a true story

Hello and welcome,

I often wonder what Montgomery Clift’s life would have looked like had he been alive today. He died, of a heart attack, in the summer of 1966, at the age of forty-five, after a decade of self-destructive behavior that would be referred to as ‘the slowest suicide in Hollywood history”. Monty was an alcoholic and an addict, nothing unusual about that. I am too. But, unlike Monty, I’m lucky enough to live in a time when there are tools available to me,  when 12-step meetings for gay men are plentiful, when there are words for things like ‘internalized homophobia’, ‘self-sabotage’‘, ‘codependency’, ‘denial’. Recovery has gone mainstream and because Monty was also emotionally intelligent, I like to think he would have taken to it were he born a few months before he died, like me, in 1965. But then again, maybe not. Even with all of these tools and resources at my disposal, it’s a miracle that I am alive today, let alone relatively sane. The times may change but the disease of alcoholism and addiction do not. Denial is not just a river in 1966.

In 2005,  two psychics told me that the spirit of actor Montgomery Clift was around me, and had been around me since I was nineteen, guiding me. According to them, Monty was not at rest because he didn't like how he had gone down in history as a tragic gay alcoholic - a cliche - and not much more.  "What about my career? What about what I contributed to the arts? What about what a good friend I was? A good uncle?" His ’spirit’ would say, from beyond the grave, upset that his legacy was defined by the worst period of his life, years of health struggles, financial hardship, lawsuits, unemployment and addiction, his personal problems aired out to dry thanks to some salacious biographies filled with the memories of backstabbing friends and family members interviewed. When I read those biographies, it never occurred to me that participation in them might be considered a betrayal, but that was before I was introduced to the concept that, perhaps, when we speak ill of the dead, they can hear us. Monty didn’t like what he heard, according to these psychic, and had tasked me with the duty to take back control of his narrative for him. With not much in it for me, at first, I dedicated my life  to writing a movie that would set the record straight, that would restore his legacy in a more complex, well-rounded way....afraid to tell it at first, when I did, this story became a popular Moth story, an award winning radio documentary on NPR and HBO hired me to adapt the story as a screenplay - which never happened it because, after fourteen year’s abstaining from crystal meth, I  relapsed, lost everything. I didn’t know it until I went into Crystal Meth Anonymous that what happened to me was common, that I had become the very cliche that Monty’s spirit came back from the grave to try and give depth too.  Now that I’m in recovery again, I think about him a lot because now I too am defined by my health struggles, financial hardship, lawsuits, unemployment and addiction. The parallels in our lives continue. The only difference?  I didn’t die.

So what would have happened if Monty had lived ? What would he have done with these extra years? With a second act? His lifelong friend Jack Larson told me that he would have become a writer, maybe moved to London, away from the toxicity of show-business and American puritanical thinking. There is no twelve step program for notoriety and, like alcoholism, once you have it, you  have it til the day you die.  The sobering, obvious point of Monty’s restless spirit sits differently with me now. His yearning to ‘set the record straight’ tells me that what we do with our lives when we’re here matters.

At the time, I thought it depressing that Monty’s spirit cared so much about how he is remembered. Did we die and take our actor‘s ego with us? But now, after all that has happened in my own life; homelessness, being stripped of my illusions and the newfound clarity that  loss brings, I see what he was trying to say to me through these psychics, through friends like Jack: each of our legacies matter. I this way, Monty saved my life. I decided to stop killing myself, to ask for help because I did not want the ending of my story to be a sad and tragic one, like his. Monty did not want to be a cautionary tale, but he is. Me too. But unlike Monty, I lived, and have the ability to use what happened to him, to me, to countless other gay men who struggle with alcohol and drug use. 

I don’t know what Monty’s life would have been like had he survived,  but I’m sure of one thing. He would want to tell his story himself. And he would want me to do the same.

Xo,

Craig