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CONFESSIONS OF AN EXPECTANT WITCH
by Dora Albert
Modern Screen
December 1965
“Honest, it’s true. I am,” she said, dimpling, and then went on to tell him how she’d been to the doctor that very morning and he’d told her that her test was positive. Dick took her into his arms and hugged and kissed her. “I’ll be the best father there ever was,” he promised. From behind the camera came the voice of Bill Asher, the director, who is Liz’s husband, the man she has really bewitched.
“That’s great, Samantha,” he said “calling her by her TV name, (as he usually does when they’re working). “A perfect take.”
Then, coming up to her, Bill put his arms around her, whispered something in her ear and kissed her just as openly as Dick York had in front of the cameras a few moments before that.
They came towards me then. The two of them were holding hands like the lovers they are – married lovers, that is. Liz smiled as she collapsed into a chair. Shielding her green eyes with her hands, she began, “I like working outdoors, but the sun bothers my eyes. I get blinding headaches afterwards from the sun. But the scene itself doesn’t give me a headache. Far from it-I love it. It has special personal meaning to me because this is the scene where I establish my pregnancy in Bewitched. Since I actually am expecting a baby at the end of this month, it was very important to know how to work around it. And it’s delightful being able to be so frankly, unabashedly pregnant when you’re an actress in a series. I can appreciate this all the more because the first time I was expecting a baby, the situation turned Screen Gems into Panicsville. The pilot of Bewitched had been sold, the sponsors lined up, the series was ready to go into production, and what happened? I made the discovery that I was going to have a baby in July, smack in the height of the production schedule. And I had to play an enticing young bride, slim as a reed.
The producers began counting the days. Obviously, I couldn’t go back to work until after the baby was born. Day after day someone from the studio would call and ask how I was feeling. When I’d say ‘Fine,’ they’d stutter a little and revise their calendars.
“Our baby was finally born on July 24th, and three weeks later I went back to work.
“This year things are different, very different. I enjoy the luxury of being comfortably pregnant while I’m working. There was no panic or confusion when Bill and I learned we were going to have another baby. One of the first things we did, after we got the news, was to call Bill’s two children by his previous marriage; Liane, who is 13, and Brian, 11. They love the baby, and we wanted them to be among the first to hear – from us, not from a gossip columnist-that there’d be another baby.
“When we called them and told them to come over to the house, that we had something important to tell them, they probably suspected. When they arrived, their eyes were as big as saucers, and the first thing Liane said was, ‘I hope this time it’s a girl,’”
Bill and Liz looked at each other and laughed; they hadn’t even told the children the news yet, but the excitement in her voice had tipped them off.
It’s typical of Liz that she likes to share the good things in her life with her stepchildren. Even when Elizabeth was pregnant for the first time, she had no false modesty. She made it a point to tell Bill’s children about it herself.
They had been very excited then. So close is the bond between Elizabeth and the children that they had reacted as thought the baby would be a full brother or sister. Brian had said, “I hope it’s a boy. If it is, please name him after me.” Bill had to explain that it would be mighty confusing to have a half brother by the same name.
When William Allen Asher was born, Brian felt, because the baby was a boy it was a personal triumph for him. Chortling proudly, he informed Liane, “I told you it was going to be a boy. Liz had a good doctor.”
Liz’s green eyes grow soft when she talks about her stepchildren. It is obvious that there is great closeness between them. “Although Bill’s children live with their mother, we see a lot of them and encourage them to think of our house as their second home. It’s true that we’re in pretty cramped quarters now, in a rented house with two bedrooms and a den. But there’s a room for the children, it’s a small back room but it’s theirs, and they use it often. Now that we’re expanding our family, we’ll move to a larger home, and we’ll have two separate rooms for Liane and Brian.
“About every other weekend they’re with us; we have a great time, mostly in the outdoors. We’ve gone to Disneyland with them, and we go to the beach and to ball games together. They love to play with the baby. Liz smiled, obviously enjoying her memories of the children’s fun.
Liane and Brian happily accept Elizabeth as a grown-up friend. They respond to her with the same warmth that children in Bewitched respond to Samantha.
When I asked her, “do you think the children regard you as a stepmother?” she replied quickly, “Well, if they have to classify me, I guess that would be the way they would do it. But I don’t know what you mean. Do you mean a stepmother like Cinderella’s wicked stepmother?” Her happy laughter rang out, at the ridiculous notion.
She went on, more seriously, “Being with Bill’s children has not required one moment of effort. I wish I could say that I have been a very intelligent stepmother, that that’s the secret of my success with them, but that’s not exactly it. They happen to be the easiest children to get on with. Of course, they’re naughty sometimes, but what child isn’t?
“I think it helps that they like Samantha so much,” Liz said. Then, noting the look of incredulity on my face, she laughingly went on. “Yes, I mean that. They are so fascinated by Samantha that I think, in turn, they see qualities in me that they wouldn’t see otherwise. For instance, they are positively intrigued with Samantha’s magic twitch and have tried to copy it. They don’t get it exactly right, but they always come to me to ask how to do it. So you see, there are some pretty unusual things they admire about me. How many stepmothers know how to twitch successfully?”
“Of course, they’re too old to expect magic results, aren’t they?” I asked.
Liz’s mouth turned up at the corners. “I don’t think anyone is ever too old to hope for magic,” she said.
There’s a bit of Samantha’s magic in the way she handles Brian and Liane. Even when she has to disappoint them, she somehow manages to keep them from feeling let down.
“Once, at the beach they wanted to take out a surfboard without Bill, who couldn’t be with us that day. Their hearts were set on it, but I had to say ‘No.’ Their faces fell, but they obeyed. I couldn’t take a chance on their going out alone and I couldn’t very well go surfing with them at the time. I was quite pregnant.”
She loves being pregnant. There’s a glow of happiness about her. Whenever she talks of the baby, of Bill’s other children, or about Bill, a look of absolute radiance comes over her face. “A woman’s life isn’t complete without children,” she said softly. “Bill is a fantastic father. He gets as much joy out of being pregnant as I do.”
She paused her a moment, and her eyes lit up as she recalled, smiling, “the first time, I didn’t tell Bill, he told me. We were just about to go out to dinner and he put his arms around me and said, ‘You’re pregnant.’
“I hoped I was but hadn’t been to the doctor yet, and was almost superstitious about his saying it. I said, ‘Oh, Bill, don’t say it. I don’t want our hopes to go up and then be disappointed.’
“He looked at me in the most wonderful way, and said ‘I can tell because I love you.’ A week later, I saw the doctor and he confirmed Bill’s prognosis.
“The second time, we learned the news at the same time. I was working on Bewitched that day and had to call the doctor, I was so nervous. You hope and pray something is going to happen, but then you’re afraid that maybe it won’t. There is that nervous, awful wait after the nurse answers and says, ‘Yes, Dr. MacDonald will be with you soon.’ I’d gone to our regular doctor; I hadn’t dared go to our obstetrician. I’d been afraid that he’d burst out laughing if I called him. The first thing I had said when I was wheeled out of the delivery room last year was, ‘I’ll be back in a year.’
“So when I held the telephone receiver in my hand, waiting for the news, I was thrilled when the doctor said, ‘Yes, the test is positive.’
“Bill was sitting beside me at the time. We were together in my dressing room, between takes. It was so marvelous for us to find out together. We cried with happiness. We were just as thrilled as the first time. We’d wanted to have a second baby as soon as possible. Right after our first baby was born I’d asked the doctor, ‘How soon can I have another?’ He’d laughed and said, ‘I think you’d better wait six months.’ His eyes had twinkled at my impatience.
“But Bill had understood. He understands everything about me. He knows that in spite of any success I have in my career, there are many things that are more important to me. My great desire is to have a houseful of children.”
This is undoubtedly another of the reasons why Liz became so fond of Bill’s children so quickly. One of the first things she did after she married Bill was to ask to meet his children.
“What I hoped for most, was that we could become good friends,” she said, those big eyes of hers sending out sparkling green lights. The sun was going down; she no longer needed to shield them. “We liked each other right away. We all went swimming together that afternoon. That capped it. We were not strangers any more. We took them to dinner in a restaurant in Beverly Hills, then to a movie. I don’t remember where or what we ate or what the movie was-just that we were careful to choose what the children would enjoy. The most important thing was the children. I was concerned about their having a good time and liking me; I was crazy about them. We became friends immediately.
“After our fist day together, Bill didn’t say much, but I could see how pleased he was. A man likes to have his children enjoy what he enjoys.” She didn’t add, “and love the woman he loves.” She didn’t have to. It was obvious.
Bill, like Liz, wants a lot of kids. “I can’t specify how many children we want,” said Liz, smiling. “The sooner they come, the better. If we’re lucky, we’ll have three or four or six – who knows?”
Perhaps one of the reasons Liz is in such a hurry to have her “houseful of children” is to make up for her two previous marriages, both of which ended in divorce, and produced no children. When she was 21, three years after she’d made her social debut, Liz married Frederic Cammann, a society figure and at the time assistant casting director for her father, in a big society wedding in New York. It lasted a little over a year. Shortly afterwards, footloose and restless, she married Gig Young, whom she had met when she was doing The Billy Mitchell Story.
Liz won’t talk about either marriage. “Bill and I are so wonderfully happy now, why should I dwell on something that was downbeat and unpleasant?” she asked. Like Samantha, the witch with the Pollyanna attitude, Liz prefers to dwell on the positive things in her life.
Her relationship with Liane and Brian stresses the positive-and for a reason. When Liz was 17, she saw her parents, who had been happy together for many years separate and divorce. Her father, Robert Montgomery, was one of the handsomest and biggest stars in Hollywood, but she worshipped him as a father, not a celebrity, and it hurt her to discover that he and her mother would no longer be together. She and her younger brother, Skip, remained with their mother, but saw their father often. If that divorce had any traumatic effect on her, Liz would be the last to admit it. But it did render her more sensitive to the hurts that might in inflicted on children when their parents parted. No one needed to advise Liz, “Be careful what you say to Liane and Brian; they’re sensitive.”
These children are an integral part of Liz’s family life. She feels that they understand the affection between herself and Bill, and that it gives them a deeper sense of security than if she and Bill tired to hide thier feelings from the children. She told me, “Bill and I love each other deeply, we show our affection openly, but I don’t think our relationship gets overly-sweet and sticky.”
Liz was obviously referring to the carping observation of a writer who wrote that theirs was a “cloying affection.” He thought it odd that when they weren’t standing side by side, they sometimes blew kisses to each other, and that Asher wore a chain around his neck containing a ring with the Montgomery family crest – a woman in a Grecian robe poised on a wave.
Elizabeth laughed. She didn’t take the writer’s criticism seriously. “I think our affection would seem cloying only to someone who has never known real love, or to someone who has had real affection and lost it and can’t bear to see others enjoy it. After that article appeared, Alice Pearce started referring to us kiddingly as ‘the real McCloys.’”
I asked Liz if she sometimes felt deprived because she can’t see the baby when she’s working, which is most of the time.
“Actually, no,” she said. “I hate to leave him in the morning, but we see him so much when we get home. He’s a night owl-very obliging, that way. He is up when we get home around 7:39, and he gets all the love in the world from us, also from his nurse, Brycie, and the maid and the cook, Olivia. I’m afraid they spoil him. When a baby gets the kind of love he gets, it doesn’t matter if his parents aren’t around 24 hours a day.
“The baby looks a lot like Bill. He’s built like Bill, with Bill’s broad shoulders. He’s a happy, healthy baby with a marvelous appetite. When he sees food coming, he says, ‘Yum, yum,’ which were practically the first two syllables he ever spoke.
“With a baby, life is always new and exciting. William is such a delight with his wonderful disposition. He’s fallen down a bumped his head a few times but there was never a peep out of him.”
As we talked, Liz’s eyes would stray every now and then to Bill. Though he was many feet away, directing Dick York in a special scene in which he was supposedly changed into a chimpanzee, there often seemed to be a silent communication between Liz and Bill.
She laughingly explained, “The scene is supposed to take place on our first anniversary. For that anniversary, Aunt Clara gave Samantha an apron and a golf cap for my TV husband, only it didn’t fit him, till she turned him into a chimpanzee by mistake.”
Take the cue, I said, “I don’t suppose anything nearly as exciting happened on your wedding anniversary.”
“Our wedding anniversary was rather quiet,” she admitted. :”We went to a small restaurant for dinner, and dawdled over our meal for a long time. I suppose our lives would seem very sedate to many people. I remember one Saturday night recently when we left the house to go out to dinner. We asked each other where to go. We couldn’t make up our minds. Neither of us could think of a place. After driving around for quite a while we headed home. We both realized there was no place except home where we could be so quiet and cozy that evening. There we would not have to talk or listen except when we felt like it. We could play chess together, as we often do (Bill always beats me). Best of all, we could enjoy the warmth of quiet, sometimes wordless companionship.
“It is absolutely extraordinary the happiness we have found. It is wonderful to be at peace with yourself and know that what you have is complete. Bill has done this for me, and I hope I have done it for him. I never dreamed that anything could be this wonderful. When your previous experiences have been unhappy, that makes you so appreciative of what you have.
“Strangely, although we have this great thing between us, Bill and I didn’t fall in love at first sight. Bill and I became friends; we saw a lot of each other.” Her eyes grew soft. “When something’s right, it evolves. Everything seemed so natural. Our love evolved.
Everything one of us likes, the other likes. What makes Bill angry makes me angry. It’s amazing. It’s all so right between us.”
Some people have wondered if there isn’t too much togetherness in a marriage where two people do everything together.
“People don’t know what is right for others,” said Liz sagely. “Some can’t work together. But it’s great for Bill and me.”
The children appreciate her almost as much as Bill does, in a different way. One day a neighbor’s son asked Brian, “Is your stepmother really a witch? Can she really do all those magic things?”
Brian grinned. “You bet she can. She’s real magic. Real.”
Bill thinks so, too.
Thanks to Allison for this article.