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11 BABIES IN FIVE YEARS
by Jane Wilkie
TV Radio Mirror
November 1969
It began with the arrival of her firstborn, Billy, July 24, 1964--a few weeks before she reported to the set of her spanking new series that follows witches (good and bad) through contemporary situations. By the start of the second season Liz was expecting her second child. Bobby bowed in on Oct. 5, 1965, a few months before Samantha, Liz's TV counterpart, gave birth to baby Tabatha--and that's where the figures go kaput. For Tabatha, to date, has been portrayed by no less than seven infants!
First there was little Cynthia Black (pictured above), who was only 2 1/2 weeks old when she played the newborn Tabatha. She was soon replaced by the Gentry twins, Heidi and Laura. And they by twins Julie and Tamar Young. And they by the Murphy twins, Erin and Diane, who currently play Tabatha on camera. And the reason for all the changing: Tabatha has to grow a bit faster on the show than a baby grows in real life.
Then, last June 17th, Liz gave birth to her own baby girl, Rebecca Elizabeth. And on Bewitched, sometime in November, Samantha will have another baby, too. That's one plus one plus seven plus one plus one--eleven. Simple? About as simple as Liz's off-camera life. Which leads to the often-asked question--what's Liz Montgomery really like? Well, she's much like Samantha in Bewitched--same grin, same funny way of tossing off a good line, same old-shoe quality.
But there are differences. She lives in a much bigger house than Samantha does. Instead of being married to an advertising man, she's wed to a producer, Bill Asher, who heads up Bewitched. In real life there are the three children instead of two. Liz has four dogs, with names like Llama, The Boozer, Puck--and even a mutt called Who. And she does not, thank heaven, go around in private life twitching her nose!
We found out about her old-shoe quality the afternoon we interviewed her in "That House," so-called because everyone who sees it says, 'I wish I lived in that house." It is rambling, roomy, ivy-covered, gabled and eaved, crammed with antiques (Liz's hobby), a house that immediately makes a guest as relaxed as a puddle.
Wearing a casual blouse, slacks and tennis shoes, Liz greeted us at the door. Meeting her for the first time, we addressed her as Mrs. Asher. A grimace flashed across her face, a reaction she explained later: "When you called me Mrs. Asher, I thought, Wow! This is going to be a dull afternoon. Please call me Liz."
Acting? Well maybe, because actresses can't help acting, but she comes across sincere. And, like the house, comfortable. She sat curled up on a couch, which like all the other couches in the house had something tossed over the back--a crocheted quilt, a blanket, in one instance a tigerskin. The room, a den, was graced by an enormous fieldstone fireplace, and the polished floors were half covered by hand-braided woolen rugs. There were paintings of horses and a gaggle of owls--wooden owls, painted owls, ceramic owls. "Because I think owls are funny," explained Liz.
Liz is funny. She told us about the day she and Asher moved into the house, back in 1965 when she was momentarily expecting Robert: "I was so big I looked like a packing case. The moving men almost picked me up a couple of times. Being me, I had to get into the act, and every time I leaned over to pick up something I couldn't pick myself up, and one of the men would straighten me up and cluck at me for being so active in that condition."
Before her last baby arrived, Liz repeatedly claimed she wanted another boy. But that's not the way she was talking when Robert was still a babe in arms. "Bill and I would like to try for a girl," she'd said. And the more she'd thought about it the more she'd seemed to like the idea then. "Yes, I'd like to have a little girl playing around the house. I'd bet anything the little witch would have her daddy and two brothers eating out of her tiny hand in a matter of months. I suppose that goes for me, too. I don't think my magic could stand up against that of a darling good little witch."
LITTLE REBEL DEBUTS
So, of course, little Rebecca Elizabeth was most welcome. "My reason for the Rebecca is that it was my grandmother's name, but with Rebecca Elizabeth, it'd be legitimate to call her Rebel," she explained. "I sort of hope that happens. I went to school with a hellion named Rebecca whose nickname was Reb--not Becky. If the baby had been a boy he'd have been called John. I kind of like Adam--but Adam Asher!" (She wrinkled her nose just a bit.) "That's too cutsie poo."
The mounting total of real plus reel children gives the impression that Liz Montgomery is almost constantly pregnant. She reacted to the suggestion with wide-eyed wonder. "For heaven's sake--there were three whole years and eight moths between Robert and Rebecca!"
Still, though Liz is delirious at having a daughter, she wouldn't have minded a third son at all. "I'm mad for boys. I think they're great. Maybe it's because I'm used to them: I was raised with my brother Skip and a boy cousin."
The fact is that Liz, in her thirties, is still a bit of a tomboy. She swims, rides, plays tennis, and is an avid racing fan. One day in her dressing room at the studio she was sprawled out on the floor with a copy of the Racing Form, when a publicity man walked by and howled in protest. Liz Looked up from the scratch-sheet, pencil clenched in her teeth, and asked what was the matter.
"If you ever want to ruin your image," said the publicity man, "this sort of thing will do it."
Liz laughed at the memory. "Lord, I adore horses. We go to the track every Saturday. I even named a character in Bewitched after a horse. There's a horse named John Van Millwood, a great big thing that can't get his legs straightened out until he's halfway around the track. And once when a script had a character--I think it was an old boyfriend of Endora's--he had some plain old name so I asked if we could call him John Van Millwood."
Besides the track, Liz loves football and, with a passion, baseball. In point of fact she was slightly put out with Robert who insisted on being born at a time that precluded Liz's attendance at the World Series opening game. And then when she first saw the baby she said, "Look at his shoulders! He's a cross between Johnny Roseboro and Roy Campanella!"
Along with her interest in sports goes an unfailing energy that is remarkable in its consistancy. When working, Liz rises at 5 A.M. and doesn't return home until shortly before 8 P.M. The crew on Bewitched keeps expecting her to fall apart, but she never does, and on days off hits the Ashers' tennis court with the verve of Billie Jean King.
"I don't know where the energy comes from," she admitted. "I guess that innately I have that thing that animals and children have. When they're tired they just doze off. You look for Johnny and find him zonked out on his bed. So I guess I do what I have to, but I know when to stop and rest."
Liz figures more rest is necessary after the birth of her daughter than she was able to get after the arrival of both Willie and Robert. She began work as Samantha only two weeks after Willie's birth. "And Robert was born 15 months later--kinda close--and when I went to work two months later I looked like a hat rack. I was down to 108 pounds and at almost five-feet-seven that's much too skinny. This time I'm taking it easy."
"Taking it easy" in Liz's terms includes such things as a trip to Disneyland two weeks before Rebecca was born. Disneyland being what it is, a western Times Square, the venture was tantamount to lunacy, considering that Mrs. Asher might possibly have foaled on the Matterhorn ride. But she waved off the possible dangers.
"Grant you, it was a little exhausting. I was there from two in the afternoon until seven at night and hardly ever sat down except for rides. But my mother had written from the farm" (in upstate New York, where Liz spent much of her girlhood) "that when she came out to California for the birth of the baby, she'd take the boys to Disneyland. And poor Mom hadn't even gotten into the living room before they were tugging at her and wanting to go to Disneyland that minute. So we went the next day, and was it ever a riot. But you must understand I wasn't any heroine. In addition to mom there was the man who drives for us, and we took a nurse along. So it wasn't such a big deal, really."
PAMPERED BY CREW
She refuses to be pampered, whether she's pregnant or not. "On the set, when I'm expecting a baby, the crew becomes kind of protective, as though they were the fathers. They're so dear, these rough and tumble guys who say, 'Just get up and give her that chair!' To anybody, even visiting V.I.P.'s! And I whisper, 'No, no, it's okay.' And they say, 'It is not!' They teased me when they found out I was expecting Rebecca. Somebody said, 'Well, here we go again.' And I said, 'What do you mean? It's been ages!'"
Liz admits she loves to act, but motherhood is more important; and she fills this role with warmth and love and a barrelful of common sense. Her sons were old enough to notice her pregnancy and, until that happened she didn't mention the expected baby.
"Why tell them at the beginning?" she reasoned. "It makes it interminable for them. And as far as answering their questions, I think you should do it by leveling with them, explaining as honestly as you can without getting into a college physiology course. And they're more than satisfied."
Willie and Robert entered the room at this point, one blond, one dark-haired, and both minding their manners. When they left, Liz said, "I have another theory on telling children about new babies. I think some parents make too big a fuss about a coming baby. Think what that does to a child: He gets the impression something's going to take over from him. These little things think, What's the matter with me? What's she need a new one for? Before Rebecca, I told Robert that now he, too, could be a big brother, and he figured, Wow! That's kinda neat."
BACK TO NATURE
All three Asher sprouts (and any more that might arrive) have it made with a mother, and father, who love the outdoors. Each year they make a trip to their grandmother's farm, and, when at home, live in a pastoral idyll that seems far removed from the hubub of Beverly Hills. The house sits on a rise overlooking perhaps two acres of pastoral scene--birch trees, a winding driveway ("If you like it now, with the white gravel," Liz told us, "you should have seen it when it was just a dirt road. It was beautiful, but you couldn't sit down for the dust in the house") and long grass rippling in the breeze.
"We keep the grass long on purpose, so it'll look like a meadow. And we have to have a special lawn mower to cut it. I like things sort of wild and natural and I'm forever arguing with our Mexican gardener, who has a clip-clip, trim-trim complex--and pretends he can't understand a word of English. He must by now. He was with the house when it was built, the year before I was born, I think.
"Manuel is extraordinary: He has the strength of ten men, although he is 92," she giggled. "He lies about his age, too, so he must be 106. I hate at this late date to ruin his reputation as a neat gardener but I'm afraid I'm going to have to. I just like things to grow natuarlly instead of being pruned into formality."
The grounds also include a pool near the house. "When we moved in there was an enormous pool down where the tennis courts are now. The thing was 62 feet long and had subterranean chambers you could walk through. I only did that once: I was terified! I kept thinking somebody up there might put a foot through the bottom of the pool and I'd drown. It would have cost us a fortune to update the old pool so we built a new one closer to the house and filled up the old one and put tennis courts on top of it. Now, whenever I play bad tennis I say 'What a great place for a pool!'"
Liz is a fine tennis player who admits she hasn't yet managed to beat her husband at the game. "Which reminds me," she said, "I was walking past a magazine stand not long ago and looked down and yipes, in great big letters a cover said LIZ MONTGOMERY: 'MY HUSBAND BEATS ME!' I picked it up and read and read--endless things they'd made up. Just terrible. I finally got to the message, which was that my husband beats me at tennis. And at chess. Which is bad enough in fact, let's face it, but to have it in print!"
We asked how she stands up under the chore of being interviewed, after five years of a TV show in the top ten, and Liz answered with refreshing honest:
"Well, there are some press you'd like to blow up. I mean, you're misquoted all the time. One woman wrote that I never wanted to do Bewitched. Are you ready for that? She couldn't have been listening to me. Or the writer who reported I'd never thought about acting. That's all I thought about the whole time I was in school. As for interviewing, well, you get so tired of the same questions. It gets to a point where I'm dying to say something outrageous and shocking. Of course, I know if I saw it in print I'd faint--but the temptation is overwhelming!"
Liz Montgomery, now as famous as her father ever was, is finding fame just a bit wearing, particularly when strangers insist on approaching her in public and working their noses into a wild twitch. After all, it can't be funny after the hundreth time.
"I'm not complaining, but it's just that you can't go out for a walk anymore," she said, "Bill and I used to love to go to the market and have a ball shopping for food: we both love to cook. But what used to take 20 minutes now takes two hours. At first you think it's never going to bother you. That's what's funny: You read about actors complaining about fans and you can't understand it. And then, suddenly you're playing tennis at the club one day and there they are, lined up on the fence with their cameras--and your game goes to pot."
With her life having been split between the east and west coasts of America, Liz prefers the East. "I like the forests and the change of season. And I adore winter. What gets to me out here--on Christmas people say, 'Good morning, Merry Christmas.' And then somebody yells, 'Hey, wanna go in swimming?' Swimming on Christmas! It's indecent!"
HAVING A LOT OF FUN
We asked if Liz intends to give up acting when (and if) Bewitched ever folds. "Heck, no. I'm grateful for the success of the show and have an awful lot of fun doing it--and I'd like to go right on having fun acting in other roles."
Bill Asher blew in then, a brawny, virile man, who gives off an aura of energy exceding even Liz's, and asked how the interview was going.
"I don't think she's got a thing," said Liz, "We've been having such giggles and stuff."
"Some press think we're dull interviews," Asher added, "because we don't join in the Hollywood social scene. And we figure the best place for a vacation is home, because we so seldom get the chance to be here. On weekends we chase everybody, so there's just the kids and us."
Dull? They're not dull--they're bewitching. And, after talking with Liz, we weren't the least surprised that she could do incredible things--like be mama to 11 babies in five years!