Twitch Upon a Star (61 page)

When asked if it was tough being Robert Montgomery's liberal daughter, she replied:

She never got used to it. Her father's political views were not always welcome in Hollywood which, in 1989, she described as “a town that claims to be so damned liberal all the time, but isn't.” It was outspoken opinions like that which probably didn't help her case in winning the majority Emmy vote amongst her peers.

Fortunately, she was adored by millions of fans, while her political advocacy and love and respect for Foxworth quenched her slight desire to pontificate. They were a glamorous humanitarian team, superheroes of the Hollywood set, battling for world peace, the disadvantaged, the downtrodden, and those suffering from the pain and discrimination of AIDS, and for the rights of those in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) community.

Although it was Foxworth who usually voiced their collective concerns in the court of public opinion, at various forums Lizzie would stand beside him, firmly, silently, with that famous closed-lipped smile which became one of her many facial trademarks. While that periodically perky smirk may have represented her apprehension to speak, she believed in exactly whatever Foxworth professed which, according to
The Los Angeles Times
in 1986 was the following:

It was a speech he gave at a rally for The Great Peace March for Global Nuclear Disarmament of 1986, which was undermanned, plagued by insurance problems, heckled by protesters, and attacked by bureaucrats. Nevertheless, Lizzie and Foxworth, along with numerous other celebrities, showed their support as approximately 1,400 marchers struck out across 3,235 miles of American desert, mountains, plains, and cities, bent on mass persuasion against the perceived evils of nuclear arms.

The march was the brainchild of David Mixner, then twenty-nine years old and a longtime activist in several liberal causes, specifically in regard to LGBT issues. His credentials include the 1968 presidential campaign of Senator Eugene McCarthy, directing Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley's 1977 mayoral campaign, co-chairing Senator Gary Hart's 1984 presidential quest, and the Vietnam Moratorium. Mixner was also one of the prominent LGBT fundraisers for Bill Clinton during his 1992 campaign but famously broke with the President over the “don't ask, don't tell” policy implemented in 1993, and was ultimately arrested at a protest in front of the White House. At such events, Lizzie was usually a figurative if not oratorical voice.

Mixner says today:

Lizzie's presence certainly gave value to Dick Sargent's life.

In 1991, her former
Bewitched
co-star announced his homosexuality, and requested her presence as Co-Grand Marshall for the 1992 Gay Rights Parade in Los Angeles. “You wouldn't see her at parties,” Sargent's former publicist Howard Bragman told
People Magazine
in 1995, “but you would always see her at benefits.”

Shortly before Sargent died in 1994 of prostate cancer (and
not
AIDS, which has been falsely reported over the years), he gave an interview to writer Owen Keehnen for
Chicago Outlines
magazine, “the voice of the gay and lesbian community,” which was later published in Keehnen's book,
We're Here, We're Queer
(Prairie Avenue Productions, 2011), during which he commented on Lizzie's support. She knew of his sexuality, Sargent said, because his “lover was alive when we did
Bewitched
.” He and his partner, Albert Williams, a screenwriter, would attend parties and play tennis with Lizzie and Bill Asher. “She really loved my lover very much,” Sargent said of the man who in 1979 dropped dead of a cerebral hemorrhage at the home they shared in the Hollywood Hills. He said Lizzie respected “the hell out of me for doing this [coming out]. She thinks it's marvelous and has nothing but encouraging words.”

In 1991,
The Star
magazine decided to out Sargent and as he told Keehnen, “they quoted everyone like they talked to them.” Sargent called Lizzie and read what the tabloid had quoted her as saying: “Well, if that's his lifestyle, I just hope it makes him happy.”

“Oh, shit,” Lizzie mused to Sargent over the fabricated line. “They gave me the only cliché in the article.”

“I love her,” Sargent concluded. “She's a very bright and caring lady.”

In 1992, Elizabeth touched on the subject of Sargent's once-secret sexuality for an interview with
The Advocate
, a national gay magazine. In Robert Pela's article, “The Legend of Lizzie,” she said the topic never came up. She simply decided his sexuality was none of her business and that such discretion at times was the very definition of friendship.

In the same article, she also addressed the long-circulated gay rumors surrounding another
Bewitched
co-star: Agnes Moorehead, who died of cancer at sixty-seven in 1974, ten years after the show debuted and two years after it was cancelled. Again, the topic of sexuality, this time with Moore-head, as before with Sargent's, was just not something that arose.

Elizabeth then further explained how some members of the
Bewitched
cast and crew considered the series a metaphor for the social and cultural issues confronting those individuals outside the mainstream.
Samantha
was forced to conceal her supernatural heritage, and pretended to be mortal (“normal?”), like some gay men and women were forced to pretend they were straight. As far as Elizabeth was concerned,
Bewitched
was about repression and the subsequent frustrations that follow. She felt it was a positive message to relay in a clandestine manner, while she admitted that being raised in Hollywood exposed her to alternate lifestyles since her youth.

The Advocate
then made note of her support of Sargent and the LGBT community in general and wondered if she felt she might be perceived as gay herself. But none of that phased Elizabeth; she had more important things with which to concern herself. For one, she appeared in the Gay Pride Parade in support of Sargent.

But she was considering playing a lesbian in a TV-movie that never went into production. It wasn't anything specific, but she thought portraying such a role might have proved intriguing.

Then again, she had already, years before, played a similarly-repressed character … in the guise of
Samantha Stephens
on
Bewitched
.

On April 15, 1989, Lizzie's fifty-sixth birthday, she and Bob Foxworth served as honorary co-chairs and hosts of the National Gay Rights Advocates Eleventh Anniversary Celebration, which was held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and whose honorees included Lizzie's devoted manager Barry Krost.

More than anything, the caring couple was heavily involved with amfAR, the American Foundation for AIDS Research, and APLA, AIDS Project Los Angeles.

In 1989, they attended “The Magic of Bob Mackie,” a fashion presentation celebrating the designer's countless years in the business. Known for his work with Elizabeth's good friend Carol Burnett on
The Carol Burnett Show
, Mackie's event was held at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles, and also attended by Burnett, Cher, Jackie Collins, Joan Rivers, and Cheryl Ladd, all proceeds for which supported APLA's service to people with AIDS and AIDS-related complex (including mental health counseling, dental care, and in-home health care).

In 1987, Lizzie and Foxworth helped to raise more than $15,000 at a benefit performance of the stage play,
Tamara
, in honor of the Twenty-seventh Anniversary of Amnesty International.

She also joined him at the preview party of the eight-part PBS mini-series
Television
, which was given at the KCET-TV headquarters in L.A. According to a press packet for the program, this series documented the “evolution and the astonishing global power and impact of the world's most powerful communication medium.”

The Los Angeles Times
called Lizzie radiant in a gown bedazzled by her grandmother Rebecca Allen's diamond and emerald brooch. Foxworth wore Western accessories including a unique bolo tie, trimmed with silver feathers, and a diamond stud in his left ear. The latter, a gift from Lizzie, who once more worked that celebrated silent smile, as Foxworth explained how the stud symbolized his “freedom from
Falcon Crest
.”

Shortly before he left the series, however, Lizzie was invited to join the show for an arc of episodes, but she declined. Instead, another media sorceress, Kim Novak, who played a witch in the 1958 feature film,
Bell, Book, and Candle,
stepped into the part.

Lizzie had more important fish to fry, as when the opportunity to express and expand her political arena arrived in 1988. It was then she narrated
Cover Up: Behind the Iran-Contra Affair
, the feature film documentary that was critical of Reagan-Bush policies in Central America. She would later lend her voice to the follow-up film,
The Panama Deception
, which won the Oscar in 1992 for Best Feature Length Documentary.

Lizzie was dedicated to both films, but her work ethic was always sound. As she said in 1989: “Work takes a certain amount of concentration and energy, even though it always looks like I'm having fun (for example) when I'm looping. Luckily, I'm pretty good at it” (as Dan Weaver experienced in 1990 during Lizzie's looping session for
Face to Face
).

One day, Barbara Trent, director of both
Cover Up
and
The Panama Deception
, had asked Lizzie to loop a few lines of narration under slightly challenging working conditions. As Trent later told
People
magazine in 1995 after Lizzie's death: “We were too embarrassed to [ever] ask her to come back into our little Santa Monica studio, where the temperatures sometimes went up to 80 degrees.”

But none of that mattered to Lizzie. She was hot for the topic. The message she was sending was in direct opposition to the Reagan administration and the man himself, who had long been a friend to her parents. But when it came time to vote for Reagan (in 1980 and again in 1984), her mother Elizabeth Allen refused to debate the issue. As Lizzie recalled in 1989, the conversation went something like this:

“Well, you and Daddy knew him.”

“But your father must have talked about him to you, didn't he?”

“Are you kidding?” (Lizzie knew her father was wise enough not to debate such topics with her, but that didn't stop her from telling her mother exactly what she thought of Reagan.)

“If you asked him what time it was, he would tell you how to take a watch apart and put it back together again, but you'd never find out the time; never. Nothing's changed, except he's probably not smart enough to take apart a watch and put it back together.”

“Oh, Elizabeth!” her mother protested (in much the same way Agnes Moorehead would at times object to Lizzie's forthright opinions on the set of
Bewitched
).

“Okay, sorry,” Lizzie concluded to her Mom. “No more politics. Promise. Never mind.”

“I just wouldn't get into it with her,” she said in 1989. “But the man is loathsome.” David White listened to Lizzie's Reagan rant and agreed.

He had worked with the former president on an episode of TV's
G. E. True Theatre
(aka
General Electric True Theatre
)—an anthology series Reagan hosted from 1953 to 1962. As David recalled, Marc Daniels (Bill Asher's precursor on
I Love Lucy
) directed the episode and, at one point between filming, various conversations transpired, periodically turning to the subject of politics, a hot topic between Reagan and White in particular:

“You know, David, what's good for General Electric is good for America.”

“No, no, Ronny boy …
what's good for General Electric
is what's good for
Ronny Reagan
… and the stockholders. And besides … we always have Westinghouse.”

Upon hearing David relay this interchange in 1989, Lizzie laughed and said, “I never met (Reagan), and I probably would have hated him … I
hope
I would have hated him.”