Montgomery Clift, Queer Star

4. The 1956 Car Accident and a New Queerness

four The 1956 Car Accident and a New Queerness Trauma and Fragmentation: The Accident and Raintree County Montgomery Clift turned down every film role he was offered between 1953 and 1956; while shunning Hollywood, he chose instead to return to Broadway in 1954, producing and starring in a controversial version of Chekhov’s The Seagull. The film that finally brought him back to the big screen was Raintree County, a sweeping Civil War drama in which he played the protagonist, John Shawnessy. The reasons why Clift accepted the role remain uncertain: he had strong misgivings about the script, and famously hated the film, which he described as “a monumental bore” and “a soap opera with elephantiasis.” Clift’s biographers tentatively cite financial need as one of his motives in making Raintree County, as well as his desire to work again with Elizabeth Taylor, who costarred in the film as John’s unhappy wife, Susanna.1 Whatever the reasons, Clift started shooting Raintree County in April 1956; nearly half of it had been completed when, the night of May 12, Clift left a dinner party at Elizabeth Taylor’s, drove down the Beverly Hills canyons and, allegedly half asleep, crashed his car into a telephone post. chapter 4 122 Endless speculations surround Clift’s alcohol and drug intake that night, even though some of those present—Taylor’s husband Michael Wilding, Rock Hudson, and Clift’s close friend and fellow actor Kevin McCarthy—always insisted that he had hardly drunk and was completely lucid. The most supported account of the events, and the one repeated by Clift himself,2 is that he was simply exhausted, already weeks into an intensive shooting schedule that saw him act in almost every scene; he was also suffering from lack of sleep.3 What is certain is that Kevin McCarthy was the first to arrive on the spot of the accident , as he had been driving ahead of Clift and had suddenly noticed his disappearance from his rearview mirror; he found Clift’s Chevrolet “crumpled up like an accordion against a telephone pole.”4 Unable to get inside the car, whose doors had jammed shut, McCarthy ran back to Taylor’s house for help; when they finally managed to get to Clift, still trapped inside, they found him breathing but only semiconscious, bleeding very heavily and visibly choking on something. A steely nerved Elizabeth Taylor stuck her hand inside his throat, to find that he was suffocating on two of his own teeth, knocked down there by the blow; she removed them, thus probably saving his life. It took the ambulance half an hour to arrive on the scene, yet it was only a matter of minutes before a storm of paparazzi descended on it, alerted through the gruesome system of celebrity reporters who loitered around police stations waiting for emergency calls.5 Clift, however, was hidden from view by Hudson, McCarthy, and Wilding, who formed a barrier around him to stop the journalists from taking photos; as a result, no public record of Clift’s battered face and body ever existed. Yet if no images of Clift himself were available, the mangled appearance of his car was; as Amy Lawrence perceptively comments, “the accident itself was traumatically visible through news photos of the car, the wreckage standing in for Clift’s ravaged body.”6 This dramatic visual evidence had gone around the world by the following morning, thanks to UPI and Wide World news agencies, in a spectacularly publicized scoop.7 The physical damage Clift had suffered was indeed huge, and his blood loss alone had nearly killed him; yet incredibly, no part of his body was severely affected aside from his face, which had borne the full impact of the crash. His left cheek was heavily lacerated, and both jaws were broken in four parts; his nose was broken in two, and the sinus The 1956 Car Accident and a New Queerness 123 was fractured. One of his upper cheekbones was cracked; his mouth was virtually ripped apart, with a hole through his upper lip. Teeth were missing. Remarkably, the reconstruction of this wrecked face would involve no plastic surgery; Clift’s left cheek was instead wired, the broken bones were reassembled, and his mouth was, somewhat messily, sown back into place. The accident’s toll caused Montgomery Clift untold physical and mental pain, as well as triggering long-term changes...