Sunny Boy

By Gerald Clarke

MONTGOMERY CLIFT by Patricia Bosworth Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 438 pages; $12.95

Before there was Pacino, or De Niro, or Nicholson--before there were James Dean and Marlon Brando even --there was Montgomery Clift. Bursting onto the screen in Red River and The Search (both 1948), Clift set the standard for a whole generation of actors. He was intense and hypnotically alive. His lines seemed to come not from the script but from the gut, and he seemed dangerously unpredictable, like a high-tension wire torn from its moorings. For the better part of a decade, Clift was the star producers sought first. But then, in the longest suicide in Hollywood history, he crushed both life and career under an avalanche of booze, pills and inexplicable anguish. He was only 45 when he died in 1966, but most people, himself included, had already attended his funeral a dozen times before.

It is a sad but fascinating story, and Patricia Bosworth, who received the cooperation of Clift's family, has turned it into compelling reading. The cooperation was necessary because Clift's problems, to a unique and peculiar degree, began long before he was born. His mother, whom everyone called Sunny, was an abandoned child who grew up in the family of a drunken steelworker in Germantown, Pa. Only when she was 18 did she learn from the doctor who delivered her that she was descended from two of the most illustrious families of America, the Blairs of Maryland and the Andersons of Virginia. One grandfather had been Lincoln's Postmaster General; the other had commanded Union forces at Fort Sumter. Her unmarried mother, Maria Anderson, had given her out for adoption, with a promise some day to come back for her. She never did, and Sunny spent most of her life seeking a claim to lineage.

When her own children were born, Sunny raised them as if they were exiled royalty. Her husband, a prosperous Chicago banker, allowed her every whim; Sunny and the children--Brooks, Monty and Monty's twin sister Ethel--spent most of their early years at Eastern resorts or in Europe. The kids were privately tutored, and Sunny prevented them from mixing with anyone outside the family. She refused to lower her expectations even after Bill Clift lost his money in the Depression. Though the Clifts moved to a one-room apartment in Greenwich Village, the sheets were made of silk, and the table was always set with sterling silver.

Monty's talent for acting (or pretending) became apparent when he was only twelve or 13, and that, coupled with his unusually handsome face, soon put him in Broadway shows. By 1935 he was in the Cole Porter musical Jubilee; five years later, at 19, he was acting with the Lunts in There Shall Be No Night. Alfred and Lynn taught him his craft, and almost adopted him. "From your real mother and father," was the way they signed a picture for him.

Hollywood summoned the actor early on. L.B. Mayer, the head of MGM. supposedly broke down in tears when Clift said: "Your scripts are bad, Mr. Mayer, and I don't want to be typecast --that'd ruin me." Finally, when he did go West for Red River, it was on his own, precedent-setting terms, and he did not have to sign the standard seven-year contract that had hobbled so many earlier stars. His best parts came in the early '50s, in A Place in the Sun with his friend Elizabeth Taylor, and in From Here to Eternity.

Cliffs only rival was Brando, who also symbolized the outsider in those pre-hippie, pre-beatnik days. When the two of them were making The Young Lions, Brando, who was playing a Nazi officer, had the idea that in his death scene he should roll dramatically down a hill and land with his arms outstretched like Christ's. "He does that, I'll walk off the picture," Monty fumed, afraid that Brando would steal the movie. In the printed scene, Brando is simply shot in the head by Dean Martin. Later, however, during Monty's dark days, Brando came to him and tried to help him. "I've always hated you because I want to be better than you," Brando admitted, "but you're better than me--you're my touchstone, my challenge, and I want you and I to go on challenging each other."

But Monty was no longer up to challenges of any kind. Sometime during the early '50s, at the very moment of his triumph, he became addicted to drink and drugs. After a catastrophic Hollywood car crash in 1956, which left his face an awkward mask, his decline became a slide. Bosworth seems to pin much of the problem on guilt over his homosexuality -- or bisexuality, as she maintains it was -- but the evidence is totally unpersuasive. Good as her book is, it offers no real reason for Monty's down fall, which was as mysterious as his talent. In one of his last illnesses Clift was visited by his mother, cheery as always. "Oh Ma," he finally cried, "give me your strength. I need your strength." That was the one thing Sunny could not give him, then or ever.

-- Gerald Clarke

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