Twitch Upon a Star (11 page)

According to
TV Radio Mirror
in January 1965, he told her, “Forget about acting, Honey. Just think you really are the wolf and act the way you think a wolf would act.” It was her introduction to
method acting
.

Slightly less appreciative may have been the faculty of Westlake. Miss Mills may have been correct. Lizzie was a good student but she didn't always work as hard as she could have. It didn't help that she had a penchant for bringing unusual pets to class. According to
Modern Screen
magazine in 1965, one Easter she received a pig which, “horribly enough,” she called
Pork Chop
. Her instructor was not too sure how to cope with that and was even more perturbed when Lizzie arrived in class with Chinese hooded rats.

The rodent business began when her mother once traveled east by train to see her husband, Robert Montgomery. Lizzie accompanied Mrs. Montgomery to the station, where she noticed a little boy walking around the station with one of the Chinese hooded rats on his shoulder. Lizzie announced that it was just the thing to have as her mother boarded the train. But Elizabeth Allen's last and very definite word was
no
… until, of course, the following Christmas when her daughter received two tiny animals as gifts she named Connie and Otis.

From there,
the things
just multiplied like crazy, she said, and at one point she owned approximately fifteen rats at once. “They used to get out of their cages and we were always counting noses, tails, and whiskers to be sure we had them all.”

On one of those days when Connie and Otis were let lose in the Montgomery abode, Allen asked Lizzie to place her new playthings back in their cage. To which Lizzie replied, “But I want one to sleep on my bed.”

“You can't sleep with the rat, Elizabeth.”

“The dog sleeps on the bed.”

“That's different.”

“Why?”

“Well, you might roll over on it.”

The wise Lizzie child was finally convinced to place her pet rat, be it Connie or Otis, back in its gilded environment, although not for long.

One evening the Montgomery family was entertaining guests, as they were prone to do, and little Elizabeth came down from her room for a meet and greet. She did everything expected of a young lady of her stature: curtsied and politely introduced herself, saying, “How do you do?”

Then the unexpected happened, causing one unsuspecting female guest to let out a shriek and drop her martini. Two little rat heads peeked out from behind Lizzie's hair bows and two skinny rat tails were protruding on either side.

“Elizabeth, try to keep the rats upstairs,” murmured Mrs. Montgomery.

Her poor mother! At one point they had three dogs, two cats, a white duck called “Pittosporum,” some alligators, and a cockatiel named “Nankypoo.” The problem was Nankypoo, which her parents had given her. As Lizzie remembered in
Modern Screen
, 1965, her mother was always saying, “Will you please make sure the bird stays upstairs?” If that sounds like a wild thing to say about a bird, it's because Nankypoo was never in his cage. He was always walking around, following some unsuspecting individual. In fact, he never flew; he walked. “He'd get up on top of doors but he wouldn't fly,” Lizzie said.

If that wasn't enough, another time, Nankypoo walked into the living room, walked up to the coffee table, hopped up on the edge of the table, and then onto a certain female visitor's glass and proceeded to drink it nearly dry. Lizzie always thought it might have been the same woman who dropped her martini over her rats, because this time she and all the other women in the room screamed loudly. Nankypoo had walked across the table, hopped to the floor, walked two feet and fell flat. “He must have had a dreadful hangover next day,” she mused.

A few years after those early spirited days at Westlake, Lizzie, at 17, embarked on her final semester with the school and faced a tough decision. Her family was leaving Los Angeles, and she could either remain at Westlake or enroll for a year at the Spence School for Girls in New York. The thought of being separated from her family was one she could not imagine. So she left Westlake and went to Spence where, she said, they were “very dear” to her, and where she enrolled in various courses in French and architecture that she called “interesting.”

After attending the Spence School, she spent two years studying acting at that same city's renowned American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Her charismatic charms were surely visible to audiences at this early stage, but her student performances drew the most stringent commentary from her father. He would send her curt, disapproving notes for performances that he deemed less than worthy. “Not good enough,” he would scribble. “Try again.”

“Daddy listens to my ideas, and then criticizes,” she told
TV People and Pictures Magazine
in October 1953. “It's all impersonal and constructive.”

According to
People Magazine
in 1995, Lizzie once said, “Like Daddy, I try to be neat, concise in my work, and in anything else for that matter.”

In 1989, however, she laughed and said her father's response to her chosen profession was, “Oh, shit!”

“That was the first time I had ever heard that word. And I was no more than six years old.”

But they were still chums, at least from when she was a child until she became a star on her own and of her own show. As she conveyed to
TV People and Pictures
in 1953, “We're terrific companions and are so much alike. We love to Charleston together. And Daddy is the only one who can tire me out. Usually, I sit out the Charleston at a dance. It's too strenuous for my dates.”

According to “Our Name Is Montgomery,” published in
TeleVision Life Magazine
, January 1954, Elizabeth dated her first boy at fourteen, when she and her family lived in an elegant white home in the Bel Air district of Beverly Hills. “Dad sort of scrutinized each young man when he came to call for me,” she said. “It was really sort of sad; they were all terrified of him. Sometimes he was a little cold, when he really disliked the boy, but most times he tried to make them feel at home.”

By the time she was twenty, she was on her own. Sometimes her mother asked her about the boys she dated, sometimes she didn't. “I was brought up to be trusted,” Lizzie said.

In either case, Mrs. Montgomery didn't wait up for her daughter to arrive home from a night out on the town. And as for marriage, it was far from Lizzie's mind at the time. She wanted to first start her career. As if mimicking the plot of
Bewitched
that would debut ten years later, she added, “I really don't think it's fair to the man if he doesn't know what he's getting—an actress or a housewife.”

As played out in the pilot of
Bewitched, Samantha
didn't reveal to
Darrin
that she was a witch until after they married.

Lizzie's relationship with her parents, specifically, her father, was passive-aggressive, to say the least. Robert and his friends, like James Cagney, eventually assisted with her theatrical pursuits, but also became her toughest critics, even when it came to how she dressed and carried herself. According to the Ronald Haver interview in 1991, Robert's primary acting advice to Lizzie was to listen to the other actors in a scene, while Cagney cautioned her about the way she walked. “Be sure you're listening to what the other person is saying to you,” her father would tell her. Cagney advised, “Just learn your lines and just don't bump into anything.”

Cagney once went as far as to say, “Elizabeth, you are the clumsiest person for a graceful person I've ever met in my life.” And she agreed. “I could ride (horses) like the wind,” she said. “I was very athletic. But trust me, to walk from here to that door I'd probably fall down three times. It was awful.”

But at least she'd fall gracefully, and looked good on her descent.

In 1988, Byron Munson,
Bewitched's
costume designer, always said Lizzie had “horrible taste in clothes.” Maybe that's because her father was never around. He had only visited the
Samantha
set a few times, and it was only once documented with a photo-op.

Ten years before
Bewitched
, however, he was there to adjust her sense of fashion. According to
TV People and Pictures
, October 1953, he'd tell her, “Never get flamboyant and always dress well.”

But at the end of that same month in 1953, she told
TV Guide
, “I like to fuss and primp before (a) party. Clothes have to fit right and be right so that I can concentrate on my date and not what I'm wearing.”

“Some parties are just impossible to figure out in advance,” she added. “Whenever I show up with shoulders bared, someone else is covered up to the neck. And then, when I cover up, no one else does.”

It all sounded like a plot on
Bewitched
. In fact, it was. Namely, the pilot episode in which
Darrin's
former girlfriend
Sheila Summers
(Nancy Kovack) invites him and his new bride
Samantha
to a party
Sheila
claims would be “casual.” It ends up being nothing of the sort, and Sam is embarrassed in her less-than-formal wear. Then, in “Snob in the Grass,” from the fourth season,
Sheila
tricks her again. This time inviting the
Stephenses
to a formal party, but upon arrival in their finest duds, they see the other attendees in casual wear.

In both episodes,
Samantha
lets
Sheila
“have it.” She twitches to her heart's content, at one point twirling
Sheila
into a frenzy of wardrobe malfunctions, leaving her emotions frazzled and her clothes unraveled, while
Darrin
stands by in amusement and somewhat guarded approval.

But Lizzie's wardrobe approval rating with her father wasn't as flexible as
Sam's
nose wriggle. So she'd keep things simple. He liked her in suits and thought blue jeans were acceptable only in the summer, as long as they were clean. She wore little makeup, liked pearl chokers, face veils, and poodle haircuts. Her father also insisted that she watch her posture. “I get a slap on the back if I don't stand up straight,” she told
TV People and Pictures
.

Unphased, Lizzie would merely get annoyed when in her youth her schoolmates and her dad called her “Betta,” just as when Bette Davis called her “Betty.” More than anything, her ambition, at least at this acting stage of the game, was her true calling—to become as accomplished and respected a performer as either Davis or her father, despite her wardrobe or lack thereof.

Bill Asher directed her third feature film, Paramount's 1963 release
Johnny Cool
, the year before they combined their powers to be on
Bewitched
. As author Ronald L. Smith observed in his book,
Sweethearts of '60s TV
(S.P.I. Books, 1993), the studio had been grooming Lizzie as a “sultry, super bewitching sex symbol, five foot eight in heels.”
The New York Times
deplored the “flaccid direction of William Asher,” but not the scenes featuring Lizzie, especially when she does her soul searching wearing nothing but a lap robe. “Miss Montgomery, without the benefit of wardrobe, attracts more attention then the entire uncomfortable cast,” all of whom remained clothed.

Four

“My art belongs to Daddy.”

—Elizabeth, to
Screen Stars
magazine, August 1967

Both of Lizzie's parents were very talented and artistic individuals. They were also wise in other ways of the world, and she trusted them for counsel in all areas, specifically when it came to her choosing a vocation.

According to
TV Radio Mirror
, April 1970, her mother once told her not to be “foolhardy” or “back away from obstacles … enjoy everything you do to the fullest or don't do it. There's nothing worse for the people around you than if you're doing something which makes you miserable.”