ELIZABETH AND MONTY: The Untold Story

The friendship between Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift dominated the gossip columns of the 1950s. The public did not realise that Monty was gay, and he went out of his way to date women while conducting affairs with Hollywood names including Roddy McDowall and Truman Capote, and idolising James Dean and Marlon Brando. Clift had extraordinarily good looks while Taylor was widely acclaimed as the world's most beautiful woman, and the stills of their film A Place in the Sun are a photographer's dream. Elizabeth had her own problems and it was during her marriage to her second husband Michael Wilding that the famous episode in which she saved Monty's life occurred. In 1956 Taylor was starring with Monty in the film Raintree County and Monty attended a dinner party at the Wildings' Hollywood home up a precipitous and dark road. Monty was drinking and on the way back he crashed the car. As news reached the Wildings, Elizabeth raced down the hill to pull Monty free from the wreckage. Later Monty repaid the debt by providing his heart medication to revive Elizabeth when she collapsed. The accident left Monty with a damaged left side of the face, which directors did their best to accommodate but which inevitably affected his career, leading to smaller roles. Taylor insisted that Monty should be her leading man in their third and final co-starring film, Suddenly Last Summer. Two years later everything changed as Taylor fell victim to a consuming passion for Richard Burton on the set of Cleopatra, and meanwhile Clift was seeing a lot of Marilyn Monroe after they starred together in her last film The Misfits in 1961. In spite of some jealousy of Marilyn, Taylor offered to help with her substance abuse and general struggle with life. Monty's death of a heart attack in 1966 was a lasting sadness to Taylor and in the 1980s she became a high-profile campaigner for AIDS sufferers, influenced by friendships with several gay people including Monty. 389pp, colour photos.