Twitch Upon a Star

by Herbie J. Pilato

  With Rebecca Elizabeth, it’s been legitimate to call her Rebel. I sort of hope that happens. I went to school with a hellion named Rebecca whose nickname was Reb—not Becky. If the baby had been a boy he’d have been called John. I kind of like Adam—but Adam Asher?! That’s too cutesy pooh.

  The latter distinction never came to fruition, except partially.

  On Bewitched, Darrin and Samantha named their son Adam who was born in the sixth season of Bewitched (and played by David and Greg Lawrence, who were fathered by Tony Curtis in real life); but Lizzie and Bill Asher never had another child after Rebecca.

  Then, after Elizabeth ended Bewitched, there was another relative, if distant, who played into the fold: an accused ax murderess whom she portrayed in the 1975 TV-movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden, based on the real-life woman who was accused of murdering her father and stepmother in 1893. James Pylant’s research revealed that Elizabeth and Borden were sixth cousins once removed, both descending from seventeenth-century Massachusetts resident John Luther.

  Author Rhonda R. McClure originally documented the relative connection in her book, Finding Your Famous (And Infamous) Ancestors (Cincinnati: Betterway Books: 2003); in which she asked, “I wonder how Elizabeth would have felt if she knew she was playing her own cousin?”

  Retro curator Ed Robertson is the host of TV Confidential, one of radio’s most renowned showcases of nostalgic television talent and discussions. He’s also the author of a number of acclaimed classic TV literary companions, including guides to The Rockford Files and The Fugitive. He weighs in on the Lizzie/Borden relative link: “Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know. But I’m not sure whether Elizabeth would have taken on the role, or at least allowed Borden to be characterized the way she was in the role, had she known she was in fact playing one of her cousins.”

  Years after playing Borden, Elizabeth finally learned of her lineage with the character. Entertainment historian Thomas McCartney, who has archived Elizabeth’s career since 1994, puts it all in perspective: “She was bemused by the idea, but never said anything else.”

  That sounds about right; no response was a typical Lizzie response.

  Several decades before Elizabeth played Borden, her grandmother Becca was born “Rebecca Lowry Daniel Allen” in 1886. Seventy-eight years later, Becca succumbed to cancer in Los Angeles, approximately ten days before Bewitched debuted on September 17, 1964.

  Lizzie’s mother Elizabeth Allen passed away at age eighty-seven on the Montgomery farm in New York, June 28, 1992, the same day Lizzie served as Co-Grand Marshall with her former Bewitched co-star Dick Sargent in the Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade.

  Elizabeth Allen’s cause of death was never documented, but she had been in poor health for quite some time, then died suddenly and quite unexpectedly. Shortly thereafter, Lizzie’s childhood landscape was sold.

  In the short period between that time and her own passing in 1995, Elizabeth continued to view the big picture of her parents’ influence as she always had, especially the impact made upon her by her father. She followed his pathway to a successful and prestigious career and, in the process, learned to handle the good with the bad, the advantages and the obstacles that went along with being born the child of a star.

  Three

  Elizabeth Montgomery Presents

  “Our hope was that she would turn out to be a good actress and not just the daughter of Montgomery.”

  —Robert Montgomery, TV Radio Mirror Magazine, January 1965

  Rebecca Allen wasn’t an actress, but Elizabeth thought she should have been. Next to her parents, Becca was the greatest influence in Lizzie’s life; she provided a sense of safety and comfort in her youth. As Lizzie recalled to Modern Screen magazine in 1965, “It was a feeling only grandmothers know how to give.”

  Whenever Robert Montgomery and Elizabeth Allen were away on business or vacation, Lizzie and her brother Skip never felt rejected. Becca was always there, Lizzie said, to offer encouraging words, to make sure she and Skip held their parents close at heart, and “prayed every night.”

  “It was really too bad,” she told TeleVision Life magazine in January 1954. “I mean, Mother and Dad being on the road so much and missing my birthdays. But it didn’t bother me too much … I wasn’t a neglected child.”

  Little Elizabeth didn’t see as much of her father as she would have liked, but she and Skip had a nurse for years. She claimed to have “had a wonderful childhood,” but at school, she’d have to watch her words. When classmates mentioned a dinner out with their parents, Lizzie would join in with, “Daddy took me to Romanoff’s.” But they’d offer blank stares and, suddenly, she said, “I’d be all alone.”

  But Becca was waiting in the wings, ready to pick up the pieces, particularly when it came to her granddaughter’s “play-acting.” According to the article, “The Girl Behind the Twitch,” published in Modern Screen magazine, May 1965, Becca watched everything performed by Lizzie, who described her grandmother this way:

  … such a lovely lady … a small woman with enormous brown eyes and a lovely kind of auburn hair. Up until the day she died she was the youngest looking thing, terribly young and vital. She adored California and was a one-woman Chamber of Commerce … She had such a love of life … an extraordinary imagination … and … such warmth. There wasn’t a soul she ever met who didn’t adore her. She loved children and was so good with us. She wrote a lot of songs and poems I would love to see published. Maybe someday I’ll illustrate them and send them off to a publisher.

  That never happened. But Lizzie was busy with other endeavors, namely, Billy Asher, Jr., whom she had just given birth to and who she said was “one of the biggest thrills” of Becca’s life. “I’m just sorry he’s going to miss having her for his audience. She was only the greatest audience I ever had.” And she wasn’t kidding.

  When she was about eight years old, Lizzie’s flair for the dramatic was already in bloom. She and her cousin Amanda “Panda” Cushman would play detective, foreshadowing characters Lizzie would depict in TV-movies like 1983’s Missing Pieces and the Edna Buchanan films from the mid-1990s (including her final performance in Deadline for Murder).

  When Panda wasn’t available, Lizzie’s little brother Skip would pinch-hit. Although his chances for getting the juicy roles were slim to none because his older sister would always win out—even if she was not right for the part.

  According to what Elizabeth told Modern Screen in 1965, she and Skip once performed in their own edition of Walt Disney’s classic animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, released in 1937. The pre-production dialogue went something like this:

  “I’ll play the king,” Skip would say.

  “No,” Lizzie countered. “I’m going to play the king.”

  “Then can I be the princess?”

  “No, you’re a boy. You can’t be the princess.”

  “Then, I’ll be the prince.”

  “No, I’m going to be the prince, too.”

  “But how can you be the prince, when you’re a girl?”

  “Well, just because … I’m the director.”

  Lizzie ultimately cast Skip as the announcer, hidden off-stage in a closeted area, from where he spoke into a wastebasket, which added a grand reverberation to his voice.

  Before their first performance, for which Lizzie naturally tapped herself as the lead, she’d tell Skip, “Go out and announce me.”

  Ever the loyal young sibling, Skip walked into the middle of the Montgomery living room, their stage, and declared to the audience, only Becca, “I am presenting … Elizabeth Montgomery!”

  But Lizzie protested from behind the invisible curtain.

  “No, no, Skip,” she interrupted, “the great Elizabeth Montgomery.”

  “I am presenting the great Elizabeth Montgomery,” he then said, adding, “but I don’t know what she’s going to do!”

  “Don’t know what she’s going to do?!” Lizzie yelped from the sidelines. �
�Of course you know what I’m going to do!” Turning to her grandmother, she said, “Clap, Becca, clap!”

  Becca consented, and then sat patiently and watched whatever production Lizzie presented (and she’d keep watching through the years).

  Elizabeth’s creative control of this pubescent Snow White production offered telling signs of her early confidence and ambition which diminished over time, while the “presenting” part of Skip’s intro foreshadowed the title of their father’s TV series, Robert Montgomery Presents, on which Lizzie would make her professional debut playing her father’s daughter.

  According to Cosmopolitan Magazine, July 1954, Mr. Montgomery was there, beside Becca, for Lizzie’s Snow White re-do, somewhere in the proverbial bleachers, cheering her on, at least during the wishing-well moment that transpired in Disney’s original White film. As Robert recalled, his daughter’s rendition was somewhat scaled down:

  If you remember the scene, Snow White would sing a line of that song, “I’m Wishing,” and then an echo would sing it back to her. Well, Elizabeth was apparently all by herself in her room, singing the song in front of (that) wastebasket, which she was using as a wishing well. And sure enough, an echo was coming from somewhere in the room.

  Further investigation identified the echo as Skip’s voice, but the father Montgomery was impressed nonetheless:

  How hammy can you get? Anybody who at the age of five would go to all that trouble to set up a scene could never be anything but an actress in later life. So I wasn’t surprised when Elizabeth came to me a few years later, when she was around fourteen, and announced she was planning to go on the stage. I never discouraged her, because I think being an actress is as good a life as any if you really work hard at it, and Elizabeth is a hard worker. She asked me if I would appear with her in her first play, and I said I would.

  In 1951, Lizzie made her social debut at New York’s Debutante Cotillion and Christmas Ball, and her father kept his promise: that same year, she made her TV acting debut on his show. But she never doubted his word; she believed her parents empathized with aspirations of all shape and color, specifically theatrical endeavors. As she told Modern Screen in May 1965, “They certainly understood Skip and me and never ever discouraged either one of us about the theater.”

  But her acting bug stung deeper than Skip’s. She’d go on to perform in a variety of roles and mediums for fifty years; he appeared in TV westerns for about four years. Then he retired from the entertainment industry, and began working at the Hayden Stone brokerage firm.

  Elizabeth was terribly proud of him. As she explained to Ronald Haver in 1991, her father was “very hard on my brother, much more so on him than on me. But I think Skip turned out to be a much better person, maybe in spite of it, I think, because he’s a terrific guy. My brother’s really neat.”

  “There’s only a two-year gap between my brother and me,” she said in 1965, this time, in August to TV Radio Mirror magazine. “I can’t recall an instance of jealousy between us as we grew up. Oh, I guess there were occasions when kid brother got in big sister’s way. But jealousy? Not a bit of it.”

  “Well,” as Samantha might have said, except maybe only once, although the incident had more to do with sexual discrimination than sibling rivalry.

  “A Second Baby, A Special Problem” was published by TV Radio Mirror in November 1966 which profiled the birth of Lizzie’s second son, Robert, named for her father—and her brother. In the article, Lizzie recalled a childhood moment when Skip was allowed to cross the street by himself whereas she wasn’t.

  “Why can’t I do that?” she asked her mother.

  “Don’t forget,” she replied. “Skip is a boy.”

  That seemed most discriminatory to Lizzie, but she kept her mouth shut:

  I knew Mom did not make her decisions lightly and, once made, she stuck to them, without discussion. Of course, once I reached my teens, she’d sit down and talk such things over, explaining why she had come to certain judgments, and she would listen carefully to my arguments on why I deserved fewer restraints.

  Certain restrictions may have inhibited Skip’s career in acting aspirations, but not his life in general. Lizzie was right. He was a “neat” person.

  According to Montgomery archivist Tom McCartney, www.bobsbewitchingdaughter.com, and www.earlofhollywood.com, Skip was born Robert Montgomery, Jr., in Los Angeles on February 15, 1936. Although his birth year has been incorrectly reported as 1930, Skip was actually three years younger than Elizabeth and six years younger than their late sister Martha Bryan.

  Though Lizzie and Skip were raised in Hollywood, they enjoyed their summers at the Montgomery country estate in Patterson, New York or in the U.K. where their father worked in films.

  In 1939, Skip became the youngest Lifetime Honorary Member of the Screen Actors Guild, over which his dad presided as president. In 1945 he attended school in Arizona. Five years later, when their parents divorced, Skip remained with Lizzie in the family’s Upstate New York home with their mother and attended St. Mark’s School in Southborough, Massachusetts in 1952. In 1958, Skip, then twenty-two, formally joined the family business by becoming a working actor. That same year, he also became a father when his wife, socialite Deborah Chase, gave birth to a son, Robert Montgomery, III.

  The following year, he won small roles in movies such as Say One for Me and A Private’s Affair as well as on TV shows such as The Loretta Young Show (NBC, 1953–1961), in which his sister performed, and Gunsmoke (CBS, 1955–1975), the latter in which he made his TV acting debut. Here, he appeared in the macabre episode “Lynching Man” which originally aired November 15, 1958.

  Directed by Richard Whorf and written by John Meston, this segment also featured an overacted performance by guest star George Macready (who had played Elizabeth’s father in NBC’s Kraft Television Theatre production of “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz” in 1955):

  A mild-mannered Hank Blenis (O. Z. Whitehead) doesn’t stand a chance in the Old West. He owned an apple farm back in Ohio, but now he’s not even sure how to ride a horse. Unfortunately, he won’t soon have to worry about learning to do so; when his healthy stallion is stolen, and he’s left for dead, hung by a tree. Meanwhile, one man vigilante Charlie Drain (Macready), whose father was lynched when he was a child, sets out to find Hank’s killer. This infuriates Marshall Matt Dillon (star James Arness), who along with his sidekick Chester (Dennis Weaver), sets out to find the real culprit. They soon meet the kindly farm hand Billy Drico (Skip), shortly before uncovering the mystery, while losing Charlie in the process.

  While Macready over-projected his part, Skip appeared to underact. Although his was a minor role, Skip could have made the part of Billy Drico something more. It was his TV acting debut. Understandably nervous, he made every attempt to live up to his father’s great expectations. But his anxiety appears to have got the best of him. Skip did not give the role his all; he appeared awkward and uncomfortable on camera. Unlike Lizzie, unfortunately, his performances were not given a chance to be properly modulated; he never quite attained the opportunity to hone his craft under his father’s watchful eye. By the time Skip started to legitimately pursue acting, Robert Montgomery Presents had completed its run.

  But, happily, Robert Montgomery, Jr. had other things on his mind. Nine months after Gunsmoke, on July 10, 1959, he and his wife welcomed a daughter into the family when Deborah Elizabeth Montgomery was born.

  He continued acting on television with minor roles in such popular fare as Sea Hunt (in two episodes, one in 1959, the other in 1961), the anthology show Death Valley Days (hosted by future president Ronald Reagan), and a series called The Tall Man, which was created by Samuel Peeples (of Star Trek fame), in which he played a character named Jimmy Carter (precursing at least the name of yet another future president).

  Skip also acted on the big screen with in 1960: a small part in The Gallant Hours, a feature his father both produced and directed, and enjoyed a larger role in the science fiction film
, 12 to the Moon.

  But correctly sensing that his career was going nowhere fast, in 1962, he left the world of acting and became a Wall Street stockbroker with Hayden Stone & Co. where he enjoyed a lucrative career for the next two decades.

  He spent his golden years in Tallahassee, Florida, where he became the community liaison for Florida State University’s Graduate Film Conservatory. He also established the Sleepy Actors Group, which provided housing for students working on their thesis films and hosted a database listing production related services and locations.

  In 1998, he served as executive producer on the independent film, Roses.

  On February 7, 2000, he underwent surgery for lung cancer and the outlook seemed positive. But on April 28, that prognosis turned grim, and he died suddenly at the age of sixty-four, leaving behind his third wife, Melanie, son Adam, and daughter Meghann.

  Years before, “kid brothers” was one of the many commonalities Elizabeth shared with her friend Sally Kemp, whom she met while attending the New York American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Kemp had few memories of Skip when they were all young and didn’t recall much of Skip’s relationship with his father. But what she did recall is noteworthy:

  I too had a brother Skip’s age, two years younger than I. Elizabeth and I were starting our adult lives and careers; our brothers were still in school when we first knew each other and I seldom saw them together. She seemed fond of him; he was cute, blond, curly haired, choirboy face but our paths at that age didn’t meet very often. Little brothers weren’t foremost in our minds. Whenever I was with Bob (Sr.) and Elizabeth it was in a more adult situation. Skip would be doing whatever it is young boys do. Bob seemed very proud of Elizabeth when I was with them and Buffy (Harkness, Bob’s second wife), too, was proud of her. It was all, from my point of view, very warm, funny, and delightful. Bob often made Elizabeth and I sing Broadway songs for him and any guests around. I saw only a privileged, affectionate family. One I envied at times. Buffy was always gentle, gracious, and perfectly lovely to everyone. If there was any trouble underneath I never saw it.