Montgomery Clift

Montgomery Clift is portrayed as an actor in precarious condition during the making of The Misfits: scarred by a near-fatal accident, isolated in his trailer, and regarded by the crew as possibly less likely to survive the production than Marilyn Monroe. To Monroe, however, his sadness and difference make him more than a troubled colleague. She recognizes him as a twin, and that recognition links his private vulnerability to the film’s portrait of people adrift and to the novel’s scrutiny of fame, damage, and performance.

Identity and Introduction

The novel introduces Clift through details that make him seem at once glamorous and diminished. He is described as alcoholic, sensual, and psychologically unsteady, his face marked by an accident that nearly killed him the previous year. The damage is not merely an item in his screen biography: it is part of the novel’s account of a man whose body carries visible evidence of a brush with death.

During production in Nevada, Clift withdraws into his trailer with a vodka-and-grapefruit drink and a young lover who is described as rude. He resists interviews and avoids venturing into the sun before midnight. The people around the production do not treat this behavior as harmless eccentricity. Many wager that he will not make it through filming, and some consider him even more at risk than Monroe. The production thus places two vulnerable performers beside each other, though their forms of vulnerability are not identical.

Life on the Set of The Misfits

Clift’s presence on the set is defined as much by withdrawal as by work. His reluctance to meet interviewers and his confinement to the trailer keep him at a remove from the public and from ordinary production routines. The novel associates that isolation with alcohol and drug use, describing him as under the influence of Benzedrine and Amytal while leaving the precise circumstances uncertain. It does not present his condition as a simple spectacle of celebrity excess: the crew’s anxious bets make the danger feel immediate, while his damaged face gives that anxiety a visible counterpart.

His performance as Perce Howland carries this physical and emotional fragility into the film. Perce is a rodeo champion whose face is disfigured and whose body has become skeletal; he is a sad-eyed man adrift. In the film’s imagined reception, Clift’s recognizable fame falls away rather than explaining the character. Viewers see a damaged rodeo rider, not simply a star playing one. The part therefore makes his own altered appearance resonate without reducing Perce to a portrait of Clift’s private life.

Relationship with Marilyn Monroe

Monroe’s connection with Clift is expressed through an idea of likeness rather than romance. She says she likes him because he is a Gemini, as she is, then reaches for his hand when she notices the sadness in his eyes. The touch matters in the context of her marriage: it is described as their first physical contact in many days. For a moment, she becomes Roslyn, her character in The Misfits, a blonde nurse whose beauty is fading. Her fellow actor’s distress draws her into the role even in an encounter off camera.

Monroe describes Clift as someone who seems like her twin. This is not a claim that their lives or circumstances are interchangeable. Rather, the resemblance gives her a way to name a recognition that the novel dramatizes through gesture: she sees sadness in him, reaches toward him, and understands his difference as familiar. The husband regards Clift as an even darker mystery than Monroe. He does not interpret the actor as a romantic rival, but as a homosexual man whose troubled condition and apparent vulnerability are frightening in their own right. His view that Monroe’s suicidal tendencies arise only from the loss of their child belongs to his understanding of her, not to an independent confirmation of her motives.

Performance, Damage, and the Film’s Afterlife

The novel’s account of Clift extends beyond the set to the film’s release. By then, Clark Gable has been dead for several months and Monroe has divorced. The Misfits does not receive the lavish premiere associated with Monroe’s earlier celebrity: there is no parade of limousines on Hollywood Boulevard and no reception at Grauman’s. The film becomes a box-office failure, despite positive reviews and critical praise for the performances of Gable, Monroe, and Clift. The studio that produced it is itself displeased with the result, which is labelled unusual and artistic, though the novel also recognizes its rough integrity.

That reception sharpens the contrast between celebrity image and screen character. The famous performers appear as people who have come undone: audiences recognize Gay Langland and Roslyn Tabor as roles, yet the familiar stars seem almost unrecognizable within them. Clift’s Perce, with his sad eyes, disfigured face, and skeletal body, belongs to this company of figures whose fame cannot protect them from appearing lost. The novel imagines them as ordinary Americans, familiar in the unsettling way of people glimpsed in childhood, when the world—and even one’s own reflection—still seemed mysterious.

Narrative Significance

Clift’s role in the novel is brief but structurally important. He is both an actor whose real distress is visible to his colleagues and the performer who gives form to Perce’s damaged life. The resemblance Monroe perceives between them connects personal recognition to the film’s transformation of its stars: on screen, celebrity recedes, and vulnerability becomes legible in the characters they inhabit.

The final reflection on Roslyn deepens that connection to Monroe herself. In her Brentwood home, she will recognize that everything Roslyn was had been her own life. Clift’s presence beside her in the film therefore belongs to more than a production anecdote. His portrayal of a man stripped of triumph and certainty helps frame the work as a meeting place between performance and lived damage, while Monroe’s recognition of him as a twin reveals how readily the boundary between a role and a life can become porous.