Twitch Upon a Star (53 page)
Read Twitch Upon a Star Online
Authors: Herbie J. Pilato
PART IV
“My darling, charming Elizabeth ⦠she has a touch of immortality.
Bewitched
is her light-hearted gift to the world, whatever shadows she battled.”
âSally Kemp, 2012
Nineteen
“You almost got the feeling that she was a little girl playing a grown-up.”
âDoug Tibbles,
Bewitched
writer, assessing Elizabeth's personality
In character or in reality, Lizzie employed a carefree spirit and wit even in the most challenging of situations. Whether she was playing
Samantha
who frequently defended her mortal marriage before her mother
Endora,
or whether she was playing herself in real life fighting for independence from the troubled Gig Young as well as from her father Robert Montgomery. In each scenario, scripted or nonscripted, Lizzie was
playing
. She maintained a strong sense of decorum, while not losing her stable sense of humor. She was beloved by viewers at home who were bewitched by her charm on screen, and the people she met off camera were just as bedazzled by her presence in person.
In the early 1990s, former restaurant manager/hostess DD Howard used to work at the tony Le Dome restaurant on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills. At the time, Le Dome (which has since closed its doors) was the hot spot for the Hollywood elite to meet, eat, and mingle. Celebrities as diverse as Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell, the Kirk Douglases, even Ronald and Nancy Reagan among many others, walked through its fashionable doors.
As Howard recalls, Lizzie and Bob Foxworth were frequent patrons of the establishment, and both were cherished by Le Dome's staff for their unaffected and unassuming ways:
After managing restaurants for over ten years, you really come to recognize personalities for who they are really when they come into a restaurant. You know who the nice people are and you know who the not-so-nice people are. You can see it right away. The essence of who they are is right there in front of you.
Well, not only were Elizabeth and Bob two of the nicest people who ever came through our doors, but they were two of the nicest people I have ever met in my entire life. They definitely made my top ten list. They were a charming, sweet, beautiful couple. And she was always laughing and smiling.
Many times she would come in with [her manager] Barry Krost, who she had a great banter with, or groups of friends. Whenever she arrived, you knew a party was gonna happen. The staff certainly always looked forward to seeing her. She was just always so interested in everyone, and who they were as a person, whether it was someone she and Bob were dining with, or whether it was one of the waiters or busboys. It was almost like she diverted attention from herself back to you.
When she'd walk in the door, I would say, “You look so fabulous!” And then she'd turn it around and say, “And â
you
' look gorgeous!” We'd then go on to have a regular conversation about what
I
was doing that day, or what was going on in
my
life.
She was just so sincerely interested in other people. She was curious and interested in everyone and everything. And that really represented just how endearing she was.
She was simply a shining star if there ever was one. The place just lit up when she walked in the room. She was an angel.
According to Tom McCartney, Lizzie discussed her sunny side of life in 1993 with journalist Bart Mills, who interviewed her, strangely enough, about her quite unsunny performance in the TV-movie,
Black Widow Murders: The Blanche Taylor Moore Story
. Portraying Blanche was by far her darkest characterization since her appearance in 1975's
The Legend of Lizzie Borden
(both films were also based on true-life tales). But Lizzie read between the lines and found laughter between the tears. In speaking with Mills, she recalled the day the
Widow Murders
cast met for its first preproduction read-through of the script. Many of writer/co-executive producer Judith Paige Mitchell's lines drew laughs, and Mitchell said to the cast, “But I didn't know this script was funny.”
But as far as Elizabeth was concerned, and as she expressed to Mills, “Life is funny even when it's upsetting. The more human a story is, the more real and the more true it is, the more likely you are to find subconscious humor in it. You may not see it on the page, but when you say it out loud, you have to laugh.”
Lizzie also “just had to laugh” about
I Dream of Jeannie's
attempts to duplicate
Bewitched's
success in the 1960s, as well as when the
Tabitha
series tried to do the same in the 1970s, and when TV audiences actually laughed, at least to some extent, at various magic-based, female-oriented shows or characters that tried to replicate the guffaws Lizzie created as
Samantha
on
Bewitched
. While the
Tabitha
series may not have fared so well,
Jeannie
certainly found a resounding success, as did other “re
sorce
ful” women on the small screen:
Sabrina, the Teenage Witch
(with Melissa Hart, ABC, 1996â2003) skyrocketed in the ratings, as did
Charmed
(1998â2006, CW; Alyssa Milano, Shannon Doherty, Holly Marie Combs, Rose McGowan). Before those good-smitten witches came along,
Angelique/Cassandra Collins
(played by Lara Parker) did her best on the gothic daytime soap
Dark Shadows
(ABC, 1966â1971), right beside
Witchiepoo
(Billie Hayes, on ABC's Saturday morning's
H.R. Pufnstuf
from1969â1970; who also played a storybook witch on
Bewitched
), and Juliet Mills was
Phoebe
on
Nanny and the Professor
(ABC, 1970â1971, which also starred a very young Kim Richards, before her quite different performances on today's
Real Housewives of Beverly Hills
). Even ABC Family's recent
Secret Circle
drama features a young band of sorceresses.
But in the fall of 1989, ABC's main network tried to more directly recapture the magic of
Bewitched
with a new “witch-uation comedy” called
Free Spirit
. It starred Corinne Bohrer (a kind of pre-
Friends
Lisa Kudrow) as
Winnie Goodwinn
who was reluctantly sent to Earth as a housekeeper/baby-sitter for the
Harper
family led by Franc Luz as
T. J. Harper
, the father. The children included
Jesse Harper
, as played by
How I Met Your Mother's
Alyson Hannigan (who would later portray the witch
Willow Rosenberg
in
Buffy,
the Vampire Slayer
, not to mention a character named
Samantha
in the short-lived 1993 series
Almost Home
, created by a writer named Lynn Montgomery, no relation).
Free Spirit
was a noble attempt, but it failed to appropriately reimagine the magic of
Bewitched
on several levels, not the least of which was the poorly funded cinematic quality. The show was videotaped in front of a live audience (allegedly), which meant it already had two strikes against it. Supernatural sitcoms should neither be videotaped nor presented in front of a live anything. The on-camera tricks and effects need to be properly executed and filmed. Imagine the tediousness of waiting in the studio seats while the crew sets up the magic for the home audience? Needless to say,
Free Spirit
was gone by the following January, with the ghost of
Bewitched's
stellar past lingering in its wake.
Meanwhile, “free spirit,” the phrase, remains to this day the best way to describe Lizzie's personality. Throughout her life, good, bad, or indifferent, she took everything in stride, with an occasional grain of salt over old wounds. Her core relationships always proved challenging, but she dealt with them head-on, although at times moving on too fast. Not one to offer second chances, she subscribed to the old adage, “Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Lizzie tended not to let things fester, even when she learned that she had cancer. At first she was angry, but then came to immediate terms with her tragic reality in 1995.
According to her commentary from 1989, Elizabeth responded to less serious and complicated circumstances in simple terms, whether discussing the possibility of a
Bewitched
reunion (“Forget it!”) or hearing about those who sought to do such a movie without her (“Anybody can do whatever they like. I don't care!”). Her amassed fortune from
Bewitched
coupled with her family's cache of cash allowed her the freedom to do as she pleased. She worked by choice, and from her work she gave choice performances, even if that work was only recognized with Emmy nominations and not a single victory.
Politically minded and theatrically gifted, she never ignored her ability to communicate, but always made certain to share a laugh amidst the probable pangs of losing Emmys to her peers, pangs she may have hidden with a Pagliacci smile. Whether engaged in a game of darts on
The Mike Douglas
Show
or a home tennis match with Bill Asher or Bob Foxworth, her true victory was never spoiled.
Whether riding colts on her family's sprawling properties stateside or in the English countryside, or rushing to play the mares at the Santa Anita or Hollywood Park Race Track, for Lizzie it was never about winning the horse race; it was about the human race to live, work, and play.
The essence of that playful spirit was thoughtfully reiterated by family members and friends on January 4, 2008 at the Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony that cemented her star.
Liz “Dizzie” Sheridan approached the podium. She described the first day she met Lizzie through a mutual friend (writer William Blast,
The Legend of Lizzie Borden
), shortly after moving to Los Angeles, how they played croquet, and became fast friends.
The next day Lizzie called Dizzie and wondered what kind of shampoo she used and if she'd like to go the race track, all in the same breath. Lizzie also insisted that Dizzie stay in her guesthouse, which Sheridan proceeded to do until she found a place of her own. At which time Lizzie lent Dizzie the required down payment. A few weeks later Sheridan paid her back on their way to the race track ⦠in Elizabeth's chauffeur-driven limousine. Upon seeing the cash, Lizzie screamed and playfully tossed the money all over the car, the chauffer, Sheridan, everything. From there, they journeyed on to the track and proceeded to spend the extra loot.
As it turned out, Dizzie was one of the few people who ever paid Lizzie back for her generosity, a true and loyal friend indeed. Elizabeth could not have cared less if Sheridan ever paid her back, but the fact that she did earned Dizzie high marks in Lizzie's highly selective realm of friendship.
Actor David Knell played Elizabeth's son,
Ed Reed
, when she took the lead in the 1980 TV-movie Western,
Belle Starr
. This film was the second professional acting job Knell had won upon moving to Los Angeles only a short time before. The first production he appeared in was for a segment of
Great Performances
, called “Life on the Mississippi” in which he played Mark Twain. Two weeks into the performance Knell broke his arm and his role had to be recast, all of which somehow later led to his being cast in the ground-breaking (and ironically titled) 1979 feature film
Breaking Away
.