Twitch Upon a Star (22 page)

She was about to open her hotel room door, when she became conscious of someone hurrying down the hall. A few days later the same thing happened. Again, she was just vaguely conscious of feeling someone hurry by her, but by the third time it happened, she “definitely saw a foot and the bottom of a skirt as it disappeared around the corner.” Swiftly, she rushed to the corner and looked down the hall. There was no one there and, as she assessed, it would have been impossible for anyone to have reached and entered one of the doors in that hall in so short a time.

She returned to her room, and contemplated what had transpired. She then became certain that whoever, or whatever, she had seen was not dressed in the fashion of the day. The “ghost's” skirt was long and full, and the foot and ankle which had disappeared around the corner were clad in a high-buttoned shoe.

The housekeeper entered her room a few minutes later and when Lizzie relayed what she had experienced, the housekeeper said, “Oh, you've seen her. She has been here for many years, ever since this house was new,” and passed the incident off casually.

Lizzie concluded, “I never learned the name of my ghost or her story.”

Author and professional namedropper Dominick Dunne had befriended Elizabeth when he served as a stage manager on
Robert Montgomery Presents
. In his book,
The Way We Lived Then: Recollections of a Well-Known Name Dropper
(Crown, 1999), he recalled, among other things, working on
Presents
, her marriages to Fred Cammann and Gig Young, and his developing friendships with Cliff Robertson and Arlene Francis, both of whom starred with Lizzie in the hit Broadway play
Late Love
(from October 1953 to January 1954). Dunne was delighted with
Love's
success, and intrigued by the bond that formed between Lizzie and his wife Lenny, a relationship that he said would have “twists and turns in years to come.”

For the moment there were only ups and downs, as the newlywed Cammanns lived in the New York apartment above the space Dunne shared with his mother, who one night hosted a party to celebrate
Late's
success. Dunne claimed that he and his mother were good friends with Lizzie, as he had served as an usher at her wedding to Cammann, a fellow stage manager on
Presents
. Both Dunne and his wife Lenny were so close to Lizzie that, after the birth of his first child (actor Griffin Dunne), she would often babysit, a fact which Dominick said his son to this day takes delight in revealing. Yet those intimate proximities would soon contract and fade.

In time, the Dunnes moved to a larger apartment on East 76th Street, Lizzie disengaged Cammann in Vegas, and on December 28, 1956, in that same fast-paced, high-living Nevada city, she wed Gig Young of whom her father was not the least bit fond. As Dunne told
Headliners & Legends
in 2001, “Bob Montgomery hated Gig Young, and was … distressed” about Lizzie's romance with the older actor. “I think that put the first strain on their father-daughter relationship.”

In the interim, the Youngs moved to Los Angeles, and Cammann married again (to Nora Franke) in yet a second ceremony for which Dunne served as an usher.

By the time all of this transpired, Lizzie's old friends, like Bud Baker, had lost track of her. She extricated herself from him and others as she had from Sally Kemp. Occasionally, after she married Young, Baker, for one, would run into her at waving distance in some mob scene when she and Gig were on the East Coast. But other than that, she was a no-show. She turned the page. Seemingly, with each new relationship came a new crop of friends, and a new era was born for the actress who liked to draw. A fresh canvas awaited her at each new brush with fame.

When Elizabeth was living with Gig Young in their rented furnished New York apartment, she fell in love with a white dishtowel decorated with blue butterflies. As writer Arnold Hano observed in the
TV Guide
article, “Rough, Tough and Delightful,” May 19, 1967, “This was no doubt a climax in the life of Liz Montgomery. When she wiped something, it turned out to be with an item totally domestic, albeit festooned with butterflies.”

In that same article, Hano made note of a poem Elizabeth composed when she was only in third grade:

When Hano asked her about that poem, and which animal she most identified with, the caterpillar or the butterfly, she replied, indignantly, “Goodness, surely not the butterfly!” Meanwhile, her marriage with Young was at times like living in a cocoon.

She first met the actor, twice married and divorced, after he had recently ended an engagement to actress Elaine Stritch and began hosting the anthology TV series
Warner Brothers Presents
. According to George Eells' biography of Young,
Final Gig: The Man Behind the Murder
(Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1991), Gig's show was filming on the same Warner's lot that Lizzie was shooting her first motion picture,
The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell
.

To celebrate signing contracts for Gig's new series, Warner Bros. staged a dinner at the Beverly Hilton Hotel at which studio executive Gary Stevens requested the actor's presence. Gig consented but was uncertain about his potential escort. Since she was on the lot, Stevens suggested Lizzie who was then all of twenty-two. Gig was born November 4, 1913, which made him forty-two, approximately, because like Lizzie he was known to tally his age with a minus-five-year span that was left open to the imagination.

In either case, Gig was apprehensive about the potential date. He simply did not want to give the impression that he was too old to be dating a young starlet. Assured by Stevens that such would not be the case, Gig invited Lizzie to join him for the studio dinner. As it turned out, she was excited about the idea. Apparently, she had seen one of his recent film performances and said to anyone who would listen, “I think he's the most attractive man on the screen and I intend to marry him.”

While most shrugged off the remark, fate seemed to play against Lizzie's hopes for a romance, let alone a marriage. At the time of her first date with Gig, she was scheduled to return to New York shortly to begin rehearsing a play. More importantly, she was not totally legally free from her marriage to Fred Cammann.

That said, and as Eells explained in his book, it was obvious to many that Gig's appearance and mannerisms were oddly similar to those of Robert Montgomery. The two had met when Gig guest-starred in an episode of
Robert Montgomery Presents
called “The Sunday Punch,” which aired October 19, 1953:

Three years after
Punch
aired, and approximately twelve months after Lizzie met Gig, she performed in an episode of his show,
Warner Brothers
Presents
, titled “Siege,” which aired on February 14, Valentine's Day, 1956. On camera, she played a country schoolteacher whose class is held captive by an escaped convict. Off-camera, her young heart was held captive by Gig and the two were married the following December 28, and her father Robert Montgomery was nowhere in sight. He would not attend his daughter's second marriage.

Meanwhile, Lizzie and Gig decided they wanted to have children of their own, immediately, if possible. But to alleviate certain health issues he had had a vasectomy when he was only twenty-five. He would later reverse the procedure but his relationship with Lizzie, which lasted six years, still did not prove fertile.

What it did produce was a lot of turmoil, largely due to the fact that Gig was a chronic alcoholic. What's more, it was challenging for him get over the loss of his second wife. In 1949 he and his first wife, Sheila Stapler, were divorced after nine years of marriage. In 1951, he wed drama coach Sophia Rosenstein, who died of cancer one year later.

Number three was up when Gig met Lizzie. He was immediately hypnotized by her sophisticated ways and flattered by the attention she showered on him. When she returned to Broadway to replace the ingénue in
The Loud Red Patrick
, they were constantly on the phone.

After finishing his stint on
Warner Brothers Presents
, Gig received an offer to go into the legendary Jean Dalrymple's revival of
The Teahouse of the August Moon
at the New York City Center. He wasn't as impressed with Dalrymple as he was with Lizzie. So, he leapt at the opportunity to be near the future
Bewitched
star. The
Moon
revival didn't spark any interest, but his romance with Lizzie was set afire.

Charismatic and confident, her charms were evident wherever she went. As author Eells uncovered in his book on Young, the actor found Lizzie alluring but somewhat intimidating. But she helped to fill a void and loosened him up socially. At times they were like two little kids, according to Bob Douglas, a mutual bystander and friend to the couple.

One weekend, for example, Lizzie took Gig and Douglas to her family's attractive country home in Patterson, New York. Upon arrival there, and after several drinks, Gig blurted out, “What about dinner?”

At which point, Lizzie ventured into the kitchen, returned and said, “Well, we really don't have much of anything.” They discussed going to a restaurant, but apparently that wasn't an option. After a time, she appeared with three plates, on which were three hamburgers. Everyone tasted them, and Gig said,

“Mmmmmm, don't think much of these.”

“What?” Lizzie wondered. “I don't think much of these,” Gig repeated.

As Douglas recalled, the meat patties were “absolutely filthy.” Lizzie had made them out of dog food!

Out of such shocking hijinks as this their romance increased and became serious. According to Douglas and his wife Sue, it was Lizzie who pushed to be married, but Gig was uncertain. Sharing the secret of his 1938 vasectomy with her was not easy. His wife Sheila had resigned to the information calmly and rarely made reference to it. With his wife Sophie, it wasn't an issue at all, since she had undergone a hysterectomy before they married. Elaine Stritch had assured him they would be together even it was not possible for him to father children. But with Lizzie, Young felt old. He became increasingly concerned about his masculinity which, as he viewed it, was diminished by the vasectomy. But he finally told her the truth, and she didn't care. They would breed dogs, she said. Sue Douglas in
Final Gig
:

According to an early studio bio, Lizzie and Gig did at least own a collie, which they named
Willie Grogan
, in honor of the principle character he played in 1962 Elvis Presley feature film
Kid Galahad
. They also had a goat named
Mary Chess
, which happened to be a trade name for a then-line of perfumes. At the time, they lived in Sunset Plaza, a fashionable mountain-side residential area above Sunset Strip, where Lizzie maintained her green thumb … for mint, which she grew in her backyard.

The two-page bio also went on to explain her principal hobby was painting. She had sold watercolor works of art and was working on an assignment to illustrate a children's book. She was a collector of antiques and had “no particular liking for modern art, although she respects it.”