Twitch Upon a Star (24 page)

At some point, Elvis had his fill of the daily Liz/Gig quarrels and he was not at all pleased with Young's unprofessional behavior. He was getting so fed up with Young, that he felt like it wasn't worth completing the movie. But he did. He would often hear Young verbally abuse Lizzie. But he didn't intercede. He just hoped that one day she would “come to her senses.” Ultimately, he was relieved that the movie was over because as he saw it, “I never want to work with Gig Young again.”

But such was not the case with Lizzie, whom Elvis attempted to cast in at least one of his films approximately one year after meeting her on the
Kid
set. But studio big-wigs kept passing on pairing the two, specifically in 1961's
Blue Hawaii
, in which Joan Blackman was cast instead, and which Lizzie later described as one of her favorite Elvis films.

There was also some talk that hip-twisting Elvis was indeed romantically interested in the future nose-twitching Lizzie. He was allegedly envious of Young's marriage to Lizzie. “If she was single,” he was to have stated, “I would certainly pursue her.”

When asked how she felt about Presley, Lizzie replied at the time:

Three weeks after
Kid Galahad
completed filming Gig was still adamant that Lizzie had slept with Elvis and continued to argue with her about the alleged antics. At one point, the disagreements became so intense, Gig apparently left town for a few days to see a friend named Helena, a development he sardonically implied would allow Lizzie to spend time with her new “lover!” Now lonely and neglected, with tears turned to anger, Lizzie allegedly hurried to Elvis' side, stopping short of having the affair that would have manifested Gig's worst nightmare.

Around the same time, rumor had it that Lizzie found Gig in their bed with some random nimble naked young blonde. Upon viewing said scene, Lizzie apparently instructed the woman to dress and leave, and in the process tossed Gig out on his ear—without any nose-twitching assistance on her part. That would come later, when she wed herself to
Bewitched
and married Bill Asher, which was another relationship for which Elvis reportedly had a measure of envy. While Asher claimed in 2003, for an interview with Terry and Tiffany DuFoe (today of
www.cultradioagogo.com
), that such was not the case, because he “didn't know Elvis,” he did have one issue with him. Apparently, Elvis was supposed to have starred in one of Bill's films. “It was a pretty good story,” Asher recalled, “and he had agreed to do it.” The motion picture would have apparently given the singing sensation the opportunity to play a “heavy,” which was very different from the more carefree persona he created in most of his films. But right before he was scheduled to work on the movie, Elvis made his famous television debut on
The Ed Sullivan Show
. Consequently, his representatives advised against their client portraying the darker role, and the young superstar pulled out of the film.

Gig Young was four years older than Vernon Presley, Elvis' father, not to mention two decades older than Lizzie. As Sally Kemp has said, she believes her friend was attracted to Gig mostly as a father figure and recalls further how Robert Montgomery was none too pleased with his daughter's decision to marry the senior actor:

Indeed, according to various sources when Robert learned of Lizzie's intention to wed Gig, he became incensed. Their relationship somewhat mercurial, he was ardently against her marrying someone he once called “almost as old and not one quarter as successful as I am.”

As time passed Robert's disdain for Gig did not subside, and Lizzie and her new love seemed to relish this fact, devising little schemes that incensed her father. As Dominick Dunne's wife Lenny explained in
Final Gig
, during one particular visit to Los Angeles, Robert invited the Youngs and the Dunnes to dinner. It was not the most tranquil of evenings, because neither Robert nor Gig was able to be cordial—sincerely or otherwise. “But after we finished dining,” Lenny relayed, “Nick and I invited everyone back to our house for a drink. They came, some more eagerly than others.”

But Lizzie had an early call the next morning for a TV show and, after a respectably lengthy visit with the Dunnes, she and Gig begged their goodbyes, though not before approaching and kissing her father with a simple, “Goodnight, Daddy Bob.” Mimicking the move, Gig swiftly leaned toward his father-in-law, smacked him right on the lips, and echoed Lizzie's words, “
Goodnight, Daddy Bob!
”

“Well,” recalled Lenny Dunne, “I thought Robert Montgomery was going to have a stroke.”

The cards may have held a similar fate for Gig. According to Eell's biography, he suffered from skin cancer and was Valium-dependent. His career failing, he was paranoid about the future and, as Lizzie's friends Bonnie Bartlett and Sally Kemp had assumed, he was an alcoholic.

Although Sally did not know Young “that well at all,” it was clear to her that he did have a “huge drinking problem. And that was always a mystery to me how that horrible, horrible thing happened with him later. I was never around him that much and I never knew him that well. So I never saw that side of him. But anyone who drinks like that has to have major demons.”

The “horrible, horrible thing” to which she refers here and to which she previously referred as the “horror story of Gig's death” was the murder/suicide that involved him and his fifth wife, a thirty-one-year-old German woman named Kim Schmidt. Schmidt was hired as the script girl on Gig's final movie,
The Game of Death
, which was released in 1978. On September 27 of that year, the two were married. Three weeks later on October 19, 1978, in the Manhattan apartment they shared, Gig shot Schmidt in the head, killing her instantly. He then shot himself. The police theorized that it was a suicide pact, but were baffled by the additional three revolvers and 350 rounds of ammunition found in the apartment. After the investigation the police stated Gig had definitely acted on the spur of the moment and his actions were not planned.

Clearly, Elizabeth's marriage to Gig was troubling and trouble-making, but it could have ended much worse than it did. Because of Gig's vasectomy, the union did not produce any children. Finally and fortunately, and after repeatedly denying she was even estranged from Gig, Lizzie confessed in April of 1963 to what would become her second “quickie” divorce in Nevada. She met Gig in 1956 while she was filming
The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell
and she left him while working with Dean Martin in
Who's Been Sleeping in My Bed?

Nine months after his divorce from Lizzie, Gig married real estate agent Elaine Whitman who was pregnant with his first child, a daughter, Jennifer, who was born in 1964—the year
Bewitched
debuted. While Lizzie was making new magic as
Samantha
(and a baby of her own with William Asher, namely William Asher, Jr.), Gig proclaimed his first child's birth a “miracle,” validating his reverse surgery as a success.

Although the Gig was up, the joy didn't stick. On November 23, 1966, Whitman filed for divorce. Frequent court battles over child support led him to publicly deny Jennifer was his daughter, claiming he was duped into his marriage to Whitman, but because he had claimed Jennifer as his own in the original divorce papers, he had no legal recourse in the matter.

According to George Eell's book, when Lizzie and Gig were still married, she envisioned having children who would have inherited his large gray eyes and dark wavy hair. When the issue of his paternity suit later became Hollywood news, she was purported to have then said to a friend: “(Jennifer's) not Gig's child. Believe me, if Gig didn't get me pregnant, he didn't get anyone pregnant.”

In
The Way We Lived Then
, Dominick Dunne said Lizzie and Gig were “wildly happy” for a long while. Dating back to his days as script supervisor for
Robert Montgomery Presents
and shortly beyond, he and his wife Lenny were friends with the Youngs and then “something happened.” But the Dunnes hadn't a clue as to what that was, as neither Lizzie nor Gig were the type to disclose private information. Apparently, she left their house in one direction and he went the opposite way, “furious with each other,” Dominick said, and that was that.

Conversely, Lizzie dearly loved her fourth and final husband Robert Foxworth who once had his own take on her marriage to Young. As he explained on A&E's
Biography
in 1999, her relationship with Young was unpleasant and “some domestic violence” was involved. Fortunately, as Foxworth pointed out, Lizzie was intelligent and strong-willed enough to break away from Young's grip.

According to George Eells in
Final Gig
, Lizzie's marriage to Young was not the perfect union that was sometimes portrayed in the press. “The first hint that trouble was brewing came early on, back in the golden days in New York.” Helena Sterling, Gig's old friend from the Louis Shurr West Coast office, had moved to Manhattan at the Youngs' request and found herself spending a great deal of time with Elizabeth, whom she at first considered as Eells put it, “scatterbrained.” “Then,” Sterling told Eells, “I realized she was lonely.” Writer Lily Brandy offered this conclusion in the article, “I Hope This Spell Lasts,” published October 1966, in
Inside Movie
magazine:

Nine

“Precrassny.”

—The Russian word for
pretty
, as spoken by Elizabeth as
The Woman
, who has the only line of dialogue in
The Twilight Zone
episode, “Two,” airing September 15, 1961

Between Lizzie's “Top Secret” premiere segment of
Robert Montgomery Presents
(December 3, 1951) and her initial twitch in
Bewitched
(debuting September 17, 1964), she made over 200 diverse guest-star TV appearances. Some of those shows include:
Boris Karloff's Thriller
(NBC, 1960–1962),
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
(NBC, 1958, “Man with a Problem”),
Johnny Staccato
(ABC/NBC, 1959/1960, “Tempted”),
One Step Beyond
(1960, “The Death Waltz”),
Wagon Train
(1959, “The Vittorio Botticelli Story”),
Raw-hide
(1963, “Incident at El Crucero”), and
77 Sunset Strip
(1963, “White Lie”).

She also delivered stand-out performances in ABC's
The Untouchables
(for “The Rusty Heller Story” episode that aired October 13, 1960, for which she received her first Emmy nomination in 1961); the series premiere of NBC's
Theatre '62
edition of “The Spiral Staircase,” which aired October 4, 1961 (in which she starred as a mute, alongside a very vocal character played by her then-husband Gig Young);
The Twilight Zone
episode two, which CBS broadcast September 15, 1961 (and in which she delivered yet another muted performance, this time with Charles Bronson, who also did not speak a word of dialogue); and for the “Mr. Lucifer” segment of
Alcoa Premiere
that aired on ABC, November 1, 1962 (when she literally “danced with the devil,” played by none other than famed hoofer Fred Astaire, who also hosted the series).

Produced by Everett Freeman, “Mr. Lucifer” was written by Alfred Bester and directed by Alan Crosland, Jr. who would years later helm episodes of
The Six Million Dollar Man, The Bionic Woman
, and
Wonder Woman
; among others. Not only is the entire episode classified as a fantasy comedy, which was a rare segment for any anthology series of the day, but it is laden with
Bewitched
-like special effects with items and props “popping in and out”; “Mr. Lucifer” even snaps his fingers and stops time as did
Samantha
many times on
Bewitched
.

As to the actual premise of the episode, and Lizzie's character, she played
Iris Haggerty
, the devil's assistant (a.k.a. “a legitimate moon goddess”). Apparently,
Iris
did her thesis (wherever that was) on moon goddesses: “I always thought it was rather unfair when the Christians turned her into a demon. But in mythology that's the way the banana splits.”