Douglas asked her to talk about her father’s former duties as the appointed television advisor to President Eisenhower (a topic which author Steven J. Ross had touched upon during his CPAN interview at the 2012 Los Angeles Festival of Books). She said that her dad helped the President with makeup, eye-glass selection, and the teleprompter. But she couldn’t remember if Eisenhower wanted to use one of those “tricky things,” because she certainly never saw their benefit. “I don’t trust them,” she said. “They make me very nervous.” If she was forced to count on the electronic cue-card machine for important presidential-like speeches, she’d be a “nervous wreck” because even the thought of using one forced her to have visions of “kind of snarling into a hole or something.”
Romero chimed in and wondered if her father helped the President with speeches and diction. “Yes,” Lizzie replied. “I believe he did. And it was funny because he was getting teased, unmercifully, when he was doing makeup for the President.”
At one point, she explained when her father called her up and said, “Meet me at the White House,” which sounded strange to her.
“That’s just crazy.”
But she agreed, on one condition: If he’d meet her in the makeup department.
She was kidding, but he wasn’t amused. “I think that’s a terrible thing to say,” he complained.
No matter. She enjoyed her meeting with President Eisenhower: “It was very exciting.” She walked into the Oval Office, and he was sitting at that “marvelous desk in that beautiful room.”
At some point, the President rose from his chair, and the first thing she noticed was his casual attire, specifically, that he wasn’t wearing a tie, which she thought “seemed kind of strange … He had on like a golf shirt—with the three little buttons and things.”
Sure enough, before she met the President, he had asked her father, “Do you think I should put on a tie?”
After Lizzie detailed her travels to Washington, Douglas asked her about the challenges of raising children with Bill Asher amidst their busy Bewitched schedule. She replied: “Oh, yes, well … it’s a little rough and thank goodness they’re young. You know, the oldest one (Billy, Jr.) is a little over two; and the youngest one (Robert, named for her father) is one year old October 5. So they’re quite a handful. But the children’s hours are so peculiar. But I don’t think it matters as long as we have enough time to really be with them if they’re kept up a little later at night as long as they get their sleep. We see them every night when we come home. We’re up at 5:30 in the morning which is before they ever get up.”
Later, Cesar Romero, whom Bewitched producers once considered to play Samantha’s father (a role rejected by Lizzie’s father and later won by Shakespearean actor Maurice Evans), interjected how he and Asher had roomed together when they were starting out in the business, and how he had once worked for Asher’s father, a producer, at Universal Studios.
The interlocking topics, though not known to all, continued when legendary theatre producer David Merrick, famous for Hello Dolly, later appeared with writer Abe Burrows to promote their new musical, Holly Golightly, based on Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and starring Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain.
At the onset of his interview with Merrick, Douglas ignited an odd conversation with the somewhat controversial and very opinionated Merrick which caught him and most probably everyone else off-guard. With Lizzie sitting opposite him, and with Merrick smack dab in the middle, Douglas said, “David, your image with actors is a father image.”
Lizzie’s reaction remained hidden from the camera, but she might not have displayed one at all. In those days, talk show guests handled themselves with decorum and were not as outlandish, abrasive, and brutally honest or as “shock-expressive” as they are in today’s “anything goes” style of reality TV. It was monumental enough that Lizzie was appearing on a talk show, let alone partaking in a segment that might open a potential can of worms.
In either case, Douglas’ father-figure reference and Merrick’s subsequent reply most assuredly gave her pause, considering her relationship with her dad, not to mention her then-present marriage to Bill Asher, and her prior nuptials with Gig Young—both of whom were older than she.
In response to Douglas, Merrick said:
“Well, I think that’s what a producer is, sort of a father image of the whole project (in this case, Holly Golightly). To get it launched and to get the entire creative team together…. and when it gets into trouble … the show I mean … and it surely does very quickly, they come looking to the producer to keep it together and also to be sort of a referee in the fights. And perhaps that’s the reason for the father image.”
As if to add insult to injury, Douglas then wondered if Merrick watched television. The producer responded forthrightly that he did not—again, while seated directly beside Lizzie, who was then at the peak of her popularity with Bewitched—the television show that all but put ABC on the map. Despite the fact that it was established in 1948, the “alphabet web” was still the youngest of the networks and it needed a hit like Bewitched to solidify its status.
Merrick was granted a chance to recover his dignity in Lizzie’s company when Douglas asked him about beautiful women. At which point he turned to the beloved actress, glanced back at his host, and said, “Here’s a beautiful woman—and a beautiful witch is best of all.”
Shortly after that, Merrick’s colleague, the flamboyant Burrows, joined the panel, and brought along with him a glimpse of that future shock-expressive mentality. Within seconds of taking the stage, he mimicked “zapping” Lizzie with his hands—right before asking if she’d like to take the lead in his next play.
Possibly intrigued by the suggestion, she responded with only a giggle (and what looked like almost a twitch), certainly aware that her Bewitched schedule might not allow for such outside demands. Also, appearing in Burrows’ next production might not have been a wise career move.
Holly Golightly, which he and Merrick were on the Douglas show to promote, did not become the hit it was intended to be (which may have been one reason why Merrick appeared so testy). It starred Lizzie’s TV contemporaries, Richard Chamberlain and Mary Tyler Moore, both of whom had just finished successful series runs (Dr. Kildare and The Dick Van Dyke Show, respectively). Unlike Lizzie, however, they could more easily forget Golightly and pursue other such assignments. But as it turned out Holly failed to pay off, which may have already been evident to the wise and perceptive Lizzie.
Another guest proved to be an even more intriguing addition to the panel: Reverend Rudolph W. Nemser, then the Pastor of a Unitarian church in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and otherwise known as the “Divorce Pastor,” was seated right next to Lizzie, who was most certainly reminded of her previously failed marriages to Gig Young and to her first husband, Fred Cammann.
Former Douglas associate producer Kenneth Johnson would later produce and direct sci-fi TV classics like Alien Nation (Fox, 1989–1990), the original V series (NBC, 1984–1985), the original Bionic Woman (ABC/NBC, 1976–1979), and The Incredible Hulk (CBS, 1978–1982), the latter of which was one of Lizzie’s favorite shows (“I absolutely love it!”).
Johnson remembers the week Lizzie appeared on the Douglas show with guest co-host Cesar Romero, “mostly because (fellow producer) Roger Ailes and I took Romero out to see Sammy Davis, Jr. in performance. And then we all spent three hours in Sammy’s dressing room afterward.”
As Johnson recalls producing the daily Douglas show, he was one of three producers who divided the guests amongst themselves. But as he explains:
Elizabeth did not fall to me that day, so I didn’t have that much communication with her. But the confluence of discussion on the show that day was truly happenstance and it’s interesting in retrospect to see how it dovetailed with Elizabeth’s own life. I do remember that we were delighted to have her on and that she was charming and the audience loved seeing her.
As it turns out, many fans of Lizz
ie and Bewitched are also fans of Johnson’s original Bionic Woman series starring Lindsay Wagner (and not the NBC remake from 2007), and have for years compared the two shows and the characters of Samantha Stephens and Wagner’s cybernetic Jaime Sommers. For one, performing and visual artist Ray Caspio:
Bewitched is the first TV show I remember watching. It was on a small color television in the front room of my grandma’s house when I was probably three years old, if that. The animated opening sequence combined with the music transfixed me, and when Elizabeth appeared on the screen, she did the same. There was something very accessible, yet private about her. Her heart was open and something deep was going on within. Elizabeth, as Samantha, represented possibility to me. Anything I wanted, I could have if I worked for it. She had the magical abilities to obtain whatever she wanted whenever she wanted, but she wasn’t satisfied with that. Her power was in herself: a theme that ran through many of her characters, and a theme that runs through characters I’ve been inspired by since childhood, such as Lynda Carter’s portrayal of Wonder Woman and Lindsay Wagner’s Jaime Sommers.
Johnson explains why Wagner was cast as Sommers:
She had a truly real, girl-next-door quality and brought a refreshing spontaneity to the scripted material. She had a facility for really making it sound like she was making it up as she went along. Part of that came from me listening carefully to her idiomatic speech patterns and writing the character of Jaime Sommers in a fashion that Lindsay could most easily embrace.
A similar strategy was utilized by Bill Asher and the other Bewitched powers that be with Lizzie’s interpretation of Samantha, whether it was strategizing on how to transfer her real-life nose wriggle into Samantha’s twitch, or with phrases like these from Samantha that stemmed from her real-life colloquialisms: “Well,” “Oh my stars!” and “Good grief” (although Lizzie relayed in 1989 that she lifted that last one from Charlie Brown and the animated Peanuts cartoon by Charles Schulz).
That said, Johnson never watched Bewitched, so he “can’t accurately compare Elizabeth’s acting style, but certainly both Lindsay and Elizabeth became America’s darlings and deservedly so,” he says.
As fate would have it, Johnson later served as the producer/director of The Incredible Hulk TV series starring Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno. As Lizzie expressed to TV Guide in 1979, Hulk was one of her favorite shows and she had at one time played opposite Bixby in a pre-Incredible segment of Password (April 5–9, 1971). Johnson’s response:
It’s very nice to hear that Elizabeth was a fan of The Incredible Hulk. High praise, indeed. We certainly labored to make each episode as meaningful and substantive as possible. Our largest audience was actually adults—with women as the largest single group. Working with Bill and Lou was always a treat. We all cared a lot. I’m glad it impacted on her so favorably.
As to the general adventures in working on The Mike Douglas Show, and the irony of those guests who appeared with Lizzie on her particular segment, Johnson concludes: “There is a wealth of stories from those years that range from the sublime to the ridiculous.”
Lizzie’s appearance on The Merv Griffin Show in December of 1970 was much less involved than The Mike Douglas Show, because her reason for doing the show outweighed her actual appearance. It was here she discussed her favorite Bewitched episode, “Sisters at Heart,” a Christmas story that originally aired on December 24, 1970. Written by a multiracial tenth grade English class at Thomas Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, the episode condemned prejudice and rallied against injustice.
The idea for “Sisters at Heart” was generated after Lizzie and Bill Asher responded to a phone call from a twenty-three-year-old California teacher named Marcella Saunders. As documented for TV Picture Life Magazine in December 1971 (when ABC aired its second and final screening of the episode), Saunders had alarming news: only six students in each classroom were reading at the proper level. At Jefferson High School, less than 1 percent were reading at the ninth grade level; 44 percent read on the third grade level and the other approximately 65 percent were either down or slightly up from that figure. The problems didn’t end there. Many of the students were not writing nor comprehending at the high school level. If able to read their textbooks, they often were unable to understand what they read.
Saunders had a solution, and her twenty-four African-American children went on to reap the benefits from what ultimately was Lizzie and Bill’s compassion and concern. Upon first speaking with Saunders, the Ashers learned that Bewitched was her students’ favorite show. Consequently, the class, all of whom did not have cars, and many of whom did not even have the money for bus fare to Hollywood, were invited to the show’s set, with Bill and Lizzie making certain the students arrived safely by chartered bus. “They were so shy at first, withdrawn,” she said at the time, “but so well behaved; so courteous and polite.”
After a relaxing lunch with the Ashers at the studio commissary, the youngsters returned to the set, relaxed, and full of meaningful, intelligent questions. They had discovered something that held their interest. The apathy had vanished, as if by magic. They had been invigorated, and wanted to know as much about television production as possible. Suddenly, children who could never write before, were writing three pages. During rehearsals, kids who could not read were now doubling up on scripts and fighting over who would portray Samantha and Darrin.
Saunders asked the students to write compositions detailing the studio experience. The papers, the way she described them, “were fantastic,” and the class returned to the Bewitched set on three different occasions; each time they were welcomed by Bill and Lizzie who said, “They seemed more interested, more eager to know about the technicalities of the production. What kids! Just marvelous. Outstanding!”
As to the actual script for “Sisters at Heart,” the students knew it had to be unique. Beyond solid writing and good grammar, it had to say and mean something. So they worked together and eventually created this story:
Tabitha (Erin Murphy), Darrin and Samantha’s little sorceress, befriends Lisa (Venetta Rogers), the African-American daughter of one of Darrin’s clients (Don Marshall) who stays with the Stephens while they’re away on a business trip with Larry. After she and Lisa are bullied in the park for being of different colors but still wanting to be sisters, Tabitha employs wishcraft, and wishes they could become siblings. Consequently, white polka dots appear on Lisa; and brown polka dots appear on Tabitha, literally painting them as equals. In the most poignant scenes in the episode, Samantha tells Tabitha and her friend, “All men are brothers; even if they’re girls.”
When the script was completed, the students made a trek back to the studio to present their gift-wrapped present to the Ashers. “We were overwhelmed,” Lizzie said at the time. Not only because of the magnitude of the gesture, but because the script was so impressive. “Really,” she added. “We’ve had bad scripts submitted by professional writers that weren’t as well written or creative.”
“Sisters at Heart” became an official Bewitched episode, a secret the Ashers shared only upon being certain the script could be utilized. To move things along, Bill hired professional scribe Barbara Avedon, who had written for Bewitched (and other family shows like The Donna Reed Show). She helped to expand the story into the required length of a 30-minute teleplay.
In 1989, some eighteen years after “Sisters at Heart” debuted, Lizzie reflected on filming the episode and its core theme of prejudice, which she also view as the central theme of the entire series:
Yeah … this is what Bewitched is all about … how people can sometimes get off track, and [get on] the outside trying to belong. It was also one of the few things that Samantha and Endora agreed on…. There were times when I certainly would have liked to have gotten a little bit more political (on Bewitched). But there were just certain parameters that we could not pass. Also, the underlined theme was the exaggerated promises-that-you-make-and-can’t-quite-keep-sometimes. And the feeling that Maybe if
I do help, maybe getting caught doing something you promised you wouldn’t do won’t be so bad if the end result is okay. I mean, people have that in everyday life. Bewitched was not about cleaning up the house, zapping up the toast … and flying around the room. It was about a very difficult relationship. (Samantha and Darrin’s marriage) was a very tough match. I mean, who the hell would want to go through that kind of stuff? It wasn’t the easiest of relationships. It had to be very difficult for Darrin Stephens to be married to this woman who could have anything that she wanted … and chose not [to] … except sometimes. It was a love story. But that’s not all of what it was. That was a part of what it was.
In other words, the romantic notions of Bewitched were only part of its charm—and Elizabeth’s. Despite her shy demeanor, she went on the Griffin and Douglas shows and her appearances were and remain riveting, if only for the fact that she was not one to grant such personal, non-scripted TV spots.
Conversely, Bewitched co-star Agnes Moorehead once served as co-host for an entire week on the Douglas show. Charles Tranberg, Moorehead’s biographer, explains:
For a private woman, Agnes was quite public. She did like appearing on talk shows, but she gave instructions about what she would and what she wouldn’t discuss. She wouldn’t discuss her marriages or her private life— except for social things she did. She loved, however, to discuss her career, she loved to discuss what she thought was the declining morals of the theatre and of younger people in general. She was very opinionated on the social issues of the day—usually from a more conservative point of view. Elizabeth was equally private. She had been married several times and didn’t want to discuss those marriages. She really didn’t even want to discuss, openly, her upbringing and her father, Robert Montgomery—all that much. When she wasn’t working she wanted to be there for her kids—and she was, by and large. By most accounts, Elizabeth was a wonderful mother. So being on talk shows or game shows (although she did enjoy guest-spots on Password and Hollywood Squares), wasn’t a priority.
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