Twitch Upon a Star

by Herbie J. Pilato

  It was a speech he gave at a rally for The Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament of 1986, which was undermanned, plagued by insurance problems, heckled by protesters, and attacked by bureaucrats. Nevertheless, Lizzie and Foxworth, along with numerous other celebrities, showed their support as approximately 1,400 marchers struck out across 3,235 miles of American desert, mountains, plains, and cities, bent on mass persuasion against the perceived evils of nuclear arms.

  The march was the brainchild of David Mixner, then twenty-nine years old and a longtime activist in several liberal causes, specifically in regard to LGBT issues. His credentials include the 1968 presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy, directing Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s 1977 mayoral campaign, co-chairing Senator Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential quest, and the Vietnam Moratorium. Mixner was also one of the prominent LGBT fundraisers for Bill Clinton during his 1992 campaign but famously broke with the President over the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy implemented in 1993, and was ultimately arrested at a protest in front of the White House. At such events, Lizzie was usually a figurative if not oratorical voice.

  Mixner says today:

  Elizabeth was one of the first Hollywood celebrities to step forward to fight for LGBT rights. At the time, everyone in Hollywood was keeping a respectful distance from the issue, but not Elizabeth. She attended events, helped raise money and often dined at Mark’s, a famous gay restaurant in West Hollywood. Never wanting to receive accolades for her work, since in conversation with me she just kept saying, “It is the right thing to do.” She was a person who made us feel we had value by her presence in those dark and difficult years.

  Lizzie’s presence certainly gave value to Dick Sargent’s life.

  In 1991, her former Bewitched co-star announced his homosexuality, and requested her presence as Co-Grand Marshall for the 1992 Gay Rights Parade in Los Angeles. “You wouldn’t see her at parties,” Sargent’s former publicist Howard Bragman told People Magazine in 1995, “but you would always see her at benefits.”

  Shortly before Sargent died in 1994 of prostate cancer (and not AIDS, which has been falsely reported over the years), he gave an interview to writer Owen Keehnen for Chicago Outlines magazine, “the voice of the gay and lesbian community,” which was later published in Keehnen’s book, We’re Here, We’re Queer (Prairie Avenue Productions, 2011), during which he commented on Lizzie’s support. She knew of his sexuality, Sargent said, because his “lover was alive when we did Bewitched.” He and his partner, Albert Williams, a screenwriter, would attend parties and play tennis with Lizzie and Bill Asher. “She really loved my lover very much,” Sargent said of the man who in 1979 dropped dead of a cerebral hemorrhage at the home they shared in the Hollywood Hills. He said Lizzie respected “the hell out of me for doing this [coming out]. She thinks it’s marvelous and has nothing but encouraging words.”

  In 1991, The Star magazine decided to out Sargent and as he told Keehnen, “they quoted everyone like they talked to them.” Sargent called Lizzie and read what the tabloid had quoted her as saying: “Well, if that’s his lifestyle, I just hope it makes him happy.”

  “Oh, shit,” Lizzie mused to Sargent over the fabricated line. “They gave me the only cliché in the article.”

  “I love her,” Sargent concluded. “She’s a very bright and caring lady.”

  In 1992, Elizabeth touched on the subject of Sargent’s once-secret sexuality for an interview with The Advocate, a national gay magazine. In Robert Pela’s article, “The Legend of Lizzie,” she said the topic never came up. She simply decided his sexuality was none of her business and that such discretion at times was the very definition of friendship.

  In the same article, she also addressed the long-circulated gay rumors surrounding another Bewitched co-star: Agnes Moorehead, who died of cancer at sixty-seven in 1974, ten years after the show debuted and two years after it was cancelled. Again, the topic of sexuality, this time with Moore-head, as before with Sargent’s, was just not something that arose.

  Elizabeth then further explained how some members of the Bewitched cast and crew considered the series a metaphor for the social and cultural issues confronting those individuals outside the mainstream. Samantha was forced to conceal her supernatural heritage, and pretended to be mortal (“normal?”), like some gay men and women were forced to pretend they were straight. As far as Elizabeth was concerned, Bewitched was about repression and the subsequent frustrations that follow. She felt it was a positive message to relay in a clandestine manner, while she admitted that being raised in Hollywood exposed her to alternate lifestyles since her youth.

  The Advocate then made note of her support of Sargent and the LGBT community in general and wondered if she felt she might be perceived as gay herself. But none of that phased Elizabeth; she had more important things with which to concern herself. For one, she appeared in the Gay Pride Parade in support of Sargent.

  But she was considering playing a lesbian in a TV-movie that never went into production. It wasn’t anything specific, but she thought portraying such a role might have proved intriguing.

  Then again, she had already, years before, played a similarly-repressed character … in the guise of Samantha Stephens on Bewitched.

  On April 15, 1989, Lizzie’s fifty-sixth birthday, she and Bob Foxworth served as honorary co-chairs and hosts of the National Gay Rights Advocates Eleventh Anniversary Celebration, which was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and whose honorees included Lizzie’s devoted manager Barry Krost.

  More than anything, the caring couple was heavily involved with amfAR, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, and APLA, AIDS Project Los Angeles.

  In 1989, they attended “The Magic of Bob Mackie,” a fashion presentation celebrating the designer’s countless years in the business. Known for his work with Elizabeth’s good friend Carol Burnett on The Carol Burnett Show, Mackie’s event was held at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, and also attended by Burnett, Cher, Jackie Collins, Joan Rivers, and Cheryl Ladd, all proceeds for which supported APLA’s service to people with AIDS and AIDS-related complex (including mental health counseling, dental care, and in-home health care).

  In 1987, Lizzie and Foxworth helped to raise more than $15,000 at a benefit performance of the stage play, Tamara, in honor of the Twenty-seventh Anniversary of Amnesty International.

  She also joined him at the preview party of the eight-part PBS mini-series Television, which was given at the KCET-TV headquarters in L.A. According to a press packet for the program, this series documented the “evolution and the astonishing global power and impact of the world’s most powerful communication medium.”

  The Los Angeles Times called Lizzie radiant in a gown bedazzled by her grandmother Rebecca Allen’s diamond and emerald brooch. Foxworth wore Western accessories including a unique bolo tie, trimmed with silver feathers, and a diamond stud in his left ear. The latter, a gift from Lizzie, who once more worked that celebrated silent smile, as Foxworth explained how the stud symbolized his “freedom from Falcon Crest.”

  Shortly before he left the series, however, Lizzie was invited to join the show for an arc of episodes, but she declined. Instead, another media sorceress, Kim Novak, who played a witch in the 1958 feature film, Bell, Book, and Candle, stepped into the part.

  Lizzie had more important fish to fry, as when the opportunity to express and expand her political arena arrived in 1988. It was then she narrated Cover Up: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair, the feature film documentary that was critical of Reagan-Bush policies in Central America. She would later lend her voice to the follow-up film, The Panama Deception, which won the Oscar in 1992 for Best Feature Length Documentary.

  Lizzie was dedicated to both films, but her work ethic was always sound. As she said in 1989: “Work takes a certain amount of concentration and energy, even though it always looks like I’m having fun (for example) when I’m looping. Luckily, I’m pretty good at it” (as Dan We
aver experienced in 1990 during Lizzie’s looping session for Face to Face).

  One day, Barbara Trent, director of both Cover Up and The Panama Deception, had asked Lizzie to loop a few lines of narration under slightly challenging working conditions. As Trent later told People magazine in 1995 after Lizzie’s death: “We were too embarrassed to [ever] ask her to come back into our little Santa Monica studio, where the temperatures sometimes went up to 80 degrees.”

  But none of that mattered to Lizzie. She was hot for the topic. The message she was sending was in direct opposition to the Reagan administration and the man himself, who had long been a friend to her parents. But when it came time to vote for Reagan (in 1980 and again in 1984), her mother Elizabeth Allen refused to debate the issue. As Lizzie recalled in 1989, the conversation went something like this:

  “Well, you and Daddy knew him.”

  “But your father must have talked about him to you, didn’t he?”

  “Are you kidding?” (Lizzie knew her father was wise enough not to debate such topics with her, but that didn’t stop her from telling her mother exactly what she thought of Reagan.)

  “If you asked him what time it was, he would tell you how to take a watch apart and put it back together again, but you’d never find out the time; never. Nothing’s changed, except he’s probably not smart enough to take apart a watch and put it back together.”

  “Oh, Elizabeth!” her mother protested (in much the same way Agnes Moorehead would at times object to Lizzie’s forthright opinions on the set of Bewitched).

  “Okay, sorry,” Lizzie concluded to her Mom. “No more politics. Promise. Never mind.”

  “I just wouldn’t get into it with her,” she said in 1989. “But the man is loathsome.” David White listened to Lizzie’s Reagan rant and agreed.

  He had worked with the former president on an episode of TV’s G. E. True Theatre (aka General Electric True Theatre)—an anthology series Reagan hosted from 1953 to 1962. As David recalled, Marc Daniels (Bill Asher’s precursor on I Love Lucy) directed the episode and, at one point between filming, various conversations transpired, periodically turning to the subject of politics, a hot topic between Reagan and White in particular:

  “You know, David, what’s good for General Electric is good for America.”

  “No, no, Ronny boy … what’s good for General Electric is what’s good for Ronny Reagan … and the stockholders. And besides … we always have Westinghouse.”

  Upon hearing David relay this interchange in 1989, Lizzie laughed and said, “I never met (Reagan), and I probably would have hated him … I hope I would have hated him.”

  “He’s just shallow and incompetent,” continued White, who was angry with Reagan and the first George Bush on an entirely different level. His son, Jonathan White, after whom Larry Tate’s son was named on Bewitched, died in the Pan Am Flight 103 incident over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988. It was Pan American World Airways’ third daily scheduled transatlantic flight from London Heathrow Airport to New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. On Wednesday, December 21, 1988, the aircraft flying this route—a Boeing 747-121 registered N739PA and named “Clipper Maid of the Seas”—was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and sixteen crew members. Eleven people in Lockerbie were also killed as large sections of the plane fell in the town and destroyed several houses, bringing total fatalities to 270. As a result, the event is also known as the “Lockerbie Bombing.” During the 2011 Libyan civil war a former government official claimed that Muammar Gaddafi had personally ordered the attack. (According to The Los Angeles Times, Abdel Bassett Ali Megrahi, the Libyan intelligence officer convicted in the bombing, who denied any role in the plot, died in Tripoli, Libya, May 20, 2012.)

  For David, it was a personal attack of another nature and a tragedy from which he never recovered. As he told Lizzie in 1989, only a short time after the incident, he received a letter of sympathy from the White House, specifically, from Reagan’s successor, George H. W. Bush:

  It arrived on my birthday, about four or five days after the parents of the victims of Pan Am 103 went down and met him. And by then I’m sure he thought I better get my ass in gear. “A kinder gentler nation” is what I said we were going to have repeatedly.

  But when David opened the letter, he was unimpressed. In fact, he laughed. Or as he put it, “I cracked up.” He was indignantly amused by the cardboard backing that was placed behind the letter in order for it not to wrinkle. “So I can hang it up in my den,” David assumed. “They thought I should think it’s a big deal. And I don’t think it’s a big deal.”

  “That’s incredible,” added Lizzie who expressed her own fury about the Pan Am incident. “I was angry when it happened. And when I realized that Jonathan was on the plane, I just couldn’t believe it. When I called Mouse (Bewitched producer Marvin Miller), I said, ‘Are you sure?’ He said, ‘Yeah … I talked to David at the gym.’”

  But now David was right in front of her, in near tears. As he went on to assess, “In October of 1988, they [international officials] knew there were bombs (on the plane) that they put in cassettes. I have an article from Newsweek [that states this]. They were warned a couple of times, not just for Helsinki.”

  According to the Report of the President’s Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, on December 5, 1988 (sixteen days prior to the Pan Am attack), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a security bulletin saying that on that day a man with an Arabic accent had telephoned the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and had told them that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the United States would be blown up within the next two weeks by someone associated with the Abu Nidal Organization. He said a Finnish woman would carry the bomb on board as an unwitting courier.

  David concluded with a heavy heart and even heavier words, that he missed his son immensely, and was clearly not pleased with those he thought were responsible for his death:

  Bless his heart. I wanted him to be his own person. [But] I say you don’t need an enemy when you have a government like ours. I have no faith in this country at all. Individual people, I like, but [not the] people who run the government.

  Then, in a swift shift to help lighten the mood, David turned to Elizabeth and asked:

  “So how many children do you have now?”

  “The same three,” she replied. “Bob [Foxworth] and I finally went, ‘Uh, no, I don’t think so’ [with regard to the possibility of them having more children when they first got together in 1974]. He has two, and I have three, and they’re all grown. They’re wonderful. We’ve got five between us, and that’s more than enough.”

  “You don’t want to raise children any more, do you?” White continued in jest.

  “Every time we get tempted,” Lizzie answered, “this friend of mine, who’s a costume designer, Frances Hays, one of my best friends, says, ‘Call B.A.’ And I said, ‘What’s that?’ And she said, ‘Babies Anonymous.’”

  While Lizzie was working on Bewitched in 1960s, Ronald Reagan hosted another anthology series, this one a western syndicated show called Death Valley Days. She was more than familiar with his work and his persona, and subsequently reveled in performing one particular scene from her 1985 NBC TV-movie, Between the Darkness and the Dawn when her character Abigail Foster made a sarcastic reference to Reagan in a dinner-table scene. Abigail had been in an epileptic coma for twenty years. Upon awakening in 1985, she learned of America’s new leader, and was shocked. “Ronald Reagan is president?!” she said incredulously, in response to the election of a former actor as the world’s most powerful decision-maker.

  Twenty-two

  Final Exams

  “I keep thinking about how I might have cancer.”

  —Blanche Taylor Moore, as played by Elizabeth in Black Widow Murders: The Blanche Taylor Moore Story (1993)

  One of Lizzie’s favorite Bewitched guest stars was Christopher George, who played the lead in the first season episode, “George the Warlock�
�:

  Endora seizes an opportunity to dissolve Samantha’s mortal marriage by enlisting the assistance of the supernaturally suave warlock named George (Christopher) to romance her daughter.

  Like many of the show’s guests in its first two years—Adam West (Batman), James Doohan (Star Trek), Billy Mumy (Lost in Space), and Bill Daily (I Dream of Jeannie), Christopher George went on to star in a weekly series of his own: The Immortal, a fanciful, if short-lived (only sixteen episodes) take on The Fugitive, a wanted-man story with a positive twist:

  Ben Richards (George) is a test-car driver whose blood contains certain miraculous antibodies that allow him to live forever. In the interim, Ben searches for his long lost brother Jason (never seen), in the hope that he too may contain the same rare form of blood-type; while the wealthy senior Arthur Maitland (David Brian) who once rejected a blood transfusion from Ben, is now in hot pursuit to track him down.

  Ben, like George, the warlock, was immortal, as were the entire band of charmers on Bewitched. None the least of which was Samantha, as played by Lizzie who leaves her own immortal legacy with a body of work that echoed and foreshadowed portions of her reality that warrants further examination.

  In 1976, she appeared in the TV-movie Dark Victory, a remake of the classic 1939 feature film starring her friend Bette Davis.

  TV producer Katherine Merrill (Lizzie) is stricken with a brain tumor. Consumed with work, Katherine ignores her personal life and the symptoms of an impending physical disorder until finally collapsing at a cocktail party and tumbling down a flight of stairs. Once hospitalized, she falls in love with the attending physician, Dr. Michael Grant (Anthony Hopkins).