Twitch Upon a Star

by Herbie J. Pilato

  A circus troupe in France takes under their wing a poor 16-year-old girl named Lili Daurier (Caron). After her father dies only a month before, Lili finds herself stranded in a strange town. Marc the Magnificent (Aumont), a magician in a local circus, takes a particular interest in Lili, though not romantically, for he views her only as a troubled child. Rejected, Lili turns to the circus puppets with whom she sings away her troubles, oblivious to the puppeteers behind the curtains. Upon her initial chorus with the puppets, a crowd gathers. The circus almost immediately has a new act, and the little girl lost is found, even though she’s not at all fond of the angry Paul (Ferrer), the carnival’s owner, who is also the main puppeteer. In time, Lili realizes Marc the magician is married (to his assistant, Gabor), and that her feelings for him were mere fancy, for it is Paul who she truly loves. It’s a fact she learns almost too late if not for the indelible mark Paul makes by infusing his heart and soul into the beloved puppets, which at the film’s conclusion, have seemingly come to life.

  Upon close inspection of the film, it may be clear as to why Lizzie held it so dear—and why she chose to share it with a good friend like Sally.

  Lili had lost her father when she was only sixteen. Sally’s father had died when she was young. Lili tells a joke early on in the film that references horses, which both Lizzie and Sally adored.

  Lili to Marc: When is a singer not a singer?

  Marc: When?

  Lili: When he is a little horse.

  Other quotes from the film are more reflective: “A little of what you want is better than large quantities” and “Refusal to compromise is a sign of immaturity.”

  On screen, Lili was seeking answers to life’s biggest questions. Off screen, in the 1953 reality of her youth, and with an adventurous, if short, life ahead of her, so was Lizzie. With her good and generous heart, she may have then felt Sally was also seeking the same answers. Instead of viewing the beastly images of the horror movies they all too frequently attended, Lizzie may have wanted her good friend to gaze upon the simple beauty of Lili—a film that Sally would later view sixteen times. “I love it,” she says. “And I think of Elizabeth each time I see it” (as will probably anyone who reads this passage).

  The similarities are significant between Lili and Lizzie’s return to comedy with the CBS TV-movie, When the Circus Came to Town, which originally aired on January 20, 1981.

  Mary Flynn (Lizzie) lives a middle-aged existence that is tedious and empty. When the circus arrives in her small town, she decides to leave home and join its ranks. In the process, Mary Flynn is rejuvenated with a new life purpose. She ultimately finds happiness and love with circus ring leader Duke (Christopher Plummer), if fleeting.

  A tender and happy story, filled with hope and promise for change, the movie (which was filmed at the Coastal Empire Fairgrounds near Savannah, Georgia) might have been equally pleasing to Bewitched fans, providing them with an opportunity to see their beloved Elizabeth Montgomery in a lighter role that most would find fitting to her comedic forte. What’s more, Circus, like much of Lizzie’s work, was filled with lines that could have easily been pulled from the dialogue of her real life. At various points in the film, her character, Mary Flynn said:

  “I don’t believe in age discrimination.”

  “My father just passed away.” (The movie aired in 1981—the year Robert Montgomery died.)

  “I have often been complimented on my appearance.”

  “I’m deathly afraid of heights” (which Lizzie was in real life).

  “I could never do anything in front of a crowd.”

  “I read a lot of Shakespeare myself” (which Robert Montgomery instructed Lizzie to do as a child).

  “Southerners have a long tradition of taking care of their own.”

  “Maybe I’ll bleach my hair. I used to see all the blond ladies walking around like someone told them it was all right to be sexy. But not me.”

  “I always wanted to marry the man I felt close to in bed.”

  “I always wanted for somebody else to tell me that things were okay.”

  Although a few other lines weren’t entirely true to Lizzie’s form, they came close. At one point in the movie, Lizzie’s Mary tells Plummer’s Duke, “I have guts,” which was true of Lizzie. But then Mary added, “I also have bad posture,” which was not true of Lizzie. Her father wouldn’t have allowed it.

  In another partially true-to-life moment, Duke quizzes Mary:

  Duke: So you were a Daddy’s girl?

  Mary: I was a Momma’s girl until she died. Then I was a Daddy’s girl.

  Off-screen, Lizzie’s mother died in 1992, approximately eleven years after her father.

  In general, however, When the Circus Came to Town still spoke to Lizzie’s reality, as did many of her performances through the years, including The Awakening Land, which, like Circus, was also directed by Boris Sagal. More significantly, Land was filmed on vast country landscapes in Illinois, many of which played into Lizzie’s memory of her youth growing up on the expansive Montgomery homestead in Patterson, New York. In Land, Lizzie portrayed a pioneer woman named Sayward Luckett Wheeler, and she was surrounded by a plethora of animals for which she had a great affection, especially horses.

  Five

  The Equestrians

  “I have a pair of jodhpurs that look like they belong on a Madame Alexander Barbie doll.”

  —Elizabeth Montgomery to Ronald Haver, 1991

  Lizzie’s early life was a relative age of innocence, one in which she strived to appreciate the simple pleasures, significantly helped along by her love for animals. As she explained in 1989, “I’ve had dogs, cats, crickets, crocodiles, alligators, deer, goats, pigs, horses, chickens, and anything else you could name.”

  Consequently, she frequently performed on screen with nonhumans such as a chimpanzee in the 1963 feature film Johnny Cool, a seeing-eye dog in the 1984 CBS TV-movie, Second Sight: A Love Story, and any number of minions from the animal kingdom on Bewitched. Due to her realistic theatrics, the audience was made to believe that she was bonding with the given goose or frog, etc. As Bewitched writer Richard Baer asserted in 1988, “This, I believe, is a very difficult thing to do. Yet, there wasn’t any question as to whether she could pull it off.”

  In fact, according to the March 1965 issue of TV Picture Life magazine and the January 1965 edition of The Saturday Evening Post, a special cat named “Zip Zip” later played into Bill Asher’s direction of Lizzie on Bewitched. Whenever he was looking to pull a particular emotion for her to utilize as Samantha, he would say, from the sidelines, “Zip Zip!”

  But all other creatures aside, it was Lizzie’s particular affection for horses that stood out, a bond which her son, Billy Asher, Jr. said was influenced by her dad. “My grandfather was an equestrian,” the young Asher relayed in 2001 on the televised Headliners & Legends profile of his mom. “When she was very young he had her on a horse and she was drawn right to it.”

  When she was three years old, Lizzie’s father sat her on a pony and said, “Ride!” and so she did; whether around the Montgomery homes in Beverly Hills/Bel Air and Patterson, New York, or in Britain, where she spent school vacations while her father produced films there. To help pass the time, she took horse-jumping lessons and frequently rode with him in the English countryside and London’s Hyde Park. She even won a number of ribbons for horsemanship.

  As she told Ronald Haver in 1991, “I’ll always remember him on horseback … and teaching me to ride. I remember him being very athletic … on horseback is how I … immediately think of him. That and like polo, and jumping.”

  Their shared love for mares was one of the non-Hollywood pastimes that contributed to their strong bond in Lizzie’s youth. Although Robert at first objected to his daughter’s chosen profession, investigative journalist and best-selling author Dominick Dunne told A&E’s Biography in 1999 that Lizzie and her father thought very highly of one another. According to Dunne, Robert embraced the idea of Lizzi
e as an actress. “She was a thoroughbred,” Dunne assessed with no intended comparison to horses, which Sally Kemp confirms both she and Lizzie “adored. I think she even had a pet llama. And if she didn’t, then she always wanted one.”

  In time, her art once more would imitate her life—in fact, a few times more. Lizzie rode a variety of mares in her twin TV-movie westerns, Mrs. Sundance (1974) and Belle Starr (1980), while horses came into play on two episodes of Bewitched.

  As she explained to TV Radio Mirror magazine in November 1969:

  Lord, I adore horses. We go to the track every Saturday. I even named a character in Bewitched after a horse. There’s a horse named John Van Mill-wood, a great big thing that can’t get his legs straightened out until he’s halfway around the track. And once when a script had a character—I think it was an old boyfriend of Endora’s—he had some plain old name so I asked if we could call him John Van Millwood.

  In 1989, she correlated working on Bewitched to playing the horses:

  There wasn’t a moment when I thought, Oh, I’d rather be someplace else. First of all, the only other place I’d probably have rather been was the race track and there was always that on the weekends … or the tennis courts, right? So that was cool. It’s ever so amazing to be paid for something you really enjoy doing,” she went on to say. “I still feel that way about acting. I mean, in general, it’s a grind. I think physically you pace yourself and that’s the way it goes. Horses do that … so can people … well, jockeys kind of help.

  The two Bewitched episodes that showcased her love for horses—as well as the race track—were “The Horse’s Mouth,” a black and white segment from the second season with Dick York that aired March 3, 1966, and “Three Men and a Witch on a Horse,” a color episode from the last season with Dick Sargent, airing December 15, 1971.

  In “Mouth”: A race horse named Dolly feels neglected and flees from her owner and into Samantha’s backyard, while her sister Adorable Diane keeps winning races Dolly helps to set up. To fully understand her quandary, Sam transforms Dolly into a woman. When Darrin objects to the magic manifestation, Samantha says it’s a special opportunity to fully understand a horse’s day at the races.

  In “Three Men”: Endora transforms Darrin into a gambler, after which Sam insists the spell be broken. Ignoring her daughter’s plea, Endora has Darrin bet on a horse named Fancy Dancer who is bound to lose—and on which he convinces Larry and a client to place all bets. As a result, Sam pops over to the stables to have a motivating chat with Dancer, who ultimately wins the race for fear of ending up at the glue factory.

  In 1968, writer Rick Byron interviewed Lizzie for a Photoplay magazine article called “The Lady Gambles.” Here, she expressed her fondness for horse racing by comparing two views from abroad, most assuredly influenced by her periodic summer vacations in England with her father. “I’m about as thoroughly American as anyone can be,” she said, and yet she felt that the United States was missing some of the ceremonial aspects of the British who, she believed, knew how to “do things in a beautiful, pageant-like manner. “That’s one of the reasons I love the races. They’re so ceremonious, so steeped in tradition.” Whenever she heard the song “My Old Kentucky Home” at the famed Derby, she was driven to tears. “That is how wonderful I think the tradition is,” she decided.

  At one point in the interview, Lizzie apologized for what she considered to be a boring life, but in the process revealed more insight into her personality than she have may realized or intended. “I’m sorry that I haven’t given you much,” she said. “I’m afraid I’m a pretty dull interview. The fact of the matter is that I’m not really wild about talking about myself (which is also what she had said in 1989). I’d much rather talk about books or movies or … horses.”

  Her love of horses may have been ignited by her father, but her penchant for the real life race track was instilled in her by her grandmother Becca. According to what Robert Foxworth said on A&E’s Biography, it was Becca who introduced Lizzie to horse racing. When Lizzie was a little girl, Becca one day walked into her room and said she would not be attending school that morning. Instead, little Lizzie would be accompanying Becca to the races. “You’ll learn much more about math at the track than you ever will in class,” Becca said.

  In a 1993 interview with magazine journalist Bart Mills, Lizzie professed, “I love the track.” She didn’t own any race horses herself because, “I can lose money perfectly well on other people’s horses.” Although, she wasn’t doing too badly at the time; the Santa Anita Race Track had been “very good to her.” “I go as often as I can,” she explained, “and when I can’t go, I send my bets with my friends … There’s nothing like a day at the races. There are no phones and if you’re lucky, you come back richer.”

  However, Lizzie’s mother was reportedly not at all fond of the equestrian creatures and vice versa. According to Montgomery archivist Tom McCartney, Robert Montgomery had named his polo pony after his wife. Lizzie once recalled the day the two Bettys met for the first time. Apparently, they both took a strong dislike to one another. As Elizabeth recalled at the time, her mother was the only person she knew who could fall off of a polo pony that was “standing perfectly still.”

  Next to her affection for horses, Lizzie’s second favorite member of the animal kingdom had to be dogs, various breeds of which she owned through the years.

  In 1989, it was the beautiful female canine, Zuleika, named after the heroine Zuleika Dobson from the book of the same title written by Max Beerbohm whose entire literary collection Lizzie inherited from her father.

  As she explained to Ronald Haver in 1991, Robert Montgomery had instructed her to read Beerbohm, Dickens, Thackeray, and Shakespeare since she was six years old.

  I was really weird as far as that was concerned. (If) you saw a funny little boney-kneed scrawny kid sitting down with Hamlet, at the age of about six, wouldn’t you think she was kind of odd? Yes. It’s true. It’s absolutely true. I was very peculiar. And I guess nothing changes. And I am so really grateful to him for all that and forcing me … certainly not against my will … to be an avid reader when I was little, so of course I still am. But I think that’s why he was so hell-bent on wanting to read everything and (owning) collections of authors … because (learning) meant a great deal to him.

  Originally published in 1911, Zuleika Dobson was a shameless parody about what happens when an enticing young woman enrolls at the elite all-male Judas College, Oxford. A conjurer by trade, Zuleika Dobson can only love a man who is immune to her allure: a circumstance that proves ruinous, as many of her love-sick beaus lose the will to live due to her cold-shoulder. Filled with notable catch-phrases (“Death cancels all engagements,” utters the first casualty) and inspired throughout by Beerbohm’s robust creativity, this rhapsodic take on Edwardian undergraduate life at Oxford has, according to literary great E. M. Forster, “a beauty unattainable by serious literature.”

  “Zuleika Dobson,” Forster had also said, “is a highly accomplished and superbly written book whose spirit is farcical. It is a great work—the most consistent achievement of fantasy in our time.”

  Beerbohm, who lived between 1872 and 1956, and whom George Bernard Shaw once dubbed “the incomparable Max,” was an essayist, caricaturist, critic, and short story writer who endures today as one of Edwardian England’s leading satirists. Zuleika Dobson was Beerbohm’s only novel, but a particular favorite of Robert Montgomery’s.

  Upon subsequently reading the adventures of Dobson, Lizzie so loved the character’s first name that she gave it to what would become one of her many household pets. As she explained in 1989, the Zuleika character in Beerbohm’s book was “so beautiful that the statues that she drove by in her carriage broke into cold sweats when she went by. So I thought, ‘Well, if I ever get a real pretty dog, I’m going to give her that name.’”

  Approximately five years before Zuleika came into Lizzie’s life, there was “Emma,” a Labrador retriever and her co-
worker, as it were, on the TV-movie, Second Sight: A Love Story, which originally aired on CBS, March 13, 1984. Here, Lizzie portrayed Alaxandra McKay, a stoic, reclusive blind woman who must come to terms with her disability and the subsequent need to utilize the services of a seeing-eye dog. Lizzie in 1989:

  I became very attached to that dog. I always get very attached to every pet I work with. But there was something special about Emma. I think it’s because I worked with her for such an extended amount of time (three weeks) before I even started shooting the film. Her trainer, Lee Mitchell, is the most wonderful, gentle person for seeing-eye dogs, and he worked so hard with me with this dog. So I got attached to her, and she got attached to me. And that was it, and the way it should be.

  Lizzie and Emma shared nearly every scene together in Sight and, at the film’s wrap party, found it difficult to detach from one another, so much so, Mitchell at one point turned to Lizzie and asked, “Would you like to have Emma?”

  Lizzie was shocked. “It never occurred to me that they would want me to keep her.”

  She tried to talk herself out of it, if only because she thought the gifted canine would be better placed with someone who was visually impaired. “Emma was totally trained as a seeing-eye dog and I thought she could at least be used as a companion for someone who really needed her,” Lizzie said.

  But Mitchell was persistent. Emma was too strong for any disabled candidate. His remaining list of specially trained dogs had already been paired with clients and continuing sessions with Emma would not have been a practical business decision. “Aside from that,” he said to Lizzie, “she’s attached to you.”