Twitch Upon a Star

by Herbie J. Pilato

  Some years before Lizzie and Bewitched were Emmy contenders, the Television Academy had awarded another female TV icon the accolade, not once, but twice. Lucille Ball had won for her various Lucy personas over the years and embraced the attention. But when she returned to weekly TV in 1986 with ABC’s short-lived Life with Lucy, she failed to win points with her peers, her fans, and the critics, and she was devastated by the lack of support on all fronts. But as Michaels also pointed out, shortly before Ball died in 1989 (of a heart ailment), droves of fans lined up around the hospital in which she spent her final days. “She couldn’t believe it. She was amazed. And just thank God she found out [how much she was loved] before she died. But I’m not so sure Elizabeth was as lucky.”

  Before he won an Emmy for his work on Bewitched, Bill Asher, Michaels’ mentor, received the coveted accolade for helming episodes of Ball’s first comedy, I Love Lucy. When Ball later switched formats to The Lucy Show, during Bewitched’s rein, Lizzie lost the Emmy twice to the redheaded phenomenon, and Asher was not at all pleased. At the press conference following the 1966 awards ceremony that included his own Bewitched victory as a director, he refused to speak with the press unless Lizzie’s contributions to Bewitched were acknowledged.

  Notwithstanding, Asher, like Michaels, thought Lizzie remained unfettered by failing to win over her peers with an Emmy. “It just didn’t matter to her,” he said in 1988. Yet consider this: Don Knotts was nominated and won the Emmy five times for his beloved interpretation of the shaky gunshy Deputy Barney Fife on The Andy Griffith Show (CBS, 1961–1968). It is the stuff of Hollywood legends how much Knotts enjoyed his life off-screen, but one would not exactly define the actor as a heavy socialite. Lizzie, on the other hand, most probably never won an Emmy, at least for Bewitched, because her performance as twitch-witch Samantha was under-rated and natural. “It didn’t seem like she was acting,” says film scholar Rob Ray, “But it was actually great acting. She made it look too easy.”

  Fellow media archivist Tom McCartney adds:

  From what I understand, apparently only a dozen people vote for the Emmys from the nominations cast by everyone in a category; unlike the Oscars where all actors vote for the Best Actor or Actress, etc.; and with all members of the Motion Picture Academy voting for Best Picture for example. With the Emmys, it’s always been a small group of cronies who did the voting, and it’s still controlled by a small group of people. Maybe (the animated) Lucy was right (in A Charlie Brown Christmas) … maybe it is also all controlled by a syndicate back East.

  McCartney muses about something that may hold more than a measure of truth. According to The Emmys (Perigee, Third Edition, 2000), author Thomas O’Neil reveals what can only be classified as shocking information about how the awards were allegedly distributed, at least by that time. For example, one year, The Mary Tyler Moore Show garnered Emmy wins for nearly its entire cast, excluding the star herself. As a result, Moore co-star Ed Asner, who won that year (and other seasons) for playing Lou Grant, was none-too-pleased and gave it good to the Emmy board, claiming his lead actress (and off-screen boss, Moore’s MTM Productions produced the series) was “robbed”; he called the voting process “thoroughly inconsistent.” “Thankfully,” Asner says, today, “Mary did win, and much deservedly so.”

  Apparently, the Emmy committee that voted on the nominees consisted of a very select group of business suits from Beverly Hills. For many years, the Emmys were nothing but a battleground between the West and East Coasts, with the East boasting the sophistication and style of New York and Washington, D.C., news programs and variety entertainment, and the West glorifying modern technology and celebrity appeal.

  While this select and affluent sector would allegedly be some sort of avant-garde, they were also products of the confines of L.A.’s cloistered television industry, periodically falling victim to their own sequestered arrogance. Consequently, they may have dubbed Bewitched and its like as unworthy, most likely because they never objectively watched the programs in the first place, thus dispelling any potentially sincere winners or losers. However, none of that mattered to Lizzie. She failed to win the Emmy for female comedy series lead three more times, losing twice to Hope Lange for The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (NBC, 1968–1970) and once to Mary Tyler Moore for The Dick Van Dyke Show.

  “I think it’s funny,” she said in 1989 about her frequent losses. She then proceeded to compare herself to Susan Lucci, another legendary multi-nominated actress who never won, at least not until ten years later. Fortunately for the soap star, she finally garnered the amulet for playing the iconic Erica Kane on All My Children (ABC, 1970–2011). “Maybe the two of us should work together,” Lizzie laughed, “do something really brilliant, and then both lose. That would be extremely comical.”

  But seriously, Lizzie “always knew” that she wouldn’t win. “There are a lot of people voting,” she said before going on to praise the work of fellow Emmy-nominee Lange who won the Best Actress in a Comedy in 1968 for playing Mrs. Muir opposite Edward Mulhare as The Ghost. “I thought she was very good, actually. I liked that series,” she said of the show that was spawned from the 1947 feature film starring Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison. “You know,” she added, “I saw that movie for the first time about three months ago (approximately March 1989). What an amazing movie!”

  As it turned out, Robert Montgomery was also never recognized with an award from his peers. As Elizabeth recalled to Ronald Haver in 1991:

  “There are times when I think that perhaps he was a bit underrated. And that might be because of the fact that he never really fell into any kind of niche … But I just feel he was versatile. He’d try different things. I think that certainly he was appreciated for Night Must Fall, because he got an Academy Award nomination for that one.”

  Released in 1937, directed by Richard Thorpe, and co-starring Rosalind Russell and Dame May Whitty, Night Must Fall was based on the play by Emlyn Williams with a screenplay by John Van Druten:

  Mrs. Bramson (Whitty) is a wealthy but crotchety matriarch who rules over a sequestered estate for which [she] hires Danny (Montgomery) a proficient handyman, whom her niece/companion Olivia Grayne (Russell) does not thoroughly trust.

  As Lizzie told Haver, her father was excited about the possibility of winning an Oscar for the role, and her mother had already picked out a dress for the event. But Robert Montgomery didn’t stand a chance. “It was kind of sad,” Lizzie intoned. Approximately two days before the dinner ceremony, an annual event that Elizabeth said was once tastefully presented (as opposed to today’s “big hoopla stuff”), the Montgomery household received a call from MGM, the film’s studio. “Don’t even bother to show up. (Spencer) Tracy’s going to get it.”

  On February 28, 2012, The Hollywood Reporter published the article, “The Artist’s James Cromwell Slams Academy Awards, Proposes Solultion for Flawed Voting Process.” Using one of Lizzie’s words, Cromwell said the Oscars have become:

  … a lot [of] hoopla, which is not really what we do as actors and as artists. We like to do the work, and the work stands for itself, and then the industry takes over. The Academy Awards were basically created by the industry to promote pictures. They weren’t really to acknowledge the performances. Then it became sort of this great popularity contest and now, it’s an incredible show and it’s seen all over the world. But the strain on us to put ourselves up against other people to think that it’s some sort of a contest, and it isn’t a contest … we’re all in this together.

  Cromwell then recalled his own experience as a nominee and what then-Academy president Arthur Hiller told him in 1995: “Listen, the Academy Award is just a crapshoot. To be nominated, for your peers to tell you that your film or your performance is one of the five best, that’s the Academy Award.”

  A random Letter to the Editor in The Hollywood Reporter, dated February 13, 1990, may have best defended Elizabeth’s particular talent in the small to big picture scheme of things. In response to the trade magazine’s unappr
eciative review January 24, 1990 of her performance in that year’s premiere of her CBS TV-movie, Face to Face, Gary Bennett, of West Hollywood, wrote:

  I hope Elizabeth Montgomery didn’t read your review of her telefilm Face to Face. While your reviewer’s lazy critique was generally flattering, his comment that she made the Emmys “‘look bad”‘ by garnering five nominations for her “‘junky”‘ Bewitched work was downright insulting, not to mention inaccurate. In its prime, Bewitched was an enchanting show, and it is to Montgomery’s credit that she was nominated so often. As for his statement that she now shows “considerable talent,” she proved that fifteen years ago with the telefilm A Case of Rape.

  In 1975, three years after Elizabeth decided to end Bewitched, Harry Ackerman, the show’s executive producer, took his young son Peter to visit her on the set of The Legend of Lizzie Borden, which like A Case of Rape was a stark departure from her previous comedic work.

  For Peter, Borden, Rape and other of Lizzie’s non-Bewitched TV-movies, such as The Victim (ABC, 1972) and Act of Violence (NBC, 1979, which like Borden was directed by Paul Wendkos) were too jarring to watch. He explains:

  During the time she made those movies, I was not an actor, beyond school plays, anyway. So, the creative choices that she made did not reach me. I was kind of grossed-out by the idea of the Rape movie, and to this day I have never watched it, or believe this or not, any of her other post-Bewitched work. I think I so loved the Liz I knew, which is just like Samantha, I just never wanted to watch her not being her. TV-movies like A Case of Rape were a new trend back in the day so it was hard for me as a pre-teen or young teen to grasp the subject matter, unlike [it is for] the youth of today.

  It was, however, still riveting and “fun” for Peter to meet Lizzie on the Borden set:

  My Dad was working at Paramount and took me to see her. I had not seen her since the end of Bewitched and in fact never saw her again after that. But she was the same Liz to me, and I do not recall any tension between her and my Dad who had remained loyal to Bill Asher after their divorce. In fact, upon hearing that I was taking tap lessons, Liz asked me to show her my steps. And I did!

  Besides that challenging day when the wives of a few crew members visited the Bewitched set and called Lizzie “fat,” she was usually cool when kids or adults visited a set. According to Montgomery curator Thomas McCartney, the cast and crew who worked with her from her 1985 CBS TV-movie Amos were impressed with her informal persona: “She was around the set a lot and liked to watch everyone work. She was always very sweet, and many specifically remembered her eyes and the way they smiled at whoever she was talking to. In fact, they sparkled and smiled. She was a little bashful, but kind, considerate, and very much a down-to-earth.”

  Apparently, there was one particular crew member on Amos who had more directly experienced Lizzie’s kind heart. He had recently lost his wife and infant son in childbirth and fortunately had a honey-eyed four-year-old daughter to help soothe his grief. For a time, however, he was unable to find a regular babysitter and a few makeup girls from the set volunteered. But when shooting fell behind schedule, the makeup team was unable to pinch-hit, and the little girl’s father went into panic mode. Who would babysit his daughter now? Of course, the answer was none other than Lizzie Montgomery.

  According to McCartney, Lizzie actually volunteered for the job. “And the little girl’s father was just astonished,” McCartney declares. “He couldn’t comprehend that Elizabeth Montgomery was actually babysitting his child. It was all pretty humorous.”

  Equally charming and surprising was how Lizzie responded to a reference to her age, a topic of which she was quite protective and sensitive. At one point during this adventure in babysitting, she and the little girl were playing a game. “And they looked really cute together,” McCartney explains. So cute, that someone on the set turned to Lizzie and said, “Oh, how sweet. She looks like she could be your daughter.”

  To which Lizzie laughed and replied, with her acerbic humor intact, “You mean my granddaughter. I’m a little long in the tooth to have a four-year-old.”

  McCartney deciphers:

  She was just an incredibly modest lady, and treated that little girl with such respect. Some mornings, the little girl would come in looking all disheveled and Elizabeth would just shake her head, and try to make the child presentable, but in a non-obstructive way. She’d laugh and say to the little girl, “Your father dressed you this morning, didn’t he, kiddo?” But she would also tell everyone how polite she was, and how refreshing it was to encounter such a well-mannered child. She constantly complimented the girl, and her father, on her manners. She would play games with the child like hop-scotch. She even got on the floor in her nurse’s white (costume) to teach her how to play jacks, and apparently, that was quite a sight.

  Lizzie even grew concerned whenever the little girl’s father made not-so-wise moves. One day the child fell asleep on the set and curled up in a fetal ball. She immediately covered her with a blanket or towel of some sort, then approached the father and politely explained: “When children curl up, they’re usually cold and too tired to do or say anything.” According to McCartney, the father looked at Lizzie as if she was Moses giving a sermon from Mount Sinai. “I doubt he forgot whatever it is she told him that day.”

  Similarly, it’s not likely that Sally Kemp and Rebecca Asher will ever forget what happened the day Kemp’s little grandson apparently had an encounter with Elizabeth’s playful, carefree spirit, literally. Elizabeth once professed to TV Photo Story magazine that she had seen a ghost in England. Billy Clift, her former hairstylist, talked extensively about his encounters with her spirit in his fascinating book, Everything Is Going to Be Just Fine: The Ramblings of a Mad Hairdresser. And now, Lizzie “transparently” materialized to Kemp’s youngest relative. Sally explains:

  Elizabeth’s daughter, Rebecca Asher, came to visit with friends of ours. And my grandson, I think he was three or four, asked Rebecca how her mother was, and [said] that she (Elizabeth) had visited him. Rebecca and all of us were surprised, but couldn’t get any more out of him. He was busy playing with his trains. Small children can very often see spirits and accept them. I guess Elizabeth just decided to pop in to see us since Rebecca was visiting too. Good timing on Elizabeth’s part since she had never met my grandson and my daughter, who I was staying with in L.A. when this happened. Pity it couldn’t have happened in life. But it didn’t surprise me. It’s something Elizabeth would do.

  Twenty

  Humanities

  “I hope to continue to live my life so that [my children] will be proud of me. I don’t mean as an actress, but as a mother, and as a human being.”

  —Elizabeth Montgomery, Screen Stars Magazine, August 1967

  In many of her post-Samantha interviews, Lizzie frequently related working on Bewitched to taking an eight-year college course in the entertainment industry.

  However, as do many from all walks of life, she attempted to learn something from every experience. She was an intelligent, open-minded individual, ever-willing to consider perspectives and opinions on any topic. She was shy, but that just made her a good listener. She was a dedicated worker, daughter, and wife, even when her father and a few of her husbands weren’t all that supportive or encouraging. She was a loyal friend to many in her close circle who loved her dearly and, as far as her children were concerned, Elizabeth was an outstanding parent who cared a great deal about not only her immediate family, but the family of humanity. As Billy Asher, Jr. relayed on MSNBC’s Headliners & Legends in 2001, she was “a great influence and … role model.”

  Despite being raised in the self-absorbed community of Hollywood, West or East Coast divisions, Elizabeth always had a solid grasp on priorities. She appreciated diversity and possessed integrity. Although reserved, she would speak her mind when discussing the importance and power that accompanies ignoring differences among peoples and nations, and instead concentrating on what makes everyone the same. A
s she explained in 1989:

  I’ve never liked the exclusivity of other people because they are of another race, another religion, another whatever. If you don’t like somebody, don’t come to me and say, “I don’t like that person because he’s black”; that’s not an excuse; or “I don’t like that person because he’s Italian”; that doesn’t make any sense to me. But if you say, “I don’t like that person because he’s rude and kicks dogs,” well, then, I’d say, “You’re probably right.”

  Lizzie’s common human charm contributed to an across-the-board allure that remains today. She appeals to a variety of people for different reasons in a multitude of roles, on screen and off. She was the kind of person you could approach at parties. And according to the June 1965 issue of TV Radio Mirror, that’s exactly what happened at one festive first-season gathering on the set of Bewitched. A gentleman advanced toward her and said, “Miss Montgomery … you not only play the part of a witch to perfection, you are that witch.”

  Whereupon she responded, “Why, isn’t everybody?”

  Not really. Liz Sheridan believed the role of Samantha fit Lizzie like a glove. As Sheridan expressed to MSNBC’s Headliners & Legends, “She was that person. She was so much like that lady that I guess it was not like acting to her. She [had the] chance to be herself.”

  Ironically, it was advice from Robert Montgomery that helped his daughter “be” Samantha. In doing so, she became more popular with this one character on TV than he ever was with several roles he portrayed in various mediums. As was explained in Cosmopolitan Magazine, July 1954, he once reminded Elizabeth that every time she walked onto to a stage, she must bring something of herself with her. She couldn’t just depend on scenery and lines. He had instructed her to bring the audience some special essence of herself, no matter how small; something that wasn’t there before she stepped out from behind the curtain. He didn’t care whether it was sadness or “an air of being afraid of somebody or a feeling of slapstick comedy,” just something that would make the audience “sit up and notice” her. “All good actors do that,” he added, thinking Elizabeth had that quality. “She enters a scene with an air of authority, making a strong, positive contribution.”