Twitch Upon a Star (55 page)

Time and again, Lizzie earned the veneration of her peers, at least in word, if not always in deed. According to Kasey Rogers, who replaced Irene Vernon as
Louise Tate
on
Bewitched
, she was “a very gifted actress. She excelled at whatever she did, be it drama or comedy. And when she appeared on
Bewitched
, she played
Samantha
with the same sensitivity and love that she possessed in real life.”

Rarely, however, did such praise transfer to actual public acknowledgement in any formal award, at least when it came to television. For example, she was recognized on several occasions for her theatrical craft on the New York stage, as when she received the “Daniel Blum Theatre World Award for Most Promising Newcomer”—for
Late Love
in 1953–1954 (which was also Cliff Robertson's debut). Past recipients of the award included James Dean, Eva Marie Saint, and director Leo Penn (Sean's father).

The television world, however, was a whole other ballgame. Although she received a total of nine Emmy nominations, five of which were for
Bewitched
, Elizabeth never won. Her non-
Samantha
nominations were for non-
Samantha
performances: The self-centered
Rusty Heller
on
The Untouchables
(“The Rusty Heller Story,” ABC, October 13, 1960); the abused housewife
Ellen Harrod
in
A Case of Rape
(NBC, February 20, 1974); the vile ax murderess in
The Legend of Lizzie Borden
(ABC, February 10, 1975); the pioneer woman
Sayward Luckett
in
The Awakening Land
(NBC, February 19, 20, 21, 1978).

Still, an Emmy victory eluded her—“a bridesmaid, but never a bride.” Why?

According to what Richard Michaels said in 1988:

Some years before Lizzie and
Bewitched
were Emmy contenders, the Television Academy had awarded another female TV icon the accolade, not once, but twice. Lucille Ball had won for her various
Lucy
personas over the years and embraced the attention. But when she returned to weekly TV in 1986 with ABC's short-lived
Life with Lucy
, she failed to win points with her peers, her fans, and the critics, and she was devastated by the lack of support on all fronts. But as Michaels also pointed out, shortly before Ball died in 1989 (of a heart ailment), droves of fans lined up around the hospital in which she spent her final days. “She couldn't believe it. She was amazed. And just thank God she found out [how much she was loved] before she died. But I'm not so sure Elizabeth was as lucky.”

Before he won an Emmy for his work on
Bewitched
, Bill Asher, Michaels' mentor, received the coveted accolade for helming episodes of Ball's first comedy,
I Love Lucy
. When Ball later switched formats to
The Lucy Show
, during
Bewitched's
rein, Lizzie lost the Emmy twice to the redheaded phenomenon, and Asher was not at all pleased. At the press conference following the 1966 awards ceremony that included his own
Bewitched
victory as a director, he refused to speak with the press unless Lizzie's contributions to
Bewitched
were acknowledged.

Notwithstanding, Asher, like Michaels, thought Lizzie remained unfettered by failing to win over her peers with an Emmy. “It just didn't matter to her,” he said in 1988. Yet consider this: Don Knotts was nominated and won the Emmy five times for his beloved interpretation of the shaky gunshy
Deputy Barney Fife
on
The Andy Griffith Show
(CBS, 1961–1968). It is the stuff of Hollywood legends how much Knotts enjoyed his life off-screen, but one would not exactly define the actor as a heavy socialite. Lizzie, on the other hand, most probably never won an Emmy, at least for
Bewitched
, because her performance as twitch-witch
Samantha
was under-rated and natural. “It didn't seem like she was acting,” says film scholar Rob Ray, “But it was actually great acting. She made it look too easy.”

Fellow media archivist Tom McCartney adds:

McCartney muses about something that may hold more than a measure of truth. According to
The Emmys
(Perigee, Third Edition, 2000), author Thomas O'Neil reveals what can only be classified as shocking information about how the awards were allegedly distributed, at least by that time. For example, one year,
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
garnered Emmy wins for nearly its entire cast, excluding the star herself. As a result,
Moore
co-star Ed Asner, who won that year (and other seasons) for playing
Lou Grant
, was none-too-pleased and gave it good to the Emmy board, claiming his lead actress (and off-screen boss, Moore's MTM Productions produced the series) was “robbed”; he called the voting process “thoroughly inconsistent.” “Thankfully,” Asner says, today, “Mary did win, and much deservedly so.”

Apparently, the Emmy committee that voted on the nominees consisted of a very select group of business suits from Beverly Hills. For many years, the Emmys were nothing but a battleground between the West and East Coasts, with the East boasting the sophistication and style of New York and Washington, D.C., news programs and variety entertainment, and the West glorifying modern technology and celebrity appeal.

While this select and affluent sector would allegedly be some sort of avant-garde, they were also products of the confines of L.A.'s cloistered television industry, periodically falling victim to their own sequestered arrogance. Consequently, they may have dubbed
Bewitched
and its like as unworthy, most likely because they never objectively watched the programs in the first place, thus dispelling any potentially sincere winners or losers. However, none of that mattered to Lizzie. She failed to win the Emmy for female comedy series lead three more times, losing twice to Hope Lange for
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir
(NBC, 1968–1970) and once to Mary Tyler Moore for
The Dick Van Dyke Show
.

“I think it's funny,” she said in 1989 about her frequent losses. She then proceeded to compare herself to Susan Lucci, another legendary multi-nominated actress who never won, at least not until ten years later. Fortunately for the soap star, she finally garnered the amulet for playing the iconic
Erica Kane
on
All My Children
(ABC, 1970–2011). “Maybe the two of us should work together,” Lizzie laughed, “do something really brilliant, and then both lose. That would be extremely comical.”

But seriously, Lizzie “always knew” that she wouldn't win. “There are a lot of people voting,” she said before going on to praise the work of fellow Emmy-nominee Lange who won the Best Actress in a Comedy in 1968 for playing
Mrs. Muir
opposite Edward Mulhare as
The Ghost
. “I thought she was very good, actually. I liked that series,” she said of the show that was spawned from the 1947 feature film starring Gene Tierney and Rex Harrison. “You know,” she added, “I saw that movie for the first time about three months ago (approximately March 1989). What an amazing movie!”

As it turned out, Robert Montgomery was also never recognized with an award from his peers. As Elizabeth recalled to Ronald Haver in 1991:

“There are times when I think that perhaps he was a bit underrated. And that might be because of the fact that he never really fell into any kind of niche … But I just feel he was versatile. He'd try different things. I think that certainly he was appreciated for
Night Must Fall
, because he got an Academy Award nomination for that one.”

Released in 1937, directed by Richard Thorpe, and co-starring Rosalind Russell and Dame May Whitty,
Night Must Fall
was based on the play by Emlyn Williams with a screenplay by John Van Druten:

As Lizzie told Haver, her father was excited about the possibility of winning an Oscar for the role, and her mother had already picked out a dress for the event. But Robert Montgomery didn't stand a chance. “It was kind of sad,” Lizzie intoned. Approximately two days before the dinner ceremony, an annual event that Elizabeth said was once tastefully presented (as opposed to today's “big hoopla stuff”), the Montgomery household received a call from MGM, the film's studio. “Don't even bother to show up. (Spencer) Tracy's going to get it.”

On February 28, 2012,
The Hollywood Reporter
published the article, “The Artist's James Cromwell Slams Academy Awards, Proposes Solultion for Flawed Voting Process.” Using one of Lizzie's words, Cromwell said the Oscars have become:

Cromwell then recalled his own experience as a nominee and what then-Academy president Arthur Hiller told him in 1995: “Listen, the Academy Award is just a crapshoot. To be nominated, for your peers to tell you that your film or your performance is one of the five best, that's the Academy Award.”

A random
Letter to the Editor
in
The Hollywood Reporter
, dated February 13, 1990, may have best defended Elizabeth's particular talent in the small to big picture scheme of things. In response to the trade magazine's unappreciative review January 24, 1990 of her performance in that year's premiere of her CBS TV-movie,
Face to Face
, Gary Bennett, of West Hollywood, wrote:

In 1975, three years after Elizabeth decided to end
Bewitched
, Harry Ackerman, the show's executive producer, took his young son Peter to visit her on the set of
The Legend of Lizzie Borden
, which like
A Case of Rape
was a stark departure from her previous comedic work.

For Peter,
Borden, Rape
and other of Lizzie's non-
Bewitched
TV-movies, such as
The Victim
(ABC, 1972) and
Act of Violence
(NBC, 1979, which like
Borden
was directed by Paul Wendkos) were too jarring to watch. He explains:

It was, however, still riveting and “fun” for Peter to meet Lizzie on the
Borden
set: