Twitch Upon a Star

  On August 7, 1954, TV Guide published the article, “Biggest ‘Barn’ On Earth: Summer Stock Was Never Like This”; it profiled Robert Montgomery’s Summer Theatre (also known as Robert Montgomery’s Playhouse), which was a summer replacement series for Robert Montgomery Presents. At the time the show was in its third hit season. Robert Montgomery was proud of the series, which he conceived in 1952 as what TV Guide called, “a sound way to hold onto his network spot during the dog days of July, August, and early September.” Or as he further explained, the program gave “a group of young actors a chance to put on a show of their own, undominated by big names and formidable reputations … this week’s star may be next week’s butler.” Presents always aired live (only Robert’s intros and farewells were on film), and the scripts had “nearly always been reasonably lively,” TV Guide said.

  After her affair with Late Love ended, Lizzie was seduced by a role in A Summer Love, which aired as a critically praised episode of her father’s summer series on July 20, 1953:

  An egotistical actor many times married (John Newland), falls hopelessly in love with a young ingénue (Lizzie) in his theatre troupe. But upon meeting her family, he enlists the assistance of a former wife (Margaret Hayes) to help him secure happiness with his new love.

  She also received high marks from her co-star, the reputable John New-land who, according to TV Radio Mirror, said, “Elizabeth is one of the most flexible actresses I’ve ever known.”

  Robert, meanwhile, was more subdued with his review. “Elizabeth,” he remarked, “always remember that, if you achieve success, you will get applause; and, if you get applause, you will hear it. But my advice to you concerning applause is this: Enjoy it, but never quite believe it.”

  The following May, Lizzie continued to address whether or not her prestigious lineage helped or hindered her career. In the article, “The Girl Behind the Twitch,” published by Modern Screen, she said, “Celebrity off-spring or no celebrity offspring, it’s one thing (to have a name) to open doors and another to keep them open. Nobody will take a second chance on you unless you’re good, no matter who you are.”

  Or as she reiterated to John Tesh in 1992, “A name will open doors.”

  But when she wed senior actor Gig Young in 1956, Elizabeth Montgomery considered changing her name to “Elizabeth Young,” if only out of respect to her new husband, and maybe as a tiny jab to her dad. “I gave it to him good,” she mused to TV Guide in 1961.

  Robert, however, recoiled at the notion and responded with a “real pathetic look,” she recalled. He was unhappy with her choice to marry a “father-figure” of a man more than twice her age. What’s more, he was concerned that the public would think she was the daughter of rival actor Robert Young who, during the reign of Robert Montgomery Presents, was the star of the hit family show, Father Knows Best (CBS/NBC, 1954–1960). Not only would Robert Young have another hit series (Marcus Welby, M.D. on ABC, 1969–1975, debuting in Bewitched’s sixth season); but like Lizzie’s father, he had been a film star of the 1930s and 1940s at the same studio, MGM.

  In effect, Mr. Montgomery wondered if Lizzie was “ashamed” of him and their family name. And even though she at times enjoyed confounding him, a brief press item about actress Lee Remick’s wedding may have offered at least a measure of relief.

  Lizzie was a dear friend of Remick’s and served as matron of honor at her marital ceremony, held at the Church of St. Vincent Ferrer in New York. As archived in the Thomas Crane Public Library, the wedding announcement/press release, dated August 3, 1957, was titled: “Lee Remick, Quincy Star of TV and Movies, Bride of William A. Colleran in New York City.” It described Lizzie as:

  Mrs. Elizabeth Montgomery Young of New York City, daughter of Robert Montgomery, film star, TV actor, and producer. Mrs. Young will wear a ballerina gown of pastel mint green chiffon with a harem skirt, matching accessories, velvet coronet, and will carry a nosegay of white carnations and pink sweetheart roses.

  Despite such intermittent clarifications, Lizzie’s lineage was always in question, as when George Montgomery, another contemporary of her father’s with whom she shared no relation, was added to the name game. (Additionally, George, Lizzie, and Robert were no relation to actor Earl Montgomery—born 1894, died 1966—who is periodically albeit inaccurately linked to Robert Montgomery’s film, and Lizzie’s favorite of her father’s movies, The Earl of Chicago.)

  Film historian Rob Ray co-hosts the esteemed weekly Friday Film Forum at Long Beach School for Adults in Long Beach, California. As he sees it, George Montgomery was more of a common man who came to prominence in the early 1940s as the more established stars like Robert went off to war. George was a Twentieth Century Fox contract player who made minor hits like 1942’s Roxie Hart (Chicago without the music), “but he never really became a star. He usually supported the female star in a list of films and had the lead in B movies.”

  George also went on to support and marry TV legend Dinah Shore, and lived somewhat in her shadow when she became a hugely popular star of her own show. While she devoted all her time to a successful television career and entertained millions, he became a talented carpenter and woodworker (a role he later popularized in Pledge TV commercials of the 1970s).

  Eventually, he became bored and “started dallying with the hired help and other available women,” Ray says. “She caught him and divorced him in 1963, but they remained friends and had children together; and he was at her side when she died, long after her very public relationship with Burt Reynolds. He died sometime later in the nineties. But he was always just another average vendor selling his wood pieces at those home craft festivals around the country back in the ’80s and ’90s. You’d never guess he had been a star, except that he still had the star charisma.

  Robert Montgomery’s life was quite a different story. He came from money and entered films around 1930 at MGM as what Ray calls “a suave, Cary Grant–type in the days before Archie Leach (Grant’s real name) became Cary Grant.” He worked largely at MGM, which is now owned by Ted Turner, and remained a star into the forties. But as they aged, Grant garnered the suave roles and Robert moved into films noir and war movies in the 1940s and went behind the cameras directing and producing especially on television in the 1950s. During the Red Scare of the late 1940s and early 1950s, he was considered a loyal, conservative old-money establishment Republican, which Ray says, “Elizabeth rebelled against.”

  Just as her career took off with Bewitched, Robert’s started slowing down. He largely stayed out of the limelight for the rest of his life until his death in 1981. “I never, ever saw him appear with Elizabeth anywhere after she became a star,” Ray intones. “I suspect she always feared being known as ‘Robert Montgomery’s daughter’ and did everything she could to downplay that relationship, including not casting him as her father in Bewitched.”

  Actually, she did cast him, but he said no. By the time Bewitched became a hit—which was immediately after it debuted in 1964—it was Robert Montgomery who became known as “Elizabeth Montgomery’s father.” Fact is, she became a bigger star than he ever was. As Lizzie’s friend Sally Kemp revealed on MSNBC’s Headliners & Legends in 2001, she encountered people who knew of Elizabeth, but were unfamiliar with who her father was.

  In 1999, Billy Asher, Jr. told A&E’s Biography that post-Bewitched, people would approach Robert Montgomery and identify him as Elizabeth Montgomery’s father. That just tickled Lizzie to no end. At such times she responded with a triumphant “Yes!” because as Billy saw it, she had a very strong sense of who she was as a person.

  The label, “Robert Montgomery’s daughter,” was an albatross around her neck. “And boy, did she want to get past that,” Billy added. Indeed. As reported in Elizabeth’s interview with TV Radio Mirror in January 1965,

  “After ten years as an actress, you’d think people would have stopped asking me how it feels to be Bob Montgomery’s daughter,” she grumbles, but without losing the twinkle in her eyes. “How the devil do
people think it feels? I’m deeply fond of my father, he feels the same about me. Just like any father and daughter. What else is there to be said about it?”

  With that in mind, and although a reserved actress, Lizzie did not shy away from the public life created first by her father’s name and then her own. In the end, her charismatic father trusted his dynamic daughter to follow her own career path. In the early days, pre-Bewitched, and upon her request, he remained accessible to her, but was sure not to play favorites. She would still have to “prove herself,” he said, which she certainly would do, time and again.

  Elizabeth’s relationship with Robert Montgomery, however, also helped to build her character and strengthen her spine in an industry that many times takes no prisoners. As Bill Asher, Sr. told Screen Stars in August 1965, “She is perhaps a little overly conscientious, in short, a worrier. But that’s a good way to be in a demanding profession.”

  However, he concluded, “I think she gets her professional attitudes, her capacity for taking infinite pains, from her father.”

  Bottom line: Elizabeth wasn’t all that interested in following her father onto the big screen. She felt more comfortable on TV and the Broadway stage, venues that for her boded well. By the time “Top Secret” aired, she had just graduated from the American Academy of Dramatic Arts (with Sally Kemp, and June Lockhart of Lost in Space fame, herself the daughter of esteemed actors Gene and Kathleen Lockhart). Lizzie had also served a summer internship at the John Drew Memorial Theater, in Easthampton, Long Island. Because of her youthful appearance, she was placed in ingénue roles at this theatre and was already concerned about being typecast, some thirteen years before immortalizing Samantha on Bewitched. “Even though I’m twenty now,” she bemoaned to TV Guide in 1953, “everybody thinks I’m about fifteen. If this keeps up, I’ll probably be playing ingénues until I’m forty.”

  Of a liberal mindset with no interest in making a mark in feature films, Lizzie preferred to play comedic parts, which were at the very least a staple of her dad’s career. She was also interested in pursuing musical comedy but confessed, “I can’t sing.” Or at least she believed she couldn’t carry a tune, which she would later disprove as Serena in a few peppy musical episodes of Bewitched and as the guest-hostess in 1966 on ABC’s The Hollywood Palace variety show. For the moment, however, she only danced, with training in ballet, in case a Broadway musical ever materialized. But that opportunity never presented itself.

  Except for her initial “Top Secret” segment of Robert Montgomery Presents, she had not yet even acted on TV, mostly because the American Academy of Dramatic Arts frowned upon students performing in any manner outside its walls. But she held no ill will against the school. In fact, she was grateful to it for teaching her how to read lines, something her father had prodded her to do for years. As she continued to tell TV Guide in 1953, “Dad taught me to read everything since I was a little girl.”

  Despite and during her privileged upbringing, she developed a daring sense of humor, which later contributed to an approachable persona that was unaffected by the various Hollywood machinations. As she explained to TV Radio Mirror in 1965:

  The parents of Hollywood children really do try to protect them from acquiring too much of the glamour stuff too soon. But, of course, some of it is bound to seep through. Still, it was only in rare cases that the kids got a lopsided view of their position in life. Take me, for instance. I never felt special because my father was a star. Most of the people who came to our house were important in one phase of the industry or another. Many of the kids I went around with at school came from richer or more renowned families than the Montgomerys. I’d say my environment was more likely to teach me humility than the feeling of arrogance.

  In 1989, she once more attributed her kind demeanor to her family’s guidance. Had she behaved with even the slightest trace of pretention, she said her father would have “picked me up by the feet and slammed me against the wall. And I probably would have deserved it. So, it’s no credit to me how I was raised. But it’s an enormous credit to my Mom and Dad.”

  As previously noted, when Robert Montgomery served in the Navy from 1940–1945 during World War II, Lizzie’s maternal grandmother Becca Allen became a member of the Montgomery household, contributing a great deal to both Lizzie and her brother’s Skip’s non-pretentious character.

  Out of all the adults who supervised Lizzie as a child, her grandmother Becca certainly seemed to be the one who, more than the others, had it all together. She was young at heart, carefree, and knew how to enjoy life beyond the rigid underpinning of her conservative Southern upbringing. She was supportive of Lizzie’s life and career, encouraging, worldly, but unaffected and open-minded. In short, she was hip, long before that word was introduced into the vernacular. No wonder Lizzie loved her so much. They bonded on so many levels and were on much more common ground than Lizzie ever shared with her parents.

  As Lizzie acknowledged in 1989, had she behaved insolently, Becca would have objected with a sardonic “Oh, please!”

  But still, Lizzie looked back and pondered, “Who knows what a value is? When you’re a tiny child, you really don’t know.”

  To her credit, she admitted to not being “the easiest child to get along with. I was stubborn. I had a very bad temper that I have since learned to control because Daddy had a worse one.” But her mother used a different strategy in reprimanding her. “Mom had a habit of becoming very quiet,” she recalled. “She would let Dad do the heavy-duty, very articulate disciplining. And I tell you, it was better to raise a hand than an adjective, a verb, or a noun.”

  “Boy,” she added of what could be her father’s periodic stern ways, “he could really give it to you.” Yet she took it all in stride. In the era in which she was raised, the 1930s–1940s, parents were taught not to spare the rod, or they would spoil the child. “I can barely think of a time when I resented getting in trouble,” she said in 1989.

  Not one to shirk responsibility, she kept herself in check. If she fell from any particular grace under her parents’ close watch, then she stepped up to the plate and took the blame. “If it was my fault, it was my fault,” she intoned with unabashed honesty. But she resented getting punished, as much as getting caught. “Because that just meant that I wasn’t as clever as I thought I was.”

  Lizzie believed her parents were rarely incorrect in the way they raised her and she had no complaints. Although she admitted her parents and Becca were “very strict,” they made certain she retained her own sense of values. Homework had to be done. Grades were expected to be good. “There were always choices within choices,” she explained. “It wasn’t just totally regulated. They gave me a lot of freedom to a point.”

  Despite that latitude, there were specific restrictions that she termed “weird.” For one, her parents forbade her from going to the movies, which was unfortunate because for her so simple an excursion was “an amazing treat.” That isn’t to say her parents denied their daughter the joyful pastime that millions around the world continue to embrace unto this day. They did not put their collective foot down and demand that she never step foot in a movie theatre. “It was much subtler than that,” she said.

  “Oh, now, Elizabeth,” she recalled her father saying, “you have something a hell of a lot better to do than on a Saturday afternoon than sitting in a movie theatre.”

  “But everybody else gets to go,” she would protest.

  “We don’t care what everybody else is doing,” would be the response. “This is what you are going to do.” She said such exchanges were “fairly regular,” and in time, she became intrigued with not attending the cinema, a media-sensitive prohibition that may have seemed odd, particularly due to her father’s movie stardom. But she didn’t think they were trying to protect her. “That might not be the right word,” she said. Instead, she viewed the prevention measure as a modus by her parents to steer her from temptation. “I was a mad enough child that I would want to jump into it immedia
tely,” she concluded in 1989 of the movie-going experience.

  However, in 1991, during her conversation with Ronald Haver, she explained how her father’s film Here Comes Mr. Jordan played into the game of her non-movie-going experience when she was as a child. She began by explaining an early scene in the movie in which the plane carrying her father’s character, Joe Pendleton, was falling apart. It became a particularly traumatic sequence for her to watch as a child:

  When I saw that strut, or whatever that’s called, on the plane snap, and plane suddenly started to go, I was just a mess. I hated that. I hated it when I was little. That’s probably why they never let me see movies because I just reacted so badly to everything. I didn’t see (Disney’s) Snow White (and the Seven Dwarfs) until it was like rereleased for the fortieth time or something because I swear I was like fifteen or sixteen … They would never let me see it because of the witch.

  Sally Kemp recalls things differently. “We’d go to the movies all the time.” But this was in their teen years, when they met as students at the prestigious American Academy of the Dramatic Arts in New York. Somewhat more independent by then, it was Lizzie who now set the rules, if only to confuse Sally with the provisions. Lizzie would take her cousin Panda to Walt Disney pictures, but Sally was only allowed to see horror movies, and she never understood why. “It was like she had some kind of catalogue,” Sally says, mimicking her friend’s logic in the situation: “Sally goes to horror movies and my cousin goes to Disney films.”

  Sally found the cinema segregation particularly puzzling, mostly because Panda, with whom she remains good friends today, seemed better suited for viewing horror films. “She had more of a macabre streak than I did.”

  Ever unpredictable, Lizzie surprised Sally one day, inviting her to see the classic 1953 feature film, Lili, starring Leslie Caron, Mel Ferrer, Jean-Pierre Aumont, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. Though a few of the characters may not always be on their best behavior, this delightful romantic comedy with a dash of fancy could hardly be classified as a monster movie: