Twitch Upon a Star Read online

  My Bewitched books concentrated on her most renowned performance, but a more expansive magical story was yet to be told. Twitch Upon a Star: The Bewitched Life and Career of Elizabeth Montgomery tells that story. The unpublished memories she shared with me in 1989 are now interspersed with her commentary from other interviews, before and after we met. Only following our chats did she allow for lengthier conversations with regard to Bewitched after she ended the show in 1972. She then seemed more comfortable discussing her career, specifically her days on Bewitched from which she had long kept safe distance. She later gave interviews to One on One with John Tesh, The Dennis Miller Show, CBS This Morning, and The Advocate magazine as well as to acclaimed film historian, preservationist, and author Ronald Haver, who for twenty years (he died in 1993) served as the curator and director for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s film center. The latter interview transpired for a commentary track accompanying the fiftieth anniversary documentary 1991 laserdisc release of Here Comes Mr. Jordan, the 1941 film classic starring her father, Robert Montgomery.

  Elizabeth and I also talked about her dad; as well as her mother, former Broadway actress Elizabeth Allen; and her maternal grandmother Rebecca Allen; all of whom played substantial roles in the development of her life and work; a career that she sometimes felt was overshadowed by Bewitched.

  Yet she had little choice but to address her immortal link to Samantha. By the time we met in 1989, twenty-five years after Bewitched’s debut, she and the show’s popularity reined steady, expanded by way of nostalgic-oriented networks like Nick at Nite, TBS, and WGN. The series flooded the airwaves, she was finding a new audience, and original and novice fans were falling in love with her all over again. When I asked if she understood just how happy she makes viewers, how classic and contemporary fans adore her just as much, if not more as when the show premiered in 1964, she replied:

  Well, I do now. I mean, you’ve pointed it out to me certainly. I know they like the show and everything. But it’s never been anything that’s kind of been bounced in my face as much as it has now with your focus on it. And I tell you something if only one person feels as you do then that’s fine with me. Something was accomplished, because your dedication to this has been absolutely extraordinary. It’s the work that is to me its kind of own reward. I know that sounds terribly Pollyanna, but I don’t care because that’s true for me. And it’s the same with you. To put that much energy into what you have done and for us to be sitting here is very good for both of us. It’s good for you on every level that you have explained to me, and it’s fun for me to sit down and talk about it with somebody who enjoys it that much because I’ve done so much since Bewitched. While doing something you’re so concentrated on it, you don’t get a chance to sit back and say, Wasn’t that or isn’t that fun? I’d like to think that the stuff that I’ve done since has meant something to somebody on various different levels. Because I’ve tried to be real diverse in the work that I’ve done since I left Bewitched.

  Her post-1989 interviews with others proved insightful from a personal standpoint; one in particular stands out from the pack. In 1990, veteran television journalist Ann Hodges, mother to a dear friend, talked with Elizabeth for The Houston Chronicle about her CBS Hallmark Hall of Fame TV-film Face to Face. After the interview, Ann put down her pen and paper and said, “I just have to tell you. My daughter is very good friends with one of your biggest fans.” Before Ann had a chance to finish her sentence, Elizabeth blurted out the name, “Herbie!”

  There are countless individuals and fan-based groups who assuredly know the more minute trivia related to Elizabeth’s entire body of work, but that she would think of me amidst a random reference remains a cherished memory and not insignificant praise. I was honored to hear of that interchange which I will forever humbly embrace. I can do nothing less. Elizabeth was one of the kindest people I ever met, and one of the least arrogant in or outside of Hollywood. I admired her lack of pretension and strive to meet that standard every day.

  That said, she was also one of the most complicated individuals on the planet—a conundrum that makes her story so compelling—and one in turn that I felt driven, dare I say, bewitched, to explore and share within these pages. This book is also filled with collected reflections from her family members and friends, and coworkers from her TV-movies, feature films, TV guest-star appearances, and other performances and, of course, Bewitched. Thoughts from interviews that she and others granted to me appear alongside selected commentary previously published in studio bios, press releases, newspaper and magazine articles, books, TV talk shows and news programs, and online sources.

  There are new memories from my exclusive interviews with her friend and fellow actress Sally Kemp (whom Elizabeth met while attending the New York American Academy of Dramatic Arts and who offers some of the most profound insight into Elizabeth’s young life); Florence The Brady Bunch Henderson (also from the Academy); her TV-movie co-stars and friends, including David Knell (who played her son on Belle Starr); Ronny Cox (from A Case of Rape and With Murder in Mind); the Oscar-winning actor Cliff Robertson (who died only two weeks after granting his interview); Bewitched guest star Eric Scott (who would later be cast in The Waltons); Peter Ackerman—son of Bewitched executive producer Harry Ackerman; Bewitched writer Doug Tibbles; Emmy-winning actor and Elizabeth’s fellow political advocate Ed Asner (The Mary Tyler Moore Show); actress, comedienne, women and children’s advocate, and political blogger Lydia Cornell (Too Close For Comfort), among many others.

  Also included are never-before-published commentary from my original Bewitched interviews in 1988 and 1989 with Harry Ackerman, William Asher, Dick York, and Dick Sargent (the two Darrins); David Larry Tate White, and others associated with the series, including Bewitched director Richard Michaels who, in 2006, went on Entertainment Tonight and admitted to his affair with Elizabeth. It was an affair that contributed not only to the demise of Bewitched and the Asher marriage, but to the end of Michaels’ nuptials to Kristina Hansen.

  When I interviewed Michaels in 1988, I was not aware of his liaison with Elizabeth, but you’d think I’d have had a clue.

  We met in Santa Monica for lunch at The Crest, then a new, but very regular eatery, along the lines of Perkins or Denny’s, if maybe just slightly upscale. Michaels was cordial, informative, intelligent, and his memories of Bewitched and all that it entailed were astounding. But as we finished our interview, he started to tear up. “When you talk with Elizabeth,” he instructed me, “you be sure to tell her that I said there will never be anyone else like her in the world. Never!”

  Originally taken aback by the statement, especially when he made me vow to relay it, I ultimately agreed, and upon meeting Elizabeth, kept my promise.

  After hearing Michaels’ message, she looked at me and said, “That’s very sweet.” And that was that. With hindsight being 20/20, it appeared that Michaels was still in love with Elizabeth, and most likely remains so. (Who wouldn’t be?)

  Another unexpected event occurred when, upon my second interview with Elizabeth, she surprised me by having invited Bewitched actor David White to join us. He and Elizabeth had not seen one another since the series ended in 1972. At the time, that was approximately eighteen years. Portions of their individual and interlocking commentary from that day, all never before published, now appear in this book.

  Who would have thought that Elizabeth and David, along with so many other Bewitched luminaries, Dick York, Dick Sargent, Harry Ackerman, Alice Ghostley (who portrayed Samantha’s bubbling witch maid Esmeralda), et al. would be gone only a few years later? White died in 1990; York in 1992; Sargent in 1994; and Elizabeth in 1995; the latter three of which while only in their sixties.

  Unfortunately, I was unable to attend Elizabeth’s memorial service at the Canon Theatre in Beverly Hills on June 18, 1995. I was also unable to attend a ceremony in her name, when finally, if posthumously, she received her designated star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, January 4, 2008.r />
  Fortunately, my good friend and radio journalist Jone Devlin managed to at least attend the star ceremony, and shared with me what transpired at the event. In addition to what was reported in the press, and from further research, I learned that it was an illustrious event.

  Unfortunately, Sally Kemp, Lizzie’s best friend from their youth, was also unable to be present at the star ceremony, at which the name Elizabeth Montgomery was so elegantly chiseled in glittering stone on that famous walkway. While pleased that her friend was immortalized in exactly that manner, Sally was puzzled as to why her friend would later answer to anything but her formal birth name.

  “It’s strange for me to hear Elizabeth referred to as Lizzie,” Kemp told me in 2012. “Never while I knew her was she called that. She didn’t like Liz either … only Elizabeth. Lizzie must have been born after she and Gig (Young) decamped to L.A. I just wonder where it came from.”

  At the Walk of Fame ceremony the answer was provided by Liz Sheridan, best known as Helen Seinfeld, Jerry’s mother on NBC’s iconic 1990s non-sitcom Seinfeld. Sheridan is also known as Mrs. Ochmonek, a Mrs. Kravitz-type neighbor on NBC’s 1980s alien-com Alf which like Bewitched was an otherworldly, fish-out-of-water sitcom (Samantha was a witch in a mortal world; Alf was an alien in a human world).

  Best friends in their later years Sheridan was introduced to Elizabeth through writer William Blast, who in 1974 penned The Legend of Lizzie Borden. From what I learned Sheridan explained at the ceremony, Elizabeth wanted to be called Lizzie from the moment she played Borden. It was a nice play on a name, especially when Sheridan was around, because Sheridan’s younger sister could never quite pronounce the name Elizabeth, the formal first name she and Lizzie shared. According to what Sheridan explained, it always came out Dizabeth.

  In the event, Sheridan became Dizzie and Montgomery became Lizzie, and there they were … Lizzie and Dizzie.

  So, however serious Elizabeth was about her life and career she knew when not to take herself seriously. She imbued a playful spirit towards Borden that stemmed from her childhood. “I used to get teased all the time about the childhood rhyme, Lizzie Borden took an ax, etc,” she said in 1989.

  Robert Foxworth and I were apparently then slated to reap the brunt of that teasing, so to speak, as when Elizabeth revealed to me a memory she had of the two vacationing at her summer home shortly after the Lizzie Borden movie aired. At one point during the getaway, it was raining, and he was kneeling in front of the fireplace, attempting to ignite a flame. “And I had an ax in my hand,” she remembered, “because we had just chopped some wood.”

  Foxworth had then turned toward her, pointed to the ax, and made a request: “Would you please put that thing down?”

  The ax was making him nervous and she knew it, but with a devilish smile belying what she recognized as the truth, Elizabeth asked, ever so innocently, “What?”

  He reiterated: “Would you please put that thing down?!”

  She finally complied, and once they cozied up to the fire, he made an admission: “I have to tell you. That ax really gives me the creeps.”

  She told me this story in 1989 at her Beverly Hills home, while holding the prop ax from the Borden film, and standing next to another fireplace. So I knew exactly how he felt. “You see,” she said with utter delight, as I sat squirming. “This is the actual ax. It used to have hairs on it, and I keep telling people not to dust it, but they do. And they’ve taken some of the blood off it. It’s not very sharp. But it would do the job.”

  She had a wicked sense of humor, a measure of which I had already experienced.

  In the early part of 1989, and upon her permission, Bill Asher had given me her phone number. I called her, and did not hear back from her until four months later. Or at least that’s how long it seemed.

  This occurred about ten years before cell and smart phones hit the mainstream market. At best I stayed close to my old-fangled answering machine, but I still missed her call—on several occasions; although she later confessed to hanging up many times without leaving a message.

  Why? She didn’t know how to respond to the Bewitched theme and “twitching” sound effects from the show’s opening credits that I had taken great pains to strategically record on my machine (again, in a pre-high-tech-phone-apps-ring-tone era).

  We finally did connect while I was living in Santa Monica and had one day temporarily stepped away from the phone to place a load of towels in the wash. I later noticed the flashing message light on my machine; pressed play, and heard: “Hi! It’s Lizzie Montgomery. I keep missing you, you keep missing me. This is crazy!”

  Like Sally Kemp, not only was I surprised to hear the nickname Lizzie being voiced by the actress herself, but I was somewhat frazzled in general that Elizabeth Montgomery had just telephoned my house and left a message on my machine. In any event, I collected my thoughts, waited a few moments and then called her back. She picked up the phone, we exchanged hellos, and I apologized for missing her call.

  “I was doing my laundry,” I said, as if talking with an old friend, which in a way I was. I had been watching Bewitched nearly my entire life and easily recognized Elizabeth’s voice and mannerisms.

  Upon hearing of such a humble task, she responded with her trademark giggle and said, “And so you should.”

  It was so typically Elizabeth to put me or anyone else at ease. Our conversations continued and she was nothing less than charming and disarming with each subsequent visit, either by phone or in person.

  At our first meeting, we were both nervous. I tripped over her coffee table, and she carefully weighed her words. During our second meeting, we considered the signatory roles she played in my life, and she was slightly more relaxed and free with her phrasing. At one point, we took our conversation from her living room to the kitchen so she could feed her dog Zuelika. A small countertop TV was blaring in the background, set on a PBS cooking show.

  I picked up our conversation: “You know … whatever critic has reviewed you in the past …”

  “I know,” she interrupted, “because forget it … you’re worse than my father, right?”

  I smiled, but at the time, did not fully grasp the assumption. Only later did I comprehend what she meant. In researching this book, I realized just how muddled her relationship was with her father. As individuals, they were each complicated. In combination, they were confounding.

  But whenever she spoke of him, in our conversations or with others, there was an underlined air of respect. He and her mother, actress Elizabeth Allen, had raised her well, in tandem with Allen’s mother, Elizabeth’s beloved grandmother, Rebecca “Becca” Allen.

  Becca also had a positive influence on Elizabeth’s brother, Robert “Skip” Montgomery, Jr., whom I had the privilege of speaking with shortly after she passed away in 1995.

  A few years later, I was saddened to learn of Skip’s own passing in 2000. When Bill Asher told me, I wanted to call Skip’s wife Melanie, but never did. I regret that, and not speaking with Skip more often. But I’ll never forget our first conversation. He was so cordial and down to earth, just like Elizabeth. As much as they were blessed in life, neither possessed an ounce of arrogance.

  He called to inquire what I wanted to do with the crystal unicorn I had given to Elizabeth upon our first meeting. Samantha liked unicorns; and so did Elizabeth; and she loved presents and appreciated gifts, even in the most token form.

  Yet the crystal unicorn was no small token. At the time, I had little extra cash to spend on so extravagant a gift. Elizabeth, of course, was worth it, but she was stunned when she saw it. She turned toward me, gave me a big hug, and said in that lyrical voice of hers, “Oh my … you know, don’t you? You know!”

  Skip had the same kind of upbeat, chipper, affable voice.

  “Hey, Herbie!” he said that day when I picked up the phone. “How ya’ doin’? This is Skip Montgomery…. Listen, I have the unicorn that you gave Elizabeth. Do you want it back?”

  “No, n
o, no,” I replied. “You keep it. I wanted her to have it—and I want you to keep it in her memory.”

  We talked a little more, exchanged addresses, and the following December, I received a Christmas card from him and Melanie, a special memento I cherish to this day more than I could have ever treasured the return of that unicorn.

  The entire Montgomery family has always been kind to me, including Elizabeth’s children, as well as Robert Foxworth, who I had profiled for Sci-Fi Entertainment magazine in 1996. And certainly, too, Bill Asher.

  One day, in between interviews with Elizabeth, she telephoned me out of the blue, just to see how I was. That morning, I was upset. The strings were broken on the guitar my father had purchased for me when I was a young boy. I was desperate to fix them, not because I played the guitar so well—which I never properly learned to do—but because the instrument held sentimental value. (Like that Christmas card from Skip would years later.)

  For some reason, I explained all of this to Elizabeth and to my surprise she in turn told me that Billy Asher, Jr. would fix my weeping guitar.

  “Why don’t you bring it to my son?”

  “Uh? What do you mean?”

  “That’s what he does. He owns a music shop in Santa Monica.”

  “You’re kidding? I live in Santa Monica.”

  “Where?”

  “On 17th and Santa Monica Blvd.”

  “I’m going to make this real simple for you. His shop is at 17th and Wilshire Blvd.”

  “That’s just up the street.”