Read Twitch Upon a Star Online
Authors: Herbie J. Pilato
Twitch Upon a Star (7 page)
Mother is a marvelous person. Just great. It's her attitude toward people that's so marvelous. She's a very warm, outgoing, generous human being. She'd acted on Broadway (that's where she met Dad); so did her sister, Martha-Bryan Allen. Both of them got reviews that are so extraordinarily good, they make you sort of proud. Mother did light comedy; she co-starred with Lee Tracy and Elizabeth Patterson. But she gave up her career when she married Dad and I don't believe ever regretted it for a moment. She loves her house and she and Dad gave my brother and me a wonderful childhood. It just couldn't have been happier, healthier or more fun.
When Lizzie was a stage-struck teen, Robert tried to sway her decision from acting by using his wife a prime example. According to the August 1967 edition of
Screen Stars
magazine, Robert told Lizzie that her mother was wise to forfeit her career to marry him and raise a family. He went on to tout his wife as the toast of Broadway, but that she knew her career would be detrimental to raising children. “It's difficult to know who your real friends are,” Robert added. “Worst of all, acting requires the constant rejection of your real self. Sometimes you don't even know who you are anymore. Imagine what that does to a family!”
Lizzie wouldn't have to wonder about the consequences; she'd experience them first hand.
Two
“There's a little bit of a displaced person in everybody, and it's nothing to be ashamed of.”
âElizabeth to Ronald Haver, 1991
Elizabeth's young life was divided between her parents' massive estate in Patterson, New York, and their elegant home in Beverly Hills. It was there they hosted various dinner parties and Sunday brunches that were attended by the conservative likes of James Cagney, Bette Davis, Rosalind Russell, Irene Dunne, Frank Morgan, and George Arliss. Her parents moved in A-list circles, and were considered Hollywood royalty. They were well-groomed, poised, and intelligent leaders of the community. They were quiet, private, and peaceful in their everyday lives and, like many of their friends (and later, Lizzie), rejected exhibitionism and screwball conduct.
On October 13, 1930, Robert Montgomery and Elizabeth Allen gave birth to the little girl they named after Allen's sister Martha-Bryan, the infant-child whose subsequent tragic death in December 1931 at only fourteen months (due to spinal meningitis) would forever change the Montgomery family dynamic.
Elizabeth's parents resided in a small house in Los Angeles until 1932, when they moved to Beverly Hills. Approximately one year later, little Lizzie arrived at 4:30 AM on April 15, 1933 (and not 1936 or 1938). However, after her brother Skip was born on February 15, 1936, the family moved to Holmby Hills, an affluent neighborhood in West Los Angeles just north of Sunset and east of Beverly Glen, in a custom-built sixteen-room mansion with an Olympic-sized swimming pool. They lived there until they all moved to New York.
Franchot Tone, a substantial star in Robert Montgomery's league at the time, then purchased the Beverly Hills home. Elizabeth later attempted to buy it back when she married Bill Asher, but Tone wouldn't budge. Subsequently, the Ashers purchased their Beverly Hills estate on Laurel Canyon Drive from Howard Hawks (the legendary director of westerns, along the lines of John Ford), where Lizzie remained after her divorce from Bill, through her marriage to Bob Foxworth, and until her demise.
Elizabeth told Ronald Haver in 1991 that her childhood was “all very kind of abnormally normal.” As Foxworth explained on A&E's
Biography
in 1999, the upscale world that she grew up in did not contribute to a regular childhood. She was expected to dress properly and to have good manners and behave in a certain way. She took that as an act, Foxworth believed, because it failed to mirror her own true feelings. So, in a sense, he said, “she was always an actress.”
In March of 1939, Robert Montgomery told
Collier's Magazine
that his farm in the Towners section of Patterson, New York, near Brewster was his refuge from acting. He lived there three months a year and any visitor to the farm who mentioned the entertainment industry in any way was reportedly “apt to be slugged.”
Robert Montgomery's love-hate partnership with Hollywood would mirror his personal relationship with Lizzie. She didn't get along with her father because, as Foxworth also surmised on A&E's
Biography
, to some extent her father was envious of Elizabeth's popularity.
Billy Asher, Jr., the first of Lizzie's three children with William Asher, blamed the ongoing rift between his mother and grandfather on their opposing political views. He, too, appeared on
Biography
, and said, “They just didn't see eye to eye.”
In later years, she and her dad seldom spoke. But if she phoned him, at least he'd answer, as he did when Hollywood called him abroad in May of 1939.
It was then he traveled to England to make
The Earl of Chicago
, which would become Lizzie's favorite of his films:
A Chicago gangster (Montgomery) learns he has inherited an earldom in England, and he travels to London in order to claim it; he does so, even though he remains involved with mobsters back in the States. Ultimately, he transforms from a two-bit gangster and ends up living in an English castle with this wonderful old valet (Edmund Gwenn) who proceeds to tutor him in the ways of being an earl. Unfortunately, his previous life continues to haunt him; he commits murder, is tried by a jury of his peers in Parliament, and ends up in prison. In the end, his valet brings his best clothes, knickers, silk stockings, and patent leather shoes, coat with lace collar, ultimately dressing him for his execution.
In 1991, Elizabeth expressed to Ronald Haver just how impressed she was with this movie:
It's just a gem, and it's not because he's in it. I could see anybody in it, as long as they were as good as he was in it. It is imaginative, it's beautifully directed, it's cleverly acted. Edmund Gwenn is so fabulous. It builds to such a point where they had the courage to do what they did at the end, instead of somebody saying,
You're kidding, you can't do that. How can you possibly end it this way?
I was just flabbergasted the first time I saw this. (You think)
Superman will swoop down and take this man away
. But he doesn't, and by God, the guy walks out of the prison, down to the guillotine, starts to walk up the steps and there's a wonderful cut of Edmund Gwenn in the window, looking down, where
The Earl of Chicago
is totally panic-stricken at this point. The look on his face is just the most horrendous thing. I mean, he's just scared to death, and quite rightly, when he realizes (that) nothing (is) going to save him. And he turns around and he looks as if he's about [to be] ready to run, and looks up at the window, and sees the valet at the window, and the valet bows to him, and he realizes,
Oh, God, it's just a killer
. He realizes he's gotta go through with this. Oh, I was in tears. I almost am now thinking about it. It was just extraordinary.
Lizzie then elaborated on the scene during which the Earl was tried in front of Parliament, how her father decided not to see the set before filming, or that scene's dialog. He knew his character was on trial; he had a vague concept of the questions and answers; but he had no idea about protocol:
He just didn't want to make himself familiar with the script at all. And I think when you watch the movie, you can tell, because when those doors open onto that room, it's like (he thinks),
My God, this sure isn't like any little courtroom in Chicago that I've ever seen before
. It's just this kind of awe-struck kind of almost childish thing that happens to this man. I love that movie. Can you tell?
Although Elizabeth's adult relationship with her father was strained, she never stopped loving him, and he never stopped loving her or her brother Skip. Family-oriented, Robert, unlike
The Earl of Chicago
, refused to go to Britain unless his wife and children accompanied him, and they did.
But while the Montgomerys journeyed to the United Kingdom, the Nazis invaded Norway, World War II began, and Robert promptly joined the American Field Service Ambulance Corps and was attached to the French army as an ambulance driver. A young Lizzie and her even younger brother Skip were then shipped back to the United States on an Arandora Star steamship bound for New York City.
Due to the radio silence of the time, it was eight days before their parents learned of their safe arrival under the care of Lizzie's grandmother Becca, who was there to greet and take them back to California.
In 1991, Elizabeth offered a concise description of her father to Ronald Haver for the fiftieth anniversary laserdisc release of
Here Comes Mr. Jordan
:
⦠primarily self-educated ⦠well, brilliantly ⦠with a very kind of quirky sense of humor, very stubborn ⦠arrogant ⦠pompous to a point where I wanted to slap him sometimes ⦠could be extremely understanding one minute and just irrational the next ⦠I don't mean irrational, I mean to someone that disagreed with him, irrational, obviously ⦠very obviously right-wing, politically ⦠but ⦠he was terrific with little children, and they seemed to adore him, which is always a good sign [she laughed], and he loved animals ⦠he adored my mother ⦠he adored my stepmother ⦠he was very hard on my brother, much more so on him than me ⦠he loved pretty things, like antique stuff, or modern even. He loved Andrew Wyeth, who was also a friend of his ⦠he loved Daumie, Max Beerbohm. I loved the way he dressed ⦠There were times when he'd be kind of tweedy ⦠Maybe that was his pompous wanting to be King of England department ⦠I always remembered too, when I was little, how handsome he looked in a dinner jacket. He always seemed very at home when he was dressed up a lot. Very relaxed; so it just suited him very well; as did ⦠riding a horse. He had his own kind of style ⦠and he had a great voice, really nice voice. He used to read Dickens'
A Christmas Carol
every Christmas and I used to love that. It was wonderful.
Robert Montgomery was clearly a larger-than-life figure in Lizzie's eyes, but she still referred to him as just plain “Daddy” in much the same way that
Samantha
called to her warlock father named
Maurice
(pronounced as
More-eese
) played by the late Maurice (pronounced
More-iss
) Evans.
In fact, before Evans was cast as
Maurice
, Lizzie asked Robert to play the role. “Unfortunately,” she recalled in 1989, “he said no. But I would have loved him to do it. He would have been divine in the role.”
She couldn't help but feel despondent about the ordeal. She was already disappointed that Robert had declined to narrate the
Bewitched
pilot in 1964; now he rejected the chance to play his daughter's father on-screen, as she had played her father's daughter on that “Top Secret” episode of
Robert Montgomery Presents
in 1951.
Robert, however, had been ill when she asked him to portray
Maurice
, so he may not have been able to do the role even had he so desired. And while Lizzie believed Evans was “perfect” for the part of her majestic TV father, that's how she also had described her real “Daddy.”
As a child, Elizabeth had not realized her father was a star. He just worked for a living, like everyone else's dad; he just so happened to be an actor and worked at a movie studio. That didn't seem out of the ordinary. As she explained to
Photoplay Magazine
in 1968, his work never entered their home and she rarely saw him on the job. She visited one of his sets once, maybe twice, when she was growing up, but she didn't discover his occupation until someone told her at Westlake.
As she lamented in 1992 to John Tesh on his short-lived TV show,
One on One
, it was kind of like finding out there was no Santa Claus. It never occurred to her that he was “doing something odd ⦠or wonderful ⦠or not so wonderful” with his career.