Twitch Upon a Star (62 page)

“He's just shallow and incompetent,” continued White, who was angry with Reagan and the first George Bush on an entirely different level. His son, Jonathan White, after whom
Larry Tate's
son was named on
Bewitched
, died in the Pan Am Flight 103 incident over Lockerbie, Scotland in December 1988. It was Pan American World Airways' third daily scheduled transatlantic flight from London Heathrow Airport to New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport. On Wednesday, December 21, 1988, the aircraft flying this route—a Boeing 747-121 registered N739PA and named “Clipper Maid of the Seas”—was destroyed by a bomb, killing all 243 passengers and sixteen crew members. Eleven people in Lockerbie were also killed as large sections of the plane fell in the town and destroyed several houses, bringing total fatalities to 270. As a result, the event is also known as the “Lockerbie Bombing.” During the 2011 Libyan civil war a former government official claimed that Muammar Gaddafi had personally ordered the attack. (According to
The Los Angeles Times
, Abdel Bassett Ali Megrahi, the Libyan intelligence officer convicted in the bombing, who denied any role in the plot, died in Tripoli, Libya, May 20, 2012.)

For David, it was a personal attack of another nature and a tragedy from which he never recovered. As he told Lizzie in 1989, only a short time after the incident, he received a letter of sympathy from the White House, specifically, from Reagan's successor, George H. W. Bush:

But when David opened the letter, he was unimpressed. In fact, he laughed. Or as he put it, “I cracked up.” He was indignantly amused by the cardboard backing that was placed behind the letter in order for it not to wrinkle. “So I can hang it up in my den,” David assumed. “They thought I should think it's a big deal. And I don't think it's a big deal.”

“That's incredible,” added Lizzie who expressed her own fury about the Pan Am incident. “I was angry when it happened. And when I realized that Jonathan was on the plane, I just couldn't believe it. When I called
Mouse
(
Bewitched
producer Marvin Miller), I said, ‘Are you sure?' He said, ‘Yeah … I talked to David at the gym.'”

But now David was right in front of her, in near tears. As he went on to assess, “In October of 1988, they [international officials] knew there were bombs (on the plane) that they put in cassettes. I have an article from
Newsweek
[that states this]. They were warned a couple of times, not just for Helsinki.”

According to the Report of the President's Commission on Aviation Security and Terrorism, on December 5, 1988 (sixteen days prior to the Pan Am attack), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) issued a security bulletin saying that on that day a man with an Arabic accent had telephoned the U.S. Embassy in Helsinki, Finland, and had told them that a Pan Am flight from Frankfurt to the United States would be blown up within the next two weeks by someone associated with the Abu Nidal Organization. He said a Finnish woman would carry the bomb on board as an unwitting courier.

David concluded with a heavy heart and even heavier words, that he missed his son immensely, and was clearly not pleased with those he thought were responsible for his death:

Then, in a swift shift to help lighten the mood, David turned to Elizabeth and asked:

“So how many children do you have now?”

“The same three,” she replied. “Bob [Foxworth] and I finally went, ‘
Uh, no, I don't think so'
[with regard to the possibility of them having more children when they first got together in 1974]. He has two, and I have three, and they're all grown. They're wonderful. We've got five between us, and that's more than enough.”

“You don't want to raise children any more, do you?” White continued in jest.

“Every time we get tempted,” Lizzie answered, “this friend of mine, who's a costume designer, Frances Hays, one of my best friends, says, ‘Call B.A.' And I said, ‘What's that?' And she said, ‘Babies Anonymous.'”

While Lizzie was working on
Bewitched
in 1960s, Ronald Reagan hosted another anthology series, this one a western syndicated show called
Death Valley Days
. She was more than familiar with his work and his persona, and subsequently reveled in performing one particular scene from her 1985 NBC TV-movie,
Between the Darkness and the Dawn
when her character
Abigail Foster
made a sarcastic reference to Reagan in a dinner-table scene.
Abigail
had been in an epileptic coma for twenty years. Upon awakening in 1985, she learned of America's new leader, and was shocked. “Ronald Reagan is president?!” she said incredulously, in response to the election of a former actor as the world's most powerful decision-maker.

Twenty-two

“I keep thinking about how I might have cancer.”

—
Blanche Taylor Moore
, as played by Elizabeth in
Black Widow Murders: The Blanche Taylor Moore Story
(1993)

One of Lizzie's favorite
Bewitched
guest stars was Christopher George, who played the lead in the first season episode, “George the Warlock”:

Like many of the show's guests in its first two years—Adam West (
Batman
), James Doohan (
Star Trek
), Billy Mumy (
Lost in Space
), and Bill Daily (
I Dream of Jeannie
), Christopher George went on to star in a weekly series of his own:
The Immortal
, a fanciful, if short-lived (only sixteen episodes) take on
The Fugitive
, a wanted-man story with a positive twist:

Ben
, like
George
, the warlock, was immortal, as were the entire band of charmers on
Bewitched
. None the least of which was
Samantha
, as played by Lizzie who leaves her own immortal legacy with a body of work that echoed and foreshadowed portions of her reality that warrants further examination.

In 1976, she appeared in the TV-movie
Dark Victory
, a remake of the classic 1939 feature film starring her friend Bette Davis.

Here, Lizzie takes the viewer through the varied emotions connected with a devastating illness (surprise, frustration, anger), and the challenges of maintaining an intimate relationship through that period. In the end, and just as in the original Bette Davis movie,
Katherine
dies. But in the last few moments of Lizzie's edition,
Katherine
turns to
Dr. Grant
, smiles, and the camera freeze-frames on the love light in her eyes. It's a bittersweet ending to one of Lizzie's better post-
Bewitched
films.

Nine years later, in 1985, she starred in another TV-movie,
Between the Darkness and the Dawn
:

The ending for
Between the Darkness and the Dawn
is less bitter and more sweet than it is with
Dark Victory
, but a glaring discrepancy detracts from this movie's credibility beyond its far-reaching premise (although similar events have transpired). The story opens in 1965, when actress Lori Bird-song portrays a seventeen-year-old
Abigail
who is soon stricken into her catatonic state. The setting then swiftly shifts forward twenty years, and Lizzie is seen playing
Abigail
, who is now apparently thirty-seven years old.

Although Lizzie blurred the age of her documented birth, April 15, 1933, by the time this film aired, December 23, 1985, she was in reality fifty-two years old. Actors sometimes play younger characters. It's an unwritten Hollywood rule. But it's a bit of a stretch for Lizzie to have played a thirty-seven-year-old in the later period suggested in
Between the Darkness and the Dawn
.

However, she embraced the opportunity to change the face of time; as she had in 1992, when according to Tom McCartney, she registered as forty-nine years old for a medical examination during filming of the TV movie
The Black Widow Murders
. That meant she would have been born in 1943, and fifty-two years old when she died in 1995. But that didn't measure up either.

When Elizabeth died in 1995, writer Lynn Elber reported in
The Associated Press
that Lizzie was fifty-seven years old. That meant she would have been born in 1938 which, as previously documented, is simply not true.

Lizzie and younger brother Skip were in England in 1939 while their father Robert Montgomery worked on
The Earl of Chicago
. They were then shipped back to the States when he was called to service for World War II. They traveled on the S.S. Arandora Star, sailed from Southampton, England for New York on September 1, 1939 and arrived in New York City on September 12, 1939. According to the passenger list chart lines that were posted on
www.harpiesbizzare.com
, one of the top
Bewitched
websites, Lizzie was then six years old, and born in 1933, which was also her documented birth year in early studio biographies. All of which means that, in reality, she had just turned sixty-two on April 15, 1995, a month and three days before she passed away on May 18.

In August of 1975, Elizabeth broached the birthday subject with an interview for
TV-Movies Today
magazine, claiming she always told the truth about her age because of her third most influential relative: Rebecca Allen. As Lizzie explained it, when her grandmother was sixty, Becca told everyone she was sixty-five. “People always think you're older anyway,” she said. “They therefore think I'm really seventy and are impressed with how youthful I appear.'”

When asked her age, Lizzie replied, “I was born on April 15, 1936, which has since become Income Tax Day and therefore is easy to remember.” So that would mean she was fifty-nine when she died in 1995 which, again, is untrue.

More age-old tales were spun on the set of her 1985 CBS TV-movie
Amos
the premise for which dealt with, appropriately enough, the elderly residents at a nursing home. According to Montgomery archivist Thomas McCartney, Lizzie took a particular liking to Pat Morita, who co-starred in this film as one of the senior residents that was abused by Lizzie's maniacal nurse
Daisy Daws
. Morita had found fame late in life, first as
Arnold
on
Happy Days
(ABC, 1974–1984) and then with
The Karate Kid
movies of the 1980s. On the
Amos
set, Morita, who was born in 1932 and died in 2005, realized he and Lizzie were approximately the same age, and while he portrayed the elderly
Tanaka
, she played a middle-aged
Daisy
.