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by Richard Warren Lewis
TV Guide
November 28, 1964
LIz's press agent arrived bearing a 4-foot-high china pussycat with a smile that matched his client's Cheshire grin and began outlining Halloween-oriented publicity photographs involving the two felines. Through the door of the dressing room, emblazoned with a sequined gold star, came the sounds of a radio broadcast indicating that the Yankees had tied up the fifth game of the World Series. Stagehands' reactions to the ball game interrupted, for the moment, a buzz of conversation about the latest ratings, which showed that Bewitched was the highest rated of all the new series.
Amid all this activity Miss Montgomery casually sipped clam chowder from a paper cup, tinkered with the Sunday New York Times crossword puzzle, offered out-of-focus color shots of her infant son in a bassinet and prepared to affix half-inch-long phony black eyelashes for her next scene. Over the previous three months, she had given birth to her first child and then filmed 12 television shows in an accelerated, 14-hour-a-day regimen that would wither a less hardy specimen. "The pressure has been just awful," she coolly admitted from her perch on an artificial leopard-skin chair. "It's something that I will never go through again. It gets to a point where I'm ready to scream. I never seem to be able to catch up. I look around and think it's kind of ridiculous for grown-up people to be playing these games."
When the pilot show of Bewitched was being filmed last November, the only apparent pressure was how to inject the fanciful script (the story of a Manhattan advertising man who discovers that his wife, Samantha, is a witch endowed with supernatural powers) with a suffciency of clever gags. Then, not long after the filming ended, it was discovered that Miss Montgomery, who was secretly married to her third husband, was just as mortal as most women. She had become pregnant. Despite her delicate condition, the show was sold for the 1964-65 season to Chevorlet and Quaker Oats, whose advertising-agency executives nervously began counting the days until childbirth.
The Asher heir was slated to arrive last July 21, already well beyond the date that every other televison series had gone into production. But by July 24, Liz was still languishing in her modern Malibu beach home, her bags packed with extra night clothes and Dr. Spock, waiting for some telltale stirrings inside herself. At the studio Asher hastily revised his shooting schedule, filming every scene in the first five episodes that did not involve his wife. "They could have shot until doomsday without me but it wouldn't have done too much good," Liz recalls. "People are continually calling me up and asking: 'How do you feel?' I'd say 'Fine.' They'd say: 'Oh.' I really began to feel rather guilty about the whole thing. Everybody was terribly nervous about getting at least several shows completed before we went on the air. The studio was nervous. The sponsors were nervous. The network was nervous. I wasn't nervous, though."
Miss Montgomery's placid exterior vanished suddenly when labor pains started. Her mother rushed her to St. John's Hospital in Santa Monica, where Asher joined her. The resulting 7-pound, 6-ounce baby was named William Allen Asher.
This blessed event relieved most of the harried Bewitched staff, although some concern still existed over when their leading lady would be ready to act again. Two days following the delivery, Liz sat propped up in bed, learning lines from her first three scripts. "At first," she remembers, "the doctor said I could start work six weeks after the baby was born. That would have left us in a big time bind. So I said: 'What about five weeks?' He said: 'Well, if it's desperate.' Then I asked: 'How about four weeks?' He said: 'No.' And I said: 'Marvelous. Now how about three weeks?'" At 6:30 A.M., exactly 24 days after becoming a mother, Liz reported on the set to be made up as Samantha.
"I guess it was crazy," she admits, "because my system was all out of whack. It really has been exhausting. I don't have anywhere near the amount of energy I used to."
THE MADDENING SCHEDULE
The unusual rapport between Liz and her husband made her maddening schedule (some show's were completed in a scant three days) much more tolerable. Asher lovingly squeezed as much work as possible out of his wife without jeopardizing her weakened condition. The pair communicated so well that often it took only grunts, looks, or catch words like "Zip Zip" or "Zap Zap" barked out by Asher behind the camera to quickly convey the desired emotional or physical response.
Wearing a velours sweat shirt and slippers adorned with fox heads, the balding director darted in panther-like strides between mike booms and electrical cables, coaxing, cajoling and periodically calling for "the witch twitch," the rabbitlike, lip-quivering gesture Liz forms with her mouth and nose when implementing her necromantic powers.
A veteran comedy director (I Love Lucy, Danny Thomas, Patty Duke), Asher also proved a sympathetic morale booster off-camera. Unabashedly, while watching rushes in screening rooms or fixing lines of dialog in her dressing room, he kissed her on the cheeks, lips and ears. They held hands like newlyweds and exhanged little endearing compliments. When the Ashers were not in close proximity, they blew kisses to one another. Asher also developed a wolf whistle to assess his wife's charms from a distance.
Such pleasantries frequently helped inspire Liz to vivid performances on first or second takes, thereby allaying front-office fears of further delays. The stakes in keeping his wife and the show in good humor and within budget are high. The Ashers own a substantial percentage of the show's profits and also share in projected merchandising rights, which may include a Samantha doll, a flavor of ice cream called "Bewitched," jewelry, dresses, slippers and cosmetics. Asher also draws a salary from each episode for his role as "production consultant."
Detractors of their cloying affection cite the symbolic ring that Asher wears on a chain around his neck as a replacement for a lost St. Christopher medal. The ring bears the centuries-old Montgomery family crest--a woman in a Grecian robe standing on a wave with an anchor in one hand and a man's head in the other, bearing the motto: Garde Bien.
Asher does just that, virtually around the clock. On weekends he and Liz take turns outdoing each other cooking beef Stroganoff (Bill is the superior Stroganoff chef), riding matched Italian bicycles side-by-side near the Pacific Ocean, and humming along to Broadway musical scores on the phonograph. On working days, after a jangling alarm clock and two phone calls from an answering service awaken them before dawn, they dress and then don his-and-her hooded parkas. Hers is a mustard gold velours with a red-fox-lined hood, while his is a weather-beaten poplin. With Asher at the wheel they drive the 45 minutes to the studio through the morning fog in a white Mercedes-Benz 220S convertible. Liz leaves her own Jaguar XK-E in the garage.
Constant companionship has helped ruin a number of show-business marriages, but so far, it has failed to derail this one. "The only problems we have are when we're not together," says Liz, who stands taller than Asher, at 5-feet-8-inches, when she wears heels. "Then both of us are kind of miserable. If you're going to have two careers in a family, it really is ideal to do it this way. Right now I can't think of anything more desirable than being with him."
Apparently the combination of motherhood, a stable family life after two broken marriages (with actor Gig Young and New York TV casting director Frederic Gallatin Cammann) and a common professional interest has paid off in the show's overnight success. Reviewers have been extremely complimentary in assessing Miss Montgomery. One notably caustic critic, Jack O'Brian of the New York Journal-American, was so mesmerized he wrote, in some classically mangled syntax: "Miss Montgomery is an uniquely equipped amulet for this feather hocus-focus. She has beauty, youth and a splendid subtlety in her reactions, able to register many a mood most girls would indicate simply by sticking out their tongues; she manages with the merest moves, eyelash batting and eyefuls of dancing glints in her admirably suppressed 'takes' and just-barely grimaces and amused gloatings."
In simpler English, much of the show's impact derives from Liz's scrubbed-clean, all-American witch appearance. "When people normally think of witches," she explains, "they imagine either funny old crones with long noses or someone kind of dark and sultry. The fact that I don't look exotic and witchlike is an enormous boost for the show's form of humor."
NO CAPS FOR HER
Liberal applications of makeup on the face of the 32-year-old actress help cast the spell. She utilizes corrective powders to make her nose look smaller under the bright, overhead lights and a blend of natural skin tones to ensure a more youthful glow on her cheeks and forehead. These are the only real modifications she allows on the countenance she has fought to retain for years in the film business. Her pert, turned-up nose has never been bobbed nor her teeth capped. In fact, her two upper front teeth are actually crooked. She chipped the right one in a fall from a horse, leaving a little opening which has never been replaced. "It's my snaggletooth in front," she admits, facetiously. "All witches have one. I don't think it's worth going to a dentist and spending hundreds of dollars to repair it. You couldn't cap just that one, you'd have to do them all. And then you'd end up with a mouth full of Chiclets."
Bewitched appears to have made a big hit with viewers. Among infants, however, it has failed to amass any appreciable following. The night the show premiered last September, William Allen Asher, then eight weeks old, was permitted to stay up past his bedtime and watch. For a while, he sucked on one of the year's supply of inflatable plastic baby bottles he received as a gift from an advertising agency. Then, just after the first commercial, he yawned and fell asleep.