Overview of You Must Remember This: Lonelyhearts and Misfits (The Bisexuals, Part 7)
This episode tracks Montgomery Clift’s post-accident career and emotional unraveling alongside Libby Holman’s deepening loneliness, grief, and dependence on volatile relationships. Karina Longworth connects Clift’s physical and psychological damage after Raintree County to the roles he played in The Young Lions, Lonely Hearts, Wild River, and The Misfits, while also weaving in Libby’s mirrored experiences: her complicated bond with Clift, her friendship with Jane Bowles, and her eventual marriage to Louis Shanker. The episode is one of the season’s most explicit studies of trauma, desire, performance, and how “damaged goods” become public identity in Hollywood.
Major Storylines Covered
Montgomery Clift after the Raintree County crash
- MGM insured the production against shutdown because of Clift’s known instability.
- After his near-fatal car accident, Clift returned to work too soon, driven by pressure from the studio and his own need to keep going.
- Libby tried to protect him and urged him not to return, but Clift chose the film anyway.
- The accident permanently altered his face, his confidence, and how audiences and colleagues perceived him.
Elizabeth Taylor’s role in Clift’s life
- Taylor is portrayed as both loving and influential in Clift’s recovery decisions.
- Libby resented Taylor’s closeness to Clift and believed Taylor’s influence helped push him back to work.
- Longstanding friendship and emotional dependence between Taylor and Clift remained central to this part of the story.
Written on the Wind and Libby’s shadow in Hollywood
- The film is discussed as a loose, highly sanitized adaptation of the Reynolds family story, clearly echoing Libby Holman’s life.
- Longworth notes how the movie transforms the real-life tragedy into melodrama, while preserving key emotional truths:
- jealousy
- sexual insecurity
- alcoholism
- pregnancy fears
- destructive family dynamics
- The episode emphasizes how Hollywood repeatedly mined Libby’s life for material while disguising the source.
Jane Bowles’s stroke and Libby’s caregiving
- Jane Bowles’ illness and stroke are presented as another devastating turning point.
- Her relationship with her Moroccan partner Sharifa is discussed as complicated by power, money, desire, and possible coercion.
- Libby supported Jane financially and emotionally, but their friendship was strained by illness and dependency.
- The episode frames Jane’s situation as part of a larger pattern of women whose relationships are shaped by instability, class, and control.
Clift’s later performances: The Young Lions, Lonely Hearts, Wild River
- The Young Lions is described as a strong performance that was undercut by critics focusing on Clift’s changed appearance.
- Lonely Hearts adapts Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts into a story about an empathic, internally fractured man who absorbs other people’s pain.
- Wild River gives Clift a quieter, more restrained role, but still one defined by insecurity, withheld emotion, and a kind of wounded masculinity.
- Karina suggests Clift’s sexuality and emotional style made him especially suited to roles where longing, dependency, and gender ambiguity were central.
The Misfits and Clift’s final major period
- Clift appears only briefly in The Misfits, but the episode treats his character as thematically essential.
- His role as Perce reflects themes of:
- maternal fixation
- masculine vulnerability
- sexual uncertainty
- identification with the wounded and captured
- Marilyn Monroe and Clift are described as “psychic twins,” both exhausted, addicted, and emotionally fraying on set.
- The production becomes another example of a star working while damaged and being mythologized as unstable.
Libby Holman’s final major relationship and marriage
- By 1960, Libby is involved with painter Louis Shanker, a forceful and controlling man.
- She resists his demands but eventually agrees to marry him after he insists on exclusivity.
- Their marriage in Jamaica is presented not as romantic triumph but as a weary, desperate compromise.
- The episode closes with the sense that Libby’s life, like Clift’s, is narrowing rather than opening up.
Key Themes and Takeaways
Trauma becomes identity
- The episode repeatedly shows how one catastrophic event can define a person in the public imagination forever.
- Clift’s accident becomes inseparable from how people read his face, acting, and even his worth.
- Libby, too, is trapped by the story of her past.
Addiction, dependency, and self-destruction
- Alcohol, pills, and emotional dependence shape nearly every relationship discussed.
- The episode links physical survival to emotional damage: the characters keep living, but not really thriving.
The porous line between life and art
- Hollywood keeps turning real people’s lives into fiction.
- Films like Written on the Wind and Lonely Hearts become indirect portraits of the people who inspired them.
- Clift’s and Holman’s real lives seem to haunt the roles they played.
Queerness, heterosexual performance, and loneliness
- The episode continues the series’ focus on bisexuality and fluid desire, but here that theme is often expressed through frustration and impersonation rather than liberation.
- Marriages, affairs, and “normal” domestic life often appear as performances people attempt but cannot sustain.
Notable Insight
- Clift and Holman are presented as parallel figures: both gifted, both emotionally exposed, both marked by trauma, and both increasingly unable to find a stable version of love or selfhood.
- The episode suggests that what Hollywood called weakness or instability may have been, in part, a refusal or inability to conform to the narrow emotional scripts available to them.
Episode Context
- This is the penultimate episode of The Bisexuals season.
- It builds toward the finale by tightening the connection between Libby Holman’s personal history and the broader Hollywood mythology surrounding damaged, desirable, and misunderstood people.