“Elizabeth Taylor Loved Him For 45 Years. He Could Never Love Her Back.”

“Elizabeth Taylor Loved Him For 45 Years. He Could Never Love Her Back.” 

The dinner party was ending. It was May 12th, 1956, and the guests were collecting their coats in the hallway of Elizabeth Taylor’s house in Belair, exchanging the ordinary pleasantries that marked the end of an ordinary evening when Montgomery Clif got into his car and drove it into a telephone pole 100 yards down the road.

 Taylor was the first person to reach him. She climbed into the wreckage before the other guests had registered what the sound was, and what she found when she got there was not something she would ever fully describe in public. Though the people she described it to in private were consistent in one detail. She did not freeze, did not wait, did not call for someone else to handle it.

She acted. She reached into his mouth with her own hands and removed the teeth that were blocking his airway, and she stayed with him on the pavement until the ambulance arrived, and her dress, by the time it was over, was soaked through with his blood. Montgomery Clif would survive that night.

 But the man who drove away from that dinner party and the man who was reconstructed by surgeons in the weeks that followed were not the same person. And Elizabeth Taylor, who understood this better than anyone, would spend the next 10 years trying to save someone she already knew could not be saved. If you are new to this channel, subscribe now.

 What you are about to hear is not the version of this story that has been told before. To understand what that night on the pavement meant, you have to understand what Montgomery Clif was to Elizabeth Taylor before the crash. Because the relationship between them did not begin with catastrophe. It began 6 years earlier on a film set with a 29-year-old actor who had already decided before the first day of shooting that he was not going to be impressed by her.

 It was 1950. The film was A Place in the Sun, directed by George Stevens, a production that would go on to win six Academy Awards and be considered one of the finest American films of its decade. Taylor was 18 years old. She had been famous since she was 12. She had grown up inside the studio system at MGM, which meant she had grown up inside a machine that had opinions about everything.

 what she wore, who she was seen with, what she said in interviews, how she was to be understood by the public that had been purchasing tickets to watch her since she was a child in National Velvet. She was accustomed to being managed. She was also, by the time she arrived on that set, acutely aware of what her beauty did to people, and she had developed a weary fluency in navigating a world in which most people she encountered had already decided who she was before she opened her mouth.

Montgomery Clif had not decided who she was. This was for Taylor genuinely unusual. Clif had come to Hollywood from Broadway, carrying with him the particular self-possession of someone formed by a discipline the film industry regarded with a mixture of respect and suspicion. He was a method actor trained in an approach to performance that prioritized interior truth over exterior effect that required its practitioners to locate within themselves the emotional reality they were asked to portray rather than simply simulate its

surface. He was considered by the people who knew his work on stage and in his first two films, The Search and Red River, both released in 1948, to be one of the most technically gifted actors of his generation, a name spoken in the same breath as Marlon Brando by critics who were watching American acting transform itself in real time.

 He was also by the spring of 1950 already drinking heavily and already managing with exhausted precision the most fundamental fact of his private life. He was a gay man working in an industry that would have destroyed his career without hesitation if that fact became public. The performance required by his professional survival was in the deepest sense incompatible with everything his training had taught him to value.

Elizabeth Taylor knew he was gay within days of meeting him. She received this knowledge with the matter-of-fact equinimity of someone for whom it changed nothing essential. What she was not prepared for was the effect of being seen by someone who had no stake in performing attraction. Clif looked at Taylor the way no man in her experience had ever looked at her, with a quality of attention that was interested but not inquisitive, warm but not pursuing, genuinely curious about who she was rather than what she represented. He

treated her as a colleague rather than an object. And the effect of this on an 18-year-old woman who had spent six years being systematically commodified by one of the most powerful studios in the world was by her own later account almost disorienting. They began talking between takes.

 Then they began talking after shooting ended. Then they began talking on the telephone at night. Conversations that went on for hours and covered territory that neither of them was accustomed to covering with anyone else. Clif taught Taylor about acting, about the difference between performing an emotion and allowing yourself to feel it in front of a camera.

 Taylor, who had been acting since childhood, but had never been formally trained, absorbed this with the attentiveness of someone who had always known what she was doing was more intuitive than it needed to be. George Stevens, watching them work together, later said that Taylor matured more as an actress during the months of A Place in the Sun than in the entire preceding decade of her career.

 What Taylor gave Clift in return was harder to name, but those who observed them closely described something that went beyond ordinary friendship. Clift, who had learned to present to the world a version of himself carefully calibrated to conceal the parts that would not be accepted, became, in Taylor’s company, visibly less armored.

 She did not require anything from him he could not honestly give. By the time the film wrapped in the autumn of 1950, they had established something that would endure for the rest of Clif’s life. They spoke on the telephone constantly, regardless of where either of them happened to be. They visited each other between productions.

 When Taylor was going through the first of what would eventually become eight marriages, she called Clif. When Clif was in the specific darkness that preceded his worst periods of drinking, he called Taylor. He called her Bessie May, a name he had given her in the early weeks of their friendship that no one else ever used.

 A private designation that marked a territory no one else was permitted to enter. The industry watched this friendship with the alertness it applied to anything it could not immediately categorize. Hollywood in the early 1950s did not have a comfortable framework for a relationship between a beautiful young woman and a celebrated actor that was clearly intense, clearly central to both of their lives and clearly not sexual.

The gossip columns attempted to suggest something more romantic because romance was a category the industry understood and could package. But the people who actually knew them were not confused. They were watching something rarer and more durable than romance. They were watching two people who had decided to tell each other the truth.

 The first years of the decade were by external measures years of professional ascent for both of them. But the drinking was worsening. The pills were multiplying. The people closest to Clif watched the acceleration of something that felt less like a habit and more like an intention, less like excess, and more like an argument he was making with himself about what he deserved. Taylor tried.

This is documented not in her own public statements, which were consistently protective of his memory, but in the accounts of people who were present during those years. They described Taylor calling Clif at hours that suggested she had been awake worrying, showing up unannounced at his apartment on East 61st Street in New York when he had stopped returning calls, sitting with him in the specific silence of someone who has run out of words and decided that presence is the only thing left to offer. She could not fix what

was wrong with him. She knew it. She came anyway. And then came the night of May 12th, 1956, and everything that had been building arrived at a physical conclusion on a road in Bair. The question that had been theoretical became suddenly and irrevocably concrete. What Elizabeth Taylor would do when the person she loved most was broken.

 The surgeons who reconstructed Cliff’s face did extraordinary work by the standards of the time. But the damage was not fully reversible, and the result was a face that was recognizably his and yet perceptibly altered. The symmetry disrupted in ways that the camera now registered with merciless fidelity. The chronic pain from his injuries required medication.

 The medication interacted with the alcohol he was already consuming in quantities his body could not sustain. Hollywood’s patients began to run out. Studios that had once competed for him began to hesitate. The industry has a highly developed mechanism for managing the decline of people it once found valuable involving a gradual withdrawal of opportunity disguised as concern.

 And this mechanism was beginning to operate in relation to Montgomery Clif by the late 1950s. Elizabeth Taylor watched it operating and decided with a directness entirely characteristic of her that she was not going to participate in it. In 1959, Taylor was offered the lead in Suddenly Last Summer, directed by Joseph El Manowitz with a screenplay adapted from a Tennessee Williams play.

 The film was to co-star Katherine Heppern, and its subject matter, repression, violence, the destruction of a man whose difference makes him a target, carried a weight that was not lost on anyone who knew the circumstances surrounding its casting. The studio, Colombia Pictures, had a list of actors it considered appropriate for the male lead.

Montgomery Clif was not on that list. The studio said he was uninsurable given his recent history that his casting created too much production risk. Taylor told the studio that if Clif was not cast, she would not do the film. She was by this point the most bankable actress in the world.

 The studio cast Montgomery Clif. She used her position not to advance her own interests, but to protect someone who could not protect himself with the blunt force that is only available to someone who has calculated her leverage precisely and decided to spend it. Clif knew what she had done. He was not a man who expressed gratitude easily, but the people who observed them during that production described equality in how he looked at Taylor that had the texture of someone looking at the one person in the world he was completely certain of. The 1960s

arrived and the situation did not improve. Clif made the Misfits in 1961 alongside Clark Gable and Marilyn Monroe directed by John Houston from an Arthur Miller screenplay and his performance was considered by many who studied his work carefully to be extraordinary. The camera finding in his changed face something a perfect face might not have been able to offer a quality of exposed vulnerability that felt less like performance than like revelation.

 But he arrived and departed from the Nevada desert in a condition that left his co-stars and director unsettled. Gable would die of a heart attack two weeks after filming concluded. Monroe was in crisis and Clif was 40 years old, already carrying more than his body could sustain, already running on a reserve that everyone around him knew was close to empty.

 He made Freud the Secret Passion in 1962, a production that became notorious within the industry for the difficulties his deteriorating condition created on set. That film marked in practical terms the end of his ability to work within the studio system. They had reached the point in a friendship of this depth and duration at which both people know certain things that neither is willing to say directly, not because they lack the courage, but because saying them would change nothing except the quality of the time they had left. Taylor was

navigating her own extraordinary tumult during these years. The Cleopatra production, Richard Burton, the Vatican’s condemnation, the dissolution of her marriage to Eddie Fischer, the beginning of her first marriage to Burden in 1964. Her life between 1961 and 1965 was generating more news than any other single life in the world.

 And through all of it, she continued to maintain her connection with Clif, continued to call, continued to visit, continued to be the person he knew he could reach when the darkness became specific. The last film Montgomery Clif completed was The Defector, filmed in Europe in 1966. By the time it was made, he was 44 years old and visibly diminished, carrying in his body the accumulated cost of the years since the accident.

 He died on July 23rd, 1966 in his apartment on East 61st Street in New York. He was 45 years old. The cause was a coronary artery disease. He was found by his housekeeper. He had been alone. Taylor received the news while she was working. The people who were present in the hours that followed describe her in consistent terms. She stopped.

 She did not perform grief for an audience. She went somewhere private and she stayed there. And when she emerged, she did not discuss what had happened in the way those around her might have expected because what had happened was not something that fit the available categories for public response. She did not attend his funeral.

 She carried the guilt of that absence for years and said so explicitly in the careful way she had of occasionally letting something through when the distance of time made it slightly safer. 23 years after his death, an interviewer mentioned Clif’s name and she went quiet. When she finally spoke, she said seven words. He knew more about me than anyone.

 Then she changed the subject and never returned to it. What she meant by those seven words is not mysterious. Clif had known her because he had not needed her to be anything other than what she was. He had not required the performance. He had seen the woman behind the face that was photographed more times than any other face in the history of American cinema.

And he had found her interesting not because of that face, but in spite of the overwhelming fact of it. Elizabeth Taylor spent her entire adult life in an environment designed to reduce people to their most marketable attributes. And within that environment, Clif had been the one consistent presence who refused to do that. He treated her as a person.

In the world she inhabited, this was extraordinary. The friendship between Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clif does not fit the stories Hollywood knows how to tell, which is probably why it has never been told quite right. It was not a romance, and it was not a tragedy of unrequited love, which is how it has sometimes been framed.

 That framing misses what was actually there, which was something more durable and more unusual. Two people who had found in each other a kind of recognition that neither could find anywhere else. Taylor, in her eight marriages and her long and exhausting public life, returned to Clif again and again, not because she wanted something she could not have, but because he gave her something nobody else had ever given her, and that after his death, nobody ever would again. He knew who she was.

Not the star, not the face, not the scandal, the person, the woman who came running down the hill in Belair in her white dress and climbed into the wreckage without hesitating. And perhaps that is the real story. Not what they were to each other while he was alive, which was extraordinary enough, but what his absence created in the 45 years that followed, a space that no marriage, no fame, no film, no amount of diamonds could fill. He had seen her clearly.

 He had known from the very first weeks on that set in 1950 that the face and the woman behind it were two entirely different things and he had chosen without hesitation to be interested in the second. She spent the rest of her life in a world that mostly could not tell them apart and when he was gone she was never entirely seen again.