Overview of Everyone Dies (The Bisexuals, Part 8)
This final episode of The Bisexuals traces the late-career decline and eventual deaths of Libby Holman and Montgomery Clift, showing how their lives in the 1960s were shaped by addiction, depression, homophobia, failed relationships, and the punishing pressures of Hollywood and high society. Karina Longworth connects their personal histories to the films and plays that seemed to mirror them back—especially John Huston’s Freud and Tennessee Williams’s The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore / Boom!—arguing that these works became eerie reflections of aging, loneliness, and self-destruction.
Main Themes
Decline, aging, and emotional isolation
- The episode argues that the 1960s, often remembered as a period of liberation, were instead repressive and painful for both Holman and Clift.
- Both became increasingly dependent on alcohol and drugs, while also feeling socially and romantically stranded.
- The episode repeatedly returns to the idea that each was surrounded by people, but fundamentally alone.
Art imitating life
- Williams’s and Losey’s works are presented as haunted by Holman’s story, even when not explicitly based on it.
- Clift’s Freud is treated as a film about trauma, repression, and psychic fracture—made under conditions that arguably worsened his own collapse.
Libby Holman’s Final Years
A marriage that narrowed her world
- In 1961, Holman married Louis Schenker and moved deeper into Hamptons society.
- Schenker was portrayed as:
- deeply homophobic
- uninterested in Holman’s queer social circle
- unpopular with her friends and sons
- Holman quickly regretted the marriage, reportedly telling friends she had made “another terrible mistake.”
Social life, performance, and melancholy
- Holman hosted large Hamptons gatherings, but often seemed like a spectator in her own life.
- Her music continued to matter:
- she performed politically conscious material
- collaborated with accompanist Gerald Cook
- sang songs drawn from Sojourner Truth speeches
- Yet her personal life increasingly felt empty, and she often remarked on having never known true love.
Decline, grief, and death
- By the mid-to-late 1960s, Holman was losing the people she loved:
- her mother
- Montgomery Clift
- several other close friends and figures
- She entered a mental health facility for a lithium study, but it did not seem to help.
- In 1971, she died in her car in the garage at Treetops from carbon monoxide poisoning.
- The episode notes lingering doubt about whether her death was suicide, accidental, or something more complicated—but suggests that, in a broader sense, Holman had been in a slow, years-long self-destruction.
Montgomery Clift’s Decline and Freud
Huston vs. Clift
- John Huston cast Clift in Freud because he believed Clift had the necessary mystery and inner complexity.
- But the production became hostile:
- Huston allegedly imposed conditions on Clift’s behavior
- he disapproved of Clift’s sexuality, drinking, and dependence on older women
- he even took over the film’s interior voiceover, effectively stripping subjectivity from Clift’s performance
- The episode frames this as both personal cruelty and directorial sabotage.
A broken production
- Clift was already in poor physical and mental health:
- cataracts
- thyroid issues
- memory problems
- pain from his earlier crash
- The shoot was plagued by delays, rewrites, and chaos.
- Universal eventually got involved, and legal disputes followed over responsibility for the overruns.
- Clift won some of the financial battle, but the stigma of being “unreliable” stuck to him.
Aftermath and final collapse
- Clift was unable to reestablish his career after Freud.
- The episode treats the lawsuits and inability to work as a major turning point in his descent.
- He died in 1966, after years of worsening drug dependence and physical deterioration.
Mirror Plays and Films: Williams, Taylor, Burton, and Holman
The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
- Tennessee Williams’s play is discussed as a possible reflection of Holman’s life:
- an aging rich woman
- a glamorous but lonely widow figure
- a man called the “angel of death”
- parallels to Holman’s son Topper, whose fall from a mountain echoes a key plot point
- Tallulah Bankhead’s performance as Sissy Goforth is tied to the same world of fading celebrity and self-willed ruin.
Boom!
- The 1968 film adaptation, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, is read as an even more ghostly version of Holman’s story.
- Taylor’s aging face, white costumes, and refusal to soften into niceness are compared to Holman’s own public persona and tabloid mythology.
- The film becomes, in the episode’s reading, a meditation on:
- the terror of aging
- the loneliness of being iconic but unloved
- the moment when desire curdles into mortality
Notable Takeaways
- Holman and Clift are portrayed as tragic figures whose talents were inseparable from their vulnerabilities.
- Hollywood and the broader culture often punished them for the very traits that made them compelling.
- The episode’s final emotional claim is that Holman’s death may have been medically ambiguous, but her life had already become a prolonged surrender to grief, alcohol, pills, and loss.
- The series ends by framing both Holman and Clift as people whose lives were defined by an ongoing struggle between performance, desire, and collapse.