Yahoo News The 'enchanting' Elizabeth Montgomery and the radical powers of Bewitched
When Elizabeth Olsen was preparing for the role of Wanda in the Disney+ series WandaVision, there was a trick she just could not pull off: imitating Elizabeth Montgomery's signature nose twitch in Bewitched, a gesture that always accompanied a display of supernatural power. “I can’t wiggle my nose, so we had to figure out something else that was period appropriate,” said Olsen, who plays Marvel character Wanda Maximoff, aka The Scarlet Witch, in a show that is both an homage to, and pastiche of, classic sitcoms.
Fans of the enchanting Bewitched, which ended in March 1972 after eight seasons on ABC, have taken an immediate shine to WandaVision. The second episode of this new Marvel fantasy, built around the plot of a magic show in a small suburban town, was such a play on Bewitched that it had Montgomery’s famous show trending on Twitter. Bewitched owed much of its appeal to the nose-twitching Samantha Stephens, a character that turned Montgomery into one of the biggest stars of 20th-century American television. She was simply everyone’s favourite witch.
Actress Sally Kemp said that the future Bewitched star used to make “a bunny nose gesture” for good luck when they were friends in school. William Asher, who married Montgomery in 1963 and produced Bewitched for its entire eight-year run, noticed that she still wiggled her upper lip and nose as an adult, when she was “perturbed or nervous”. When the show was looking for a trademark gesture to signal that Samantha was making magic, Asher suggested, “what about that thing you do with your nose?”
Her debut nose twitch came around five minutes into the first Bewitched, which premiered on 17 September 1964. The gesture was incorporated into the show’s memorable animated opening, a masterpiece of Hanna-Barbera artwork, when a cartoon Samantha turns her witch’s hat into a frying pan at the twitch of a nose.
In the actual show, according to Herbie J. Pilato’s book Twitch Upon a Star: The Bewitched Life and Career of Elizabeth Montgomery, the footage of Montgomery’s twitch was always “sped up just a tad”, and accompanied by the tinkling sound of a xylophone to add to the impact.
Montgomery sometimes lamented the frequency with which she was stopped in the street by strangers and asked to “do her famous nose trick”. She recalled that when she attended an LA Dodgers baseball game in 1966, fans screamed out for it. “When the Dodgers were in trouble and I was in the stadium, I would hear people shout out ‘twitch, twitch’,” she said.
She would occasionally reject a request for nose twitching. “I would sometimes think ‘not with this guy’,” she told an interviewer in 1992. She added that she was particularly outraged when a mother demanded that she perform it to frighten her young daughter. “The time I had a big problem with it was when a woman with a child came up and said, ‘you haven’t been a good girl, come here and say hello to Samantha or she’ll turn you into a toad.’ This poor little thing was terrified. I said, ‘how dare you do this to a child?’”
Montgomery, the daughter of actors Robert Montgomery and Elizabeth Allen, was born in Los Angeles on 15 April 1933. She started out as a repertory player on her father’s NBC show Robert Montgomery Presents, before making a name for herself on Broadway. Her role as Janet Colby in Late Love, at the National, won her a Theatre World Award for most promising newcomer in 1953.
By the time she was cast in Bewitched, she had starred in eight films and 30 television shows, including Rawhide and The Twilight Zone. She was approached for the lead role in Bewitched only after Tammy Grimes turned it down, but as soon as she read the script, she told the show’s creator Sol Saks, “this is a series I just must do”. She had one stipulation: the main character’s name must be changed from Cassandra to Samantha.
Saks, who was 100 when he died in 2015, admitted he had been inspired by the film I Married a Witch when he wrote the pilot script for Bewitched. It was an instant hit and afterwards he just sat back and let the royalties roll in. “Sol became a millionaire and was very open about just being hit by a lucky stick,” said Paul Wayne, a writer on Bewitched.
Rehearsals for the pilot – called I, Darrin, Take This Witch, Samantha – began on 22 November 1963, a few hours after the assassination of President Kennedy. The tragedy was particularly hard for Montgomery and Asher. “They were friends with JFK,” Pilato said. “Asher produced Kennedy’s birthday bash where Marilyn Monroe sang Happy Birthday, Mr. President.”
In the pilot, Samantha uses her supernatural powers to defeat Darrin’s former girlfriend, with pranks such as having the woman put her elbow in a bowl of soup, and suddenly being disfigured by a black tooth. The pilot quickly established the template for Samantha’s mischievous charm, a quality that struck a real chord with the American public.
After Saks took a step back, ABC handed the writing reins to a 40-year-old producer called Danny Arnold. Under the cloak of being a fantasy about a witch who marries an advertising executive and tries to live a “normal” suburban life, Arnold used the scripts to tackle themes such as “bigotry and social injustice”.
Arnold said he believed that the central theme of the show was a woman who had more power than her husband and his failed attempts to control her. “I’m sick of simmering like a watched pot, I want to get out and boil,” Samantha tells Darrin when he objects to the clothes she has chosen.
Bewitched arguably did not get the credit it deserved for inventing a lot of sitcom tropes about family life, as well as showing a funny, empowered “housewife”. It was also genuinely funny, much of its humour down to the sparkling interplay between Samantha and her on-screen mother Endora, beautifully played by Agnes Moorehead. “The cast was extraordinary and we made the show as honest as possible,” said Montgomery, who earned five Emmy and four Golden Globe nominations for Bewitched.
Montgomery asked Moorehead to portray her mother, after bumping into the 62-year-old in Bloomingdale’s department store in New York. “I saw this mad looking woman with pink hair and she looked like an over-sized thing of cotton candy,” recalled Montgomery. As soon as she heard Moorehead’s voice, she knew she had “found her witch mother”. At first, Moorehead was reluctant to sign up – admitting later that she couldn’t imagine anyone being interested in a show about witches, anticipating that Bewitched would be a “flop”.
Moorehead had played Orson Welles’s mother in Citizen Kane and been part of his repertory company – and was described by him as “the greatest actor I have ever known”. She chose the name Endora for her character and was captivating as Samantha’s even “witchier” mother. Much of the comedy revolved around Samantha’s effort to shun witchcraft and her family coven’s desire to pull her back to her old self.
Endora has hugely enjoyable running battles with Darrin. When Samantha tells her mother she has fallen in love with a “dear, sweet, wonderful, perfectly marvellous man,” Endora replies: “Oh, my poor baby. He sounds simply horrible.”
She pours scorn on the uptight Darrin, always getting his name wrong – everything from Dawson and Darwin to Dum-Dum and Dumbo – often just calling him “what’s his name”. She belittles his attempts to assert his patriarchal authority. “Why do you object to my daughter being herself?” Endora asks. In one moment of revenge, she turns Darrin into a werewolf, just before he is supposed to be entertaining a potential client.
Darrin fares no better at the hands of Samantha’s warlock father Maurice, who was expertly played by Maurice Evans (and by Michael Caine in the 2005 movie starring Nicole Kidman). In one episode Maurice turns Darrin into a newspaper and then vaporises him in cloud of yellow smoke.
When the Bewitched scriptwriters added the character of Samantha’s hippie cousin Serena in 1966, Montgomery had great fun playing that role as well, using the pseudonym Pandora Spocks. Montgomery believed that character reaffirmed the notion that it was acceptable to be unconventional.
Darrin was played first by Dick York, who had become addicted to painkillers after a terrible back accident during the filming of They Came to Cordura in 1959. By the late-1960s, the pain was so severe that he started missing filming on Bewitched. When season six started in September 1969, he was simply swapped out for Dick Sargent, with no explanation of this change of identity. Viewers did not seem to mind, though. Montgomery was the star of the show.
The first 70 episodes of Bewitched were filmed in black and white, but by the time of Darrin II, the show was in colour – a change emulated in the second instalment of WandaVision – and Samantha had given birth to Tabatha and Adam. “The girl’s name was my idea. I loved it because it was so old-fashioned,” she told Screen Stories in 1967. “I got it from one of the daughters of Edward Andrews, the actor. Tabitha was the name I picked when I was pregnant on the show. But somehow it came out as Tabatha on the credit roll and that’s the way it has been ever since. Honestly, I shudder every time I see it. It’s like a squeaky piece of chalk scratching on my nerves.”
Montgomery said that a seventh-season episode called Sisters at Heart, with a plot line built around Tabatha, was her favourite of all 254 episodes. After receiving a letter from Marcella Saunders, Montgomery and Asher invited the young English teacher to bring her tenth grade class from LA’s Thomas Jefferson High School into ABC’s Hollywood studio to collaborate on a storyline about a friendship between Tabatha and a young black girl called Lisa.
The episode, set on Christmas Eve, deals with the racism displayed by one of Darrin’s clients, when he mistakes Darren for the father of a mixed-race daughter. Although the show’s intentions were good – the episode earned the Emmy Governor's Award in 1971 – it now looks outdated and bizarre, not least for the fact that Samantha casts a spell on the businessman that causes him to see everyone at a party with black skin. Elizabeth Montgomery in blackface is not her finest moment.
The show was made in a time of different social norms, something obvious in the Bewitched Colouring Book that was launched as a marketing spin-off from the show in 1968. It featured a cover picture of suburban sorceress Samantha taking delight in lighting her husband’s cigarette.
Erin Murphy, who played Tabatha, was once asked, ‘what would surprise people about Montgomery?’ “She had a really dirty sense of humour,” replied Murphy. The actress was also willing to push boundaries, in ways ABC sometimes found uncomfortable. From the sixth season, Montgomery decided that she did not want to wear a bra during filming, something that became abundantly clear during the episode Samantha and the Loch Ness Monster, when she knocked cigarette ash on her blouse and accidently set it on fire. In a panic to avoid taking off her top, she furiously patted the fire out in front of a startled crew.
Away from the set, Montgomery struggled to keep her private life out of the newspapers. During the final season, she had an affair with Bewitched director Richard Michaels, a romance that led to the break-up of both their respective marriages. Montgomery was married to Asher, her third husband after Frederick Cammann and Gig Young. “She enchanted every man she ever met,” wrote Pilato, “but she seemed drawn to troubled men, not nice guys. She was always looking for the ‘bad boy’, which may have been part of her rebellion against her father.”
Among the men she cast a spell over were Elvis Presley (with whom she became friendly while visiting Young on the set of Kid Galahad), Dean Martin (her co-star in Who’s Been Sleeping in My Bed?) and Gary Cooper (who starred with her in the film The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell). When Presley and Young clashed over “flirting” with Montgomery, a furious Presley called Young an “arsehole” before storming off.
Montgomery also caused waves with her political views. She received death threats for protesting the Vietnam War. In opposition to her staunchly Republican father, Montgomery became a liberal activist and advocate of inclusiveness. When Sargent publicly discussed his homosexuality, she showed her support for her former Bewitched co-star by joining him on a 1992 Gay and Lesbian Pride Parade in West Hollywood.
“Bewitched was perfectly comfortable hiring gay actors at a time when society at large was still calling homosexuality an illness. Bewitched was way ahead of its time in that regard,” said Adam-Michael James, author of the book The Bewitched Continuum.
In 1988, she narrated the documentary Cover Up: Behind the Iran Contra Affair. Montgomery’s activism escalated in the 1990s, when she campaigned regularly for Amnesty International and AIDS charities. She narrated The Panama Deception, a documentary that criticised the 1989 US invasion of Panama. The film won an Academy Award for best feature documentary of 1993.
Her professional life after Bewitched was varied and controversial. She played a series of killers or the victims of violent crimes. In The Victim (1972), she portrayed a woman stalked by a psychotic killer; she was a victim of sexual assault in A Case of Rape (1974); and in The Legend of Lizzie Borden (1975), she played a notorious New England woman tried for the axe murders of her father and stepmother.
In 1993, she played the infamous murderer Blanche Taylor Moore, commenting during filming that, “my roles all have different kinds of ‘feels’ to them and that’s probably one of the reasons why I’ve done them. I get letters from people saying one of the things they like best about what I’ve done since Bewitched is that they never know what I’m going to do next.” One role she turned down was that of Krystal Carrington in the hit soap Dynasty.
Montgomery even starred in a made-for-television movie with OJ Simpson, a 1977 production that, in retrospect, had the unfortunate title A Killing Affair. Montgomery and fellow homicide detective Simpson have an adulterous affair as they hunt a vicious murderer. When the film was shown in one southern state, a CBS affiliate station received a bomb threat for screening a film featuring an inter-racial love affair. Interviewed long before Simpson’s notorious October 1995 trial for murder, Montgomery described Simpson as “such a nice person”.
Montgomery died from colon cancer on 18 May 1995, five months before Simpson’s trial. She left behind a fourth husband, actor Robert Foxworth, whom she had been with for more than 20 years. Montgomery retained her impish sense of humour until the very end, joking that she wanted Piña colada fed into her IV Drip at her Beverly Hills home.
Despite all her late career accomplishments – which included an Emmy nomination for best actress for her part in The Awakening Land in 1978 – it is the alchemy and style she brought to her role as a suburban 'housewitch' that ensures her place in television history. Montgomery, who was immortalised in a nine-foot bronze statue in Salem Massachusetts in 2005, could never quite leave Bewitched behind her.
Although she declined repeated television offers to reprise the role of Samantha, she broke her resolve in the early 1980s, when she again twitched her witchy nose for a series of lucrative commercials in Japan for Lotte’s Mother chocolate biscuits.
WandaVision creator Jac Schaeffer described her new Disney+ show as “a love letter to the golden age of television,” Bewitched included. There are even rumours of an ABC remake of Bewitched to capitalise on the nostalgia for the show. At its peak, Bewitched was viewed by more than 50 million viewers around the world, most of whom agreed that every little thing Montgomery did was magic.
