Here’s What Happened to ‘Bewitched’ Star Elizabeth Montgomery

Courtesy Herbie J Pilato/The Thomas McCartney Collection

Here’s What Happened to ‘Bewitched’ Star Elizabeth Montgomery as Told by Her Biographer and Friend

An iconic figure to emerge from Classic TV of the 1960s was undoubtedly Elizabeth Montgomery, who starred in the supernatural comedy Bewitched. Running from 1964 to 1972, the sitcom looked at the marriage between a witch (her character of Samantha Stephens) and a mortal male (Darrin, played first by Dick York and, then, by Dick Sargent), and the comic chaos that comes from them trying to live a normal life while dealing with visitations from her magical brood.

The show’s popularity was enormous, which is why, when it ended, Elizabeth worked so hard to put it and Samantha behind her as she attempted to prove to the world that she was capable of doing much more than twitching her nose (which is how she made magic happen on air). In fact, when it came to Bewitched, something of a barrier within her came up that was pretty impenetrable, though one person who did break through was Herbie J Pilato, author of The Essential Elizabeth Montgomery: A Guide to Her Magical Performances and Twitch Upon a Star: The Bewitched Life and Career of Elizabeth Montgomery. Sitting down to talk to her over multiple sessions, he came away believing he had really come to know who she was.

“She was everything you could possibly want your favorite TV star to be in real life,” observes Herbie. “I mean, she was so warm and welcoming, especially for someone so private and protected. For me to have been welcomed into her world to talk about Bewitched — a subject she hadn’t addressed in any depth since the show ended — was big. From the first voicemail message from her to our first meeting, she seemed so down to Earth and accessible and a real sweetheart, but at the same time she was also a very complicated person. I saw that, too.”

Before exploring those complications, considering that Herbie — in addition to Elizabeth herself — is the host of this particular tour into her life and career, it’s important to note how he had gained her trust and, ultimately, friendship. Back in 1985, he was working as a page at NBC and was involved with publicity for the TV movie I Dream of Jeannie: 15 Years Later.

“I was upset,” he admits with a laugh, “thinking, ‘Wait a minute. If anybody is going to do a reunion movie about a magical blond woman and a dark-haired mortal man, it should be Bewitched.’ And Bill Asher, the guiding creative force on Bewitched and Elizabeth’s ex-husband, directed the Jeannie movie, which upset me even more. So, long story short, I actually wrote the script for a Bewitched reunion movie, and got it to Bill Asher who at the time just so happened to be working on a reboot of Bewitched. Sony was also putting together a movie version, so it was a Bewitched world. In his new proposed version, it was going to be focused on a nubile witch who Samantha would pop on to introduce and then pop off forever. Elizabeth was going to be making a cameo, which was major.”

Unfortunately, financing fell apart and Herbie wondered, instead, if Elizabeth would be willing to cooperate with him on a book looking back at the show (which would gradually evolve into her biography). After Asher checked with his ex-wife, Herbie was given her phone number and eventually found himself sitting in Elizabeth’s home, chatting with her about all things Bewitched.

“When we sat down to talk, she asked me, ‘Why are you doing this?’ recalls Herbie, “and I said, ‘Well, because I believe in Bewitched. I believe there’s a message of prejudice and that it’s about true love. That people can love each other despite their differences. It’s also about a strong ethic in that Darrin wanted to buy things for his wife on his own and care for her, and not depend on magic. Everybody thought Samantha was a pushover, but she wasn’t. It was her choice to live a mortal life. She was really one of the first independent women of TV.’ Anyway, she’s listening to all of this and she says okay about the book, because Bill Asher told her she needed to talk to me and she said, ‘He never tells me I need to talk to anybody.’”

For much more on Elizabeth Montgomery, please scroll down.

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On top of that, she essentially paid it forward in that two people who had refused to speak to him for his Bewitched book were Dick Sargent and David White (the latter of whom had played Darrin’s boss, Larry Tate). Both of them had the same condition: they wouldn’t talk to him (or anyone, for that matter) unless Elizabeth had given them her blessing to do so. Problem is that she hadn’t spoken to either of them in the 15 years since the show ended.

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“But then I suddenly get a phone call from Dick Sargent who says, ‘I just got the strangest call from Elizabeth Montgomery,’” Herbie details. “‘She says that you’re doing some book on Bewitched; I haven’t heard from her in 15 years, but she told me I need to talk to you.’ So we’re talking and call waiting beeps in and it’s Elizabeth, who tells me that I should be expecting a call from Dick Sargent. So here I am on the phone with Samantha and Darrin at the same time, like it was some surreal episode of Bewitched. And then, during the second meeting I had with her, she said she had a delivery coming at 4:00. Well, 4:00 comes along, the doorbell rings and in walks David White. So here I am sitting with Larry Tate and Samantha Stephens, neither of whom have seen each other in 15 years. But from there, she ended up being a co-marshal or something of the Gay Pride Parade with Dick Sargent.

“So this project,” he adds, “reunited these people, and she felt what I was doing was therapeutic for her, because people thought she hated Bewitched. The truth is, she loved Bewitched, but she definitely wanted to prove that she could do more. And she did.”

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Courtesy Herbie J Pilato/Thomas McCartney Collection

She was born Elizabeth Victoria Montgomery on April 15, 1933 in Los Angeles to Broadway actress Elizabeth Daniel Bryan and film star Robert Montgomery, who in the fifties also had his own anthology series, Robert Montgomery Presents. In a 1954 interview, Elizabeth related to The Los Angeles Times that her love for acting began when she was just four-years-old and, like most other children, she was an enthusiastic “make-believe actress in play.” The difference, of course, came from her acting bloodline.

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She recalled, “Dad tells me I often climbed on his lap after dinner and remarked, ‘I’m going to be an actress when I grow up.’ I don’t know whether he encouraged me or not, but he told me he would humor me and would tell me to wait and see what happened when I grew up. I’ll be real honest and say that Daddy did help me get a break in TV and I’m really grateful for his assistance and guidance. He’s my most severe critic, but also a true friend as well as loving father.”

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Although Elizabeth would get her big break on her father’s television series, before that she went through 11 years of schooling, first at the Westlake School for Girls and then a year at New York’s Spence School, from which she graduated in 1951. As she commented to The Los Angeles Times in 1954, “I’m sure I gave many of my Westlake teachers gray hairs, because the only things I could concentrate on were studies relating to dramatics. Acting was and is my main objective in life.” Which she got to prove when there was a part for someone to play her father’s daughter in an episode of Robert Montgomery Presents. Said Elizabeth, “It was the chance I had been waiting for. I figured it was tailor-made for me, because who could put more into the role than a real-life daughter?”

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Maybe, but she was forced to audition with a dozen other young hopefuls, though she did win out in the end. As she told reporter Walter Ames after getting the part, “Everyone was on pins and needles as the hour for the show approached. Dad called me into his dressing room for an old-fashioned, last-minute pep talk. I assured him everything was under control so far as I was concerned. I don’t know whether he could tell that I was shaking all over. But when the cameras came alive for the show, I had no trouble concentrating on my part and the program went off without a hitch.”

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Thomas McCartney Collection

From there she became a part of the Robert Montgomery Presents’ troupe of actors (appearing in 30 episodes) and when asked whether or not she had interest in starring in films, she commented, “Maybe later. Right now I can’t tie myself down with a long term movie contract, because I’m so busy with TV. But I hope some of the wonderful film offers are available in the future.” She was, however, interested in acting in a play her father would be directing. “I’ll let you know if I get it,” she said. “If I do, you can be sure Dad made me earn it in competition. As I said, he’s a true friend and loving father, but when it comes to acting, he’s a perfectionist.”

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There may have been more to it than that. Offers Herbie, “Her father did not want her to follow in his footsteps and he didn’t even want her to go see movies; he was very strict. But as much as he didn’t want her to act, it was on his show that she made her debut and she did a number of those, so eventually he came around. He was actually far more interested in her marriage to Frederick Gallatin Cammann, a New York socialite, he was thrilled, because he was the same age as Elizabeth, but Fred wanted a wife and Elizabeth wanted to be a star. They divorced a year later. In 1956 she married actor Gig Young and her father was livid, because he was 20 years older than her and he just felt that wrong. I think she married him out of spite, anyway. Sadly, that marriage was a horrible disaster. He was abusive to her and it was a situation she got out of in 1963 after she met William Asher, who directed her in Johnny Cool. The funny thing is, they hated each other when they first met, but then they fell in love and were married that same year.”

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Speaking to The Californian in 1956, she related her father’s feelings about her being an actor: “He would say how dismal a life it was. Of course, knowing me, he’d always start his speech by saying, ‘Now I know you’re not going to take my advice, but …’ And I never did. Maybe I should have. Being his daughter opened doors for me in the beginning, but it’s like the old saying goes — it’s easy for a girl to get a husband, but it’s hard to keep him. It was easy for me to get in to see people, but after that I had to make it on my own.” She also had to be careful not to take certain roles that she knew she wasn’t right for, but were offered due to her father’s reputation. “I wanted to do it, but I knew I couldn’t do a good job and had to say no — I couldn’t risk disgracing my name. If I’d been anybody else, I would have done it anyhow. It would have been fun.”

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The 1950s were a truly break-out period for Elizabeth. The same year she appeared on her father’s TV show, she made her Broadway debut in Late Love, returning to the stage in 1958 for The Loud Red Patrick. In 1955 she was featured in her first film, Gary Cooper’s The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell. During its making she found herself thoroughly impressed with his abilities, telling the New York Daily News, “I saw some rushes of the trial sequence. One close-up probably won’t be used, because it doesn’t lend itself to CinemaScope projection, but when the verdict [in the film] is announced, Cooper gives a great performance. You can see him actually blanch when he’s found to be guilty.”

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CBS Television Distribution

In addition to her father’s show, Elizabeth began appearing on such anthology series as Kraft Television Theatre (seven episodes), Appointment with Adventure (two episodes), Studio One (three episodes), Playhouse 90, Alfred Hitchcock Presents, The Twilight Zone and Thriller as well as making guest star appearances on Riverboat, Johnny Staccato, Wagon Train and The Untouchables.

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In looking at her accomplishments to that point, and still referencing her father’s name, she spoke to The Times of San Mateo, California in 1956, noting, “Being his daughter means that I have to work harder to prove myself to others. Others can make horrendous mistakes, I can’t. My ability as an actress and my personal life both reflect on him. It sort of means that I have to work a little harder at everything.

“My biggest complaint,” she added, “is when I first started acting, nothing seemed to bother me at all. I guess I didn’t know any better. But in this business, the more you learn, the more nervous you get. Ten minutes before I go on nowadays, I fall apart. I haven’t made the grade yet and I know it, but I think I’m learning.”

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When speaking to her many years later, Herbie had the sense that Elizabeth had come to grips with feelings about her father. “When she used to talk about him,” he offers, “she would sit back and say, ‘Well, one time Daddy said …’, and it was very wistful. The way she said ‘Daddy’ was the way she would say Daddy to Maurice Evans on Bewitched. She actually asked her father to play the role and he turned her down, which was very hurtful to her. Ultimately, I think her father was jealous that Elizabeth became a bigger star on TV or otherwise than he ever was. I mean, Elizabeth was one of the biggest TV stars of the sixties. That’s all there is to it. That show put ABC on the map. So it started out being this resentful father-daughter relationship, because he didn’t want her to be an actress. Then a further wedge grew between them when he divorced her mother, who she loved dearly.”

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“The biggest wedge,” Herbie suggests, “came from the fact that before Elizabeth was born, a previous daughter, an infant, had died. My sense was that Robert Montgomery never got over the death of his first daughter and somehow seemed to resent Elizabeth from the beginning, almost for being born. It’s a hard thing to verbalize here, but that was my sense of it. So it was a very strange relationship, but she still loved him and she still respected his work, but theirs was a complicated relationship.”

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The early 1960s saw Elizabeth continuing to guest star on shows like Rawhide, 77 Sunset Strip and Burke’s Law, and appearing in such films as Bells Are Ringing (1960), Johnny Cool and Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed? (both 1963) and the TV movies The Spiral Staircase and Boston Terrier (both 1963). And then she and William Asher decided to do the series Bewitched, which, it should be noted, she was pregnant during the months leading up to the start of production— making network and agency people rather nervous. Which she decided to have some fun with, as she shared with the Santa Cruz Sentinel in 1964: “Every time I met someone connected with the sponsors or the network, he would say — at the end of our conversation — ‘The baby is due by August, isn’t it?’ And I would assure them that was true. But one day I heard it just once too often and I said, ‘No, the baby is due 15th of September.’ And I walked away, leaving him staggered. It was mean of me, but what the heck?”

A few months later she would reveal, “I went back to work three weeks after the baby. I get a little tired some days, but you don’t mind when the show is a success and they tell me Bewitched is.”

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“Isn’t it lovely to be playing a witch?” she asked the Petaluma Argus-Courier rhetorically. “I imagine there will be no end to the jokes. I know when we were filming the pilot, a light blew every day. Nothing like that had ever happened before. And every time a light blew, the crew would turn and look at me, as if I really were a witch. I told Bill I’m waiting for the day when he congratulates the special effects man on a particularly good trick, only to have the man say, ‘But I wasn’t even there.’”

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Speaking of a “good trick,” one of the highlights of the show — accomplished without any effects — is the way Samantha twitches her nose and makes magic happen. In conversation with The Journal News of White Plains, New York, Elizabeth explained, “Bill said to me once, before I ever did Bewitched, ‘You do a funny thing with your nose whenever you get impatient.’ Then he asked me to do it for him. I couldn’t. I didn’t know what he meant. Then one night, my nose twitched and Bill said, ‘That’s it!’ and then I knew. We were at a Dodger’s game once and the bases were loaded, there were two outs and Sandy Koufax was coming up — he can’t hit — but Bill said to me, ‘C’mon, Liz, twitch,’ so I did and Sandy walked and the winning run scored. Then I was at a Chicago Cubs game and I twitched my nose for Ernie Banks, who hadn’t hit anything all day. When I twitched, Ernie hit the ball right out of the park.”

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By the time Bewitched concluded its eighth and final season in 1972, much of the magic was gone. The marriage between she and Bill Asher was falling apart and despite the fact that the show remained popular, pretty much everyone was ready to move on. “ABC had actually renewed Bewitched for two or three more years,” says Herbie, “but Elizabeth’s marriage was not the same, the show was not the same — if you look at that last season, she’s dragging her feet. She’s just gone. She’s bored out of her skull and you can see it. Now everybody thinks ABC canceled the show because of low ratings. Elizabeth Montgomery canceled the show. But she still had a couple of years on her contract, and ABC decided to cast her in her first TV movie post-Bewitched, The Victim. That was in 1972. And then she did Mrs. Sundance in 1974, which is where she met Robert Foxworth.”

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She and Foxworth fell in love and were together until her death in 1995, although they only got married in 1993. “She liked him,” Herbie says, “because, number one, he had her father’s name. Number two, he never watched Bewitched and she loved that. So those movies were a result of her having a contract with ABC. But when she left ABC to do the NBC TV movie A Case of Rape, people were, like, ‘You can’t do this!’ Her peers, people in the industry and her fans were, like, ‘Wait, what?’ I have yet to see the movie fully, because I can’t watch Samantha get raped. It’s traumatic for me. But she was serious about it. There were two different rape scenes in that movie and NBC was going to cut one of them and Elizabeth said to them, ‘You cut either of those scenes, you can get somebody else to star in the movie.’”

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In the film her character suffers a rape from the same man twice, and has to deal with the ramifications of that and cope with the trial to follow. Elizabeth explained to the Santa Maria Times in February of 1974, “Women have been beaten down by the system for too long. That’s why this film has something important to say. I don’t know why women have put up with it for so long. Everything seems weighted in the rapist’s favor in court. Lawyers can destroy a woman’s name with slander and innuendo, but details of the rapist’s past cannot be brought out in the trial. And the laws are really out of date. The women are subject to all sorts of humiliation right after they’ve gone through the trauma of rape … It’s easy for me to understand why it has been estimated by police that only one fourth of the rapes committed in this country are reported.” She was nominated for a Primetime Emmy in the category of Outstanding Lead Actress in a Special Program — Drama or Comedy.

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She followed A Case of Rape with 1975’s The Legend of Lizzie Borden, playing the title character, who, in 1892, murdered her father and stepmother with an axe. “She had one movie left on her ABC contract,” Herbie points out, “so she did Lizzie Borden. Robert Foxworth said she delighted in doing that film, because she knew that it was going to freak people out.” She received another Emmy Award nomination for this one.

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The TV movies and the acclaim continued to roll in. In fact, between 1976’s Dark Victory and 1995’s Deadline for Murder: From the Files of Edna Buchanan, she starred in 20 of them. Muses Herbie, “Before Jane Seymour, before Lindsay Wagner and before Valerie Bertinelli, Elizabeth was the first Queen of the TV movies; she went from queen of the witches to queen of the TV movie and it was no longer a struggle to break away from Bewitched. The ironic thing is that she died at about the same time there was the resurgence of Classic TV and Nick at Night. You know, about five or six years ago Barbara Eden was at some big event in Australia in the Jeannie costume, looking fabulous. The people at this particular arena went crazy and had Elizabeth lived, I think she would have done something like that. She would have gotten into the black ‘flying’ outfit again.”

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Besides all she accomplished as an actress, and the fact that she raised the three children she had with Bill Asher, Elizabeth was politically very active. Donating time, money and considerable energy, she was involved with women’s rights, AIDs activism and gay rights. As previously noted, she and former co-star Dick Sargent served as grand marshals at the Los Angeles Gay Pride Parade.

In her private life, she had waged a long battle with colon cancer. It was believed that the disease was in remission, but, sadly, it came raging back in the spring of 1995. She died on May 18, 1995 at the age of 62. Robert Foxworth and her children issued a joint statement: “The image of Elizabeth Montgomery is the image of the medium of television itself. She was a friend who has been in our living rooms thousands of times and has impacted our lives in many ways. As an actress, she brought us joy with Bewitched and groundbreaking rape legislation with her performance in A Case of Rape. As an activist, she has been a longtime supporter of gay and lesbian civil rights, HIV-AIDs causes and animal-rights organizations. She was most of all a person who loved life and her work and shared both with us generously.”

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In reflecting on it all, from the impact Elizabeth Montgomery made on his life in Bewitched to his real-life friendship with her, and the deeply-felt honor he felt in writing her biography, Herbie says, “I think her legacy is always going to be Bewitched. Certainly her body of work beyond that is impressive, but what’s interesting is that more times than not people don’t say, ‘Oh, I love that show.’ Or, ‘That character was so much fun.’ They say I love her, which means that they loved the woman who played that role. Elizabeth had soul. She had heart and soul in real life and I feel that that’s her legacy.”