Raintree County Hodgepodge

Here is an interesting variation of the classic Beef Stroganoff. Slow roasted beef with onions, mushrooms, and a bit of green beans will provide some much needed comfort food. We honor a LGBT hero Actor Montgomery Clift tonight, read a quick story about him and have some interesting dinner conversation!

Slow roasting the beef insures a soft juicy texture. The use of the taste of brandy added to bacon soup makes for a long remembered dish.

Ingredients:

2 ½ lbs beef chuck roast

1 cup brandy

2 onions chopped

2 cups mushrooms

1 can cream of bacon soup

1 cup sour cream

1 cup french style green beans

Package wide noodles.

Directions:

Place the roast in a large enough baking dish. Pour 1 cup brandy over and cover dish with plastic wrap. Let sit on counter for ½ hour. Then turn the meat over to soak the other side for another ½ hour.

Preheat oven to 215 degrees and spray a dutch oven. Chop the onions into large chunks.

When marinating is done. Place the onions in the pot. Take the meat out of the marinade and cut into bite sized chunks. Place on the bed of onions.

Cover and let slow roast for 3 hours.

Go ahead and cook up the noodles according to package.

You will have more than enough meat, so portion out about half into freezer bags for use at a latter time.

Drain all but about 1 cup of liquid from the pot and add the mushrooms.

Let cook for about 7 minutes to reduce moisture. Add the cup of green beans, then return the meat and onions. 

Stir in the can of bacon soup and the cup of sour cream.

Stir occasionally until well blended and heated through.

Serve this over the noodles.

If you wish, for an interesting twist, serve this over a bed of plain puffed rice!

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socialslave

To satisfy and restore.

To nourish, support and maintain.

To gratify, spoil, comfort and please,

to nurture, assist, and sustain

…..I cook!

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Montgomery Clift

(1920 – 1966) An American actor. A four-time Academy Award nominee, He was known for his portrayal of "moody, sensitive young men".

While we know he was gay, the details of his private life remain speculation. That has not stopped the LGBT community from embracing him as an important part of our culture.

Edward Montgomery Clift was born in Omaha, Nebraska. All her life Clift's mother was bound and determined that her children should be brought up in the style of true aristocrats.

He and his siblings were privately tutored, traveled extensively in America and Europe, became fluent in German and French, and led a protected life, sheltered from the destitution that followed the First World War.

He took to stage acting, beginning in a summer production, which led to his debut on Broadway by 1935. In the next 10 years, Clift built a successful stage career working with some of the top names of the theater, like, Fredric March, Tallulah Bankhead, Alfred Lunt, and Lynn Fontanne. He appeared in plays written by Moss Hart, Robert Sherwood, Lillian Hellman, Tennessee Williams, and Thornton Wilder.

In 1939, as a member of the cast of the Broadway production of Noël Coward's Hay Fever, Clift participated in one of the very first television broadcasts in the United States. A performance of Hay Fever was broadcast by NBC's New York television station W2XBS (the forerunner of WNBC) and was aired during the World's Fair as part of the introduction of television.

Clift did not serve during World War II, having been given 4-F status after suffering dysentery in 1942.

From the start, Clift was framed as a rebel and an individual. When he first arrived in Hollywood, he didn’t sign a contract, waiting until after the success of his first two films to negotiate a three-picture deal with Paramount that allowed him total discretion over projects. It was unheard of, especially for a young star

His first movie role was opposite John Wayne in Red River, which was shot in 1946 and released in 1948. His second movie was The Search, which premiered in the same year. Clift was unhappy with the quality of the script, and reworked it himself. The movie was awarded a screenwriting Academy Award for the credited writers.

He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. 

Clift's performance in A Place in the Sun (1951) is regarded as one of his signature method acting performances. He worked extensively on his character, and was again nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. For his character's scenes in jail, Clift spent a night in a real state prison.

Sensitive, mysterious, brooding, and suspiciously single. These are just among the many words used to describe the enigmatic heartthrob of the 1950s.

Clift was incredibly private about his love life. He had close female friendships, including stage actress Libby Holman, who was 16 years older. Tabloids would whisper about them, but he would insist to the platonic nature of their friendship, and state “those romantic rumors are embarrassing to both of us.”

He insisted on maintaining his residence in New York, spending as little time in Hollywood as possible. His apartment, which he rented for 10 dollars a month, was described by friends as “beat up”.

He survived on two meals a day, mostly combinations of steak, eggs, and orange juice, and he rejected going to nightclubs, instead spending his spare time reading Chekov, classic works of history and economics, and Aristotle, whom he praised for his belief in happiness. When he wasn’t reading or exhausting himself in preparation for a part, he liked to go to the local night court and attend high-profile court cases just to watch the humanity on display.

The Los Angeles Times called him the “Rumpled Movie Idol”; he infamously owned only one suit.

Whatever relationships Clift may have had, he was circumspect. Unlike Rock Hudson, whose affairs were very nearly exposed to the entire nation by Confidential, Clift never made the pages of the scandal rags. He was “lonely,” yet with the help of his refusal to live in Los Angeles or participate in café society, he was able to keep his private life private.

In 1966, returning from a party at Liz Taylor’s house, while filming Raintree County, he smashed his car into a telephone pole.

Moments after the accident, actor Kevin McCarthy, driving in front of Clift, ran back to check on him, seeing that “his face was torn away—a bloody pulp. I thought he was dead.” McCarthy ran to fetch Taylor, Wilding, and Rock Hudson and Hudson’s wife, Phyllis Gates, who all raced to the site of the accident.

One version of the story has Hudson pulling Clift from the car and Taylor cradling him in her arms, at which point Clift started choking and motioning to his throat, where, it soon became clear, two of his teeth had lodged themselves after coming loose during the accident. Taylor opened his mouth, put her hand down his throat, and pulled out the teeth.

When photographers arrived, Taylor announced that she knew each and every one of them personally-- and if they took pictures of Clift, who was still very much alive, she’d make sure they never worked in Hollywood again.

Regardless of the veracity of this story, one thing remains true: there’s not a single picture of Clift’s broken face.

But after an initial flurry of coverage, he retreated from public view entirely. Months of surgeries, rebuilding, and physical therapy followed. Production resumed on Raintree County, which the studio feared would fail following Clift’s accident. But Clift knew the film would be a smash, if only because audiences would want to compare his long unseen face from before and after the accident. In truth, his face wasn’t truly disfigured but one side was left immobile.

In October 1956, Louella Parsons reported on Clift’s “very bad health” and various attempts to clean him up. His decline was never explicitly evoked, but with his visage in Raintree County, it was there for all to see.

By 1958, Clift lashed out, proclaiming, “I am not—repeat not—a member of the Beat Generation. I am not one of America’s Angry Young Men. I do not count myself as a member of the ripped-sweatshirt fraternity.” He wasn’t a “young rebel, an old rebel, a tired rebel, or a rebellious rebel”—all he cared about was re-creating a “slice of life” on the screen. He was sick of being a symbol, a symptom, a testament to something.

Liz Taylor insisted that Clift be cast in her new project, Suddenly, Last Summer (1959). It was a huge gambol: since everyone knew how much booze and pills Clift was on, he was virtually un-insurable on set.

The results were not pretty. Clift couldn’t get through longer scenes, having to split them up into two or three chunks. The subject matter, which involved him assisting in the cover-up of a dead man’s apparent homosexuality, must have sparked mixed emotions. Director Joseph Mankiewicz tried to replace Clift, but Taylor and co-star Katharine Hepburn defended and supported him. Hepburn was reportedly so incensed by Mankiewicz’s treatment of Clift that when the film officially wrapped, she found the director and spat in his face.

Next came the film The Misfits, best known as the final film of Marilyn Monroe and Clark Gable. The director, John Huston, supposedly brought in Clift because he thought he’d have a “soothing effect” on Monroe. But Monroe reported that Clift was “the only person I know who is in even worse shape than I am.” The pictures from the set are poignant and heartbreaking.

The Misfits bombed, only to be recuperated, years later, as a masterpiece of the revisionist genre. Looking back, the film had a legacy of darkness: Gable died of a heart attack less than a month after filming; Monroe was only able to attend the film’s premiere with a pass from her stay at a psychiatric ward. She wouldn’t die for another year and a half, but Misfits would be her last completed film. As for Clift, the shoot was incredibly taxing, both mentally and physically: in addition to acquiring a scar across his nose from a stray bull’s horn, severe rope burns, and various other rough-and-tumble injuries, he also performed what has widely come to be regarded as one of his best scenes, a stilted, heartbreaking conversation with his mother from a phone booth. Even if Clift himself was already spiraling out of control, playing a character that did the same only amplified the psychological toll.

While filming a 15-minute supporting role as a mentally handicapped victim of the Holocaust in Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), he had to ad-lib all of his lines. But something of the old talent remained— to earn Clift a nomination for best-supporting actor, playing, “a victim irretrievably damaged by suffering.”

He was such a mess on the set of Freud (1962) that Universal sued him.

Actor Montgomery Clift died of a heart attack in 1966.

In 2000, at the GLAAD Media Awards, where Elizabeth Taylor was honored for her work for the LGBT community, she made the first public declaration by anyone of the fact that Clift was gay and called him her closest friend and confidant.

Clift once said, “The closer we come to the negative, to death, the more we blossom.” He took himself to that precipice, but he fell straight in. And so he remains frozen in the popular imagination, circa From Here to Eternity—those high cheekbones, that set jaw, the firm stare: a magnificent, proud, tragically broken thing to behold.