Before closed captioning was available on TV, people who were deaf tuned into action shows where the story line could be followed without dialogue. I remember asking deaf friends in the pre-captioning days what they liked to watch and Bewitched was at the top of their list. It was Montgomery’s expressive face and “speech-readable” mouth that attracted them. Of course, the graphic manifestations of magic needed no dialogue to be enjoyed by any member of the audience.
Emmy-winning TV producer Dan Weaver has worked on acclaimed talk shows such as The Phil Donahue Show and Hour Magazine. In 1996, Weaver, who is hearing-impaired, was the guiding creative force behind a tribute to Elizabeth on Entertainment Tonight. He had the wonderful fortune of meeting Elizabeth twice. First, in 1986, when he produced a special for Donahue called “AIDS: Face to Face.” Weaver recalls:
Phil had wanted to do a show on people battling AIDS in their final stages. It was a powerful experience, and the program was nominated for two Emmys, and received an Alliance for Gay and Lesbian Artists (AGLA) Award. These awards predated the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, (GLAAD) Awards, which also celebrate the most outstanding images of the LGBT community in the media.
On behalf of the show, Weaver, who is gay, proudly accepted the award. “It was a magical night,” he says, including a surprise meeting before the program with Lizzie and Robert Foxworth. Before showtime, Weaver couldn’t resist the chance to introduce himself and his life partner, Lee. “Thinking back,” Weaver intones, “Elizabeth and Robert were early allies in the LGBT equality movement in Hollywood. That was during the time when many people believed that you could catch AIDS and that it was God’s punishment of gays. Yet there they were, and she was as gracious and beautiful as I’d imagined.”
During their brief conversation, Weaver said he also “felt her incredible sensitivity.” In a nervous attempt to make small talk, he mentioned that a friend of his was being considered to do some publicity work for her. Upon hearing this, Lizzie’s expression changed and she became “defensive,” Weaver recalls, “saying that [it] wasn’t true,” and proceeded to ask Weaver if that’s the line his friend was telling everyone. “I felt the panic in her voice.”
In hindsight, Weaver believes his innocent remark was probably inappropriate, since he was a stranger to her. Also, too, his friend may have been exaggerating his prospective employment as her publicist. “I regretted that I had said anything,” Weaver goes on to explain, “yet it made me drawn to her even more … her feelings, her vulnerability, and her fragility. I think these qualities motivated her to help the underdogs, others that may have those feelings sometimes, too, like [those in] the LGBT community and the disabled.”
One of Weaver’s favorite autographs is a beautiful note he received from Lizzie, thanks to a mutual producer friend who met her at a PBS fundraiser. Weaver’s friend told Elizabeth of his incredible fascination with her which, Weaver admits, “I have gotten teased about over the years.”
No matter. Both he and Lizzie kept a sense of humor about it all. Her note to Weaver said, “You may be demented, but you obviously have impeccable taste.”
“I loved her humor,” Weaver adds.
His other meeting with Elizabeth transpired at a “looping session,” where an audio track is recorded after either a movie or TV show is filmed. As a surprise, Weaver’s partner Lee had arranged this “second chance” for me. Weaver explains:
I walked in and there she was in the sound booth, speaking Swahili for her TV movie, Face to Face. When she came out for a break, I practically pounced on her. Luckily she hadn’t remembered our first encounter, but this one became equally uncomfortable for me. This was finally a chance to connect with her. But I overwhelmed her on what amounted to a short work break. I did what many fans do. I couldn’t stop talking and did a soliloquy on why she was important to me. Ugh! She was flattered at first and then became uncomfortable. Thinking back, if I were in her shoes, I would have felt the same way.
Years later, in 1996, he was producing the tribute to Elizabeth for Entertainment Tonight, where he met “her wonderful daughter Rebecca,” who smiled upon hearing how he met her mother. I am sorry I never got to convey this in the right way to Elizabeth, but it meant a lot to be able to share my thoughts with Rebecca. I’m just someone who truly felt a connection with Elizabeth, someone who sensed her shyness and her goodness. I felt her compassion even as a child. There was a universal appeal of Bewitched that made people from many diverse groups feel welcomed each Thursday night at 8:00 PM [when the show originally aired on ABC]. Echoing Lauri Klobas’ thoughts, Weaver recalls:
I remember it being one of the first shows I watched with special effects, and for a hearing-impaired person where there weren’t subtitles back then, I am sure it was a fun show to watch. Her real-life passion for social causes, witnessed in some Bewitched episodes, came through.
The show found innovative ways to work in messages (with episodes like “Samantha Twitches for UNICEF,” and “Sisters at Heart,” the latter of which dealt with bigotry). In those days, dealing with such a real issue like racism was rare on TV; and for a supernatural sitcom to take it on was very courageous and creative. Elizabeth and Bill Asher were pioneers in social cause storytelling.
I learn best through storytelling and visualization, perhaps another reason I was drawn to this series that was so visually interesting
As a video storyteller some four decades later, the show had a huge impact on my career, and using TV as a creative tool in educating others on social issues that impact us all…. Elizabeth’s beauty both externally and internally, had a truly magical ability to take such a supernatural and out-there concept and give it so much grounding and reality.
I always sensed a bit of insecurity with her, one that I have known well throughout my own life. When I would watch her on the screen I had strong feelings about what Elizabeth, the actress, was going through personally. I’ve learned over time that she so wanted to please her dad, and I felt that. She was a tremendously gifted woman, but I imagine a very sensitive person who, like all of us, had her demons. But I totally also got that she was a very loving person who cared deeply about people, and never saw herself as a celebrity.
I think she struggled with being a celebrity. In a way, she was probably similar to Samantha, just wanting to live the simple life, one where people didn’t see her any differently than themselves. I think she accomplished this by never forgetting the underserved in this world, and the power in changing lives by taking on personal actions, like doing narration of audio books for the blind. She was a terrific actress and funny. But there was a depth in her that showed much sensitivity and vulnerability. She played Samantha as simply someone who was trying to fit in, to have her family accept her husband’s world. There was always love for both sides, but it was a challenge. And Samantha always had respect for everyone’s point of view. It was not easy for her to be in a minority in a mortal world, but she so wanted to embrace it and share those simple and universal family values.
That one word answer she gave (prejudice, in defining Bewitched’s central theme) really crystallized why the show was so real to me and why I have loved it on one level; I could sit and be entertained yet on another level really consider a much heavier philosophical perspective.
Today, Weaver is a partner and Senior Vice President of Talent Development for Diversity Works LLC (www.diversityworksllc.com), a marketing and communications agency whose clients include lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) certified businesses, nonprofit organizations, and corporate allies. Their tagline is: Turning Pride into Profit.
“We work with companies to help build their strategic relationships in the LGBT Marketplace,” he explains, “which is an $800 billion dollar industry. As a minority group, the LGBT market is third only to the African-American and Hispanic populations, and actually exceeds the Asian-American buying power.”
What’s more, Diversity Works supports all groups, but has particular interests in LGBT seniors
, LGBT people with disabilities, and the transgender community. “We believe these groups have some of the most significant unmet needs and face the most discrimination.”
According to Weaver, one quarter of all gay seniors fear revealing their sexuality even to their own doctors, while an estimated 40 to 60 percent of the transgendered population is unemployed due to workplace discrimination. So for him, “It’s been interesting finding out about Elizabeth’s compassion for diversity and disability groups. She was a special soul put here, who used her time well, and is on to her next mission. Her work, whether on screen, at home, or with her charitable causes, lives on like a beautiful tale in a storybook.”
Twenty-one
Political Science
“My parents never tried to force their opinions on me, politically, religiously, or any other way.”
—Elizabeth Montgomery, Modern Screen Magazine (July 1970)
Lizzie frequently employed her widespread image for the benefit of others, remaining civic-minded throughout her life and career, in spite or despite conservative views expressed by her mother and father. As she explained to Ronald Haver in 1991, broaching politics with her father was like talking to a brick wall.
For one, her stand on Vietnam was not a popular topic with him. As she put it, “He just figured, ‘Well, there’s no sense of even getting into this with someone like that!’” She felt it was more productive that they were on different coasts; she on the West (the left); he on the East (the right). “And it was just as well that we weren’t in each other’s company a lot because it would have been unpleasant … for a whole mess of people.”
Despite such political friction with her father, Lizzie went on to protest the Vietnam war, and lent her name, along with a great deal of personal time, money, and energy to a wide variety of charitable and political causes, including supporting human equality and the Peace movement; helping to further AIDS research, and reaching out to the disabled community. However, she modestly defined her social involvement as adequate. “There are times when I know I could still be doing more,” she said in 1989.
According to Ronny Cox, Lizzie’s liberal-minded co-star from the issue-driven TV-movies A Case of Rape and With Murder in Mind, their shared political views were at the core of their friendship:
Elizabeth was very left-wing, not as left-wing as me, but very left-wing. And it was refreshing for each of us to run into someone whose politics were sort of as vociferous as the other person’s … someone who we could each blow off steam with, especially at that time.
While Bewitched was on the air through the 1960s and early 1970s, Ronny was “there in ’68 … working in the streets with the kids” during the upheaval surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination and the subsequent riots.
At the time, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. There was massive resistance to, among other things, desegregation of public restrooms, buses, restaurants, and schools. The anti–Vietnam war movement was commencing. Michael Harrington’s book, The Other America (Scribner, 1997) would later document the gaps between America’s rich and the poor; the haves and the have-nots. Cesar Chavez was challenging America in the Grape Boycott; music was alive with revolution, from the likes (and dislikes) of The Beatles to The Smothers Brothers. It was the day of The March on Washington (from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial) for jobs, to halt discrimination against African-Americans, and equality for all. Everyday people of every race, creed, and color were there, in numbers 250,000 or more, walking arm-in-arm down Constitution Avenue, alongside celebrities such as sports legend Jackie Robinson (who had shattered the color barrier in Major League Baseball).
By the time A Case of Rape aired in 1974, Ronny says influential people like the Harvard educated poet Robert Lowell refused to visit the White House due to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war. In Ronny’s view, Lowell (born in 1917) in particular, played an important role in the revolution of the 1960s.
But from any perspective, Lowell’s writings are significant, especially his early works, including Land of Unlikeness (1944) and Lord Weary’s Castle, the latter for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947 at the age of thirty. Both books were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism, and explored the dark side of America’s Puritan legacy. Before Vietnam, he also actively objected to World War II, became a conscientious objector, and was subsequently imprisoned.
According to Cox, it was only after Lowell began questioning mainstream artistic choices that issue-oriented films like Rape (which helped to push forward nationwide landmark legislation that changed the rights of rape victims) could be produced and introduced to TV home viewers. Before then, Cox says:
It was either frothy comedy or some sort of made-up drama. We were a nation still going through the throes of the Southerners disagreeing with the Civil Rights Act and us coming out of Vietnam. Everyone was vilifying the hippie movement. People were still having trouble voting. We were not that far removed from ’65–66. And just look around at the world today! We still have inequalities!
Back in 1974, Cox had serious arguments with those in the artistic community who questioned the association between politics and the arts. “Because in those days,” he says, “there was this total segregated idea, that entertainment was here and the real world was there. So I think in some ways (A Case of Rape) probably made some people squirm a little bit.”
The same could also be said for his 1972 big screen film Deliverance, which hit theatres slightly before Rape premiered on TV. This movie also made an integral artistic contribution to the era, for it too dealt with the issue of sexual assault, but this time a man was violated. Cox shares his memories of working on the film in his new book, Dueling Banjos: The Deliverance of Drew (Decent Hill, 2012). He says Deliverance was ground-breaking if only for the healthy social dialogue it created:
This was the first time men had had to deal with the whole concept of rape. For the first time people were realizing that rape isn’t [just] a sexual crime. It’s violent and out of control. I’m not even sure there’s hardly any sexual component to it. It’s an act of humiliation … the me-dominating-you aspect.
In comparative analysis of Case and Deliverance, he believes both films “changed a lot of people’s psyches. Because now for the first time, men had to deal with the kind of thing that women had to deal with for years.” Before Case in particular, he says, once a woman was raped, her sex life was open to extreme scrutiny. “If she just dated someone, the deck was stacked against her. And you couldn’t say anything if a man had prior arrests. He was completely off limits.”
Yet it was Lizzie’s caring and compelling drive to serve others that made her so accessible to Cox on the set of Case. He was impressed with her unaffected demeanor, considering her father’s conservative stance and her prestigious upbringing, as well as with her obvious decision to shun arrogance, and retain an open-minded and keen understanding of priorities:
You have to admire Lizzie. She could very easily have just been one of the haves. And that’s what sets her apart; that sensibility of saying, “No! I don’t agree with the right wing paradigm.” To them, it’s the zero sum game … getting a lot of money or getting a lot of power or getting [a] lot of stuff doesn’t mean anything (unless the Left loses). They want this trickle-down-stuff, and if they would just be historians and realize that when the least of us—especially the middle class—does the best that’s when everybody else does the best. The paradigm for this country is to make sure that [the] vast middle is doing well and then you’ll pull the poor up from the bottom and the rich still do well. And Elizabeth realized that.
Although he’s enjoyed his share of stardom, Cox admits to not experiencing Lizzie’s level of success. He did not know her father, nor did they have discussions about her father. “I can only talk from my own sense of it,” he says, “but I think she looked around and saw those right wing guys, the soullessness of them, not caring for the other p
eople,” and decided from there.
However, he remains particularly puzzled as to how Lizzie became part of an artistic community like Hollywood, filled with celebrities of all shapes, sizes, and success levels, some of who may be defined as arrogant and self-centered:
Who knows? In some ways it sounds paradoxical. In some ways it’s as though our religions almost mitigate against us ever getting together … in lots of ways. If you take what I call the right-wing extreme religions of the world … the right wing elements of the religions of the world … right wing Christian fundamentalists, right wing Muslims, right wing Jewish, right wing Buddhists … those ultra-right wings … they always mitigate…. they always propagate an us-against-them mentality. But that’s the way of these guys having their power! I grew up in a small town of fundamentalist right-wing religion bigots of the worst order. I was overwhelmed with what I observed as deep hypocrisy and disregard for humanity. So, I vowed at a very early age to choose a more productive path. In some ways, I’m sort of prejudiced against organized religion because of that. Because I saw such hatred, such bigotry coming from those kinds of places, no caring for humanity at large, no caring for our fellow man. That turned me off.
Ronny Cox doesn’t know for certain, but he’d “like to think that Lizzie saw the same things from the excessives … the same lack of caring from her side of the tracks.”
If Lizzie was the most down-to-earth actress in Hollywood, then her male counterpart, beyond Robert Foxworth in that community, would have to be none other than Emmy-winning actor Ed Asner. Asner is best known for playing the tough-as-nails-but-gentle-of-heart Lou Grant on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and its sequel Lou Grant. The Grant role, a supporting role on a half-hour situation comedy, was the first in TV history to be spun-off into a one-hour dramatic series. He made TV history again when he recently reprised his role as wealthy art collector and smuggler August March on updated edition of Hawaii Five-O. He first played March on the original Five-O, starring Jack Lord, a frequent co-star of Lizzie’s. According to the article, “Ed Asner Visits Hawaii,” published in The Los Angeles Times, on March 19, 2012, the day the new Five-O segment aired, it was the first time a guest performer played the same character on separate versions of the same series.
Twitch Upon a Star Page 37