The Accidental Feminist: How Elizabeth Taylor Raised Our Consciousness and We Were Too Distracted by Her Beauty to Notice by M. G. Lord Page B

drugs while shooting Raintree County . But when I interviewed McCarthy in Los Angeles, he insisted that Clift and he had “gone on the wagon” that day.
    The dinner, he recalled, was unremarkable, except that Wilding had a sore back and spent the night horizontal on a couch. At about ten thirty P.M., McCarthy excused himself. He had to travel to Berkeley, California, early the next morning. Clift knew the canyon even less well than McCarthy, so Clift left with McCarthy, planning to follow him down the hill.
    The two men had rented identical cars—brown-and-white, four-door Chevrolets. As McCarthy eased through the first hairpin turn, he was jolted alert. Clift had hung back, then surged forward. That daredevil, McCarthy thought. “He’s trying to tickle my bumper.” So McCarthy sped up, zipping through another sharp curve. But suddenly, he recalled, “I didn’t see his lights anymore. I thought, Now what the hell has he done? Gone out to take a leak?”
    Fear replaced annoyance. In the rearview mirror, McCarthy saw headlights—erratic flickers—as if a car were careening from object to object. He raced back up the hill: “I saw Monty’s car. The lights were on. The motor was racing.”
    McCarthy ran to turn off the ignition. The doors were mangled, jammed. Because he couldn’t see a driver, McCarthy assumed Clift had been thrown clear. But when he reached through a shattered side window to turn the key, he saw Clift—bloody, crushed—beneath the level of the dashboard.
    “Even now it hurts to talk about it,” he remembered decades later. “It brings tears to my eyes. I thought: What do I do? I can’t just leave him here. But I have to leave him here—to get help.”
    McCarthy zoomed to the Wilding residence. “Get an ambulance!” he shouted when Wilding opened the door. “Monty’s been in an accident.” While Wilding barked details into the telephone, McCarthy and Taylor barreled down to Clift.
    “He was conscious,” McCarthy said. “Sort of groaning—going, mrrrrr, mrrrrr. And I froze.” But Taylor rushed to him. She tugged and pounded on the doors, and when they wouldn’t budge, she climbed through a rear window—indifferent to the grease, blood, and dust on what McCarthy recalled had been her white silk dress. As Taylor cradled Clift’s head, he made that “mrrrrr” noise again. He was choking. His front teeth had been dislodged by the impact and were now stuck in his throat. Without hesitating, Taylor reached into his mouth and pulled them out. She saved his life.
    “Liz was so strong,” McCarthy said. “Like one of those pioneer women. Like you read about. Like … like—”
    Like Leslie Benedict in Giant ? I suggested.
    “Yes!” He agreed. “In so many ways.”
    Rex Kennamer, Clift’s doctor, arrived first at the scene. Even at death’s door, Clift never forgot his manners. He politely introduced Kennamer to Taylor. No sooner had she said hello than she was again forced to harden into Leslie Benedict. Behind the ambulance came the press, jockeying for a gruesome shot of Clift. “Get those goddamned cameras out of here!” Taylor shouted, covering his face with her hands. Then, in a voice that sent the photographers scrambling, she added, “Or I’ll make sure you never work in Hollywood again.”
    Although Clift’s nose was broken, his face bandaged, and his smashed jaw wired shut, he survived. In occasional upbeat moments he even sipped martinis through a straw. Such moments, however, were few and far between—for both him and Taylor. Between Clift’s accident and Dean’s death, Taylor was badly in need of solace. She grieved, too, for her marriage to Wilding, which was past resuscitation. In such a state, what could be more normal than to seek comfort, and, if one looked like Taylor, to find it? During this time, biographers link her first with singer Frank Sinatra, then with cinematographer Kevin McClory, who had worked as a unit director on Around the World in 80 Days