Twitch Upon a Star

by Herbie J. Pilato

  Plainly stated, it was challenging for Lizzie to find a good script. By 1981, she had one more movie left in the CBS deal, and she was considering several ideas, one of which was a comedy, but nothing was a lock. But then the Circus Came to Town which, as Tom McCartney says, Lizzie viewed as “a romantic comedy,” the first such lighter concept she would consider since Bewitched.

  The idea for Circus was generated by one sentence from Doug Chapin, who produced her previous film, Belle Starr. She was ready to drop the project altogether until writer Larry Grusin impressed her with his script, which McCartney says CBS executive William Self was initially apprehensive about sending her way. It was then her manager Barry Krost, Chapin’s business partner, who then suggested she read it.

  She did so, and subsequently hired director Boris Sagal, who besides guiding her through A Case of Rape and The Awakening Land, had also directed the 1980 TV-movie edition of The Diary of Anne Frank with Melissa Gilbert (of Little House on the Prairie fame), and would soon helm 1981’s Masada mini-series (with Peter O’Toole and Peter Strauss, of Rich Man, Poor Man).

  Krost had played an interconnecting role in Lizzie’s post-Bewitched life and career, protecting and guiding both her personal and professional decisions. She trusted him implicitly (it was in his apartment where Lizzie and Bob Foxworth secretly tied the knot on January 28, 1993), and Krost had enormous respect for her as a client and as a human being.

  In 1999, author Michael Anketell published, Heavenly Bodies: Remembering Hollywood and Fashion’s Favorite AIDS Benefit (Taylor, 1999). In the book, producer Doug Chapin, Krost’s business partner, explains how in 1986 Lizzie and actor Roddy McDowall (who died of lung cancer in 1998) were the first two celebrities to lend their support to the initial Los Angeles fashion-show (displaying the 1930s Hollywood designes of Adrian) to benefits HIV/AIDS awareness. According to what Chapin told Anketell, Elizabeth attended every one of their events up until the time of her death.

  Other celebrities who attended the Adrian function, included Carol Kane, Brenda Vaccaro, Bess Armstrong, JoBeth Williams, and Jackie Collins. Anketell writes:

  Had it not been for the valiant efforts of a few of Hollywood’s favorite stars and their managers, Barry Krost and Doug Chapin, who encouraged them, neither Hollywood nor the fashion world would have taken any but passing notice of our efforts. Without stars, there would have been little press coverage and our message would not get out. But on the night of the Adrian show, the stars did come.

  Anketell went on to explain how Lizzie was a stand-out participant:

  Possibly our most popular star that evening was Elizabeth Montgomery, the beloved Samantha of Bewitched. Elizabeth was the daughter of film star Robert Montgomery and the wife of actors Gig Young and Robert Foxworth. She had starred in a couple of dozen TV movies in which she was often a victimized woman who would find her personal strength, though she also portrayed Western bandit Belle Starr and parent-hacker Lizzie Borden.

  Krost then talked about Lizzie’s personal involvement in bringing awareness to AIDS and other causes:

  Elizabeth became very political and very caring and yet, at the same time, always was strangely shy for a lady who had all her life been around press and Hollywood. She protected her private life and she found the spotlight, at times, very uncomfortable, unless it was about a specific project—a movie or a cause she believed in. She was one of the first public people to get involved in the very early days of the fight against HIV.

  I think Elizabeth was on the side of anybody, any group of people that she thought was being treated inappropriately. But she was still shy. I remember when we arrived that first year at the Adrian event. There was a press line outside and she suggested we stop the car, get out and go in the side entrance. I said, “It sort of defeats the point of your being here.“And she said, “Oh, yes, you’re right,” and she went in the front way, through the press.

  In 1999, on Bewitched: The E! True Hollywood Story, Krost said: “If she was your friend she was there, good times, bad times. She was there. And if she was in your life, somehow you went to bed at night and the world was just a little bit safer. And very few people have that effect on you.”

  In 2001, on MSNBC’s Headliners & Legends, he added: “When HIV came along, not only in a charitable sense, raising money and awareness … but also one-on-one with people; she spent an awful lot of time that way.” She cherished her private life with, for example, her children of whom, as Krost explained, she cared a great deal. “It’s a very delicate balance between being a star and what happened in the house. And I think she really protected that and felt very vulnerable.”

  Lizzie’s son Billy Asher, Jr. relayed on the same show: “She felt a responsibility with her life and her career as being a celebrity … to use that at times to make other people aware of issues that she felt were important.”

  In all, there are those who are critical of celebrities, specifically, actors, intermingling their public personas with politics, believing that the twain should never meet. But during his appearance at the Los Angeles Festival of Books on April 22, 2012, Steven J. Ross, the author of Hollywood Left and Right, explained it this way:

  I would say yes, you can have celebrities divorced from politics if you have business leaders divorced from politics, if you have all the CEOs in America divorced and if you have every other American divorced. They are citizens first. They are actors second. Why should we single out actors? And the reason why most people don’t like it is nobody wants their dream factory burst. We all have our celebrity images. We all have our belief of who they are, and as early as 1918 you had people like Sid Grauman, who founded the famous Grauman’s Chinese Theatre where we have all the handprints and the footprints, telling actors to keep your mouths shut when it comes to politics, because the moment you open your mouth you alienate half your audience.

  Certainly, there was little sign of audience alienation when Lizzie’s fans turned out by the droves when she, if posthumously, received her star at the Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony, January 4, 2008. Her fans, coworkers, and family, including her three beloved children, were there to partake in the honor.

  Today, Billy Asher, Jr. is the proprietor of a highly successful and respected music business (Asher Guitars). Rebecca Asher is a renowned TV script supervisor (Raising Hope, Mad Men, Samantha Who?), and Robert Asher is an artisan of many talents and crafts who at times works with his brother Billy (as does Bob Foxworth’s son Bo). In one way or another, they each have followed in their parents’ professional footsteps.

  In looking back at the development of Lizzie’s character, she evidently believed in at least some form of positive higher-consciousness that somehow guided her decision-making process with her life and career. It may not have always been a consistent belief, but it was a belief nonetheless. And although she may have enjoyed pulling Agnes Moorehead’s religious leg during their Bewitched era, it was clear she was no slouch in the spiritual department, even in the most basic or sporadic way.

  When she and her brother Skip were children, their grandmother Becca instructed them to pray when their parents were away. It was a solid, traditional way to handle a child’s temporary, if intensely emotional feelings. But as Lizzie explained in the February 1970 edition of TV Radio Mirror magazine, she and Skip never said nightly prayers, nor did they attend church on a regular basis. “I suppose we believed in God,” she acknowledged, but “… in our own way.” She and Skip apparently did at least attend Sunday school and looked forward to going. But to her the Bible stories were more like fairytales. She didn’t really take them seriously.

  And by 1970, that seemed to fit. She was no longer a child of a star, but a star herself, many times over. She was also a mature adult, on her third marriage, with three children of her own. Her childhood days with Skip were long gone, and even though her child-like manner remained, she now faced adult decisions, and was responsible for leading the way for three little people who would one day become adults themse
lves.

  By this time, she had become disillusioned with the way many parents of the day instilled the mortal fear of a condemning God who took pleasure in punishing bad children. “Using fright to teach religion seems to me to be very unhealthy,” she said. “After all, if we can’t base our beliefs in a Supreme Being on love, that how can any of us truly believe?” Lizzie also believed that many people turned to religion out of a deep need, and thought it was productive that they employed their faith to help deal with the turmoil of Vietnam and the race riots. Her three children, including Rebecca, just born in 1969, were then too young to ask about God. If they had wondered, Lizzie hadn’t a clue as to how she would have replied. But she did want her kids to attend Sunday school like she and Skip had when they were young. “I feel that it is a good foundation for any child,” she said. “After all, even as a piece of literature alone, there is so much that is fine and wonderful in the Bible.”

  “I think of God as the beauty in life,” she concluded, “… it’s loving and being loved. It’s feeling good inside because you are living the life of a good person. Maybe it’s a good idea to try new ways of looking at the subject.”

  It was a fresh perspective that helped to close an age-old generation gap between her and her conservative-minded parents. Years before, when she was only twenty, they had been pleased with her decision to at least be baptized if only shortly before her marriage to Fred Cammann, and even though that union ended in divorce.

  In May of 1970, she addressed it all with reporter Nancy Winelander of TV Picture Life magazine. The conversation mixed religion, her marriages to Asher as well as Gig Young, and again, raising her children. The article described Lizzie as Episcopalian. Young was a Protestant; Asher, Jewish. As she intoned, both she and Asher “love our religion. Bill isn’t the most religious man in the world. He doesn’t go for a lot of the ritual, but he believes deeply in his Jewish religion and cultural heritage. I really haven’t been a practicing anything for years. Still, I don’t want to divorce myself from my heritage either.”

  Yet, she was surprised at how “meddlesome people can be,” when it came to raising a family under one particular faith or the other. “After all,” she added, “whose business is it how our children are raised?” But at the time, it was an issue, one that she had not confronted before. As Winelander explained, Lizzie had no children by the much older Young. If they had had kids, apparently, there would not have been any religious quandary with the Protestant Young. [Note: All Episcopalians are Protestants but not all Protestants are Episcopalians. Protestants include virtually all Christian sects outside of Roman Catholicism: Episcopalians, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, etc.] Lizzie told Winelander:

  Gig wouldn’t have cared anyway. He was very easy-going on matters like that. He had kind of a live-and-let-live philosophy. I think he would have left it pretty much up to me, no matter what he had been. Besides, our marital problems became so overwhelming the question of christening children just never had a chance to arise.

  Former TV actor and present day Episcopalian priest Peter Ackerman is a happy anomaly with a unique perspective on Lizzie’s persona, spiritual and otherwise. As the son of Screen Gems head and Bewitched executive producer Harry Ackerman and Father Knows Best actress, Elinor Donahue, Peter started acting on shows like The New Gidget, the 1980s syndicated reboot of his father’s 1960s ABC/Sally Field sitcom (a few episodes of which were directed by Bill Asher). After a time, however, he became disinterested with acting on-screen (as did Lizzie, at least for a while), mostly because he found it more challenging to create and sustain a character on the stage. So after Peter married in the late 1980s, he began working in production for TV commercials, music videos, and in various other such capacities. This new career path culminated with him serving as a producer’s assistant on the second and third seasons of TV’s mega-hit, Friends (NBC, 1994–2004).

  With Friends, Peter was happy at home (with his wife and now two children), but his vocational life was lacking. He subsequently embarked on a spiritual journey that lead him back to the Episcopal Church he grew up in, “where priests can be married and women.” After an especially difficult day on the set of Friends, he made a dramatic and desperate plea to God: “I know I will like whatever You have in store. I am ready to do it. Just show me what YOU want. I am tired of trying to figure it out on my own.”

  So, today, he’s not only an Episcopalian priest, but a married Episcopalian priest with a family; while in the 1960s, for him:

  Bewitched felt like family and was. After all, Bill Asher and Liz came over to the house a lot with their kids, Willie, Robert, and Rebecca, and they became the godparents to my youngest brother, Chris. There was really no difference that I saw growing up with Samantha on TV and Liz who came over our house. She was friendly, had a sense of humor and definitely had that fun/wicked ‘pixie’ sense about her.

  Quite young at the time, Peter did not have a sense of Lizzie’s eminent heritage, but he was always impressed by her unaffected disposition. It was a trait he says she shared with her brother Skip, with whom one day, Peter, his father, Lizzie and others had shared a limo, “probably all going to a Rams game,” he says. As Peter recalls, Skip “was a relatively quiet, thoughtful, and serious man, but not aloof or anything. To me, a kid, he was just a guy.”

  Peter has a theory as to how the Montgomery siblings absorbed the same approachable demeanor:

  Social scientists will one day figure this all out, but remember back in those days there were no paparazzi hunters. My mom (Elinor Donahue) and I would go grocery shopping or to get an ice cream and people would ask her, “Aren’t you …?” and sometimes ask for an autograph. But it was no big deal. As people began playing the game of Hollywood, and making themselves less accessible, that’s when the mess happened that we have today with celebrity. Suffice it to say, I assume Liz, like my parents, never played “the game.”

  Former child star and Bewitched guest actor Eric Scott has a contrasting take on Lizzie’s affability. Best known as Ben Walton on The Waltons (CBS’s long-running and critically acclaimed family series; 1972–1981), Eric appeared on the Samantha episode, “Out of the Mouths of Babes,” which aired in 1971. This was right around the same time he was cast in the CBS TV-movie The Homecoming, which ultimately was the backdoor Waltons pilot that led to his weekly stint as Ben. In “Babe,” on Bewitched, he played Herbie, a basketball-loving neighborhood boy who befriends a shrunken and pre-teen Darrin who is made so by one of Endora’s manipulative spells. Eric had several scenes with Lizzie in this episode, and remembers her fine balance of humility and sophistication on the set:

  I thought she was one of the most beautiful ladies I had ever seen. I had worked with people like Elke Sommer and other actresses that were just gorgeous. But there was something about Elizabeth that was just wow. And at the end of the production, when I asked everyone for their autograph, she wrote hers like a movie star. And she carried herself so very regally.

  Like Lizzie, Eric retained a strong sense of normalcy amidst the glitter of Hollywood. After The Waltons ended its original CBS run in 1979 (only to return as various CBS and NBC TV reunion movies until 1997), acting roles were few and far between. Forced to explore alternative sources of income, he began work for Chase Messenger Service in Los Angeles. Today, some forty years after his first scenes as Ben Walton and Herbie on Bewitched, he is now the proprietor of Chase, and acts periodically. He found TV stardom as a child and business success as an adult, while remaining cordial and unassuming in every decade—a demeanor he credits to his parents, who raised him within a solid moral structure. His family was not wealthy like the Montgomerys, and his mother (who served as his manager) and father (a hairstylist) struggled to make ends meet. But ultimately, the Scott brood triumphed, most assuredly because they worked as a team. He knows why he survived Hollywood unscathed, but is amazed as to how Lizzie managed so well to retain her firm grip on priorities.

  I don’t know how she
did it. I really don’t. Someone was looking out for her. And hopefully it was her parents. I know that’s what did it for me. As a parent of three children myself, I’ve realized it’s the environment that we create for our kids that dictates how they’re going to end up. If you give them a lot of love and give them a lot of structure, they thrive. If you have them vacillating and trying to figure out too much, they falter. My eldest is in college. My middle one is in grade school. And my youngest Jeremy is just seven, the same age I was when I started acting. In fact, he’s a mini-me. He reminds me so much of myself. He’s a Cub Scout and I’m a Cub Scout leader. He plays guitar, is taking up drums, and will soon start to play the keyboard.

  Jeremy also plays baseball and basketball, just like Eric’s character Herbie did on Bewitched. “It’s funny,” Eric goes on to say, “Jeremy has been in baseball for the last two years, and our family became close friends with the coach’s family. And I had recently attended a Waltons reunion in Virginia, so my wife Cindy explained to the coach’s wife that we’d be out of town for a while for the reunion. And they were like, ‘Why?’”

  “Because,” Mrs. Scott replied, “Eric was on the show,” a fact about which the coach’s wife had not a clue. Since that time, and upon learning of Eric’s childhood fame, other parents of kids on the team have approached him in awe and said, “I just heard.”

  “I live in a small town and the word got out,” he says with a laugh. “And the recognition is actually very sweet, but I would never want my kids to live in that shadow. So, I don’t know how Elizabeth’s parents did it … how she grew up so well … without being in that shadow … or even if that shadow was attainable.”