WHAT'S NEW
BIOGRAPHY
PHOTO GALLERIES
SCREEN CREDITS
STAGE CREDITS
ON THE RECORD
MEMORABILIA
SIX YEAR GIG
ASHMONT
A WORTHWHILE VENTURE
LIZ'S DAD
LIZ'S BROTHER
BEWITCHED STORE
WANTED ITEMS
LINKS
GUESTBOOK
MAILING LIST
CONTACT THE WEBMASTER
SITE MAP
Modern Screen
May 1965
It took 13 years and three marriages but Liz lived to achieve success and happiness. Here's how!
Small Bill howls with laughter. He laughs so hard he gets the hiccoughs and Elizabeth picks him up to give him some water. She handles the child easily…gives him the bottle…pats his back…pats his bottom. Over her shoulder he smiles at his daddy. Then he sees the cat again and breaks up.
“That cat is just too much,” Elizabeth says. “And you know why, Bill? The baby looks at all those stuffed animals and can’t figure out why that cat runs around and the other fuzzy things don’t.”
She carries him with her to the door, hugs him, kisses his funny little nose. Bill hugs him, too. Then they hand him over to his nurse and are off to the studio. They are crazy about that baby. They talk about him all the way to work, how he looks in that new sweater their writer friend Artie Julian gave him, a white letterman sweater with a football embroidered in blue. They’ve just taken snapshots of the baby in that sweater to send to Elizabeth’s mother back east, and to her dad.
“We’ve sent thousands of pictures. Every day…when he’s grown even this much…click click click,” Elizabeth tells me later when I catch up with her and Bill on the set of Bewitched.
It’s been a rehearsal day. They are done at about three, and wander across the vast empty soundstage back to her dressing room. Hand in hand, a man and his girl. For the moment, not a director of a top show and his star, but two people in love and in work together. They’ve just remembered they never had lunch and Bill gives his girl a quick kiss and dashes off to get her a hamburger, while she and I talk.
This is my first meeting with Elizabeth Montgomery and she is not at all the star image I’d expected…expected because this is a Hollywood child, the daughter of a great star. Her dad Robert Montgomery dominated the screen in the 30’s and 40’s along with Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Henry Fonda and Gary Cooper. Pictures like Night Must Fall, The Earl of Chicago and They Were Expendable made film history. So this girl grew up in Hollywood and in a fabulous era. I’ve known girls from such backgrounds and Elizabeth is different. She is quiet. She listens. Her face comes alive when she listens, when she speaks. No make-up, hair drawn back into a barrette, and those marvelous eyes. On the walls of her dressing room are some quick sketches of a child named Annabelle about whom she’s writing a book. Annabelle has pigtails with polka dot bows but she also has ragamuffin eyes. Round, listening eyes, full of warmth and love like Elizabeth’s.
I guess this is the difference. Here is a Hollywood child grown into a Hollywood star, but she is happy, up to her eyebrows in happiness.
Have you ever talked to a star on a top TV show who wasn’t even a little apprehensive? Who didn’t watch the ratings with foreboding and tell you candidly, “It’s great of course, but where do we go from here? There’s nowhere to go from here but down.”
Well, meet Elizabeth. She has a top show, she also owns a part of it, it’s catapulted her “overnight’ into the stardom she’s worked for for thirteen years, and it doesn’t matter. Doesn’t really matter.
“It’s wonderful and gratifying to know that people are enjoying an idea that you enjoy… to know you’re bringing them something that gives pleasure. But if you’re lucky enough to have success with a series, it’s something that you really can’t think of as being your own. You should be grateful, of course, and you have a responsibility to the people who are watching, but success itself is something just loaned to you. Once it’s gone, if you felt you’d lost something, then the other part of your life, your basic personal life, would not be complete. That’s not right!
“I've always felt that way. I’m not riddled with ambition. Acting is something I’ve done because it’s fun and hard work. I enjoy hard work. But a career with me is about as close to last as second can get. First is my life: love, children and a home.”
And it didn’t come easily, this happiness in Elizabeth’s life. Maybe because she wanted it so much she thought she’d found it too quickly. At twenty-one she married socialite Frederic Cammann who was working as a casting director in the theater. The marriage lasted one year. At twenty-three, she married actor Gig Young. That lasted six years. Elizabeth isn’t about to discuss either marriage or their failures. Why should she – she’s found now what she’s been looking for.
The important thing is that she survived – the personal disappointments and the long, sometimes weary apprenticeship in television. And she survived, she feels, precisely because she was a Hollywood product, knew glamour for what it was worth, and saw how many women scrambled for careers because they weren‘t happy enough women. Acting was a normal, natural thing to her – both her father and mother had the talent-and it was something fun to do, not something to sacrifice your life for.
Elizabeth had two women with whom to identify as she grew up and they were both warm, outgoing, vital women who were enormously creative in their personal lives; her mother, Elizabeth Allen Montgomery, and her grandmother, Rebecca Allen.
“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.
“Mom and Dad built the house we lived in in Beverly Hills, and I love that house so I’d love to have it now, for us. It would be just perfect for us now but I guess it’s perfect for Blake and Patty Edwards, too, because they own it and I don’t see any FOR SALE signs, although I keep looking. We also had – Mom lives there now – a beautiful place in the country just sixty-five miles out of New York City. Every summer we’d go back east to stay, and it was the whole family, Mom and Dad and my grandmother and uncles and aunts and cousins. Everybody.
“There were three lakes up there and we swam like crazy. We had rowboats and horses…it really was the most wonderful life a child could have. We had such freedom, and such good discipline. We were taught never to go off on our own. We were taught to have respect for horses and guns. The older kids looked after the smaller kids and it was just a great big happy sort of world with no such thing as competition or any feeling of being left out. My whole life we went there, every summer. I loved the place so, I could hardly wait to show it to Bill and we were back there last May just two months before the baby was born. Of course, Bill fell in love with the place, too…and with Mom, who came west to be with us when I went to the hospital. She and Bill sort of held onto each other.”
Adoring horses, Elizabeth’s first dream was to be a bareback rider. She also thought about lion taming; but by the time she was eight, the movies she saw began making an impression. Whenever she and her cousin Amanda got together; they’d play detective. Without Amanda, Elizabeth had to enlist the dramatic aid of her brother, Skip. Since he was younger, his chances for good parts were pretty slim. Elizabeth took all of the good parts.
“I’ll play the king,” Skip would say when Elizabeth explained the “script.”
“No, I’m going to play the king.”
“Then can I be the princess?”
“No, you’re a boy, you can’t be the princess.”
“Then, I’ll be the prince.”
“No, I’m going to be the prince, too.”
“But how can you be the prince, when you’re a girl?”
“Well, just because . . .I’m the director.”
During “Snow White,” poor Skip was stuck in the closet where he had to make like an echo while Elizabeth sang into the wastebasket, and always, always, he was the announcer.
“Go out and announce me, Skip.”
So Skip would go out into the middle of the room and announce to the audience, which was always their grandmother Becca, “I am presenting . . .Elizabeth Montgomery!”
“No, no, Skip,” Elizabeth would protest from behind the door . . .”the great Elizabeth Montgomery!”
So Skip would say, “I am presenting the great Elizabeth Montgomery, but I don’t know what she’s going to do.”
“Don’t know what she’s going to do! Of course you know what I’m going to do. Clap, Becca, Clap!”
Her grandmother would clap, sit patiently and watch the production. She kept on watching through the years.
“In addition to Mom and Dad, Becca was the third great influence in my life,” Elizabeth tells me. “She had such a love of life, for one thing…an extraordinary imagination, and again such warmth. There wasn’t a soul she ever met who didn’t adore her. She loved children and was so good with us. She wrote a lot of songs for us and poems I would love to see published. Maybe someday I’ll illustrate them and send them off to a publisher.
“Becca spent a great deal of time with us. When Mom and Dad had to be away, she’d stay. When Dad went into the Navy, she lived with us; and she was constantly involved with me and my play-acing. She sat there and watched everything, such a lovely lady . . a small woman with enormous brown eyes and a lovely kind of auburn hair. Up until the day she died she was the youngest looking thing, terribly young and vital. She adored California and was a one-woman Chamber of Commerce. She gardened, she wrote. She was never an actress but she should have been. Two years ago she went to New York to see Mother and Aunt Martha and she said, “Now don’t tell them I’m taking my passport because if they know I want to tour Italy and England and France and Belgium and Africa, they’ll just worry. She went too.
“I’m so glad she lived to see the baby – he was one of the biggest thrills of her life, and I’m just sorry he’s going to miss having her for his audience, she was only the greatest audience I ever had.”
Slightly less appreciative was some of the faculty at Westlake School where Elizabeth was in attendance for eleven years. Se was a good student but she didn’t always work as hard as she might have, and she had a penchant for bringing some of her pets to school. A pig for instance. “One Easter I got a pig which horribly enough I called Pork Chop. My teacher didn’t know how to cope with that. And she was even more perturbed when I arrived with my Chinese hooded rats.
“The rat business started one time when Mom was going east to meet Dad, and I was there to see her off with our wonderful couple, Connie and Otis. There was a little boy walking around the station with one of these Chinese hooded rats on his shoulder. I thought it was just the thing and as Mom got on the train, I was announcing that I wanted one. Her last and very definite word was NO. Well, that Christmas Connie and Otis gave me two of these hooded rats.
“That was only the beginning. They multiple like crazy and at one point we had something like fifteen all at once. They used to get out of their cages and we were always counting noses, tails and whiskers to be sure we had them all.”
“Will you put the rats back in the cage!” Elizabeth’s mother would say.
“But I want one to sleep on my bed.”
“You can’t sleep with the rat, Elizabeth.”
“The dog sleeps on the bed.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“Well, you might roll over on it.”
This was the one argument that convinced Elizabeth to put her rat back in the cage. But not for long…
One evening there were guests and the little girl came down to meet them. She curtsied and said how-do-you-do? And right in the middle of a do-you-do, one poor lady let out a shriek and dropped her martini. Two little rat heads had peeked out from behind Elizabeth’s hair bows and two skinny rat tails were sticking out on either side.
“Elizabeth, try to keep the rats upstairs,” murmured her mother.
“Poor Mom,” she laughs now. “At one point we had three dogs, two cats, a white duck called Pittosporum, alligators, and a cockatiel named Nankypoo. The problem was Nankypoo, and Mother and Dad had given it to me themselves. Mother was always saying, “Will you please make sure the bird stays upstairs.” And if that sounds like a wild thing to say about a bird, you’ll have to understand that Nankypoo was never in his cage. He was always walking around, following somebody. He never flew. That silly bird walked. He’d get up on top of doors but he wouldn’t fly.
“We had company once and Nankypoo walked into the living room, walked up to the coffee table, up on the edge of the table, hopped to the lady’s glass and proceeded to drink half her drink. I’ve always thought it was the same lady who dropped her martini over my rats. This time she and all the other ladies screamed loudly. Nankypoo, hopped down, walked across the table, hopped to the floor, walked two feet and fell flat. He must have had a dreadful hangover next day.
“I think Mom and Dad really understood about children. They certainly understood Skip and me and never ever discouraged either one of us about the theater. (Skip acted in westerns for about four years and now works for a brokerage concern, Hayden Stone. I’m terribly proud of him.)
“They were both sweet enough to point out some of the difficulties of a show business life, especially for a girl. The difficulty is actually the matter of exposing yourself to a series of rejections. It isn’t like any other business. You’re selling yourself, offering yourself, and if you don’t get a part, it’s you who are being rejected. It’s something you have to learn to live with if you’re really serious about acting.
“Daddy not only never discouraged me; as a matter of fact, he said, ‘If that’s what you really want, how would you like to make your professional debut with me? When you’re out of school, of course.’” She made her debut on Robert Montgomery Presents. “He knew me well enough to know that being an actress would never interfere with me. Actually working with him gave me an enormous respect for the business.”
Elizabeth was fourteen or fifteen when her father first made this suggestion, and when Elizabeth was sixteen, her mother and father were divorced. “When you think everything’s fine, this comes as a blow,” she says today, “but fortunately I was old enough to understand. We all moved east. We lived in Manhattan, I with my mom and Skip, but we saw Dad all the time. I had been very close to both my mother and dad. I continued to be; I still am. I’m certain that the wonderful feeling of security I have comes from them.”
This is what sustained her during the years when life wasn’t a breeze and her dream of personal happiness kept moving away from her – that happy childhood. And then, two-and-a-half years ago, she made a picture called Johnny Cool and the director was William Asher. She’d never met him but she knew his work. “You hear about good directors,” she says. “I had turned down a number of series and always said that if I did a series, it would be wonderful to get William Asher.”
He proved just as good as she’d been told he was. She didn’t fall in love with Bill during that one picture, but she did fall in love with his directing.
As for Bill . . . can you imagine any director who would willingly marry an actress? “I always said it was the last thing I’d ever do,” he laughs when he joins us, bringing Elizabeth a coke and a hamburger in a paper sack. “Fall in love with an actress? Never! But I was aware from the first that she was special. Very definitely special. She has none of the personality which usually goes with a personality. She doesn’t possess the slightest affectation. She isn’t affected by adulation. She’s first of all what she is. Second, she’s an actress.”
“What he means,” laughs Elizabeth, sipping her coke, “is that the only drive I have is to get home. I often wondered if it was possible to be a good actress and a happy woman. I knew I could be, when I met Julie Andrews. I think she’s enormously talented…marvelous…please put that in the story, that’s one thing I want very much to say…and she seems to me to be extremely happy.”
“We’re lucky,” Bill says. “We enjoy working together, so this situation is ideal. This is what we’ve wanted ever since we’ve known each other. We found one property, brought it to Screen Gems, but meanwhile they’d found this and we liked it even better.”
By that time, they were deeply in love, and secretly married (not secretly so far as Elizabeth’s parents were concerned) and when Bewitched was finally scheduled for production, Elizabeth was having a production of her own…the baby. The studio brass was on tenterhooks. Every day the phone would ring and they’d inquire how she was.
“Fine, Just wonderful!” Elizabeth would say. And they’d answer, “Oh” with a touch of anxious disappointment. The only person unperturbed was the expectant mother. She was having the time of her life. Three weeks after her baby was born, she was before the cameras, and her and Bill’s lives have been hectic ones ever since.
“How can you stand it, seeing each other all day and all night?” people ask them. “Going to and from work together, seeing rushes together, being together every minute?”
“What’s wrong with it?” Elizabeth says. “Frankly, I think it’s marvelous.” She smiles at her husband and gives him a bit of hamburger.
“It might not work for everyone; it works beautifully for us,” he says. “There’s never a question of shop talk at home. We have both lived through the day’s experience at the studio so we’re free to talk of other things.” They share the baby-and cooking. Elizabeth’s mother is the most “incredible cook in the world. She and my Aunt M. B. and my cousin Amanda are just fantastic in the kitchen (they’re much better than I am) and I enjoy cooking too. Bill and I cook together.”
Oh-and they’re looking for houses. So far they’ve been renting, but now they want a house were they can live for years and years…a house like the one Elizabeth grew up in, where all the basic values were in the right places…where children were important and the superficial aspects of show business were recognized as superficial and acting was accepted as a damned fine art.
It has become chic to regard the children of celebrities as poor, underprivileged and half forsaken. Elizabeth Montgomery proves thats a cliché. She is Hollywood’s child.
Thanks to Allison for this article.