Twitch Upon a Star (23 page)
Read Twitch Upon a Star Online
Authors: Herbie J. Pilato
As Eells explained in
Final Gig
, a band of “loosely connected couples” from the entertainment industry surrounded Lizzie and Young in Manhattan, including the Dunnes, Howard and Lou Erskine, Betsy Von Furstenberg and Guy Vincent, and Bill and Fay Harbach.
Husband and wife actors William Daniels and Bonnie Bartlett were also part of that group. Married for over fifty years, Bartlett and Daniels had known Lizzie and Gig from their days in New York when they performed in guest-star roles on
Robert Montgomery Presents
. Although Lizzie made frequent appearances on her father's show, none were with Daniels and Bartlett. The two would not work with her until years later. Daniels, best known to classic TV fans for his regular stints on
St. Elsewhere
(NBC, 1982â 1988) and
Boy Meets World
(ABC, 1993â2000), as well as being the voice of
K.I.T.T.
on the cult car show,
Knight Rider
(NBC, 1982â1986), appeared with Lizzie in her 1974 NBC TV-movie,
A Case of Rape
. Bartlett, a heralded actress in her own right with countless TV and film appearances under her belt, worked with Elizabeth in her 1975 TV-movie for ABC,
The Legend of Lizzie Borden
. “So Bill and I just happened to be in two of her biggest hits,” Bartlett says.
Decades before, Elizabeth and Gig visited Daniels and Bartlett in their New York apartment:
“Gig was a rather elegant and charming gentleman,” Bartlett recalls. “But he drank too much.
Everybody
drank too much. They were both drinking a lot, but I never saw her drunk, while he was pretty hopeless. She was good to get away from him.”
Actor/author J. Anthony Russo had chronicled in his book,
Creativity or Madness
, that Dean Martin believed Lizzie to be intoxicated on the set of
Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed?
, and now Bartlett remembers Lizzie once revealing that her mother “drank a lot.” “She had a nice way of saying it, so it wasn't coarse,” Bartlett explains, “but she said, âI told Mother I was going to cut her off at the bar.' And I believe at this point, her mother lived with her. She adored her mother.”
Upon hearing this, Sally Kemp, has an epiphany: “My mother, I realize now, like Elizabeth's, was an alcoholic.”
But while studies have shown that alcoholism is both a disease and hereditary, Sally questions if Lizzie had a substance abuse problem:
Elizabeth and I usually sat next to each other in classes at the Academy and always had lunch together. I
never
smelled alcohol on her and would have known instantly. I was very wary and conscious of it. I wasn't aware of her drinking much until she was trying to extricate Gig from Elaine Stritch. She had a tremendous crush on him and there was a big age difference between them ⦠I don't know how many years ⦠and [her father] was against the match. I saw less of her by then since I was pursuing my own life. I saw them occasionally once they were married and they seemed happy. Gig was very charming until he'd had too much, then he'd kind of blur. I think Elizabeth
did
try to keep up with him, partly to lessen the age difference. I think she was far more intelligent than he was. He had a suave, sleek surface, but I've no idea what was beneath it, or even if there was a beneath. If she was unhappy or becoming unhappy, she never shared it and once they moved to L.A. all contact ceased and I know nothing of hers or their life together. When I heard the horror story of Gig's death, I was deeply grateful she was well out of it. I don't know about her life from then on except that she and Bill Asher had three children, which must have made her very happy ⦠she always had a lovely childlike ability to create fun. I heard rumors of [her] drinking with [Bob] Foxworth, but they were only rumors and there are always rumors about celebrities. I knew as an actress myself that she couldn't keep up her work schedule, raise three children, and look beautiful if she was incapacitated by booze. I wish our lives hadn't gone apart, that's all I can say.
Biographer George Eells in
Final Gig
:
If the Young-Stritch affair played itself out as a bittersweet Neil Simon, then Gig and Liz's mad marriage radiated Noel Coward savoir faire: communal dashes to the martini fountain after screenings, croquet matches and other games. To those who knew them both, it seemed that Liz was intent on matching Gig's capacity for drink, as though it were some kind of contest.
Agent Martin Baum represented both Lizzie and Gig while they were together. Baum to Euell in
Final Gig
:
As a couple, Gig and Liz were a delight. There was a childlike innocence about him that was totally refreshing. There was little guile, no jealousy or resentment of others who were doing well. A dear person. Of course, that was the surface Gig. I noticed when we were out on an evening socially, he drank excessively by my standards, and Liz was drinking right along with him. But they seemed happy.
In late summer of 2011, Lizzie's good friend Cliff Robertson described her relationship with Gig as “very warm and passionate,” adding:
They seemed to get along very well. He was a charming fellow and a good actor. I would see them out on the West Coast for a while, when she was spending most of her time out there. But then she and Gig split up and she called me in New York, where I was still living at the time. She'd call every once and a while [to] say, “Are you coming to town?” And I'd tell her when and we'd often meet at a restaurant to catch up. She would tell me about her latest exploits and what not. But I never had any indication of whether or not there was trouble in the marriage. And when they did split I was sorry to hear that. I knew that they had been very happy, though clearly not for a long period of time.
Loyal until the end, Robertson believed Lizzie handled every circumstance throughout her life with “grace and charm. She showed a lot of spunk for a girl who was brought up with creature comforts.” Once more, it was Lizzie's unaffected demeanor that marked her appeal, specifically with Gig. “That was probably one of the main things that he saw in her,” Robertson surmised. “That she was so well-grounded.”
Montgomery archivist Thomas McCartney:
Her background helped to ground her, especially in that industry, which allowed her to survive where as so many others within it perished, literally. Her inner strength allowed her to continue to focus on her work when all around her crashed and burned in her personal life, this again came from being fundamentally strong, stable, and secure within herself and who she was as a human being. She was able to float with ease from one to any other social interaction, no matter if it was a lunch-bucket crew member or someone with high social standing to the point of royalty itself. She mainly drank with Gig to be able to be close to him on an emotional level so he would not shut her out, this being to keep loneliness at bay and to make Gig emotionally available, otherwise he shut down emotionally and shut her out. All addicts like company and pressure those around them to take part in their addiction. In this case, the pressure to do so came from Liz herself to retain access to Gig, so he would take her along on his magic carpet rides rather than leave her behind. Drinking like they did, as with Liz's mother, was the norm then; in those days, no one would bat an eye at someone who drank a half a dozen hard drinks a day. Point being that the way Liz and her mother drank then was not noticeable. That's what people did and society almost expected [it] of one. It was the norm. Now, we know better, but then they did not, nor would they be aware that their actions would be taken with anything more than a shrug of the shoulders.
McCartney makes a valid observation: In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, on-screen and off, daily alcohol consumption was considered socially acceptable and
cool
, as was smoking. But the devastating health ravages of such vices were not yet fully calculated.
As with many dramas and sitcoms in the 1960s, specifically,
Bewitched
, characters were frequently seen drinking or inebriated. Certainly, whenever
Darrin
felt overwhelmed by his wife's witchcraft, he made himself a
double
or a
triple
, once even asking
Sam
to fix him a
quadruple
(in the fifth season episode, “I Don't Want to Be a Toad; I Want to Be a Butterfly,” where he says, “Make it a quadruple and finish the story after I pass out”). In fact, actor Dick Wilson, better known as
Mr. Whipple
from the famous Charmin bath tissue commercials, was considered nearly a semi-regular on
Bewitched
due to his more than fifteen appearances as a drunkard, either at
Darrin's
favorite bar, trying to pick up
Samantha
outside a restaurant (while
Darrin
fetched the car in “If They Never Met”), or as a neighborhood bum who thought
Endora's
down-sized version of
Darrin
was a leprechaun (in “
Samantha
's Wedding Present”).
Consistent drinking also took place on 1960s shows like
That Girl, I Dream of Jeannie
, even on the daytime gothic soap,
Dark Shadows
(which Johnny Depp and director Tim Burton recently resurrected for the big screen), where a glass of sherry was the gothic drink of choice. Acting and song legend Dean Martin, Elizabeth's co-star in the 1963 film,
Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed?
, had a reputation as a chronic drinker and he brought that role to the party every week on his very successful TV variety hour,
The Dean Martin Show
. Additionally, one of the
Martin
program regulars was comedian Foster Brooks who, like Dick Wilson on
Bewitched
, became famous for making light of the drinking-man persona.
Later into the 1970s, drinking appeared regularly on sitcoms like
The Paul Lynde Show
, which just so happened to star a former
Bewitched
regular, which was produced by
Bewitched's
Bill Asher, who also just so happened to be Elizabeth's third husband. Lynde's anxiety-ridden attorney
Paul Simms
would frequently ask his wife
Martha
(played by Elizabeth Allen, but not Lizzie's mother) to fix his regular dose of martini.
However, the devastating health ravages of weekly if not daily inebriation were not fully explained because the statistics just weren't there at the time. It was an ignorant era and ignorance was bliss, or maybe just blind, even after 1964, when
Smoking and Health: Report of the Advisory Committee to the Surgeon General of the United States
was published. Unfortunately, before the 1970s, tobacco advertising was legal in the United States and most of Europe. In America in the 1950s and 1960s, cigarette brands frequently sponsored TV shows, from all-family fare such as
The Dick Van Dyke Show, I Love Lucy,
and
The Beverly Hillbillies
, to the celebrity-laden game shows
To Tell the Truth
and
I've Got a Secret
.
Flash forward to two interviews in the early 1990s, and Lizzie seemed to have made a startling realization of her own. Two times she was asked if she ever got tired of people asking her to do the twitch, and with both replies, she mentioned the topic of wine. In 1991, when she sat down with Ronald Haver for their
Here Comes Mr. Jordan
laserdisc conversation, she mused, “Well, it depends on how many people I ran into,” then adding she'd be unable to nose-wriggle if she had a drink. “If I wanted to get sloshed on the (
Bewitched
) set,” she continued with a laugh, “I would have never been able to [do the] twitch. So, I can't do it if I'm tired or if I've had a glass of wine. Isn't that funny?”
In 1992, during her chat with John Tesh for
One on One
, she laughed, and said:
If I'm tired, if I've had one glass of wine, or if I'm inclined to get the giggles, there is no way to do it. Now, you can figure out which one is my excuse now. Obviously, I haven't had a glass of wine, I'm not tiredâyetâ and I mean, sitting here (trying to do it, when asked, on camera, and not in character as
Samantha
) ⦠it's very hard.
According to a variety of sources including the March 1962 issue of
Photo-play Magazine
, Thomas McCartney, and
www.elvispresleynews.com
, music superstar Elvis Presley, who certainly had his own issues with substance abuse, may have undermined the foundation of Lizzie's relationship with Gig Young. It appears that a tense situation developed on the set of
Kid Galahad
, the 1962 motion picture starring Presley, and a purportedly very agitated Young. Although
Kid
is considered some of Presley's best work on screen (1956's
Love Me Tender
and 1958's
King Creole
notwithstanding), it's startling to conceive how it ever completed filming considering Gig's antics.
Apparently, Lizzie was a daily visitor to the
Kid
set and while Gig was busy filming, she'd chat up a “storm” with Elvis, so much so that one time Gig became enraged and caused a scene. Green with “Elvis envy,” he nearly physically attacked Elvis, while Lizzie was crushed at Gig's accusation and burst into tears. At which point Elvis reached out to comfort her, which only further infuriated Gig. The two men exchanged threats and then Elvis called Gig “an asshole” and ordered him to “grow up!”