San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
A loyal friendship
Elizabeth Taylor-Montgomery Clift bond is still fascinating
George (Montgomery Clift) is an upwardly scrambling young man, embarrassed by his origins, dipping a toe in wealth’s pool. Angela (Elizabeth Taylor) is the rich, indolent young woman who strolls into the billiard room just as George sinks a shot. They gaze at each other with perfect helplessness, and why not? They’re two of the most beautiful people ever to share a screen.
The origins of their story lie in Theodore Dreiser’s “An American Tragedy,” which makes the unassailable point that people do bad things for money and status. The movie version, “A Place in the Sun,” does to that social critique what movies do to social critiques — and makes us complicit. We cease to care what crimes George has to commit to keep Angela because, having seen them together, we only want them to stay that way. No two lovers have ever hungered for each other more, and no one else deserves them.
Taylor and Clift were both ascendant actors when they were cast, but their trajectories couldn’t have been more different. She was an MGM child star, trained from an early age to perform on cue. He was a child of the New York theater, a searching, deeply intelligent talent who, along with Marlon Brando, helped revolutionize American acting by turning it inward. His example inspired Taylor to deepen her own game, but, as Charles Casillo’s touching “Elizabeth and Monty” underscores, theirs was a relationship of equals. Not a screen romance, exactly — he was gay, and she was ardently and serially heterosexual — but the longing was mutual, and that truth still shines out from those long-ago close-ups.
In the years after “A Place in the
Sun,” their careers and friendship would intertwine, but their lives would converge most unforgettably around tragedy. On the night of May 12, 1956, Clift, driving home from a party at
By Charles Casillo
Kensington 352 pages, $27
Taylor’s, wrapped his car around a utility pole and smashed his head into the dashboard. Taylor rushed to his aid, and she pulled two broken teeth from his throat to keep him from choking. But the face, with its crushed bones and severed nerves, could only be reassembled, not restored.
The Clift who emerged from that wreck was a disquieting sight: an aged sarcophagus of his former self, with a glint of terror in the eyes. In movies such as “The Misfits” and “Judgment at Nuremberg,” we can still feel him in touch with his art, but the loss of his beauty and expressive power and the permanent damage to his spine sent him into a slow death spiral of alcohol and painkillers, supplemented at intervals with heroin and self-injected liquid codeine. (Marilyn Monroe, a “Misfits” co-star, allegedly said he was “the only person I know who is in worse shape than I am.”) As his addictions deepened, he became both less employable and more alienating. Work and hope fell away, and in 1966, he died of a massive heart attack in his Manhattan
townhouse. He was 45.
It’s a sad and brutal story, still compelling after all these years, and if I hold any reservations about the equal billing in Charles Casillo’s title, it’s that it demands equal time for Taylor’s amply documented scandals. Like a million gossip columnists before him, Casillo weaves through the archipelago of Liz’s lovers and husbands and, on occasion, lapses into cheesy scene-setting. (“‘Damn you, Monty!’ she retorted angrily. ‘You said you would always be close with me! That you’d always be my best friend!’ With that, she slammed down the phone.”) But if you persevere through the hyperbole and repetition, you’ll be rewarded with a new respect for Taylor, who was as loyal and doughty a friend in life as any she played on screen.
The night of Clift’s accident, she cradled his bleeding head until the ambulance came for him. Then she coaxed him back, still racked with pain, to the film set of “Raintree County.” She insisted that he be cast with her in “Suddenly Last Summer,” threatening to quit if the director replaced him with another actor. When producers balked at hiring such an unhealthy specimen to be her co-star in “Reflections in a Golden Eye,” she put up her own milliondollar salary as insurance. (The movie was filmed after his death with Brando in the Clift role.) “When Elizabeth loved,” Casillo writes, “she loved big.”
Casillo makes a persuasive case that Taylor’s gutsy, unapologetic AIDS activism, dating to the earliest years of the epidemic, was inspired by Clift’s memory. The final testament belongs to Taylor herself, who, shortly before her own death, recorded a moving tribute for Turner Classic Movies: “I miss talking to him, exchanging thoughts and ideas. I miss laughing together and doing silly things together. He was the best friend I’ve ever had — and I think he would say the same about me. … Oh, I loved him! And I still do.”