Twitch Upon a Star

by Herbie J. Pilato

  The Untouchables ran from 1959 to 1963 and featured Robert Stack as Elliot Ness. Stack went on to become the popular host of the documentary series, Unsolved Mysteries, (NBC/CBS, 1988–1999), while The Untouchables was adapted into a feature film in 1987 and then returned to television as a new syndicated weekly edition in 1991. But in 1959, its original version was considered shocking programming.

  Authors Tim Brooks and Earle Marsh explain as much in their Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows: 1946 to Present (Ninth Edition, Ballantine Books, 2007):

  With the chatter of machine-gun fire and the squeal of tires on Chicago streets, The Untouchables brought furious controversy—and big ratings—to ABC in the early 1960s. It was perhaps the most mindlessly violent program ever seen on TV up to that time. Critics railed and public officials were incensed, but apparently many viewers enjoyed the weekly bloodbath, which sometimes included two or three violent shoot-outs per episode.

  TV Guide observed that, if anything, The Untouchables was consistent:

  In practically every episode a gang leader winds up stitched to a brick wall and full of bullets, or face down in a parking lot (and full of bullets), or face up in a gutter (and still full of bullets), or hung up in an ice box, or run down in the street by a mug at the wheel of a big black Hudson touring car.

  Either way, Lizzie relished in the opportunity to appear in the “Rusty Heller” segment, which also happened to feature a guest stint with future Bewitched regular David White. On Bewitched, White portrayed the conniving ad-man boss Larry Tate. In “Heller,” he was Archie Grayson, right hand man/attorney to gangster Charles ‘Pops’ Felcher (played by Harold J. Stone). Ultimately, Rusty used Archie to get to Pops—who was the man with the real power. When Lizzie was reminded in 1989 that Rusty was responsible for Archie losing his tongue, she said, “Well, he got his tongue cut out, and I squealed on him so he could.” She also remembered one of her favorite lines as Rusty:

  “I’d rather walk barefoot through a snakepit.”

  With his tongue intact in 1989, White only praised Lizzie’s performance in the episode, stating very simply and to the point: “She was very good in it.” A synopsis of the episode reads:

  Rusty Heller is a nightclub performer who envisions a better life which, in her case, means attaining a lot more money. So she sets her eyes on mobster Charles ‘Pops’ Felcher, who has ambitions of his own. With the recent arrest of Al Capone on tax evasion charges, Pops seeks to become the top mobster in Chicago. But when he shows little interest in Rusty, she settles for his attorney, Archie Grayson. Although Pops eventually comes around, Rusty starts to live and play more dangerously; she ups the ante, as it were, and decides she can make more money by selling the same information to both Pops and the Capone mob.

  In his biography, Straight Shooting (McMillan, 1980), Untouchables star Robert Stack said the “Rusty Heller” story was one of his favorite segments in the series, mostly because of working with Lizzie:

  One of the best episodes was “The Rusty Heller Story.” When it came time to cast the lead, the producers drew up a list of actresses as possible stars. The last name on the list was Elizabeth Montgomery. I had known Liz’s father Bob Montgomery; I went shooting with him, and took him to Dad’s duck lodge when I was a kid. I’d only known Elizabeth as a young socialite. When the girls at her finishing school talked about making a debut, I’m sure they weren’t thinking about the kind Liz made in her first appearance on The Untouchables, in the role of a tough young southern hooker. I’d learned from parts I’d lost that you must be objective in your judgment; the fact that I knew this girl and her background was no reason to disqualify her from consideration for the part. The producers didn’t always ask my opinion about casting, but in this instance, I’m glad they did. Anyway, she took the part and ran away with it; she got an Emmy nomination and, I think, should have won it. Dame Judith Anderson won the award for Medea, which was shot in Scotland on location over a thirty-day period. Liz turned in a smashing performance in six days. It was the only time that Ness got emotionally involved. The episode had a touching and gentle poignancy to it.

  As TV Guide noted at the time, this Untouchables segment and Lizzie’s Emmy-nominated performance doubled her “acting price.” She also attained a feature film contract, was inundated with TV scripts, and, after a decade of hard work, all but established Robert Montgomery as “Liz Montgomery’s father.” But she, then married to Gig Young, was all but surprised by the attention. As she recalled at the time, Stack had approached her while working on the show and said, “Liz, if you don’t get an Emmy nomination for this, I’ll be surprised.” She replied:

  Oh, Bob, for heaven’s sake. It was the last thing I did in 1960 before Gig and I left for New York (Young appeared on Broadway for six months in Under the Yum Yum Tree). Then last spring Gig and I were driving back from New York and we stopped in Arizona. Gig said, ‘There’s a Los Angeles paper,’ and I said, ‘Oh, I just can’t wait to see who’s been nominated for all those statues.’ And I looked down and saw Ingrid Bergman— Judith Anderson—and me. I knew Judith Anderson would get it. It wasn’t a wish. I just knew it.

  Anderson won that year for “Outstanding Single Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role” for her interpretation of Lady Macbeth in the Hallmark Hall of Fame production of Macbeth, which aired on NBC. It was Hallmark’s second version of Shakespeare’s classic play with a different supporting cast, but the same two leads (Anderson and Lizzie’s future Bewitched father, Maurice Evans), and the same director (George Schaefer).

  Lizzie’s other fellow contender that year was Ingrid Bergman, who was nominated for her role in CBS’s Twenty-Four Hours in a Woman’s Life. Bergman’s Clare was grandmother to Helen Lester (played by Helena de Crespo) who was in love with a man she had known only 24 hours, a playboy who spent time in jail for passing bad checks. Although the man has promised to change, most of her straitlaced relatives are up in arms. Bergman’s Clare says the girl is free to join the man she loves on one condition: that she listen to the story of a day in Clare’s own life and of a man she tried to change.

  Bergman’s Clare was a character of great texture, as certainly was Anderson’s Lady Macbeth, and both actresses were stellar veteran performers, even then. Lizzie, however, was still somewhat of a newcomer and pigeon-holed as her father’s daughter. Those were two strikes that may have worked against her in the eyes of Emmy academy.

  What’s more, the twitch ties to The Untouchables were manifold if not yet realized.

  The Untouchables was produced by Desilu, the powerhouse studio run by Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, the latter of whom gave Bill Asher his big break in TV directing for I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–1957). A few years after her Rusty Heller stint on Untouchables, Lizzie, coming off of two failed marriages, fell in love with Bill on the set of Johnny Cool in 1963, shortly before they worked together on Bewitched. It was a match made in magic, as two very different but somehow similar people were brought together to form what eventually became one of the most successful Hollywood business partnerships this side of Ball and Arnaz.

  Not only did Bill direct episodes of I Love Lucy and Bewitched, but there were other similarities between the two shows. The famous Lucy episode, “Job Switching,” was remade as a Bewitched segment called “Samantha’s Power Failure.” Just as Lucy squealed, “Well!” to her husband Ricky on Love at some impending doom, so did Samantha to Darrin on Bewitched; Lucy and Ricky were of different cultures as were Samantha and Darrin. Lucy employed her wit and special prowess to resolve any particular situation, as did Samantha.

  In any case, Asher was the “third man in.” Freddie Cammann had long been out of Lizzie’s life; Gig Young, like Cammann, was not able to live up to the qualities of the idealized man Lizzie envisioned to be her husband. Now it was up to Asher, and everyone wondered if he’d be able to pull it off.

  PART II

  Bewitched

  “This is Elizabeth Montgomery. Stay t
uned for Bewitched. Next! In color.”

  —Elizabeth Montgomery, in on-air promos for Bewitched

  Ten

  Lizmet

  “There’s one thing that makes Samantha easy to play … she’s as much in love with Darrin as I am with Bill (Asher).”

  —Elizabeth Montgomery, Look Magazine, January 1965

  In 1985, Bill Asher directed his final feature film, Movers and Shakers, written by Charles Grodin, who also appeared on-screen in the movie, along with Walter Matthau and many classic TV legends: Gilda Radner (Saturday Night Live), Bill Macy (Maude), Tyne Daly (Cagney & Lacy), Vincent Gardenia (All in the Family); with cameos provided by Steve Martin and Penny Marshall (star of Laverne & Shirley, co-producer of 2005’s Bewitched feature film):

  Hollywood studio president Joe Mulholland (Matthau) makes a slightly silly promise to his dying friend Saul Gritz (Gardenia), most of which involves making a movie using the title—if not the content—of a best-selling sex manual. Joe ultimately hires down-and-out writer Herb Derman (Grodin) and off-beat director Sid Spokane (Macy) to formulate a concept, but soon realizes he may have over-promised his friend Saul.

  Twenty years before, in 1963, Asher was keeping promises to Lizzie on the set of Johnny Cool, although it wasn’t exactly love at first sight. In fact, upon first meeting, they loathed one another. As Asher told TV Circle magazine in August 1970, “It was a case of instant hate. I was late for our appointment. She didn’t like that and I didn’t think it mattered whether she liked it or not. So it was rocky going at first, until we began working. Then after a while, bam! There we were.” As Asher concluded on MSNBC’s Headliners & Legends in 2001, after he cast her, he was pretty well “gone,” in other words, head over heels in love.

  However, just prior to their mutual Cupid encounter, Bill and Lizzie were preoccupied with other relationships. As he expressed to The Saturday Evening Post, March 13, 1965, “We were both emotional basket cases when we met. Maybe Liz had never been loved, never been happy before. I don’t know. I wouldn’t want to speculate.”

  No speculation required. In 1951, Asher married actress Dani Sue Nolan, who made over thirty film and TV appearances between 1949 and 1988. (She played William Holden’s secretary in his famous Asher-directed I Love Lucy episode, “L.A. at Last,” in which Lucy burned her nose with a cigarette). They had two children: Liane (born 1952) and Brian (born 1954).

  By 1963, they’d been separated for approximately two years, but feelings lingered. Elizabeth, meanwhile, had recently separated from Gig Young, feelings depleted.

  In retrospect, Lizzie meeting Bill on the set of Johnny Cool turned out to be a blessing, if at first in disguise.

  Compared to the previous men in her life, he was the opposite of the dashing Fred Cammann and Gig Young, not to mention her debonair father Robert Montgomery. Writer Joe Hyams explained it all that spring in The Saturday Evening Post. Asher was muscular, stocky, and tan, but he had bushy eyebrows and closed-cropped hair. He resembled more of a “retired prize fighter than a director.” Although Hyams called Asher the “antithesis” of Lizzie’s first two husbands, like Cammann, Young, and her father, he was also “a strong and dominating presence.”

  Also like Young, Asher was in his forties and Lizzie liked older guys, this older guy, in particular, whom she called “the greatest director I know, because he’s a sensitive, compassionate person.” Consequently, after smoothing the initial bump on the hot road to their Cool romance, they became inseparable. Lizzie liked the great outdoors. So did Bill. She loved to play tennis. So did he. In fact, it was one of the many things they had in common. They even shared the same sense of humor. They loved each other. They loved to work. They loved working together, and when they did so, it was magic. Asher, in particular, was a master of making it all work, on-screen and off. As a man, he knew how to please the ladies. As a director, he was one of the greatest conductors to orchestrate media magic in TV history. Before and after Bewitched, he was a heralded presence in the industry.

  Born William Milton Asher on August 8, 1921, Bill was the son of Ephraim Asher, an associate producer of the classic 1931 horror films Frankenstein and Dracula, as well the original 1935 edition of Magnificent Obsession starring Irene Dunne and Robert Taylor (which was remade in 1954 with Jane Wyman, Rock Hudson, and Bewitched’s Agnes Moorehead). His mother Lillian worked as a clerical assistant for MGM.

  As chronicled in Palm Springs Life magazine December 1999, Bill lost his father when he was just eleven years old and “the excitement of a life in the new and daring film industry” was supplanted by the bottle for a Catholic mother whose Jewish associate producer–husband had died young and left her the burden of rearing children during the Depression. At fifteen, Bill enlisted in the Army, lied about his age, and forged his mother’s consent.

  After four years with the Signal Corps as a photographer during World War II, he left the service, which he said probably saved his life because he was one to fight authority.

  Consequently, he headed for Hollywood where he approached “some guys” his father knew for help. They slammed the door in his face. At which point, he left Tinseltown for the low-rent, basic living of the Salton Sea area east of Palm Springs. There, he began writing short stories for magazines, which he had done in the Army.

  In 1948, he co-directed with Richard Quine the feature film Leather Gloves, starring Cameron Mitchell, Virginia Grey, and a young aspiring actor named Blake Edwards. Like Asher, Edwards would later marry an actress best known for playing a supernatural woman: Julie Andrews (Mary Poppins). (Also like Asher, Edwards would become one of the industry’s most prominent directors; 10, S.O.B., The Pink Panther, Victor/Victoria, The Man Who Loved Women).

  In addition to feature length movies, Asher also wrote short films, five-minute reels that were utilized as interstitials in theatres for a new growing sensation called television. This resulted in a call from CBS officials who were familiar with his work and seeking directors for this new small screen medium, then a foreign concept in the industry. But within six weeks, Asher had returned to Hollywood, where he was directing shows like Racket Squad (1950–1953, syndicated CBS), and Big Town (1950–1954, CBS/NBC). He also completed a pilot for a new TV series called Our Miss Brooks (1952–1956), featuring big screen star Eve Arden, recreating her hit show from radio.

  On the sound stage next to Miss Brooks was another infant CBS show called I Love Lucy which was about a relatively diverse married couple. He was Ricky Ricardo, a Cuban bandleader played by the multifaceted Desi Arnaz; she was his wife Lucy, daffy-but-crafty Hollywood-obsessed American redhead embodied in the one and only Lucille Ball. Despite such combined talent the show’s immediate future was in doubt. But Lucy and Desi remained calm in the midst of the storm, preserved the honesty of their Love and, in the process, the series became the cornerstone for an entertainment empire called Desilu (a company title that combined its proprietors’ first names).

  One of the first bricks placed to solidify that creative foundation was by a vigorous Asher who, in 1952, was hired by Arnaz to direct a few Love episodes. By the end of its first season, Lucy was a monster hit and was renewed for an additional year. Bill was asked to direct the show for $500 per episode. “In those days if you were making $200 a month, you were doing well,” he told Palm Springs Life. “I was in my mid-twenties, unmarried, working on Our Miss Brooks and I Love Lucy, making $1000.00 a week from both shows combined. I lived like a drunken sailor! You can believe I spent the money.”

  But he also spent time honing his craft, in the process blazing the trail for a new medium that would change the way the world communicated. Once turned away by his dad’s false friends, Bill eventually connected with the TV greats of the era: Danny Thomas on Make Room for Daddy (ABC/CBS, 1953–1965); The Dinah Shore Chevy Show (1956–1963; for which he won an Emmy); Sally Field on Gidget (ABC, 1965–1966; for which he directed the pilot and several episodes); producer Sidney Sheldon on The Patty Duke Show (ABC, 1963–1966), and co
untless others.

  By 1963, he ventured into directing movies first for TV (Mickey and the Contessa), and then features, beginning with Johnny Cool, in which he met and cast Lizzie, who shared the lead with actor Henry Silva. The film was co-produced by Asher’s friend Peter Lawford, who was married to Pat Kennedy, sister to President John F. Kennedy, and party to the famous celebrity Rat Pack: Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin (Lizzie’s co-star from Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed, which filmed that same year), Joey Bishop, and Sammy Davis, Jr., who both had supporting roles in the movie (while Davis performed the title song). Adapted from the novel, The Kingdom of Johnny Cool, by John McPartland, the movie follows this story:

  Gangster Salvatore Giordano (Silva), his future fortunes and misfortunes, were planted in his youth, growing up in the hard climate of World War II Sicily defying both the government and the mafia. When he was but a boy, his mother was shot in the crossfire—and from then, his gun was his only family. (At least, that’s how the English subtitles translated the Sicilian dialogue in the film’s prologue.) Years after his mother is killed, an adult Salvatore is crowned Johnny Cool by an ostracized American gangster named Johnny Colini (Marc Lawrence)—the first Johnny Cool—who in turns sends his replacement to America to whack those responsible for his exile. Upon arriving in New York, the new Mr. Cool proceeds with Colini’s vendetta, and begins to make the required assassinations. But complications arise after he hooks up with divorced socialite Darian “Dare” Guiness (Lizzie).

  While hardcore Bewitched fans may liken her character’s name to Samantha’s “what’s-his-name” mortal husband, Dare was also the name Elizabeth once considered giving her first daughter. But that never panned out (she ultimately decided on Rebecca, after her grandmother).