Dictated that he had to die young, handsome, and without asking many questions to be a legend, like Marilyn Monroe or James Dean, but Montgomery Clift insisted on surviving a terrible accident to resurface as a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, within a riddle. In 1956, on a break from filming "The Tree of Life," he drove his car into a telephone pole, drunk after a night out at his friend Elizabeth Taylor's house. It was she who found him, with a split lip, a broken and crushed nose, a dislocated jaw, and a torn left cheek. Also who pulled out the teeth that were stuck in his throat and prevented him from breathing.
She saved his life but was never able to rescue him from himself, the victim of a spiral of self-destruction that is considered the longest suicide in Hollywood, another of the clichés with which that cursed generation is romanticized.
I wanted to return to this text to give it another ending. We are heirs to that idea of the cursed artist, of a vision of the creator as someone tormented and lonely; I believe that a creator is someone celebratory, someone who lives in amazement, someone who has empathy with goodness, with humanity", says the theater poet Alberto Conejero, who rewrites one of his first texts to give it a new outcome, more optimistic, in 'How can I not be Montgomery Clift?' (Two Mustaches), an ode to the fallen artist, to the talent in the shadow of ghosts, and to the actor, who turned against the clichés. "Beyond the love of celluloid, of the purple of fame, it is the story of a human being trying to get ahead, to survive, to save his vocation," explains the playwright in an interview.
Cinema was Clift's doom and redemption. The actor, who debuted as John Wayne's son in 'Red River' (1946), achieved four Oscar nominations in just over a decade, an award that he always resisted. He otherwise had it all, but only in appearance. The accident changed his face, unrecognizable after the surgeries that tried to rebuild his attractiveness, but also his career, allowing him to aspire to a cinema that was forbidden to the handsome. «That contradiction accompanied him until the end of his days: he lived with the ghost of that beautiful young man who ended up forever in the traffic accident but, on the other hand, he freed himself from that mask and accessed papers that he might never have accessed. arrived if he had continued in the cliché or a prisoner of that beauty, ”says the playwright.
The tyranny of beauty
A beauty from which he tried to escape by clinging to the Stanislavski method, by which he memorized a mass in Latin for his role as a tortured priest in 'I Confess' and rehearsed his famous monologue for 24 hours in 'From Here to Eternity', which it gave him another nomination but not the statuette. In the form of a theatrical monologue, Conejero puts the actor in front of his own mirror to reflect on his traumas, his S-, but also on the broken toy factory that was the golden Hollywood, where you only got to Olympus if you lived fast and didn't think too much. and, above all, if you followed the rules of a game to which the interpreter, "unruly", never lent himself. «It is very difficult to escape from what others think we should be. Sometimes the gaze becomes a narrow cage and it is very difficult to break or widen those walls of the gaze of others. It happened to Montgomery Clift but also to Marilyn Monroe, who throughout her short life tried to show that beyond that presence and that aura, because they were absolutely magnetic people, there were human beings with intellectual concerns”, observes the author.
Both Marilyn and Montgomery were the masks that Norma Jean and Edward put on to achieve success and admiration, although the price they paid was too high. "There's a line from Chekhov's 'The Seagull' that Clift is rehearsing in the book all the time that says, 'When I think of my vocation, I don't fear life. He tried his whole life not to pay the price that was demanded of him. There is a reflection that not everything is for fame because one can burn until consumed. I don't think it makes sense," suggests Conejero.
Marilyn Monroe's mask
Other voices parade through the "populated solitude" of Montgomery Clift, such as that of his friend Elizabeth Taylor, with whom he formed an "alliance of the fragile", or Marlon Brando, also born in Omaha with his own traumas but who did achieve success. who dodged the actor of 'Winners or Losers?', a film in which he had to improvise due to the difficulty in remembering the script due to his alcohol abuse. «Clift was wrong to think that they were not going to hire him after the years, lost the beauty, because of that idea that Hollywood used and threw away these young beauties. Marlon Brando is the opposite example. In the book Clift tells him: “Do you think they're going to hire you when you're fat when you're bald? They will throw you in the face that you are no longer the beautiful animal of 'A Streetcar Named Desire'”. All these questions show his mistake because Brando agreed to splendid roles already in his maturity and with his body punished. They had a rivalry with those that are sometimes artistically necessary to grow and grow. It was one of those rare friendships in which admiration and envy go hand in hand", affirms the playwright, who contrasts the two actors precisely because Brando conquered freedom, while Clift, "who tried to free himself from that yoke, did not could."
Despite their deaths, many tragic, and others in life, time makes actors survive because they have a talent that never ends. Sometimes unfairly, they are buried in oblivion. Others resist. Sometimes it's just a matter of distance, of perspective. «It is a beautiful and terrible sieve that of time because the names are disappearing. How many stars were and now we have forgotten them. Some survive and continue to accompany us because their brilliance was almost infinite. Time allows us to sift, to distinguish. They are arts that have something ephemeral and there is an invisible agreement generation after generation to save something from all that legacy, "says Alberto Conejero. And so, even far from John Ford's West, "when the legend becomes fact, the legend is written about."
