Elizabeth Taylor tried to seduce Montgomery Clift and stood by him after coming out to her

Screen legends  Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift shared an immeasurable bond when they were the top of Hollywood’s elite.

The eight-times married star could have had any man she wanted at the height of her career, but like most, ‘we all want what we can’t have.’

Biographer Charles Casillo took a deep dive into the intense relationship between the two stars in his new book Elizabeth and Monty: The Untold Story of Their Intimate Friendship.

‘Up until that point, whoever she set her eyes on, she could get,’ he told People about a teenage Taylor, who was already breaking hearts across the entertainment industry.

But the one person she couldn’t win over was Clift, her devastatingly handsome A Place in the Sun co-star who was also 11 years her senior.

‘They were soulmates,’ Casillo said about his book, which features colorful, well-researched details and interviews with stars who knew the film legends. 

‘Monty felt more comfortable in letting her know he was gay — and talking about it,’ Casillo said.

However, according to Casillo, Taylor never loved any of the many men she bedded and married — including even Richard Burton — as much as she loved Clift. Even Burton knew it, once telling ‘Monty’: ‘She likes me, but she loves you’.

She first fell for the chiseled actor when they met in 1949 before shooting the Academy Award-winning drama, and the author admits Clift shared the same feelings. 

He confessed their attraction was so strong that their co-star Shelley Winters ‘actually thought there was an affair going on. It’s almost like you’re seeing them fall in love during that dance,’ referencing the pair’s iconic dance scene.  

The two were ‘even seen smooching in the back of limousines,’ but Casillo pointed out that ‘Monty couldn’t bring himself to tell her that he was gay.’

They kept things platonic, but he said it only made Taylor desire Clift even more: ‘I think that was a part of the first interest on her part.’

She was known to undress in front of him and talk to him while bathing when he’d go to her room to rehearse.

‘He sat on the edge of the bathtub — and actually rehearsed,’ Casillo recalled. ‘This was intriguing to her because men were interested in her for her physicality. Now she had a man who was sitting there, talking about movies and books that she liked, her plans for her future and the roles she wanted to play. I really do think he’s the first one who saw interest in her as a person.’

Their increased comfortability around each other led to Clift openly discuss his sexuality with Taylor, leading her to become both a friend and a confidant for the closeted star.

‘Elizabeth even started trying to think of other gay men she could fix him up with,’ Casillo added, acknowledging that they were there for each other during various times of tragedy, such as the 1956 alcohol-induced car wreck that left his famously beautiful face reduced to a bloody pulp.

‘He was bleeding so much that it looked like his face had been halved,’ the actress later recalled after rushing to the scene of the crash, which occurred when Clift left a party at her Hollywood Hills home. ‘I was just holding him like a baby and rocking him. He opened his eyes and saw me. His eyes looked the color of a bright red rose.’ 

He was trying to mumble something to her but she couldn’t hear. She suddenly realized he was choking on his own broken front teeth and, as his blood pooled in her dress, she instinctively stuck her fingers down his throat and pulled them out.

Said Casillo about the incident: ‘Everyone on the scene said that she saved his life. [Otherwise] he would have died right there.’

Acclaimed as two of the most beautiful in Hollywood history, the pair starred in a string of films together, sometimes after Taylor had overruled producers who didn’t want to use the brilliant but drink-and-drug-addled Clift. 

‘Elizabeth said, “If he goes, I go.” If Elizabeth Taylor was your friend, she was your friend to the end,’ Casillo revealed.

Earlier this month, the writer talked to the Daily Mail about the pair’s sexual tension, explaining that Clift was flattered by Taylor’s interest and flirted back, encouraging her to go on a ‘full-out campaign to seduce him’ even as it made him agonize about his conflicting feelings towards women.

‘Just when he overcame all his inhibitions about making love, he’d panic and pull away.’ 

Taylor would stay with him in New York in between films, telling friends she was still in love with him and once admitting: ‘It’s strange because I never get angry or jealous when I hear of Monty with boyfriends. But when I hear of him with a woman, I just go to pieces… because he’s mine.’ 

Clift died in July 1966 at 45 of a massive heart attack — probably caused by his many addictions — and Taylor locked herself in her bedroom when she heard the news. ‘Moments after,’ wrote Casillo, ‘Richard and the staff could hear her wailing in pain.’

She sent two huge bouquets to his funeral. ‘Rest perturbed spirit,’ said the card on one. What Casillo calls ‘Hollywood’s greatest unrequited love affair’ had finally run its course.