MONTGOMERY CLIFT His Long Road to HAPPINESS

THE COMPLICATED AND GIFTED ACTOR TRIED TO LIVE HIS LIFE WITH HONOR AND HONESTY

-  LOUISE A. BARILE

Fans waited for two hours outside St. James’ Church on Madison Avenue to say goodbye to Montgomery Clift. Huge bouquets of flowers, including some from Elizabeth Taylor, flanked his coffin at the simple service in New York City, where his family, close friends, and celebrities like Lauren Bacall bowed their heads in prayer.

In the decades since Monty’s death in 1966, his life has been viewed as another great Hollywood tragedy. Certainly, the loss of the four time Oscar nominee at 45 is terrible, but it’s not his whole story. “The thing about Monty was he wasn’t anything like people thought he was,” said Jack Larson, who played Jimmy Olsen on TV’s The Adventures of Superman. “He loved to have fun. He had a great sense of humor. As a person, he was nearer to Jerry Lewis on screen than he was to Montgomery Clift.”

Monty also wasn’t as tortured as his myth has suggested. “Most people think of him as a self-loathing homosexual who destroyed his life from guilt over being gay. That is a big misconception,” Charles Casillo, author of Elizabeth and Monty: The Untold Story of Their Intimate Friendship, tells Closer. “The thing that Monty did hate was having to conceal parts of his true self.”

HIS OWN ROAD