Biography of Robert La Guardia.- Chapter one / Biografía de Robert LaGuadia.- capítulo 1

Images

The public remembers him as a splendid screen presence, glamorous and vulnerable. He floats by on that giant sceen, the image of the intensity of youth, in its most beautiful guise. He was an overnight sensation. Men and women loved him for the promise offered by his unthreatening masculine grace and looks. Bobby-soxers screeched and pounded the floors when his magnificent, sensitive face loomed in darkened movie theaters. Fan clubs popped up all over the country. Hollywood moguls found themselves forced to accede to his demands, their rigid control over actors shattered. He was a total enigma: a polite, well-brought-up young man who achieved great power in Hollywood passively, without deviousness.

But for those people who saw Monty, the real Monty, close up -who lived with him and ached with him- the images are very different. Like a series of takes arriving at the editing laboratory, these memories of an older Monty flicker, out of sequence, with haunting power: Monty walking against the wintry Manhattan wind, his shoulder and hunched body leaning heavily against a black man, his male nurse. Collapsing over and over, ina state of drugged drunkenness, on the floor of a Fire Island summer house, as the homosexual boys and men, fatigued with picking him up, let him lie, and walk over him as if he were a piece of inanimate junk. Waking up in a semi-coma from drugs and liquor ina bedroom of his sepulchral townhouse on Sixty-first Street; being picked up bodily by his nurse an put under a cold shower, in order to face another dose of the life which drove him this state. His hands and body sometimes shake with tetany, because of a rare hormonal disease. His legs cannot hold him steadily -the drinking has brought on phlebitis. A thyroid condition has made him pop-eyed. Cataracts cause him to wear bottle-cap glasses. An automobile accident and too many pills have ruined his looks, made the scary, and a plastic surgeon with a criminal background begins to make them worse. He has been blackballed from themotion picture business. He sits in his bedroom, vacantly watching television, tears drenching his cheeks. He has destroyed his sexual life. He will not eat. He makes tearful, desperate calls, but his best friends have left him. He shoots Demerol into his arms to anesthetize himself to the pian of his existence. And he drinks... and he drinks.

At the age of forty-five, his heart stops.

The personal story, with its riveting horrors, seems locked in combat with his unique professional achievement. Montgomery Clift was, and still is, one of the more important influences on contemporary picture acting. Few of today's younger generation of moviegoers realize, when they sit back in awe at the intensity and truth of an Al Pacino or Robert De Niro or Dustin Hoffman or Jack Nicholson, that these actors' roots can be traced back, in large part, to the strivings of Monty Clift. Many people, when confronted with these so-called "rebel" actors, tend to think "Method" or "Actors Studio", or credit an actor by the name of Marlon Brando with having started it all, but that is a misconception.

The facts speak for themselves. Monty had no predecessor for his screen presence. He did not use the Method, and it was Brando and James Dean and the rest who followed and often built upon Monty's achievement.




To be continued...