Here, Lizzie takes the viewer through the varied emotions connected with a devastating illness (surprise, frustration, anger), and the challenges of maintaining an intimate relationship through that period. In the end, and just as in the original Bette Davis movie, Katherine dies. But in the last few moments of Lizzie’s edition, Katherine turns to Dr. Grant, smiles, and the camera freeze-frames on the love light in her eyes. It’s a bittersweet ending to one of Lizzie’s better post-Bewitched films.
Nine years later, in 1985, she starred in another TV-movie, Between the Darkness and the Dawn:
Abigail Foster (Lizzie) awakens from a decades-long viral-induced epileptic coma. She finds her sister (Karen Grassle) has married her boyfriend (Michael Goodwin), and her mother (Dorothy McGuire) has become obsessed with being her caregiver. Fortunately, in time, Abigail manages to foster an alternate happiness with the new man in her life (James Naughton).
The ending for Between the Darkness and the Dawn is less bitter and more sweet than it is with Dark Victory, but a glaring discrepancy detracts from this movie’s credibility beyond its far-reaching premise (although similar events have transpired). The story opens in 1965, when actress Lori Bird-song portrays a seventeen-year-old Abigail who is soon stricken into her catatonic state. The setting then swiftly shifts forward twenty years, and Lizzie is seen playing Abigail, who is now apparently thirty-seven years old.
Although Lizzie blurred the age of her documented birth, April 15, 1933, by the time this film aired, December 23, 1985, she was in reality fifty-two years old. Actors sometimes play younger characters. It’s an unwritten Hollywood rule. But it’s a bit of a stretch for Lizzie to have played a thirty-seven-year-old in the later period suggested in Between the Darkness and the Dawn.
However, she embraced the opportunity to change the face of time; as she had in 1992, when according to Tom McCartney, she registered as forty-nine years old for a medical examination during filming of the TV movie The Black Widow Murders. That meant she would have been born in 1943, and fifty-two years old when she died in 1995. But that didn’t measure up either.
When Elizabeth died in 1995, writer Lynn Elber reported in The Associated Press that Lizzie was fifty-seven years old. That meant she would have been born in 1938 which, as previously documented, is simply not true.
Lizzie and younger brother Skip were in England in 1939 while their father Robert Montgomery worked on The Earl of Chicago. They were then shipped back to the States when he was called to service for World War II. They traveled on the S.S. Arandora Star, sailed from Southampton, England for New York on September 1, 1939 and arrived in New York City on September 12, 1939. According to the passenger list chart lines that were posted on www.harpiesbizzare.com, one of the top Bewitched websites, Lizzie was then six years old, and born in 1933, which was also her documented birth year in early studio biographies. All of which means that, in reality, she had just turned sixty-two on April 15, 1995, a month and three days before she passed away on May 18.
In August of 1975, Elizabeth broached the birthday subject with an interview for TV-Movies Today magazine, claiming she always told the truth about her age because of her third most influential relative: Rebecca Allen. As Lizzie explained it, when her grandmother was sixty, Becca told everyone she was sixty-five. “People always think you’re older anyway,” she said. “They therefore think I’m really seventy and are impressed with how youthful I appear.’”
When asked her age, Lizzie replied, “I was born on April 15, 1936, which has since become Income Tax Day and therefore is easy to remember.” So that would mean she was fifty-nine when she died in 1995 which, again, is untrue.
More age-old tales were spun on the set of her 1985 CBS TV-movie Amos the premise for which dealt with, appropriately enough, the elderly residents at a nursing home. According to Montgomery archivist Thomas McCartney, Lizzie took a particular liking to Pat Morita, who co-starred in this film as one of the senior residents that was abused by Lizzie’s maniacal nurse Daisy Daws. Morita had found fame late in life, first as Arnold on Happy Days (ABC, 1974–1984) and then with The Karate Kid movies of the 1980s. On the Amos set, Morita, who was born in 1932 and died in 2005, realized he and Lizzie were approximately the same age, and while he portrayed the elderly Tanaka, she played a middle-aged Daisy.
Morita laughed off the same-age reference, claiming it must have been the water in Japan that helped him retain his youth. Lizzie blushed and made every attempt to downplay the somewhat awkward assumption. “She’d get real embarrassed about the age comparison,” McCartney explains, claiming that makeup had contributed to her youthful appearance and Morita’s older look. “But no one was buying it. She had a naturally young, blithe spirit,” he says.
She also had a way with numbers. Upon further early influence from her beloved grandmother Becca, Lizzie frequented the race track and loved to gamble, which is really what her life became. And although Dark Victory and Between the Darkness and the Dawn had comparatively uneven endings, both films foreshadowed what would later become Lizzie’s darkest hours.
In the final analysis, it was never Lizzie’s performance as Samantha or any of her characterizations or unique talents that were in question. It was her choices for certain roles, before and particularly beyond Bewitched that proved to be intriguing, if not downright mind-boggling. But her friend and TV-movie co-star Ronny Cox wouldn’t have had it any other way. She was “an actress, and the fun is in playing the roles that stretch you,” he says. In the decades since Cox was the affable dad on TV’s Apple’s Way, (CBS, 1974–1975), he’s mostly played “bad guys,” similar to Lizzie’s choices in films like The Legend of Lizzie Borden and The Black Widow Murders. And although not evil in nature, her character in A Case of Rape was eons away from Samantha on Bewitched. “Hell!” Cox proclaims, such roles are “twenty times more fun to play,” because films like Rape, he says, give actors a chance to showcase and expand their talents.
Case in point: When former Charlie’s Angels star Farrah Fawcett appeared in NBC’s shocking TV-movie, The Burning Bed, directed by Robert Greenwald, this film was based on the book by Faith McNulty, with a teleplay by Rose Leiman Goldemberg:
Francine Hughes (Fawcett) is the loving mother of three children. But she is also the battered wife of Mickey Hughes (Paul Le Mat), who is both verbally and physically abusive. However, whenever Francine reaches out for help, she’s turned away, and ultimately becomes incapable of bringing Mickey to justice. So, one terrifying night, after he rapes her, she sets their bed on fire with him still in it, asleep. As a result, Francine goes on trial for her life.
Just as in Lizzie’s Case, Fawcett (who worked with Cox on Apple’s Way) played an abused woman who is forced to defend herself within a closed-minded judicial system. Both actresses were allowed the opportunity to utilize what Cox calls their theatrical “muscles” for what became physically demanding and emotionally draining performances.
For some Bewitched fans, watching Lizzie—their once-cheerful witch-with-a-twitch—get raped in Case may have been a traumatic experience. But Cox believes that was the “essence of why she desperately needed” to do such roles—so fans would “realize that this person on the screen” is only a character played by an actor. Often times, actors are mostly identified with one particular character, as it was and remains with Lizzie and Samantha. But according to Cox, too many fans of actors mistake “brilliant acting for the person.”
In further defense of Lizzie’s post-comedic Bewitched performances, Cox poses:
You can’t play Lizzie Borden? You can’t play an ax murderer? You can’t play King Lear who goes crazy? I mean, that’s what acting is! Lizzie didn’t want to walk around for the rest of her life being Samantha! It’s asking way too much to say, “No, no, no … don’t be anything else! Just be Samantha for the rest of your life! I can’t stand it if you do anything but being Samantha!”
“God, that’s prison!” Cox bellows, figuratively, adding, “Slit your wrists!”
How would Cox compare Lizzie’s childhood “play-acting” performance as Snow White (for her grandmother Becca) to her portrayal of the Wolf in her Westlake School’s French language production of Little Red Riding Hood?
“In playing Snow White,” Cox deduces, “you still have all these people that love you and care for you and you’re dealing with morality and things like that. At the end of the day you’re still dealing with dwarfs and the wicked [queen], so you’re dealing in fantasy.”
Yet, he loves “the lightweight stuff, too,” especially his friend’s much later and more professional fanciful role as Samantha:
Lizzie was brilliant on Bewitched, but that tapped like this much (gestures small space between index finger and thumb) of her talent. And I talked with her about this, too. She could play that character and phone it in. One of the things that Lizzie knew about acting [were] the tricks of the craft. She had that special spark … her personality sort of shone through in roles like Samantha. And in lots of ways she could just get by on that persona … that personality. But that wasn’t all of her talent, only a measure of it.
Post-Bewitched, Elizabeth certainly leaned toward those edgier roles, more times than not, playing people with malevolent traits. Her manager Barry Krost explained in 2001 on MSNBC’s Headliners & Legends: “If there was a wicked gene in a character, odds are, Lizzie would do it.”
On A&E’s Biography in 1999, Robert Foxworth said Lizzie was “thrilled” with the idea that she surprised her fans and detractors with Emmy-nominated performances as in The Legend of Lizzie Borden. To have viewers accept her in such a non-Samantha role and subsequently respect the theatrical diversity that she would bring to such a role as an accomplished actress was “probably one of her great victories in life.”
The Legend of Lizzie Borden was helmed by Paul Wendkos, a favorite director of Lizzie’s, who also guided her in the 1958 “Bitter Heritage” episode of Playhouse 90, and the 1979 TV-movie, Act of Violence.
Director Boris Sagal was another of her favorite directors, guiding her and Ronny Cox through A Case of Rape in 1974. Before that, he directed her in the 1960 TV Kraft Theatre production of The Spiral Staircase, in 1978’s The Awakening Land, and in 1981’s When the Circus Came to Town, the last which stood out from the rest, if only due to lighter content.
The actual driving force behind Circus was legendary producer Robert Halmi, who conceived of the story idea and was responsible for casting not only Lizzie, but acting legend Christopher Plummer, best known for his performance in the 1965 classic feature, The Sound of Music. By then, Halmi had produced more than 140 feature and TV films (and went on to produce countless more), and was considered one of the industry’s busiest and most respected producers. As he revealed to The Toronto Star in 1981, Halmi viewed working with the former-Bewitched star as “a wonderful opportunity for Liz to do what she does best. She’s fantastic. She makes you laugh, she makes you cry. She’s physical. She’s sexy.”
While Halmi’s words could have just as easily described what Lizzie brought to playing Samantha on a weekly basis, her Circus co-star Christopher Plummer would never as willingly embrace a regular TV role. “It’s bad news, I think, for someone like me,” he told The Toronto Star. “You get so terribly identified with one role you can’t be taken serious as an actor.”
For years, Plummer was identified with the role of Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music, just as Lizzie had been identified for so long with Bewitched. In 2011, he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Beginners, in which he portrayed Hal Fields, a dying gay senior who comes out of the closet.
Four decades ago, both actors should have been pleased with the critical praise showered upon When the Circus Came to Town, which proved to be a nice addition to their already impressive resumes. In his 1981 review in The Toronto Star, critic Bill Kaufman said the film “convincingly manages to develop Mary’s character and how she becomes involved with the raggletaggle touring circus. Plummer plays Duke Royal, owner and ringmaster of the shabby big top, a flamboyant man who ultimately changes Mary’s life with boy love and a guiding hand. The progression of Mary’s involvement with circus life is skillfully fleshed out under the guidance of veteran director Boris Sagal.”
In 1989, Lizzie said her performance in Circus was “tough work, physically, but so much fun to do.” For many scenes, she was outfitted in a heavy headdress, and she wore fishnet stockings with runs and holes, in order to better authenticate the slight seediness of that particular circus portrayed in the movie. Prior to filming, she spent several weeks training with legendary stuntman Bob Yerkes and his son, Mark, who had trained actors, singers, etc. to participate in TV shows like Circus of the Stars (the era’s answer to today’s Dancing with the Stars). He’s also worked on feature films like Back to the Future, Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, and Hook (and he currently hosts stunt training, on invitation only, at his Los Angeles home).
She always knew that certain productions would prove challenging. Actors are never sure of what lies ahead until the day of the shoot. Certainly, timing is imperative and performers must trust their colleagues on the set, behind and in front of the camera. In Lizzie’s case, she was pleased that she would be allowed to do some of the stunts they had planned for her stand-in.
For example, she had donned a clown’s garb for a few Circus scenes, but according to Thomas McCartney, she confessed at the time: “I have never been a clown person. Maybe I was scared badly by a clown when I was a child.”
The “fear-factor” in that last sentence may have been some subconscious allusion to the intimating presence her father pervaded over her young life. It was a character flaw that Robert Montgomery may have developed by way of the tragic loss of his daughter, Martha Bryan, Lizzie’s infant sister. Into this mix there were the other tragic losses in the early Montgomery lineage, namely with regard to Henry Montgomery, Lizzie’s grandfather.
Author and genealogist James Pylant concludes:
[Henry’s] suicide clearly had an impact on Robert Montgomery’s life, and it would have extended into the relationship with his own children. Perhaps what is seen as his jealousy of Elizabeth’s success as an actress was his resenting of her achieving fame too easily because she was Robert Montgomery’s daughter. His father’s early demise led Robert to toil as a railroad mechanic and an oil tanker deckhand before his big break in Hollywood, and maybe he felt Elizabeth hadn’t earned her dues. And the death of his first child, Martha, may have made him more emotionally distant to Elizabeth.
Consequently, she may have attempted to earn those dues and her father’s approval, while also igniting his fury by later fanning a bigger star than his via Bewitched, the lighter fare of which she then replaced with roles like Lizzie Borden.
Classic TV author, curator, and radio show host Ed Robertson offers these thoughts:
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 as 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 in the year 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 (who played Borden’s father), through his work on such shows as The 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 … The Lizzie Borden trial was, for its time, considered the trial of the century, as was the O. J. Simpson case more than a century later. Like Lizzie Borden, O. J. Simpson became a pariah, even though he was acquitted. And o
f course, a few years after doing Lizzie Borden, and about fifteen years before the Simpson murder trial, Elizabeth did a TV-movie with O. J. for CBS [A Killing Affair, 1977].
As to how all of this to relates to Elizabeth’s performance on Bewitched, Robertson believes it’s
kind of an apples and oranges comparison. The subject matter of Lizzie Borden is much darker and more disturbing than anything she’d done on Bewitched. Which goes back to my earlier point: It appears she was looking for projects that would challenge her as an actress, as The Legend of Lizzie Borden certainly did. Given that the movie portrays Borden as having committed the murders [the case, though closer to closures, remains unsolved, even after all these years], it was Elizabeth’s job to somehow make this cold, calculating, mercurial woman evoke sympathy from the viewers, even though she committed these heinous acts. To her credit, I think she did.
I’m sure some (of her fans) were shocked, especially those who may have been clinging to her wholesome image as Samantha. But I’m just as sure that those who loved her as an actress, taking into her account her body of work prior to and after Bewitched, were pleased and mesmerized by her performance.
When the Circus Came to Town at least offered a glimmer of the comedic sparkle Lizzie presented on Bewitched. The 1981 movie was made in association with her production company, Entheos Unlimited Productions. According to Roland L. Smith’s book, Sweethearts of ’60s TV (S.P.I. Books, 1993), Lizzie had signed a deal with CBS in 1979 that paid her $275,000 per film, an amount that would increase over the years. Add to that the shrewd investments and stellar profts from Bewitched (of which she and Bill Asher were part owners) and her annual income became substantial.
However, as Smith observed, retaining her integrity and remaining visible in pertinent television films wasn’t always easy, “sometimes even the most determined efforts were in vain.”
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