Twitch Upon a Star (15 page)
Read Twitch Upon a Star Online
Authors: Herbie J. Pilato
Although a few other lines weren't entirely true to Lizzie's form, they came close. At one point in the movie, Lizzie's
Mary
tells Plummer's
Duke
, “I have guts,” which was true of Lizzie. But then
Mary
added, “I also have bad posture,” which was not true of Lizzie. Her father wouldn't have allowed it.
In another partially true-to-life moment,
Duke
quizzes
Mary
:
Duke: So you were a
Daddy's girl
?
Mary: I was a Momma's girl until she died.
Then
I was a Daddy's girl.
Off-screen, Lizzie's mother died in 1992, approximately eleven years after her father.
In general, however,
When the Circus Came to Town
still spoke to Lizzie's reality, as did many of her performances through the years, including
The Awakening Land
, which, like
Circus
, was also directed by Boris Sagal. More significantly,
Land
was filmed on vast country landscapes in Illinois, many of which played into Lizzie's memory of her youth growing up on the expansive Montgomery homestead in Patterson, New York. In
Land
, Lizzie portrayed a pioneer woman named
Sayward Luckett Wheeler
, and she was surrounded by a plethora of animals for which she had a great affection, especially horses.
Five
“I have a pair of jodhpurs that look like they belong on a Madame Alexander Barbie doll.”
âElizabeth Montgomery to Ronald Haver, 1991
Lizzie's early life was a relative age of innocence, one in which she strived to appreciate the simple pleasures, significantly helped along by her love for animals. As she explained in 1989, “I've had dogs, cats, crickets, crocodiles, alligators, deer, goats, pigs, horses, chickens, and anything else you could name.”
Consequently, she frequently performed on screen with nonhumans such as a chimpanzee in the 1963 feature film
Johnny Cool
, a seeing-eye dog in the 1984 CBS TV-movie,
Second Sight: A Love Story
, and any number of minions from the animal kingdom on
Bewitched
. Due to her realistic theatrics, the audience was made to believe that she was bonding with the given goose or frog, etc. As
Bewitched
writer Richard Baer asserted in 1988, “This, I believe, is a very difficult thing to do. Yet, there wasn't any question as to whether she could pull it off.”
In fact, according to the March 1965 issue of
TV Picture Life
magazine and the January 1965 edition of
The Saturday Evening Post
, a special cat named “Zip Zip” later played into Bill Asher's direction of Lizzie on
Bewitched
. Whenever he was looking to pull a particular emotion for her to utilize as
Samantha
, he would say, from the sidelines, “Zip Zip!”
But all other creatures aside, it was Lizzie's particular affection for horses that stood out, a bond which her son, Billy Asher, Jr. said was influenced by her dad. “My grandfather was an equestrian,” the young Asher relayed in 2001 on the televised
Headliners & Legends
profile of his mom. “When she was very young he had her on a horse and she was drawn right to it.”
When she was three years old, Lizzie's father sat her on a pony and said, “Ride!” and so she did; whether around the Montgomery homes in Beverly Hills/Bel Air and Patterson, New York, or in Britain, where she spent school vacations while her father produced films there. To help pass the time, she took horse-jumping lessons and frequently rode with him in the English countryside and London's Hyde Park. She even won a number of ribbons for horsemanship.
As she told Ronald Haver in 1991, “I'll always remember him on horseback ⦠and teaching me to ride. I remember him being very athletic ⦠on horseback is how I ⦠immediately think of him. That and like polo, and jumping.”
Their shared love for mares was one of the non-Hollywood pastimes that contributed to their strong bond in Lizzie's youth. Although Robert at first objected to his daughter's chosen profession, investigative journalist and best-selling author Dominick Dunne told A&E's
Biography
in 1999 that Lizzie and her father thought very highly of one another. According to Dunne, Robert embraced the idea of Lizzie as an actress. “She was a thoroughbred,” Dunne assessed with no intended comparison to horses, which Sally Kemp confirms both she and Lizzie “adored. I think she even had a pet llama. And if she didn't, then she always wanted one.”
In time, her art once more would imitate her lifeâin fact, a few times more. Lizzie rode a variety of mares in her twin TV-movie westerns,
Mrs. Sundance
(1974) and
Belle Starr
(1980), while horses came into play on two episodes of
Bewitched
.
As she explained to
TV Radio Mirror
magazine in November 1969:
Lord, I
adore
horses. We go to the track every Saturday. I even named a character in
Bewitched
after a horse. There's a horse named John Van Mill-wood, a great big thing that can't get his legs straightened out until he's halfway around the track. And once when a script had a characterâI think it was an old boyfriend of
Endora's
âhe had some plain old name so I asked if we could call him
John Van Millwood
.
In 1989, she correlated working on
Bewitched
to playing the horses:
There wasn't a moment when I thought,
Oh, I'd rather be someplace else
. First of all, the only other place I'd probably have rather been was the race track and there was always that on the weekends ⦠or the tennis courts, right? So that was cool. It's ever so amazing to be paid for something you really enjoy doing,” she went on to say. “I still feel that way about acting. I mean, in general, it's a grind. I think physically you pace yourself and that's the way it goes. Horses do that ⦠so can people ⦠well, jockeys kind of help.
The two
Bewitched
episodes that showcased her love for horsesâas well as the race trackâwere “The Horse's Mouth,” a black and white segment from the second season with Dick York that aired March 3, 1966, and “Three Men and a Witch on a Horse,” a color episode from the last season with Dick Sargent, airing December 15, 1971.
In “Mouth”: A race horse named
Dolly
feels neglected and flees from her owner and into
Samantha's
backyard, while her sister
Adorable Diane
keeps winning races
Dolly
helps to set up. To fully understand her quandary,
Sam
transforms
Dolly
into a woman. When
Darrin
objects to the magic manifestation,
Samantha
says it's a special opportunity to fully understand a horse's day at the races.
In “Three Men”:
Endora
transforms
Darrin
into a gambler, after which
Sam
insists the spell be broken. Ignoring her daughter's plea,
Endora
has
Darrin
bet on a horse named
Fancy Dancer
who is bound to loseâand on which he convinces
Larry
and a client to place all bets. As a result,
Sam
pops over to the stables to have a motivating chat with
Dancer
, who ultimately wins the race for fear of ending up at the glue factory.
In 1968, writer Rick Byron interviewed Lizzie for a
Photoplay
magazine article called “The Lady Gambles.” Here, she expressed her fondness for horse racing by comparing two views from abroad, most assuredly influenced by her periodic summer vacations in England with her father. “I'm about as thoroughly American as anyone can be,” she said, and yet she felt that the United States was missing some of the ceremonial aspects of the British who, she believed, knew how to “do things in a beautiful, pageant-like manner. “That's one of the reasons I love the races. They're so ceremonious, so steeped in tradition.” Whenever she heard the song “My Old Kentucky Home” at the famed Derby, she was driven to tears. “That is how wonderful I think the tradition is,” she decided.
At one point in the interview, Lizzie apologized for what she considered to be a boring life, but in the process revealed more insight into her personality than she have may realized or intended. “I'm sorry that I haven't given you much,” she said. “I'm afraid I'm a pretty dull interview. The fact of the matter is that I'm not really wild about talking about myself (which is also what she had said in 1989). I'd much rather talk about books or movies or ⦠horses.”
Her love of horses may have been ignited by her father, but her penchant for the real life race track was instilled in her by her grandmother Becca. According to what Robert Foxworth said on A&E's
Biography
, it was Becca who introduced Lizzie to horse racing. When Lizzie was a little girl, Becca one day walked into her room and said she would not be attending school that morning. Instead, little Lizzie would be accompanying Becca to the races. “You'll learn much more about math at the track than you ever will in class,” Becca said.
In a 1993 interview with magazine journalist Bart Mills, Lizzie professed, “I love the track.” She didn't own any race horses herself because, “I can lose money perfectly well on other people's horses.” Although, she wasn't doing too badly at the time; the Santa Anita Race Track had been “very good to her.” “I go as often as I can,” she explained, “and when I can't go, I send my bets with my friends ⦠There's nothing like a day at the races. There are no phones and if you're lucky, you come back richer.”
However, Lizzie's mother was reportedly not at all fond of the equestrian creatures and vice versa. According to Montgomery archivist Tom McCartney, Robert Montgomery had named his polo pony after his wife. Lizzie once recalled the day the two
Bettys
met for the first time. Apparently, they both took a strong dislike to one another. As Elizabeth recalled at the time, her mother was the only person she knew who could fall off of a polo pony that was “standing perfectly still.”
Next to her affection for horses, Lizzie's second favorite member of the animal kingdom had to be dogs, various breeds of which she owned through the years.
In 1989, it was the beautiful female canine, Zuleika, named after the heroine
Zuleika Dobson
from the book of the same title written by Max Beerbohm whose entire literary collection Lizzie inherited from her father.
As she explained to Ronald Haver in 1991, Robert Montgomery had instructed her to read Beerbohm, Dickens, Thackeray, and Shakespeare since she was six years old.
I was really weird as far as that was concerned. (If) you saw a funny little boney-kneed scrawny kid sitting down with Hamlet, at the age of about six, wouldn't you think she was kind of odd? Yes. It's true. It's absolutely true. I was very peculiar. And I guess nothing changes. And I am so really grateful to him for all that and forcing me ⦠certainly not against my will ⦠to be an avid reader when I was little, so of course I still am. But I think that's why he was so hell-bent on wanting to read everything and (owning) collections of authors ⦠because (learning) meant a great deal to him.
Originally published in 1911,
Zuleika Dobson
was a shameless parody about what happens when an enticing young woman enrolls at the elite all-male Judas College, Oxford. A conjurer by trade,
Zuleika Dobson
can only love a man who is immune to her allure: a circumstance that proves ruinous, as many of her love-sick beaus lose the will to live due to her cold-shoulder. Filled with notable catch-phrases (“Death cancels all engagements,” utters the first casualty) and inspired throughout by Beerbohm's robust creativity, this rhapsodic take on Edwardian undergraduate life at Oxford has, according to literary great E. M. Forster, “a beauty unattainable by serious literature.”
“
Zuleika Dobson
,” Forster had also said, “is a highly accomplished and superbly written book whose spirit is farcical. It is a great workâthe most consistent achievement of fantasy in our time.”