Taylor vowed: “If he goes, I go.” Clift stayed.
Seven years later Taylor came to Clift’s rescue again, agreeing to star in 1966 drama Reflections In A Golden Eye only if Clift played her husband. When insurers refused to underwrite him,Taylor put up her $1million salary as guarantee that Clift would complete the film – “an enormous gamble,” says Casillo.
Before filming began Clift went on a week-long booze and drugs bender. On July 23, 1966, he was found dead of a heart attack at his New York home. He was 45. Taylor, told of Clift’s death while filming The Taming Of The Shrew with husband Richard Burton in Italy, sobbed: “I loved him. He was my brother – he was my dearest friend.”
Years later, her ardour was undiminished. “He was so brilliantly talented, and such a tragic figure,” said Taylor. “Oh, I loved him. And I still do.”
Adds Casillo: “Friends say that Elizabeth’s campaigning for Aids research was inspired by her love of Monty. She loved many men, but her love for Monty was never equalled.”
‘They spent hours in each other’s hotel rooms, sometimes sleeping in the same bed’
UNTOLD STORY: Author Charles Casillo
●● Elizabeth and Monty: The Untold Story Of Their Intimate Friendship, by Charles Casillo is published by Kensington Books on May 25