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Saying hello -- and goodbye -- to Monty

Montgomery Clift, one of the biggest Hollywood stars of the 1950s, was in a 1957 car crash that left the left side of his face paralyzed. After the accident, Patricia Bosworth writes in her 1984 biography of him, his years of drinking and pill taking marked "the longest suicide in Hollywood history." He died of a heart attack in 1966 at the age of 45.

"I had been madly in love with Montgomery Clift when I was a teenager, and my father had served as his lawyer," she said. "I remember coming home from school one day when I was 14, and there he was, lying on our living room floor talking a mile a minute with my father. He had dark, burning eyes. I had never seen such a beautiful young man. He was at the height of his fame. When we were introduced, I curtseyed, and he hooted with laughter and curtseyed back." In fact, when he left, she was so starstruck that she took his cigarette butt out of the ashtray and wrapped it in plastic. "I still have it," she laughed.

The last time Bosworth saw Clift was at a party at the Actor's Studio in Hollywood. "Suddenly, this ravaged-looking man came over to me and said, 'Patty? Patty? It's Montgomery Clift,'" she recalled. "At first, I didn't recognize him because he had been in that terrible car accident, and his face had been destroyed. We talked a bit, and suddenly he curtseyed to me. Then he was gone."

30 March 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations