Read Twitch Upon a Star Online
Authors: Herbie J. Pilato
Twitch Upon a Star (59 page)
Despite such political friction with her father, Lizzie went on to protest the Vietnam war, and lent her name, along with a great deal of personal time, money, and energy to a wide variety of charitable and political causes, including supporting human equality and the Peace movement; helping to further AIDS research, and reaching out to the disabled community. However, she modestly defined her social involvement as adequate. “There are times when I know I could still be doing more,” she said in 1989.
According to Ronny Cox, Lizzie's liberal-minded co-star from the issue-driven TV-movies
A Case of Rape
and
With Murder in Mind
, their shared political views were at the core of their friendship:
Elizabeth was very left-wing, not as left-wing as me, but very left-wing. And it was refreshing for each of us to run into someone whose politics were sort of as vociferous as the other person's ⦠someone who we could each blow off steam with, especially at that time.
While
Bewitched
was on the air through the 1960s and early 1970s, Ronny was “there in '68 ⦠working in the streets with the kids” during the upheaval surrounding Martin Luther King, Jr.'s assassination and the subsequent riots.
At the time, the Civil Rights Movement was in full swing. There was massive resistance to, among other things, desegregation of public restrooms, buses, restaurants, and schools. The antiâVietnam war movement was commencing. Michael Harrington's book,
The Other America
(Scribner, 1997) would later document the gaps between America's rich and the poor; the haves and the have-nots. Cesar Chavez was challenging America in the Grape Boycott; music was alive with revolution, from the likes (and dislikes) of The Beatles to The Smothers Brothers. It was the day of
The March on Washington
(from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial) for jobs, to halt discrimination against African-Americans, and equality for all.
Everyday people
of every race, creed, and color were there, in numbers 250,000 or more, walking arm-in-arm down Constitution Avenue, alongside celebrities such as sports legend Jackie Robinson (who had shattered the color barrier in Major League Baseball).
By the time
A Case of Rape
aired in 1974, Ronny says influential people like the Harvard educated poet Robert Lowell refused to visit the White House due to the U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war. In Ronny's view, Lowell (born in 1917) in particular, played an important role in the revolution of the 1960s.
But from any perspective, Lowell's writings are significant, especially his early works, including
Land of Unlikeness
(1944) and
Lord Weary's Castle
, the latter for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1947 at the age of thirty. Both books were influenced by his conversion from Episcopalianism to Catholicism, and explored the dark side of America's Puritan legacy. Before Vietnam, he also actively objected to World War II, became a conscientious objector, and was subsequently imprisoned.
According to Cox, it was only after Lowell began questioning mainstream artistic choices that issue-oriented films like
Rape
(which helped to push forward nationwide landmark legislation that changed the rights of rape victims) could be produced and introduced to TV home viewers. Before then, Cox says:
It was either frothy comedy or some sort of made-up drama. We were a nation still going through the throes of the Southerners disagreeing with the Civil Rights Act and us coming out of Vietnam. Everyone was vilifying the hippie movement. People were still having trouble voting. We were not that far removed from '65â66. And just look around at the world today! We still have inequalities!
Back in 1974, Cox had serious arguments with those in the artistic community who questioned the association between politics and the arts. “Because in those days,” he says, “there was this total segregated idea, that entertainment was
here
and the real world was
there
. So I think in some ways (
A Case of Rape
) probably made some people squirm a little bit.”
The same could also be said for his 1972 big screen film
Deliverance
, which hit theatres slightly before
Rape
premiered on TV. This movie also made an integral artistic contribution to the era, for it too dealt with the issue of sexual assault, but this time a man was violated. Cox shares his memories of working on the film in his new book,
Dueling Banjos: The Deliverance of Drew
(Decent Hill, 2012). He says
Deliverance
was ground-breaking if only for the healthy social dialogue it created:
This was the first time men had had to deal with the whole concept of rape. For the first time people were realizing that rape isn't [just] a sexual crime. It's violent and out of control. I'm not even sure there's hardly any sexual component to it. It's an act of humiliation ⦠the
me-dominating-you
aspect.
In comparative analysis of
Case
and
Deliverance
, he believes both films “changed a lot of people's psyches. Because now for the first time, men had to deal with the kind of thing that women had to deal with for years.” Before
Case
in particular, he says, once a woman was raped, her sex life was open to extreme scrutiny. “If she just dated someone, the deck was stacked against her. And you couldn't say anything if a man had prior arrests. He was completely off limits.”
Yet it was Lizzie's caring and compelling drive to serve others that made her so accessible to Cox on the set of
Case
. He was impressed with her unaffected demeanor, considering her father's conservative stance and her prestigious upbringing, as well as with her obvious decision to shun arrogance, and retain an open-minded and keen understanding of priorities:
You have to admire Lizzie. She could very easily have just been one of the
haves
. And that's what sets her apart; that sensibility of saying, “No! I don't agree with the right wing paradigm.” To them, it's the
zero sum game
⦠getting a lot of money or getting a lot of power or getting [a] lot of stuff doesn't mean anything (unless the
Left
loses). They want this trickle-down-stuff, and if they would just be historians and realize that when the least of usâespecially the middle classâdoes the best that's when everybody else does the best. The paradigm for this country is to make sure that [the] vast middle is doing well and then you'll pull the poor up from the bottom and the rich still do well. And Elizabeth realized that.
Although he's enjoyed his share of stardom, Cox admits to not experiencing Lizzie's level of success. He did not know her father, nor did they have discussions about her father. “I can only talk from my own sense of it,” he says, “but I think she looked around and saw those right wing guys, the soullessness of them, not caring for the other people,” and decided from there.
However, he remains particularly puzzled as to how Lizzie became part of an artistic community like Hollywood, filled with celebrities of all shapes, sizes, and success levels, some of who may be defined as arrogant and self-centered:
Who knows? In some ways it sounds paradoxical. In some ways it's as though our religions almost mitigate against us ever getting together ⦠in lots of ways. If you take what I call
the right-wing extreme religions of the world
â¦
the right wing elements of the religions of the world ⦠right wing Christian
fundamentalists, right wing Muslims, right wing Jewish, right wing Buddhists ⦠those ultra-right wings â¦
they always mitigateâ¦. they always propagate an
us-against-them
mentality. But that's the way of these guys having their power! I grew up in a small town of fundamentalist right-wing religion bigots of the worst order. I was overwhelmed with what I observed as deep hypocrisy and disregard for humanity. So, I vowed at a very early age to choose a more productive path. In some ways, I'm sort of prejudiced against organized religion because of that. Because I saw such hatred, such bigotry coming from those kinds of places, no caring for humanity at large, no caring for our fellow man. That turned me off.
Ronny Cox doesn't know for certain, but he'd “like to think that Lizzie saw the same things from the
excessives
⦠the same lack of caring from
her
side of the tracks.”
If Lizzie was the most down-to-earth actress in Hollywood, then her male counterpart, beyond Robert Foxworth in that community, would have to be none other than Emmy-winning actor Ed Asner. Asner is best known for playing the tough-as-nails-but-gentle-of-heart
Lou Grant
on
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
, and its sequel
Lou Grant
. The
Grant
role, a supporting role on a half-hour situation comedy, was the first in TV history to be spun-off into a one-hour dramatic series. He made TV history again when he recently reprised his role as wealthy art collector and smuggler
August March
on updated edition of
Hawaii Five-O
. He first played
March
on the original
Five-O
, starring Jack Lord, a frequent co-star of Lizzie's. According to the article, “Ed Asner Visits Hawaii,” published in
The Los Angeles Times
, on March 19, 2012, the day the new
Five-O
segment aired, it was the first time a guest performer played the same character on separate versions of the same series.
But Asner is also well-known for heralded performances in countless other television programs and feature films, everything from programs in which Lizzie also appeared (
Armstrong Circle Theatre, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Untouchables
), to mini-series like
Roots
and
Rich Man, Poor Man
, TV-movies like
The Gathering
, to big screen family films like
Elf
and
Up!
Like Lizzie, Asner's success never went to his head, even at the super height of his popularity during the
Mary Tyler Moore Show
days. Although he could well have afforded a Mercedes or BMW like many of his Hollywood peers, Asner pulled into various studio parking lots of the day in a 1977 Oldsmobile Cutlass. He explains how and why that happened, and more:
I came from a middle class Jewish Orthodox family. My father couldn't read or write English. He had morals and standards. I was afraid of him because the four older kids made me afraid of him. And yet he never laid a glove on me. I was a mama's boy. Up until the beginning of second grade we lived in a railroad apartment which we owned, which was above my father's junkyard. My classmates were Mexican. The junkyard was across from a farmer's packing house. So I certainly had humble beginnings in terms of ostentation.
We moved to what I regarded as a white bread village. So I made friends in the class. I went through public school and high school and being the youngest, I was more sheltered than the rest of my siblings, who before long were all away and I was on my own. I encountered whatever I had to encounter on my own.
I became a success in high school but in my sophomore year, all my friends were invited into fraternities and I wasn't. And I saw which way the wind blew for me. I said, “Okay, I had been the class clown up to that point. I can't look to friendship to be surrounding me, I've got to excel, so I started excelling and achieved.”
My greatest regret was joining a fraternity in my senior year! It was totally unnecessary, but my buddies were in it, so I thought I'd join and I betrayed my standards by doing so. I went to college, the University of Chicago. I was there a year and a half. I got involved in acting, which was extracurricular, became open to acting, dropping out of college.
I then took on a series of jobs, all of them blue collar and I suppose the fact that I held onto the Cutlass signifies two things: That I was tight and that I identified and I'd always be identified as a common middle class working stiff!
Both of my sisters were social workers in their post-college years. Maybe some of that rubbed off on me. I know in certain cases it did. They certainly had their liberal ideals.
And [World War II] was on at the time. And we were Jews. We had some idea of what befell Jews, not only in Europe but the anti-Semitism that was certainly rife in America at that time!
I was willing to join a fraternity that my friends were in at one time and after I went to three meetings they voted on you. And I found out that two people blackballed me: A guy from the next block and a football player I knew and was friendly with. But my friend who was in the fraternity told me about it and I said, “Was it because I was Jewish?” He said, “Yeah.” I was greatly relieved! “Oh,” I thought, “it wasn't because it was me!” How goddamned stupid can you get?!
Anyway, I went on and joined the other fraternity to my regret.
So, being a Jew in Kansas City, Kansas, discrimination was of that mild a nature, but it was enough to make me realize I was one of the
others
but being an
other
I think makes you tend to identify with the character of others who are
others
.
I think that primarily dictated, having been a working stiff and a union man, [that] finally it was natural that I should pursue whatever causes I spoke for, because I was always a loudmouth, a clown. How do you say it?
A loudmouth goon clown
.