Pink Triangle: The Feuds and Private Lives of Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Famous Members of Their Entourages (Blood Moon's Babylon Series) (23 page)

Tennessee later told Windham, “Perhaps Monty’s greatest acting challenge was to pretend passion with Guthrie.”

“I want to play Hadrian as incandescent, mysterious,” Monty told Tennessee.” Deeply devoted to his self-image as a Method actor, he annoyed the rest of the cast because he kept changing his blocking on stage.

Years later, Tennessee told his friend, author Dotson Rader, that he was “beguiled by the very feminine beauty of Monty. He was the loveliest man in the world then, and he was considered the finest young American actor until he threw it all away. I think Marlon Brando broke his heart. I was mesmerized by his eyes. They were like a wounded bird’s. People say he liked to go into the back rooms of gay bars and pass out and anybody could fuck him.”

Tennessee found Monty “up-jittery, overly enthusiastic. I visited him backstage in his dressing room. He was in his underwear. Such a hirsute creature. His next play should be called
The Hairy Ape.”

“At first, he didn’t like me,” Tennessee continued, “because I was open about my homosexuality, and he was in the closet. But he eventually warmed to me because he respected the arts, especially theater. After seeing
The Glass Menagerie
, he became convinced that I was an important new voice in the theater. Actually, we were both aware that
You Touched Me! [which opened on September 25, 1945]
was only produced to capitalize off my success with
Menagerie
, which had opened in April of 1945, just two blocks to the north. It had become the hottest ticket in town.”

[For the most part
, You Touched Me!
was negatively reviewed and suffered unfavorable comparisons to
The Glass Menagerie.
Lewis Nichols, writing in
The New York Times,
claimed that the play “is not an improvement nor an advancement for Tennessee Williams; in fact, it represents a step down.” Nichols attacked the play for being “verbose and filled with lofty and long speeches. It needs editing as well as cohesion. Finally, it does not have the warm acting which glossed over the imperfections of
The Glass Menagerie,
for the members of its cast play in several styles. It is, in short, a disappointment.”]

One strange night, Clift arrived drunk and drugged at Tennessee’s apartment at one o’clock in the morning. He had an unusual demand. “I want you to take me to the inner circle of hell. Once there, I want to experience depravity, debauchery, degradation, the three Ds. I’ve been a puritan too long, so very disciplined, but now I want to release my inner demons, my darkest desires.”

“That’s a pretty tall order for me to fulfill,” Tennessee said, “But come on in.”

As Tennessee later told Windham, “In bed, I found Monty passive, tender, not very aggressive. At the time I was a raging sex maniac, so I took advantage of him, even though he is not my physical type. He had a great embarrassment over his small penis, but I was never known as a Size Queen. His feeling of inadequacy was one of the secret tragedies of his life.”

“Monty and I ended up admiring each other’s talents, not necessarily our sexual prowess,” Tennessee said.

“In private,” Tennessee continued, “Monty would sometimes display a delicate femininity, but on stage in his role as the R.A.F. pilot he personified virility rather like ‘The Gentleman Caller’ in
The Glass Menagerie
. He exuded male sensuality without the vulgar display of it—say, Brando’s portrayal of Stanley Kowalski in
A Streetcar Named Desire.”

One night over dinner, Monty confided to Tennessee that he’d escaped the draft because of “this dysentery I can’t get rid of. Some bug in Mexico that lives forever in me. Actually, I was scared shitless of going to war and getting my face blown off. As an actor, I say everything with my face, more than with my body.”

“It was ironic that he said that,” Tennessee said. “Later, he’d have that horrible automobile accident when his face had to be almost totally rebuilt. He ended up with some plastic mask created by doctors, as anyone who has seen the closing reels of
Suddenly Last Summer
can testify.”

Monty’s performance in
You Touched Me!
would have a great impact on his film career. Director Howard Hawks came to see it, and decided that he would be ideal cast as the foster son of John Wayne in
Red River
, released in 1948.

“I saw Monty after he’d shot the movie for Hawks,” Tennessee recalled. “He told me that Wayne had denounced him as a fag. But one drunken night Wayne grabbed him and kissed him, sticking his tongue down Monty’s throat. Fortunately, John Ireland, who played a minor role in that film, was more delectable.”

“It was the mating of two opposites,” Monty said. “I was called Princess Tiny Meat, and John Ireland is known to have the largest cock in Hollywood.”

In the early 1950s, after he’d co-starred in
A Place in the Sun
with Elizabeth Taylor, Monty optioned
You Touched Me!
for the screen. Both Tennessee and Windham were surprised, eventually learning that Monty had wanted to function as both the producer and the star in whatever film adaptation of
You Touched Me!
was eventually crafted. As part of his plan to expand his career into that of a Hollywood producer, Monty joined with his best friend and fellow actor, Kevin McCarthy, brother of the famous author, Mary McCarthy, to write the screen play.

During their struggles with the script, Tennessee visited Monty at his apartment. “I was shocked, and few things ever shock me. Both Kevin and Monty were sitting nude on the living room floor eating raw meat with blood running down their chins. I thought they were cannibals.”

“Monty explained that raw meat made him more creative, and that he had persuaded Kevin to try it,” Tennessee said. “Kevin was presumably straight, but it was obvious that Monty was madly in love with him. I also learned that whenever Kevin came to visit Monty, his host insisted that Kevin remove all his clothing.”

“I read some of their screenplay,” Tennessee said, “and I was kind in my remarks. It was awful. They had such lines as, ‘Would you like to stroke my pussy?’”

The McCarthy/Clift screenplay version of
You Touched Me!
was sent to every major studio in Hollywood, including 20
^th
Century Fox and MGM, but no producer went for it.

In later years, Tennessee saw less and less of Monty, as both Gore and Truman assumed larger roles in the actor’s life.

Tennessee did meet with him in 1955 to see if Monty wanted to play the closeted homosexual character of Brick in
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
on Broadway. Monty turned it down, the role going to Ben Gazzara instead.

When Paul Newman interpreted Brick on the screen opposite Elizabeth Taylor, Tennessee met with Monty one night in a small tavern in the Manhattan’s theater district. “I noticed that many critics are calling Newman ‘the new Montgomery Clift’ for his performance as Brick. All that acclaim and adulation could have been yours.”

“What are you trying to do to me? Monty asked. “Increase my liquor consumption and pill popping over my regrets in life?”

Tennessee, from afar, heard of Monty’s journey into self-destruction—his car accident, his reliance on drugs, his struggles during his involvement in the filming of Tennessee’s play,
Suddenly Last Summer
.

As both men moved into the 1960s, Tennessee was more sympathetic than Gore and others about Monty’s drug usage. “I was taking drugs myself,” Tennessee confessed. “Much the same stuff that Monty consumed—Doriden, Luminol, Seconal, Nembutal, Phenobarbital. Of course, mixed with liquor, these drugs can become poisonous, lethal even, driving Monty to that land romantically called ‘The Far Frontier.’”

In 1965, one of Tennessee’s closest friends, novelist Carson McCullers, called him to tell him that her
Reflections in a Golden Eye
was to be filmed. Elizabeth Taylor, the star, wanted Monty to make a sort of comeback, cast as a homosexual army officer. A starting date had not been announced.

Originally, when the novel was optioned for the screen, Tennessee was first queried to see if he’d like to write the film script.

It was with sadness to Tennessee that Monty never got to star with Taylor, his
A Place in the Sun
costar of long ago, in the McCullers drama. Monty died before filming began.

It was a bittersweet memory for Tennessee when he recalled his last time with Monty.

Accompanied by Julie Harris, Tennessee had a reunion with Monty in the studio of Caedmon Records. Harris and Monty were there to record an audio version of
The Glass Menagerie
. Monty told Tennessee that except for the McCullers project, he had not been offered a part on the screen or stage in four years—“Just two spaghetti Westerns to be shot in Italy.”

Later, from a VIP position in the control booth, Tennessee listened to Monty emote during his portrayal of “The Gentleman Caller.”

“I wept when I heard that tender, beautiful voice,” Tennessee said. “In just a few months, Monty would be dead, but he brought my character to life again.”

“In his Passage to Hell, Monty lived in a dark closet where no moonlight ever penetrated,” Tennessee said. “He did not hear the music of the wind.”

Burnt out far too early in life, Monty, born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1920, died on July 13, 1966 in Manhattan. Marlon Brando replaced him in the lead role of
Reflections in a Golden Eye
.