Upon meeting Lizzie in 1979, TV Guide’s Tabitha Chance said:
[She had an] air of quiet command and cool amiability. She seemed infinitely unknowable; it is unimaginable to think she might ever be sloppy or have bad breath. At 46 [and marking her birth year as 1933] and easily looking a full sixteen years younger, Elizabeth is smooth of face and perfect of figure. Were one to come upon her suddenly in Saks Fifth Avenue [which she frequented], the conclusion would be that this woman had never done anything more than slice a catered chateaubriand … [She was] as carefully nurtured as any rich man’s privileged daughter. And yet, breeding, private schooling, riches, looks, and derivative fame were not enough.
Robert Montgomery’s shadowy presence still lingered, blurring Lizzie’s own identity. But as Chance explained, Lizzie contributed to that stigma. She was no doubt grateful to her father for jump-starting her career. Although she enjoyed drawing and painting pictures, whenever Lizzie said things like, “My art belongs to Daddy,” she was talking about her inherited theatrical craft … a lucrative craft, one that certainly materialized in a big way via Samantha’s witchcraft, as well as other performances.
By 1979, Lizzie had negotiated an exclusive contract with CBS to craft two TV-movies a year for the following three years, for which she received more than 1.5 million dollars. That would buy a truckload of art supplies today, let alone over three decades ago.
Of the scripts offered to her in that period, she selected Act of Violence. From the minute she agreed to do the movie, Lizzie wanted it shot as written or, as Chance wrote in TV Guide, as “sexy, violent; rough in word and deed.” While she may have looked like “a tea rose,” Chance pointed out, Lizzie was ready to fight network executives, if need be, to keep that approach. “If somebody says no and it’s important, you argue,” Lizzie said. “But I prefer the word negotiate.”
Such was the case with Rape in 1974, when NBC executives were nervous about a scene involving Lizzie’s character, Ellen Harrod, and her examination in a doctor’s office. “I didn’t like doing that scene,” she told Chance, “but we fought for it and it stayed in and we were right.”
Chance then explained, “Well brought-up women usually don’t discuss their private lives with anyone but their mothers, best friends, and hairdressers,” and while Elizabeth was willing to bare her soul on camera, she was no exception to that rule, further confirming her intense need for privacy.
She was by this time living happily with Bob Foxworth and felt no need to share with anyone, the press or friends alike, the soap-operatic details of her failed marriages to Fred Cammann, Gig Young, and Bill Asher. But she did enjoy sharing with pals her hilarious, complicated plot recapitulations of daytime TV soap operas.
As she told TV Guide, she would indeed “forget” to return phone calls, but she also still wondered if her “Daddy” was proud of her. She remained down-to-earth, but drove a Mercedes, albeit a ten-year-old Mercedes (which was adorned with a “Lizzy” license plate, a misspelling of her favorite nickname). As during her days on Bewitched, Lizzie was never late to the set of any of her TV-movies and she was always professional. She readily convinced the crew to adore her by acting like what Chance called “a normal nice person, telling jokes and joining in with the four-letter word patois rampant in Hollywood sets.”
“If that bawdiness may seem a strange paradox for the queenly Elizabeth,” Chance concluded, “it isn’t. A lady always puts everyone at ease …” as opposed to the heartless woman Lizzie portrayed in the 1991 CBS TV-movie, Sins of the Mother. Based on the book, Son, by Jack Olsen, Sins was written for television by Richard Fiedler, and directed by John D. Patterson:
As a public figure, Ruth Coe (Lizzie) is a prestigious socialite. In private, she abuses her adult son, the charismatic Real Estate agent, Kevin Coe (Dale Midkiff). The consequences are devastating, when his most recent ladylove realizes he’s the serial rapist that has decimated their community.
An especially harsh review of this film appeared in The Hollywood Reporter, February 19, 1991:
Montgomery turns in a peculiarly mannered performance and appears not to have been directed to her best advantage. Though her lines seethe with vitriol and need, she seems disconnected from any emotional underpinning at all, as though she’s reading the lines off the page … CBS’ best shot may be to market it to fans of Elizabeth Montgomery who want to see her play a witch again.
In a strange twist of TV fate in 2001, Mary Tyler Moore, Lizzie’s contemporary classic TV female star of the 1960s (via The Dick Van Dyke Show), took the lead in the similarly-themed and titled TV-movie, Like Mother, Like Son: The Strange Story of Sante and Kenny Kimes.
Just as some Bewitched fans may have been taken aback by Lizzie’s portrayal in Sins of the Mother, Moore’s admirers (by way of her happy character portrayals of Laura Petrie on Van Dyke and Mary Richards on The Mary Tyler Moore Show) may have been just as stunned when she played Sante Kimes in Like Mother, Like Son.
Sante’s childhood abuse and exploitation leaves a legacy of amorality that she passes on to her son Kenny (with a “K” played by Gabriel Olds), just as Lizzie’s Ruth Coe’s sins were instilled in her son Kevin (also with a “K”; played by Dale Midkiff).
What may prove to be further compelling, and a little confusing, is that Lizzie later played a similar role in 1993 CBS TV-movie, The Black Widow Murders: The Blanche Taylor Moore Story (the subtitle of which is similar to Mary Tyler Moore’s real name).
To top it all off, Lizzie and Mary’s hair styles are very similar (and the same color) in Sins of the Mother and Like Mother, Like Son, while all three films are, sadly, based on true stories.
While it may be fascinating how it all worked out, in 1993, journalist Bart Mills delineated the premise of Black Widow Murders in particular, and Lizzie’s subsequent participation, taking the lead role of Blanche Taylor Moore:
Life was placid in shabby-genteel central North Carolina, where Blanche Taylor Moore worked in a grocery store, lived in a trailer park, went faithfully to church, raised her daughters well, gossiped with her friends, and poisoned every man who went to bed with her. When the police finally confronted her with her crimes, she was flabbergasted. How dare they accuse an innocent woman, even though everyone close to her seemed to wind up in the cemetery, stuffed with arsenic? Elizabeth Montgomery is apt casting for this sly, chilling look at psychopathy. Elusive, elliptical, more likely to smile enigmatically than explain exhaustively, Montgomery gets behind the formality of Moore’s way of speaking and offers convincing hints of the innocence of evil.
Today, Blanche Moore, who told authorities she was sexually abused as a child, has terminal cancer and is on North Carolina’s Death Row, convicted of the murder of her long-time lover. Her first husband, her mother, and her father are others whose exhumed bodies revealed large concentrations of arsenic. Her second husband, a minister, who nearly died of arsenic poisoning, testified against her at her trial in 1990.
As Lizzie explained to Mills in 1993:
Blanche was very lucky. Thirty or forty years ago, she would have sizzled by now. I don’t believe they will wind up executing her. She’s appealing at the moment. I think she doesn’t feel she did anything terribly wrong. It was something she had to do, particularly to the second husband, who was an ordained minister … Blanche truly believes she is innocent. No, I mean, she truly believes she is an innocent. She didn’t think what she did was wrong, because of the sexual abuse she said she suffered as a child. People have different ways of dealing with their problems. Once she started on her way, there was no going back.
In 2012, classic TV curator and author, Ed Robertson, host of the popular radio show, TV Confidential, put it this way:
Once Bewitched ended she was looking for projects that would allow her to grow as an actress, and further develop her dramatic skills, which she was not always able to do as Samantha, particularly in the last couple years of the show. I don’t think she was necessarily trying to “shed” her image a
s Samantha, but I do believe she wanted to show audiences (and for that matter, casting directors and the like) that she could do much more than Samantha. That’s why I think she did A Case of Rape, which had aired the year before in 1974, and I think that’s what may have attracted her to doing The Legend of Lizzie Borden. That, plus the project itself had a strong pedigree. Paul Wendkos had already established himself as an excellent director, plus Fritz Weaver, through his work on such shows as Twilight Zone, was an accomplished, respected stage actor. I don’t know whether Fritz worked with her father, but I imagine Elizabeth would have relished the opportunity to work with someone like him.
She also embraced the chance to work with screen legend Kirk Douglas in the 1985 CBS TV-movie, Amos, which also starred Pat Morita, best known as Arnold from TV’s Happy Days and later as Mr. Miyagi in the original Karate Kid movies. This time, Lizzie not only played a heartless character, but a seemingly soulless one as well:
Daisy Daws (Lizzie) is a psychopathic abusive nurse at a senior facility that houses Amos Lasher (Douglas), her main patient, and Tommy Tanaka (Morita), and other seniors who ultimately band against her in a battle for their very lives.
Shortly after this film was rerun in the summer of 1986, a Los Angeles viewer wrote in to the Television Times supplement of The Los Angeles Times, pining for Lizzie to return to her own “happier days” on screen and her most beloved role. Interestingly, the viewer also addressed what Lizzie later described in 1989 and during other interviews as her personal philosophy about acting. But more than anything, the writer expressed what had been on the minds of countless fans of Elizabeth’s and Bewitched. In his letter dated August 9, 1986, home audience member Bob Thompson of Burbank, California composed his thoughts and said:
Amos with Kirk Douglas and Elizabeth Montgomery had to be the most brilliant television movie I’ve seen this year. Montgomery displayed her true talent for portraying a witch. Her performance was incredible. However, with all the reunion movies on television lately, I would love to see a revival of Bewitched. All I’ve seen Montgomery do in the last decade is heavy drama. Enough already. Let’s see some comedy. I believe it to be her forte. Isn’t it harder to make people laugh than cry anyway? What I’m trying to say, I guess, is … “Samantha, where are you?”
PART IV
Reconciled
“My darling, charming Elizabeth … she has a touch of immortality. Bewitched is her light-hearted gift to the world, whatever shadows she battled.”
—Sally Kemp, 2012
Nineteen
Spirits and Angels
“You almost got the feeling that she was a little girl playing a grown-up.”
—Doug Tibbles, Bewitched writer, assessing Elizabeth’s personality
In character or in reality, Lizzie employed a carefree spirit and wit even in the most challenging of situations. Whether she was playing Samantha who frequently defended her mortal marriage before her mother Endora, or whether she was playing herself in real life fighting for independence from the troubled Gig Young as well as from her father Robert Montgomery. In each scenario, scripted or nonscripted, Lizzie was playing. She maintained a strong sense of decorum, while not losing her stable sense of humor. She was beloved by viewers at home who were bewitched by her charm on screen, and the people she met off camera were just as bedazzled by her presence in person.
In the early 1990s, former restaurant manager/hostess DD Howard used to work at the tony Le Dome restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. At the time, Le Dome (which has since closed its doors) was the hot spot for the Hollywood elite to meet, eat, and mingle. Celebrities as diverse as Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, the Kirk Douglases, even Ronald and Nancy Reagan among many others, walked through its fashionable doors.
As Howard recalls, Lizzie and Bob Foxworth were frequent patrons of the establishment, and both were cherished by Le Dome’s staff for their unaffected and unassuming ways:
After managing restaurants for over ten years, you really come to recognize personalities for who they are really when they come into a restaurant. You know who the nice people are and you know who the not-so-nice people are. You can see it right away. The essence of who they are is right there in front of you.
Well, not only were Elizabeth and Bob two of the nicest people who ever came through our doors, but they were two of the nicest people I have ever met in my entire life. They definitely made my top ten list. They were a charming, sweet, beautiful couple. And she was always laughing and smiling.
Many times she would come in with [her manager] Barry Krost, who she had a great banter with, or groups of friends. Whenever she arrived, you knew a party was gonna happen. The staff certainly always looked forward to seeing her. She was just always so interested in everyone, and who they were as a person, whether it was someone she and Bob were dining with, or whether it was one of the waiters or busboys. It was almost like she diverted attention from herself back to you.
When she’d walk in the door, I would say, “You look so fabulous!” And then she’d turn it around and say, “And ‘you’ look gorgeous!” We’d then go on to have a regular conversation about what I was doing that day, or what was going on in my life.
She was just so sincerely interested in other people. She was curious and interested in everyone and everything. And that really represented just how endearing she was.
She was simply a shining star if there ever was one. The place just lit up when she walked in the room. She was an angel.
According to Tom McCartney, Lizzie discussed her sunny side of life in 1993 with journalist Bart Mills, who interviewed her, strangely enough, about her quite unsunny performance in the TV-movie, Black Widow Murders: The Blanche Taylor Moore Story. Portraying Blanche was by far her darkest characterization since her appearance in 1975’s The Legend of Lizzie Borden (both films were also based on true-life tales). But Lizzie read between the lines and found laughter between the tears. In speaking with Mills, she recalled the day the Widow Murders cast met for its first preproduction read-through of the script. Many of writer/co-executive producer Judith Paige Mitchell’s lines drew laughs, and Mitchell said to the cast, “But I didn’t know this script was funny.”
But as far as Elizabeth was concerned, and as she expressed to Mills, “Life is funny even when it’s upsetting. The more human a story is, the more real and the more true it is, the more likely you are to find subconscious humor in it. You may not see it on the page, but when you say it out loud, you have to laugh.”
Lizzie also “just had to laugh” about I Dream of Jeannie’s attempts to duplicate Bewitched’s success in the 1960s, as well as when the Tabitha series tried to do the same in the 1970s, and when TV audiences actually laughed, at least to some extent, at various magic-based, female-oriented shows or characters that tried to replicate the guffaws Lizzie created as Samantha on Bewitched. While the Tabitha series may not have fared so well, Jeannie certainly found a resounding success, as did other “resorceful” women on the small screen:
Sabrina, the Teenage Witch (with Melissa Hart, ABC, 1996–2003) skyrocketed in the ratings, as did Charmed (1998–2006, CW; Alyssa Milano, Shannon Doherty, Holly Marie Combs, Rose McGowan). Before those good-smitten witches came along, Angelique/Cassandra Collins (played by Lara Parker) did her best on the gothic daytime soap Dark Shadows (ABC, 1966–1971), right beside Witchiepoo (Billie Hayes, on ABC’s Saturday morning’s H.R. Pufnstuf from1969–1970; who also played a storybook witch on Bewitched), and Juliet Mills was Phoebe on Nanny and the Professor (ABC, 1970–1971, which also starred a very young Kim Richards, before her quite different performances on today’s Real Housewives of Beverly Hills). Even ABC Family’s recent Secret Circle drama features a young band of sorceresses.
But in the fall of 1989, ABC’s main network tried to more directly recapture the magic of Bewitched with a new “witch-uation comedy” called Free Spirit. It starred Corinne Bohrer (a kind of pre-Friends Lisa Kudrow) as Winnie Goodwinn who was reluctantly sen
t to Earth as a housekeeper/baby-sitter for the Harper family led by Franc Luz as T. J. Harper, the father. The children included Jesse Harper, as played by How I Met Your Mother’s Alyson Hannigan (who would later portray the witch Willow Rosenberg in Buffy, the Vampire Slayer, not to mention a character named Samantha in the short-lived 1993 series Almost Home, created by a writer named Lynn Montgomery, no relation).
Free Spirit was a noble attempt, but it failed to appropriately reimagine the magic of Bewitched on several levels, not the least of which was the poorly funded cinematic quality. The show was videotaped in front of a live audience (allegedly), which meant it already had two strikes against it. Supernatural sitcoms should neither be videotaped nor presented in front of a live anything. The on-camera tricks and effects need to be properly executed and filmed. Imagine the tediousness of waiting in the studio seats while the crew sets up the magic for the home audience? Needless to say, Free Spirit was gone by the following January, with the ghost of Bewitched’s stellar past lingering in its wake.
Meanwhile, “free spirit,” the phrase, remains to this day the best way to describe Lizzie’s personality. Throughout her life, good, bad, or indifferent, she took everything in stride, with an occasional grain of salt over old wounds. Her core relationships always proved challenging, but she dealt with them head-on, although at times moving on too fast. Not one to offer second chances, she subscribed to the old adage, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Lizzie tended not to let things fester, even when she learned that she had cancer. At first she was angry, but then came to immediate terms with her tragic reality in 1995.
According to her commentary from 1989, Elizabeth responded to less serious and complicated circumstances in simple terms, whether discussing the possibility of a Bewitched reunion (“Forget it!”) or hearing about those who sought to do such a movie without her (“Anybody can do whatever they like. I don’t care!”). Her amassed fortune from Bewitched coupled with her family’s cache of cash allowed her the freedom to do as she pleased. She worked by choice, and from her work she gave choice performances, even if that work was only recognized with Emmy nominations and not a single victory.
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