Twitch Upon a Star

by Herbie J. Pilato

  PART III

  Disenchanted

  “I’m likely to have my share of flops as well as successes … as long as I don’t have to wriggle my nose for eight years again.”

  —Elizabeth Montgomery, to journalist Steve Jacques, during an interview to promote A Case of Rape (1974)

  Fifteen

  To Twitch Or Not To Twitch

  “She hated it when people asked her to twitch her nose.”

  —Liz Sheridan, chatting about Elizabeth’s post-Samantha disdain on Bewitched: The E! True Hollywood Story, 1999

  By the mid-1960s, TV shows had switched from black and white to color, and Bewitched was not any different. In later seasons, Elizabeth would preface each episode with voice-over and visual promos, each of which she instilled with a vivacious energy that encouraged the viewer to watch with eager anticipation. “This is Elizabeth Montgomery,” she’d say. “Stay tuned for Bewitched…. In color.”

  The show’s first color episode was “Nobody’s Perfect,” which opened the third season, airing September 15, 1966. This episode also introduced Samantha and Darrin’s daughter Tabitha as a full-fledged young supernatural. Consequently, Samantha was forced not only to curtail her own powers, but her daughter’s as well, mostly instructing her with the phrase, “Mustn’t twitch!”

  Upon first hearing that, Endora pops in and says, “Oh, how charming. When every other mother in the world is telling her child, mustn’t touch, you’ll be saying, ‘Mustn’t twitch!’” Simultaneously, off-camera at home in Beverly Hills, Lizzie was parenting her real-life children.

  In an interview with Photoplay Magazine in 1968, she acknowledged the challenges facing a working mother. At the time, she and Bill Asher only had the two young boys, Billy, Jr. and Robert, but because of Bewitched’s heavy workload, it was not always possible to give her sons a so-called normal childhood.

  Still, she was determined to maintain as regular an environment as possible under the circumstances. She wanted her sons to feel the same way about her work. One day, she invited Billy, Jr. to visit her at the studio, but he wasn’t all that impressed by the Hollywood glitter. It was just a place where his parents went to work. He liked to come to the studio, but only to play with Erin and Diane Murphy, the twins who played Tabitha. They were the same age, and Lizzie said they had “a perfectly fine time.”

  She tried to avoid the pitfalls that accompany being a working mother. At the time, the major concern was finding a nurse who could be firm-but-friendly to her sons. As she told Photoplay, “We have one now who is a gem. She knows just when to crack down on the boys and when to let them alone. That’s important.”

  Lizzie had experienced nurse troubles before. They expected her to supply the discipline when she arrived home from Bewitched. “That would have been great!” she mused. “Here the mean old Mommy came home and whacked them for something they did at 10:00 o’clock that morning and had already forgotten about.”

  Then there was the day she came home and found Billy, Jr. pouring a glass of water on the living room carpet.

  “Don’t do that!” she told him.

  “Nanny let me,” Billy replied.

  Lizzie turned to the nurse and asked, “Is that true?”

  “Poor little thing, what harm can he do?” the nurse wondered.

  Lizzie exploded: “What harm can he do? In the first place, he’s playing with a glass and could cut himself if it broke. In the second place, he’s ruining the rug.” Needless to say, the nurse’s services were no longer required.

  She tried to “remain firm with the boys,” she said, but it wasn’t always easy. When she came home at night she had a tendency to indulge them, to compensate for her absence. “That’s a mistake,” she admitted.

  When she wasn’t working, she gave them as much time as she could. On the weekends she and Bill, Sr. were home most of the time, and on their off days during the week, they were with little Billy and Robert. One time, she and Bill, Sr. went to Palm Springs for a few weeks without the kids, if only because she felt it was easier than “uprooting the boys.”

  “They didn’t mind,” she told Photoplay. “They prefer being at home.”

  Years later, Lizzie still felt she could have done more as a mother to all of her children. As she expressed to John Tesh on One on One in 1992, “Parenting is probably the toughest job anyone could ever have. I haven’t been very good at it. But I think I’ve gotten better.”

  However, after she passed away, Billy Asher, Jr. appeared on MSNBC’s Headliners & Legends in 2001, and said she was a “great parent.” And although she believed she wasn’t maternally accessible because of her career, from Billy’s perspective, she provided nothing but unconditional love.

  Each of her children acknowledged how fortunate they were to have had Lizzie as their mom; just as the Bewitched cast and crew appreciated working with her on the set.

  As the show’s executive producer Harry Ackerman said in 1988: “We were the luckiest people in the world to have someone as warmhearted and appealing as Elizabeth Montgomery.”

  Echoing what her friend Sally Kemp said upon first seeing Elizabeth do the “bunny nose” when they were kids, Ackerman concluded, “No one could twitch her nose like she did. Believe me, we all tried.”

  Once Lizzie walked away from Bewitched, she walked away for good. She would not twitch again on screen, except for a series of Japanese TV commercials in the 1980s, and American public service announcements for the visually impaired in the early 1990s. Beyond that, her famous facial tic became a harness around her adenoids. Over the years too many negative nose encounters took their toll, ad nauseam, and she could not always wriggle her way free.

  According to what her friend Liz Sheridan said on Bewitched: The E! True Hollywood Story in 1999, Lizzie was not at all pleased when people asked her to twitch her nose.

  But what was she to do? She retained one of the most dedicated followings in TV history—and in turn felt obligated to her fans. “They have given me what I have, and I’m grateful,” she told Screen Stars magazine in 1965. She liked a “normal amount of privacy,” but she wasn’t the “dark-glasses type” who scurried behind hedges or ducked out back doors every time a fan approached her for an autograph. If they were “reasonably courteous,” she intoned, “I felt I should be also.”

  Years later, in 1989, she said, “People are nice. They really are … most of the time.” Other times, not so much, as when a random parent would force their child to say hello. “This inevitably happens at least once a year,” she said, “and it’s heartbreaking.”

  On one occasion, she was shopping and a somewhat abrasive woman, with her reluctant preteen daughter in tow, approached Lizzie and made a scene. “You come over here and say ‘hi’ to Miss Montgomery,” the mother insisted to her offspring.

  “No,” the child responded. “I don’t want to.”

  Yet the woman insisted how much her daughter wanted to meet Samantha.

  “If that’s true,” Lizzie wondered, “why is she yelling to the contrary?”

  “She’s just shy,” the mother replied, and then to threaten her child, she said she’d told her that if she refused to greet the Bewitched star, the actress would twitch her nose and “turn her into a toad.”

  Lizzie was livid: “You told her what?! How dare you say such a thing? No wonder she’s scared to death!”

  Upon hearing that, the mother grabbed her daughter by the hand, and scuffed away in a fit of anger.

  Another time, early in Bewitched’s run, Elizabeth was filming a promotional spot on the set of Bonanza, as both series had the same sponsor (Chevrolet). “Every time I did the twitch,” Lizzie remembered in 1989, the director of the spot would yell, “Cut!’”

  She thought, “What the hell is the matter? I’m getting bored with this. I thought I could do this in one take and then get out of here!”

  No such luck. Suddenly, the director turned to someone on the set and said, “I don’t know how she’s ever going to
do a series. She’s got this terrible twitch!”

  “Everybody was like, ‘Oh, my God … he doesn’t know,’” Lizzie laughed in recalling the awkward moment. “He saw the storyboards but just never made the connection. He must have been the most humiliated person. But I was hysterical.”

  A third uncomfortable public twitch encounter, this time, somewhat more intrusive, less comical, and downright insulting, occurred shortly after Bewitched debuted. As Elizabeth revealed in 1989, it happened one night in the ladies’ room of Chasen’s Restaurant in West Hollywood. “Of all the weird kinds of old fashioned places to be in,” she said, “Right?”

  “I was powdering my nose or whatever it was I was doing,” she went on to explain, and this woman kept pacing back and forth in front of her. Lizzie was like, “What is going on here?”

  She found out, when the woman approached her and said, “Pardon me, but I just have to ask you … where did you get your nose job?”

  “Being the quick thinker that I am,” she mused to herself, “Oh, God— what do I say? Don’t say (anything like), ‘My Mummy and Daddy gave it to me.’”

  Instead she replied, “The Farmer’s Market,” which only further confounded the woman. But Lizzie continued taking delight in sending her inquisitor on a detour: “You know, there’s a place called The Coral Reef, and right in back of that little kind of hut … there’s a doctor’s office … and it’s absolutely amazing what they can do. I was only bruised for like a couple of days. They’re fantastic.”

  “In California you can just find anything,” the woman replied sincerely, if a little befuddled.

  Lizzie recalled in 1989:

  To this day, I still think of that woman, because I knew she had to be a tourist. And then I thought, Why did I say “The Farmer’s Market?” It just popped into my head … and I just had to make something up. But she was like, “Oh, wow! That’s really great.” And I just pictured this poor woman wandering around The Farmer’s Market (looking for just the right plastic surgeon).

  David White listened to Lizzie tell this story, and said the nosy woman should never have questioned his famous twitch-witching friend about such a delicate subject, not to mention, operation:

  She should have known that you didn’t, if she looked at your nose, she would have realized that nose jobs sink after a while. A girl I knew in New York had one, and she was beautiful when she just had it done (but only) for a few years afterwards. And then I saw her later, and it had sunk … because they take the bone out … and they put gristle in there or something. So it isn’t as sturdy a bone like the bridge of your nose … Your nose is just like your Dad’s.

  While filming Bewitched, he and Lizzie would meet in the makeup room every morning, “And there she’d be,” he said, “without any makeup on, and her hair pushed back. I used to think, ‘She could never say Robert Montgomery isn’t my dad.’”

  “People do say that I look like him,” Lizzie interrupted.

  “Yes, around the eyes,” David said.

  “My Mom and Dad both had these (arched) eyebrows.”

  Overall, Lizzie may have shielded many aspects of her personal life from the press, specifically with regard to her marriages and other personal issues that she may have had, but a fine balance of her trademark humor and decorum ever lurked behind the scenes. On occasion, if selectively so, she was refreshingly honest and self-deprecating, whether discussing, for example, her father or her appearance. She cheerfully addressed both topics during an interview with TV Radio Mirror magazine in January 1965, concluding:

  I myself believe there was some kind of hocus-pocus afoot in my getting to be a TV star. In spite of my being Robert Montgomery’s daughter, the odds were against me. I’m no Hollywood glamour girl, and my so-called “beauty” calls out for a plastic surgeon. I feel sorry for the poor makeup man in the morning. I’m his greatest challenge.

  At the start of Bewitched’s third season, executive producer Harry Ackerman offered the position of story editor to then-twenty-six-year-old Bewitched writer Doug Tibbles, who penned a few segments of the show including the “Nobody’s Perfect” episode that introduced the catch phrase, “Mustn’t twitch.” But Tibbles, now seventy-two, turned down the job. He explains:

  I just didn’t want to do it. I felt like I was good at the dialogue, but I just didn’t like the show. It just didn’t hold my interest. I just didn’t care about it. It didn’t mean anything to me. And I had a string of money coming in, which dried up later. But at the time, it seemed like I could pick and choose.

  Because Tibbles rejected the promotion, Ackerman offered the position to Bernard Slade, who later became famous on Broadway for writing Same Time Next Year and for creating The Partridge Family for ABC in 1970. “To be honest,” Tibbles says, “Slade was ‘more qualified’ for the job. I was too young. I was good with the dialogue and that’s what I was known for. My trick was to ‘make ‘em laugh out loud’ twice on a page, even if they couldn’t use it, or even if Standards and Practices threw it out for some reason.”

  But according to how Lizzie felt about Tibbles’ talents, his words weren’t going to land anywhere except in the mouths of the Bewitched actors. For example, there’s a “perfect” moment between Samantha and Tabitha that is quite touching and eloquent, and representative of the core “acceptance” message of the entire series. When Sam catches her daughter using witchcraft for the first time she experiences a circle of emotion, but ultimately pride and joy. She says:

  Oh, I know … I know what it is like to be part of the magical life, to have so much at your fingertips. But we’re living in a world that isn’t quite used to people like us. And I’m afraid they never will be. So, I’m going to have to be very firm with you. You’re going to have to learn when you can use your witchcraft and when you can’t. Now, your wonderful daddy wants us to be just plain people. So you’re going to have to stop wiggling your fingers whenever you want something.

  Besides “Nobody’s Perfect,” Tibbles penned “I Don’t Want to Be a Toad, I Want to Be a Butterfly” and “Samantha the Sculptress,” all of which he wrote while only in his mid-twenties.

  “Samantha the Sculptress,” from the fifth year, 1968–1969, involved very odd special effects that featured talking-head clay busts of Darrin and Larry. It was a quirky entry, just this side of The Twilight Zone.

  “Toad/Butterfly,” also from the fifth season, turned out to deliver what Lizzie considered to be one of the funniest lines in the entire series. The episode aired on December 12, 1968, and featured Maudie Prickett as Mrs. Burch, Tabitha’s mortal teacher who talks with Ruth Taylor (Lola Fisher) about her daughter (and Tabitha’s fellow classmate) Amy Taylor (played by Maralee Foster, and named for Doug Tibbles’ real-life daughter).

  Ruth Taylor: I understand about playing in the forest, I understand why you wanted to make my Amy a toad instead of a butterfly. But the fact is that my child is still missing.

  Mrs. Burch: But I have never lost a child in all my years as a teacher.

  Ruth Taylor: And you start by losing mine.

  Mrs. Burch: Look—somehow I’ll make it up to you.

  Ruth Taylor: I’m calling the Police.

  It was that second last line, “Look—somehow I’ll make it up to you,” to a parent about the misplacement of their child to which Lizzie took a liking. “For whatever reason,” Tibbles explains, “she loved that line.” Whether or not her appreciation of that line had anything to do with the troubled kinship she experienced with her father Robert Montgomery is left to the imagination.

  In the meantime, Elizabeth’s other core relationship of the day, her marriage to Bill Asher, may have already been in trouble. According to what Tibbles can remember, the Montgomery-Asher-Richard Michaels triangle began long before the final season of Bewitched. He, like William Froug, saw signs of tension as early as season three, while working on “Nobody’s Perfect.”

  But before discussing the details of what Tibbles recalls about that complicated relations
hip, it’s pertinent to provide some background on his own fascinating life and career:

  Doug is the son of the very successful writer George Tibbles, who penned the pilot for My Three Sons (which starred Fred MacMurray) and that sitcom’s subsequent first season. He also wrote episodes of fantasy shows such as The Munsters; both to which Doug would also contribute scripts. Doug also wrote episodes for Happy Days and, just as with Bewitched, he was offered the story editor position on that show. This time, however, he accepted the job. For five hours. Then, as he recalls, “I said to myself, “That’s it! I’m never doing it [writing a TV sitcom] again!”

  “It was my father’s business,” he explains, “and I just jumped into it because I needed the dough. My dad was a piano player who always wanted to be a writer, and I was a drummer who never wanted to be a writer. But I didn’t like writing, even though I was successful at it.”

  Because of his father’s musical and subsequent writing success, from the time he was a child and on into his twenties, Doug found himself hobnobbing the Hollywood party circuit. His father played the piano in the 1940s and toured with the likes of the legendary Eddie Cantor. Doug accompanied him to the crossroads of the Los Angeles Union Station, where he would meet Cantor, as well as Charlie Chaplin, Ed Gwynn, and Lou Costello, all with whom George Tibbles had been associated. “And I was only seven years old!” Doug exclaims. “It was an amazing time. I mean, we used to go to places like [director] Walter Lang’s house, just to play cards. I even remember playing cards with a twenty-year-old R. J. (Robert) Wagner, and Fred and June MacMurray before my Dad even really knew them or did My Three Sons.”