Twitch Upon a Star (39 page)

On February 6, 2012,
Time Magazine
published a fascinating cover story, “The Power of Shyness: The Upside of Being an Introvert (and Why Extroverts are Overrated)” by self-admitted introvert Bryan Walsh who wrote:

Shyness is a form of anxiety characterized by inhibited behavior. It also implies a fear of social judgment that can be crippling. Shy people actively seek to avoid social situations, even ones that may be inhibited by fear. Introverts shun social situations because, Greta Garbo–style, they simply want to be alone … Caution, inhibition, and even fearfulness may be healthy—and smart—adaptations for the overstimulated person, but they're still not characteristics many parents would want in their children, especially in a society that lionizes the bold. So it's common for moms and dads of introverted offspring to press their kids to be more outgoing, lest they end up overlooked in class and later in life. That, however, can be a mistake— and not just because our temperaments are difficult to change fundamentally.

Still, Lizzie did somehow manage to show up that day in 1985 with Scott Osborne on
Entertainment Tonight
, and she made four other rare appearances on TV talk shows with live audiences. She was by no means a frequent talk show guest, like Totie Fields, Burt Reynolds, or Zsa Zsa Gabor, but there she was on:
The Dennis Miller Show
(in 1992 with Robert Foxworth),
The Merv Griffin Show
(in December 1970 to promote her favorite
Bewitched
episode, “Sisters at Heart”),
The Joey Bishop Show
(in 1967 with Michele Lee, who would later appear with Elizabeth in the 1976 TV-movie
Dark Victory
), and
The Mike Douglas Show
, on November 4, 1966, an especially riveting segment in which she proved telling, honest, and protective, all at once.

Here are some highlights from the
Douglas
interview in particular, by far her most fascinating talk show appearance:

Douglas opened the show with his routine musical number, she emerged from behind the program's sliding stage doors with a strange companion: a small statue of a fox's head that Bill Asher had purchased for her at an antique shop. She brought it with her for good luck, and kept it on her lap when not in her hand.

The figurehead worked like a charm. She, Douglas, and his co-host Cesar Romero (then playing
The Joker
on ABC's camp classic
Batman
) played darts, and she won.

Later, Douglas turned to the studio audience (and the home viewer) and said, “I'm not sure if any of you know this, but Elizabeth is the daughter of Robert Montgomery.” The studio audience applauded in recognition, while she smiled and said, “I like him, too.”

When Douglas wondered if she felt her father played a role in her career, she went on to address several key aspects of the core relationship with her father:

“Probably—because it was in the family my interests peaked. I don't think you can be around something like that and either not love it or just give it up entirely. My brother (Skip) tried it for a while and just decided it really wasn't for him. And I think probably he's the only sane member of the family. But Dad helped. And people say it is a help or a hindrance to have a parent who is known. And it's definitely a help. I think it's silly to say it isn't, because I know it certainly helps open doors that [would] not necessarily open that easily or maybe never. Afterwards, I guess, it depends on ability. But certainly it helps and I've always been very proud of him.”

Douglas asked her to talk about her father's former duties as the appointed television advisor to President Eisenhower (a topic which author Steven J. Ross had touched upon during his CPAN interview at the 2012 Los Angeles Festival of Books). She said that her dad helped the President with makeup, eye-glass selection, and the teleprompter. But she couldn't remember if Eisenhower wanted to use one of those “tricky things,” because she certainly never saw their benefit. “I don't trust them,” she said. “They make me very nervous.” If she was forced to count on the electronic cue-card machine for important presidential-like speeches, she'd be a “nervous wreck” because even the thought of using one forced her to have visions of “kind of snarling into a hole or something.”

Romero chimed in and wondered if her father helped the President with speeches and diction. “Yes,” Lizzie replied. “I believe he did. And it was funny because he was getting teased, unmercifully, when he was doing makeup for the President.”

At one point, she explained when her father called her up and said, “Meet me at the White House,” which sounded strange to her.

“That's just crazy.”

But she agreed, on one condition: If he'd meet her in the makeup department.

She was kidding, but he wasn't amused. “I think that's a terrible thing to say,” he complained.

No matter. She enjoyed her meeting with President Eisenhower: “It was very exciting.” She walked into the Oval Office, and he was sitting at that “marvelous desk in that beautiful room.”

At some point, the President rose from his chair, and the first thing she noticed was his casual attire, specifically, that he wasn't wearing a tie, which she thought “seemed kind of strange … He had on like a golf shirt—with the three little buttons and things.”

Sure enough, before she met the President, he had asked her father, “Do you think I should put on a tie?”

After Lizzie detailed her travels to Washington, Douglas asked her about the challenges of raising children with Bill Asher amidst their busy
Bewitched
schedule. She replied: “Oh, yes, well … it's a little rough and thank goodness they're young. You know, the oldest one (Billy, Jr.) is a little over two; and the youngest one (Robert, named for her father) is one year old October 5. So they're quite a handful. But the children's hours are so peculiar. But I don't think it matters as long as we have enough time to really be with them if they're kept up a little later at night as long as they get their sleep. We see them every night when we come home. We're up at 5:30 in the morning which is before they ever get up.”

Later, Cesar Romero, whom
Bewitched
producers once considered to play
Samantha's
father (a role rejected by Lizzie's father and later won by Shakespearean actor Maurice Evans), interjected how he and Asher had roomed together when they were starting out in the business, and how he had once worked for Asher's father, a producer, at Universal Studios.

The interlocking topics, though not known to all, continued when legendary theatre producer David Merrick, famous for
Hello Dolly
, later appeared with writer Abe Burrows to promote their new musical,
Holly Golightly
, based on
Breakfast at Tiffany's
, and starring Mary Tyler Moore and Richard Chamberlain.

At the onset of his interview with Merrick, Douglas ignited an odd conversation with the somewhat controversial and very opinionated Merrick which caught him and most probably everyone else off-guard. With Lizzie sitting opposite him, and with Merrick smack dab in the middle, Douglas said, “David, your image with actors is a father image.”

Lizzie's reaction remained hidden from the camera, but she might not have displayed one at all. In those days, talk show guests handled themselves with decorum and were not as outlandish, abrasive, and brutally honest or as “shock-expressive” as they are in today's “anything goes” style of reality TV. It was monumental enough that Lizzie was appearing on a talk show, let alone partaking in a segment that might open a potential can of worms.

In either case, Douglas' father-figure reference and Merrick's subsequent reply most assuredly gave her pause, considering her relationship with her dad, not to mention her then-present marriage to Bill Asher, and her prior nuptials with Gig Young—both of whom were older than she.

In response to Douglas, Merrick said:

“Well, I think that's what a producer is, sort of a father image of the whole project (in this case,
Holly Golightly
). To get it launched and to get the entire creative team together…. and when it gets into trouble … the show I mean … and it surely does very quickly, they come looking to the producer to keep it together and also to be sort of a referee in the fights. And perhaps that's the reason for the father image.”

As if to add insult to injury, Douglas then wondered if Merrick watched television. The producer responded forthrightly that he did not—again, while seated directly beside Lizzie, who was then at the peak of her popularity with
Bewitched
—the television show that all but put ABC on the map. Despite the fact that it was established in 1948, the “alphabet web” was still the youngest of the networks and it needed a hit like
Bewitched
to solidify its status.

Merrick was granted a chance to recover his dignity in Lizzie's company when Douglas asked him about beautiful women. At which point he turned to the beloved actress, glanced back at his host, and said, “Here's a beautiful woman—and a beautiful witch is best of all.”

Shortly after that, Merrick's colleague, the flamboyant Burrows, joined the panel, and brought along with him a glimpse of that future shock-expressive mentality. Within seconds of taking the stage, he mimicked “zapping” Lizzie with his hands—right before asking if she'd like to take the lead in his next play.

Possibly intrigued by the suggestion, she responded with only a giggle (and what looked like almost a twitch), certainly aware that her
Bewitched
schedule might not allow for such outside demands. Also, appearing in Burrows' next production might not have been a wise career move.

Holly Golightly
, which he and Merrick were on the
Douglas
show to promote, did not become the hit it was intended to be (which may have been one reason why Merrick appeared so testy). It starred Lizzie's TV contemporaries, Richard Chamberlain and Mary Tyler Moore, both of whom had just finished successful series runs (
Dr. Kildare
and
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, respectively). Unlike Lizzie, however, they could more easily forget
Golightly
and pursue other such assignments. But as it turned out
Holly
failed to pay off, which may have already been evident to the wise and perceptive Lizzie.

Another guest proved to be an even more intriguing addition to the panel: Reverend Rudolph W. Nemser, then the Pastor of a Unitarian church in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., and otherwise known as the “Divorce Pastor,” was seated right next to Lizzie, who was most certainly reminded of her previously failed marriages to Gig Young and to her first husband, Fred Cammann.

Former
Douglas
associate producer Kenneth Johnson would later produce and direct sci-fi TV classics like
Alien Nation
(Fox, 1989–1990), the original
V
series (NBC, 1984–1985), the original
Bionic Woman
(ABC/NBC, 1976–1979), and
The Incredible Hulk
(CBS, 1978–1982), the latter of which was one of Lizzie's favorite shows (“I absolutely love it!”).

Johnson remembers the week Lizzie appeared on the Douglas show with guest co-host Cesar Romero, “mostly because (fellow producer) Roger Ailes and I took Romero out to see Sammy Davis, Jr. in performance. And then we all spent three hours in Sammy's dressing room afterward.”

As Johnson recalls producing the daily
Douglas
show, he was one of three producers who divided the guests amongst themselves. But as he explains:

Elizabeth did not fall to me that day, so I didn't have that much communication with her. But the confluence of discussion on the show that day was truly happenstance and it's interesting in retrospect to see how it dovetailed with Elizabeth's own life. I do remember that we were delighted to have her on and that she was charming and the audience loved seeing her.

As it turns out, many fans of Lizzie and
Bewitched
are also fans of Johnson's original
Bionic Woman
series starring Lindsay Wagner (and not the NBC remake from 2007), and have for years compared the two shows and the characters of
Samantha Stephens
and Wagner's cybernetic
Jaime Sommers
. For one, performing and visual artist Ray Caspio:

Bewitched
is the first TV show I remember watching. It was on a small color television in the front room of my grandma's house when I was probably three years old, if that. The animated opening sequence combined with the music transfixed me, and when Elizabeth appeared on the screen, she did the same. There was something very accessible, yet private about her. Her heart was open and something deep was going on within. Elizabeth, as
Samantha
, represented possibility to me. Anything I wanted, I could have if I worked for it. She had the magical abilities to obtain whatever she wanted whenever she wanted, but she wasn't satisfied with that. Her power was in herself: a theme that ran through many of her characters, and a theme that runs through characters I've been inspired by since childhood, such as Lynda Carter's portrayal of
Wonder Woman
and Lindsay Wagner's
Jaime Sommers
.

Johnson explains why Wagner was cast as
Sommers
:

She had a truly real, girl-next-door quality and brought a refreshing spontaneity to the scripted material. She had a facility for really making it sound like she was making it up as she went along. Part of that came from me listening carefully to her idiomatic speech patterns and writing the character of
Jaime Sommers
in a fashion that Lindsay could most easily embrace.

A similar strategy was utilized by Bill Asher and the other
Bewitched
powers that be with Lizzie's interpretation of
Samantha
, whether it was strategizing on how to transfer her real-life nose wriggle into
Samantha's
twitch, or with phrases like these from
Samantha
that stemmed from her real-life colloquialisms: “Well,” “Oh my stars!” and “Good grief” (although Lizzie relayed in 1989 that she lifted that last one from
Charlie Brown
and the animated
Peanuts
cartoon by Charles Schulz).