The TV show Bewitched is described as a comedy, but its lovely star Elizabeth Montgomery maintains it's a funny show because the characters in it are funny - not because some of them happen to be ghosts. Elizabeth Montgomery really does believe that witches and ghosts might exist.
"You'd be surprised how many
share my belief," says the actress
who stars as the witch Samantha.
"It's probably because of my TV
alter ego, but people are always
telling me about some hard-to-believe event they have experienced."
But Liz's belief in unexplainable powers does not only depend upon what she has heard from others. She has had a very real, very scary experience of her own - with a ghost!
It all began many years ago when Liz's family took her with them to Europe. Her father, Robert Montgomery, was one of America's biggest film stars at that time. He was a dashingly handsome young man whose romantic leads opposite such stars as Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Bette Davis and Rosalind Russell coupled with his natural charm and intelligence to make him a welcome addition to the group of people who served as the Jet Set of that time.
Some of the Montgomerys' English friends invited the family to spend the summer in their very elegant - and very old - country house. It was here that Elizabeth met the ghost.
"My room was on a corridor near the main stair, off which a hallway extended into another wing of the house and dead-ended some fifty feet beyond my door," remembers Elizabeth, with a shudder. You can imagine what a terrifying place this was for an imaginative young girl. Some English houses have over 100 rooms! They are dank, musty, cave-like places that even modern electricity cannot make seem light and cheery. The corridors often have bare stone walls and ceilings over 12 feet high. They are always dark and the old buildings produce eerie and unexplainable noises.
Anyone might be frightened to spend even one night in this place. Liz says that she was not frightened until:
"One afternoon, shortly after we arrived, I was about to open my door when I became conscious of someone hurrying down the hall.
"A few days later the same thing happened. Again I was just vaguely conscious of feeling someone hurry by me.
"The third time it occurred, however, I definitely saw a foot at the bottom of a skirt as it disappeared around the corner. Quickly I rushed back to the corner and looked down the hall.
"There was no one there and it would have been impossible for anyone to have reached and entered one of the doors in that hall." Liz recalls that this was the moment when she first began to feel that something very unusual was certainly going on.
"When I returned to my room,
thinking about the incident, I became certain that whoever, or whatever, I
had seen was not dressed in the fashion of the day. The skirt was long and
full, and the foot and ankle which
had disappeared around the corner
were clad in a high buttoned shoe!
"The housekeeper came into my room a few minutes later, and when I told her what had happened, she said, 'Oh, you've seen her. She has been here for many years, ever since this house was new,' and passed the incident off very casually.
"I never learned the name of my ghost, or her story," Liz added.
She never guessed then how prophetic the incident was. Surely the young girl who had dreamed of being an actress, of following in her famous father's professional footsteps could not have known that when she finally became successful it would all be thanks to the supernatural world of ghosts, goblins, and witches.
It was not the wave of a witch's magic wand that made Elizabeth a star. It was a lot of long, hard work, earnest determination, and real talent.
Robert Montgomery says of his daughter's early ambitions, "She had a perfectly normal childhood, I like to think. She always wanted to be an actress. When she announced at 13 that the decision was a firm one, I told her that I wanted her to make her debut with me.
"That's exactly how it happened. I never opposed her going into theater as several magazines have said. How could I? After all that acting had done for me. Naturally I felt at the time that a young girl might change her mind. Liz didn't. She went to the American Academy, of Dramatic Arts in New York.
"I was doing the TV show, Robert Montgomery Presents, and she played her first professional performance in the role of my daughter. She got good reviews. I collected them, then mailed them to her with a note, 'Don't believe any of it. Much love, Dad.' "
Despite such beginnings, Liz's career didn't immediately zoom her to the heights of stardom. Her first TV role was in 1951, the same year she also made her society debut at a cotillion in New York City.
Between that time and her first appearance as Samantha on Bewitched Elizabeth Montgomery played roles in no less than 200 television shows, a couple of movies and one play. All of these were so unmemorable that some nasty critics complained that the only reason she got even these roles was that her father was a famous actor. It seemed that all she had earned after all that hard work was an ugly nickname, "Miss Dull," probably given to her by a jealous competitor who wasn't getting any roles!
Elizabeth's personal life wasn't all that she might hope it could be either. During this uninspired time in her life Liz was married twice. In 1954, in one of the biggest events of the New York social season, she was wed to Frederic Gallatin Cammann, scion of an old and prominent family. That marriage lasted one year.
Her second marriage to actor Gig
Young, lasted five years longer than
her first one had. But it too ended in
divorce.
Then, suddenly, things began to pick up. In 1963 Liz starred in the movie Johnny Cool and fell in love with it's director William Asher. They were married shortly after the film was completed.
William Asher's background is as unlike his wife's as it could possibly be. He's been supporting himself since he was 13 years old. He didn't finish high school, but started his career as a $12-a-week mail boy for Universal studios. He too was recovering from an unhappy marriage when he met Liz Montgomery.
After marrying, the couple decided they should work together so that they could both maintain their careers without being separated for long periods of time. A TV series that he could direct and she could star in was the logical solution to their problem but it took a while to find one that satisfied them.
Both Liz and her husband took an instant liking to the idea of a series about a witch married to a mortal man. Elizabeth says that after having read four pages of the first script of Bewitched she was sure the series would be a grand success.
Is it possible that her earlier experience with the ghost somehow had something to do with her decision to star in Bewitched? Why was she so sure that the show would be successful when she had had so many failures in the past?
Many more experienced judges were saying that the idea was too sophisticated and too unreal to make for a good situation comedy - that it would be a good Broadway play, but never a good TV series. Yet Liz Montgomery had total confidence in Bewitched and she and her husband committed themselves to it entirely and staked their professional reputations on their commitment.
The result is TV history.
BY LORRAINE MARTIN
Write to Liz, c/o ABC-TV, Prospect
at Talmadge, Hollywood, Calif.