Twitch Upon a Star

by Herbie J. Pilato

  When Lizzie attended New York’s American Academy of Dramatic Arts it was a breeding ground for future stars-in-the-making. Past graduates included the likes of Grace Kelly (who would ultimately leave Hollywood and become Princess Grace of Monaco) and Anne Baxter (who played royalty of a whole other kind in 1965’s classic film The Ten Commandments).

  There were additional students of the Academy and other similar institutions who paid tuition with funding from, for example, their G.I. Bill, namely actor James Arness. A contemporary of Lizzie’s, Arness would later become a legendary TV star in his own right, taking the lead in Gunsmoke (CBS, 1955–1975) on which Lizzie’s brother Skip ultimately made his TV debut. Meanwhile, too, Arness was brother to another soon-to-be-popular actor, Peter Graves, future star of Mission: Impossible on CBS, 1966–1973/ABC, 1989–1990. In either case, Arness utilized his military assistance to join an acting program at the Bliss-Hayden Theatre, a small established theatre school in Lizzie’s future city of Beverly Hills (where he was ultimately discovered by an agent).

  Other Academy graduates would periodically assemble for training or observation purposes, sometimes even after they graduated. As Sally Kemp recalls, one day in the green room there prowled a certain young charismatic man who left a year or so before she, Lizzie, and Jarmila. “But he was always lurking around there.”

  Many of the thespian alumni would “make the rounds” following graduation, she says. “In those days, you could do that.” It was one of many traditions that allowed for aspiring actors to pay random first visits to producers’ offices. “I never had the courage to do that. But it was possible.”

  “We were more privileged than many of the other students,” Sally says of the fortunate young life she shared with Lizzie and Jarmila. “There were those who had worked for years as waiters and waitresses to make money in order to attend the Academy.”

  In any case, the newfound male dramatic arts alumnus who frequently concealed himself and his perceptions in the distance was just about to spark Sally Kemp’s interest.

  During his periodic peeks from inside the Academy green room, the relatively new graduate remained clandestine and silent until one day, when he stopped Sally and said, quite unabatedly, “You’re one of the three graces, aren’t you?”

  Sally was flustered and a little annoyed.

  “Yeah,” the young man affirmed. “You, Montgomery, and the baroness—we call you the three graces.”

  Now flattered and somewhat embarrassed at how she and her dear friends were perceived by a few of their former, present, and maybe even some future schoolmates, Sally said, “Oh … well, that’s lovely. Thank you so much.” Then added, “But who are you?”

  “My name is John Cassavetes,” the young man answered.

  “How do you do,” she replied in turn. “I’m Sally Kemp.”

  Almost urgently, she then walked away, and thought sadly, “That boy’s just never going to amount to anything. He’s always in the green room.”

  She was dead wrong, of course, as the young Cassavetes would go on to become one of the greatest actors and directors of their generation. In the article, “A Second Look: John Cassavetes’ Touch is Clear in ‘Too Late Blues’” by Dennis Lim, Special to the Los Angeles Times, May 27, 2012, Cassavetes was dubbed “the original Method actor turned DIY [do-it-yourself] filmmaker.” As Lim went on to explain, “For that reason his early forays into studio directing … 1961’s Too Late Blues for Paramount and 1963’s Stanley Kramer-produced A Child Is Waiting for United Artists—are usually thought of as footnotes at best, or compromised failures at worst (a view that has been ascribed to Cassavetes himself).”

  Before dying too young at fifty-nine in 1989, he was featured in a list of celebrated big and small screen appearances. Those included the occult theatrical film, Rosemary’s Baby, about an evil coven of witches, which was released in 1968. The latter part of that year also marked the fifth hit season of Bewitched, two episodes of which (“The Battle of Burning Oak” and “Samantha’s Shopping Spree”) made a reference to Rosemary’s Baby, which also happened to feature Maurice Evans.

  As fate would have it, Cassavetes was linked to Lizzie via a few TV appearances. First, in 1954, for an episode of Robert Montgomery Presents titled “Diary,” and then on his own show, Johnny Staccato, for an episode called “Tempted” (which aired November 19, 1959):

  Faye Lynn (Lizzie) literally runs into Johnny (Cassavetes), seeking his protection while delivering a valuable diamond necklace. They share a brief romance and a sensual moment in his living room. Faye at first seems sincere, but in the end, her obsessive hunger for the finer things in life reveals her true intentions.

  Robert B. Sinclair directed this Staccato segment, in which Lizzie has some memorable lines as Faye Lynn that, if they don’t quite reflect her reality off-camera, certainly reference it.

  For example, regarding her failed and insincere relationship with Johnny, Faye tells him: “We tried to make a go of it. It’s just one of those things!” He says, “Faye—you’ve seen too many movies,” and she replies: “That’s right, Johnny … too many movies with too many glamorous people, wearing glamorous clothes and going to glamorous places. But that’s what I want, Johnny. I want it so very much.”

  In reality, of course, Lizzie could not have cared less about those things … except attending movies, at least when she was a child. She always wished she could have seen more films in her youth, something her parents prevented her from experiencing.

  Meanwhile, Lizzie as Faye shares a passionate kiss with Cassavetes as Johnny in one scene, probably the most sultry scene from her entire body of work.

  Seven

  The Europeans

  “Only then in Europe could she begin to see Robert as a father, a person separate and different from the famous star.”

  —Writer Jacqueline Starr, Screen Stars Magazine, August 1967

  In 1979, Lizzie appeared in two very different TV-movies: Act of Violence and Jennifer: A Woman’s Story. Violence was in keeping with her post-Samantha traumatic plot choices (a woman is assaulted and turns bitter); Jennifer’s story was somewhat more uplifting (a wealthy woman loses her husband and takes over his successful company).

  That same year, Lizzie’s friend Lee Remick was featured in a film called The Europeans which was the initial presentation of Merchant Ivory Productions, headed by producer Ismail Merchant of Bombay and American director James Ivory, who later directed such acclaimed and stylish films as Howards End (1992) and The Remains of the Day (1993).

  The Europeans was the first in this series of movies to address the pertinent balance of social graces and reserved emotions—the kind Elizabeth had been addressing her entire life, as instructed by her parents, most certainly her father.

  Remick was born in Quincy, Massachusetts, the daughter of Gertrude Margaret Waldo, an actress, and Francis Edwin “Frank” Remick, a department store proprietor. She appeared on six episodes of Robert Montgomery Presents, during which she and Lizzie developed their friendship.

  Although the two young actresses never performed together on Presents, Remick made her Broadway debut with Be Your Age in 1953, the same year Lizzie debuted on Broadway in Late Love. They later appeared in a fanciful rendition of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novella The Diamond as Big as the Ritz, adapted by William Holdack for an episode of NBC’s Kraft Television Theatre. Airing September 28, 1955, the story was broadly played by all cast members including Lizzie as a seemingly pre-Serena-esque character named Jasmine, who’s unimpressed with her family’s wealthy status.

  Remick played her sister Kismine, alongside Lizzie’s future TV-movie co-star William Daniels (from 1974’s A Case of Rape) as her brother. Rounding out the cast was Signe Hasso and George Macready, as Lizzie’s on-screen parents, and Mario Alcalde as Remick’s boyfriend.

  Lizzie has a free-for-all as Jasmine, reciting biting dialogue with such flare to her arrogant pretend mother and father, as if hoping her off-screen prestigious real paren
ts would take a listen.

  Here’s a sample, regarding Jasmine’s father:

  “There’s a look about not feeding the animals all over Father’s face”

  “It would just take a twist of Father’s wrist to put you back in the pit again”

  “Oh, now Father, you’re just getting yourself upset about nothing”

  “You mustn’t mind Father. He’s a bit theatrical”

  “That would be a good one on Father.”

  To Jasmine’s mother:

  “Mother, why do we always have to have wealthy people visit us? They’re such bores”

  “Mother, why don’t you send Kismine to college?” (“It’s only for boys, dear.”)

  In several scenes, Jasmine is seen reading Cinderella, one of many fairy-tales, Disney-related or otherwise, that Lizzie loved; and at one point Jasmine says to her mother:

  Mother, don’t you think Cinderella is divine? It’s the only book that is worth anything, well except the one about the little girl who has to sell matches to support her father [The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen]. Oh, I love that one.

  And then:

  I think Cinderella is the best. Only I think everybody ought to be poor in the end instead of rich. I think it would be much better that way.

  To her sister Kismine near the end of the episode:

  You don’t expect me to go on living in this house, doing stupid things and meeting stupid wealthy people, while you’re out in the world, poor and having fun, do you?

  And later, when she wants to accompany her sister and Alcalde:

  I won’t be a nuisance. I’ll help all I can. And we will be poor, won’t we … like the people in books. And I’ll be an orphan, and utterly free. Free and poor. What fun!

  Dialogue from the other characters also must have proved compelling for Lizzie upon her first read of the script. Remick’s boyfriend says: “Everybody’s youth is a dream,” to which Lee adds, “How pleasant to be young.”

  The most telling non-Jasmine dialogue that might have hit a nerve in Lizzie’s father/daughter dynamic was voiced by Macready’s parental TV role: “Cruelty doesn’t exist where self-preservation is concerned.”

  In January 1954, TeleVision Life published the article, “Our Name Is Montgomery” by Norma Gould, in which Elizabeth talked about her how her parents viewed her career. She had expressed how much her father tried to discourage her from acting, painting the bleakest possible picture of the entertainment industry. “He said it was the most heartbreaking field you can go into,” she recalled. However, her father added that it could also be quite satisfying.

  These comments were voiced the year Elizabeth debuted in “Summer Love,” an episode of Robert Montgomery Players, the summer replacement series for Robert Montgomery Presents. It was in “Love” that she co-starred with John Newland, who spoke glowingly of Lizzie, who called him a “wonderful performer.” When asked if they had ever dated, she replied, “Well, we’ve had drinks together after rehearsals at the Barberry Room. We’re just good friends.”

  Her ideal man, as explained in the article, was one with personality, character, ease, and a nice wardrobe. “She also prefers older men,” Gould wrote, as was later more than evident when Lizzie married Gig Young and then Bill Asher.

  But at the moment, her father was the only older man in her life; and for the most part, he approved of her life and career. He kept a close eye on each of her performances, including those on Robert Montgomery Presents and the Robert Montgomery Summer Theatre shows. As for her mother, “Well, I guess she’s pleased,” Elizabeth said. “You know how it is; she’s never actually sat me down and said, ‘Elizabeth, I want to tell you how pleased I am with what you’re doing.’”

  In September of 1967, TV Radio Mirror magazine published the article, “An Old Beau Tells All about Liz Montgomery’s Past,” by Jane Ardmore. It profiled a former boyfriend of Elizabeth’s from New York, a physician who—because the American Medical Association apparently then frowned upon the personal publicity of its members—was clandestinely identified as “Bud Baker.”

  Baker used to dance at various high society balls with Elizabeth; he had attended St. Mark’s High School in New York with Lizzie’s brother Skip and then later went to Harvard with a young sophisticate named Frederic Gallatin Cammann, who graduated in 1951.

  In 1950, after her parents divorced, Lizzie moved with her family to New York. Her father was despondent over the lack of Hollywood roles for forty-something men his age and he had high hopes for a lateral career move on the East Coast. He was also now married to the socially prominent Elizabeth “Buffy” Harkness, an heiress who just happened to be close friends with Cammann’s mother, who according to Tom McCartney, was known as Mrs. H. Thomas Richardson; Cammann’s father was Frederic Almy Cammann.

  While it is uncertain as to who exactly introduced Lizzie to Frederic, who would in time become her first husband, it was most likely Buffy, who was slightly class conscious. But Lizzie and Cammann had many mutual professional and personal connections, and they saw one another at various social functions and dances in New York, the same debutante gatherings that were periodically attended by Bud Baker. As Baker told TV Radio Mirror in 1967, “I’d always be on the stag line,” where he would see Lizzie whom he described as “very, very pretty, very popular.”

  “You couldn’t dance with her one minute straight without some other guy cutting in,” he said. “And she always seemed so above it all; bored stiff, really.” Or so she appeared. In reality, the high society game wasn’t Lizzie’s style. Only later did Baker understand that she was a country girl at heart, someone who loved horses and dogs, any animal, and the wide open spaces of the Montgomery compound in Upstate, New York.

  “The social game was new to her,” he said. Her entrée was, he confirmed, by way of her stepmother Buffy Harkness, “and of course, everyone knew she was Robert Montgomery’s daughter. But Liz was a bright light in her own right. She had this built-in radiance.”

  Bud had first met Lizzie when his cousin escorted her to a prom at St. Mark’s—a cousin who apparently still treasured her picture in his year book. “And let me say,” he clarified, “that my cousin wasn’t any big romance of Elizabeth’s. He was a fun friend. That’s what I was, too.”

  That’s how dating was defined in those days; you attended dances and proms with platonic friends, most of the time never sharing the slightest kiss or even holding hands. At least such was the case for this younger wealthier set … from the outside looking in.

  Baker then recalled another dance, this time at the River Club, down by the water on New York’s East End Avenue. The summer before, he had met Lizzie’s father and brother. His family owned a home on the shore and someone invited the Montgomerys, including Robert and Skip, to join them. Bud said they were both “great … easy-going,” Skip, in particular, “always was.”

  Bud hoped such associations would have proved fortuitous, if only so he could cut in line to dance with Lizzie at the River Club, approach her and say, “Hey—you know, I met your dad and your brother this summer.”

  More times than not, however, and to his great disappointment, she would be unimpressed, which made him think, “She’s really snooty.”

  Bands headed by Meyer Davis (who died in 1976), or Lester Lanin (who died in 2004, but was still going strong into his nineties) would be playing in the background, and Bud would try again. “Great band, isn’t it?” Still, Lizzie would give him that “above-it-all look.”

  “To tell you the truth,” he said in 1967 at the height of Bewitched’s popularity, “she wasn’t as much fun as she is now.” And apparently, she wasn’t as attractive to him then as she had become. “Her figure was always okay, but her face was sort of babyish and kind of pouty, especially when you mentioned her father. It wasn’t from any lack of love for him, though. Through the years I’ve discovered that. She adores her dad. But who wants to talk about a famous father?”

  Probably not Lizzie; b
ut Bud wasn’t “hung up” on those dances. He didn’t get carried away and he never thought Lizzie did either. The only reason he attended those dances was to dance with her and a few other gals.

  Although Lizzie was very reserved, and more insecure than she let on, according to Bud, she danced like a dream. She was a coordinated athlete who looked and was totally feminine. She wore lovely discreet clothes, in excellent taste. “You figured she’d marry young … someone with a great family name behind him and become one of the social set on the East Coast.”

  She did. Frederic Gallatin Cammann, Baker’s upper-class Harvard acquaintance whom he said came from “a great family,” namely Albert Gallatin, Cammann’s maternal great grandfather, and a former Secretary of the Treasury. According to the U.S. Department of the Treasury:

  Born to an aristocratic Swiss family, Albert Gallatin (1761–1849) emigrated from Switzerland to America in 1780. Elected to the House of Representatives in 1795 and serving until 1801, Gallatin fought constantly with the independent-minded first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. He was responsible for the law of 1801 requiring an annual report by the Secretary of the Treasury, and he submitted the first one later that year as Secretary. He also helped create the powerful House Ways and Means Committee to assure Treasury’s accountability to Congress by reviewing the Department’s annual report concerning revenues, debts, loans, and expenditures. Appointed Secretary of the Treasury in 1801 by President Jefferson and continuing under President James Madison until 1814, Gallatin was in office nearly thirteen years, the longest term of any Secretary in the Department’s history.