Twitch Upon a Star (5 page)
Read Twitch Upon a Star Online
Authors: Herbie J. Pilato
Before Lizzie basked in the sparkle of stardom as
Samantha
, she was born in the shadow of Robert Montgomery's fame. The story of who she was begins with him; the seeds of who she became were indelibly planted by this versatile actor and political idealistâa father who was just as complex as his daughter; a daughter who had a father complex.
Five years after his marriage to Broadway actress Elizabeth Allen on April 24, 1928, Lizzie was born into her privileged childhood, at the peak of his film popularity.
Talented, handsome, athletic, rich, and famous, Robert had the right social credentials, coupled with a solid intellect. Before his stable career on the small screen of the 1950s, he was a feature film legend of the 1930s and 1940s.
Although he was a Republican, and she a Democrat, Lizzie followed in his social advocacy. It was difficult for her to fathom and accept the scope of his notoriety before she ever began to question her own. She would later ponder the harvested influence over a legion of
Bewitched
buffs, because she had seen the role celebrity played in her father's life. Once she glittered with fame, it was hard for her to embrace praise even from those whose lives she helped improve.
A political promoter rooted with a conservative outlook, her father held a stoic position in moderate contrast to her liberal stance; but both believed in the American dream (and the freedom that goes along with it).
In 1935, he was elected to the first of four terms as president of S.A.G., the Screen Actors Guild. It was here his political agenda began to take shape. In this capacity, he gained publicity in 1939 when he helped expose labor racketeering in the film industry. He went on to become a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve, an assistant naval attaché at the American Embassy in London, an attendant at a naval operations room in the White House, a commander over a PT boat in the Pacific, and an operations officer during the D-Day invasion of France. He was awarded the Bronze Star and later decorated as Chevalier of the French Legion of Honor.
In 1947, he headed the Hollywood Republican Committee to elect Thomas E. Dewey as President. That same year he testified as a
friendly witness
in the first round of the House Un-American Activities Committee, denouncing communist infiltration in Hollywood. Following President Eisenhower's 1952 campaign, he was called on by the Principal Head of State to serve as a special staff consultant to television and public communicationsâthe first individual to hold such a media post for the White House.
Robert came to Eisenhower's attention because of his affiliation with
Robert Montgomery Presents
. During the 1960s he was engaged in a futile campaign against the practices of commercial TV, which he summarized in the book
An Open Letter from a Television Viewer
(J. H. Heineman, 1968). Also in the 1960s, the decade in which his daughter would begin to turn the world on with her twitch, Robert served as a communications consultant to John D. Rockefeller III and a director of R. H. Macy, the Milwaukee Telephone Company, and the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. From 1969 to 1970 he was president of Lincoln Center's Repertory Theatre.
Steven J. Ross is the author of
Hollywood Left And Right: How Movie Stars Shaped American Politics
(Oxford University Press, 2011). On April 22, 2012, Ross appeared on C-SPAN at the Los Angeles Festival of Books. When asked what role Robert Montgomery played in the Hollywood/political game, he replied:
Robert Montgomery actually had gone to prep school with George Murphy and the two of them were very close friends and Murphy ⦠during the late â40s and â50s was a very prominent Republican activist. In fact, he was Louis B. Mayer's [MGM executive] point man going around the country and when in 1952 Eisenhower wanted some help from Hollywood, or should I say the GOP got Eisenhower help, the two people who advised him on media strategy were Montgomery and Murphy. And Eisenhower liked the two of them so much that he basically told his Madison Avenue firm that had been hired to do the TV, “You can keep writing the ads, but they're going to show me how to appear on TV.” Afterwards, Eisenhower asked both men to come to Washington with him. Murphy kindly deferred and Montgomery still kept his career but he actually had an office in Washington to help Eisenhower for eight years with sort of media appearances and helping him stage his presence. Remember ⦠this is a period when TV is just really emerging as a national phenomenon and politicians don't really know how to deal with television. They were teaching them things like how to use makeup, what color glasses to use, how to face a camera ⦠how to do sound bites ⦠how to hold your body, camera angles ⦠everything that a sophisticated actor would learn, they taught to Eisenhower.
As recorded in James Pylant's expertly researched
Bewitching
article Robert Montgomery was born Henry Montgomery, Jr. on May 21, 1904 in Duchess County, New York.
Beacon is commonly given as his birthplace, though he was actually born in Fishkill Landing. (Beacon was formed from the adjoining towns of Fishkill Landing and Matteawan in 1913.) Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) promoted Robert Montgomery's movie persona as a sophisticated, well-bred socialite by embellishing the elite family background of its handsome star. And while the actor was
born in a large house on the banks of the Hudson River
, and his father served as an executive of a rubber company, the 1920 Federal Census leaves a somewhat different impression. Fifty-two-year-old Henry Montgomery, the vice president of a rubber factory, and Mary W., age forty-seven, with sons Henry, Jr., age sixteen, and Donald, age fourteen (all New Yorkers by birth), boarded in a Beacon hotel kept by William Gordon. Henry, Sr., was a first generation American, his father being Irish and his mother was Scottish. Mary W.'s father was a Pennsylvanian, while her mother was from the West Indies. Twenty years earlier, the 1900 Federal Census shows the newly wedded Montgomerys (“years married: 0”) boarded in William Gordon's hotel, then in Fishkill. Private secretary Henry Montgomery (Sr.), age 32 (born in May of 1868) and âMai W.,' age 24 (born in March of 1876) were among the hotel's many boarders. Mrs. Montgomery's birthplace is listed as New Jersey and her mother's birthplace is Jamaica. Robert Montgomery's mother is named in biographies of her son as Mary Weed Barnard, but her maiden name was actually
Barney
. At the time of the 1900 federal census, the Montgomerys had been married a little over six months, their marriage date being 14 December 1899. Mrs. Montgomery appears twice on the federal census in 1900, the second instance being as âMay W. Barney,' age twenty-five, born in March of 1875 in New Jersey. Her marital status was indicated as single, then written over to read
married
. She is named as a daughter of eighty-one-year-old Nathan Barney, who rented a Third Street home in Brooklyn, wife Mary A., age fifty-six (born in October 1843), sons George D., age thirty-four (born in October 1865 in Connecticut), Nathan C., age twenty-seven (born in June 1873 in New Jersey), and Walter S., age eighteen (born October 1882 in New Jersey). A twenty-three-year-old Irish servant also made her home with the family. Mr. Barney was born in Pennsylvania, and Mrs. Barney was born in âJamaica, W. I.,' a fact consistent with what May W. Montgomery supplied in 1900. According to
Genealogy of the Barney Family in America
, Mary Weed Barney was born on 30 March 1875 in Bayonne, Hudson County, New Jersey, to Nathan Barney, Jr. and his second wife, the former Mary A. Deverell. The Barney genealogy identifies the parents of Henry Montgomery, Sr., as Archibald Montgomery and the former Margaret Edminston of Brooklyn. Henry Montgomery, a one-year-old, is found in the household of Irish-born Archibald Montgomeryâa prosperous shipping merchantâand Margaret (born in Scotland) on the rolls of the 1870 Federal Census in Brooklyn.
In 1970, Robert Montgomery gave an interview to Richard Lamparski for his book,
Whatever Became Of � Volume III
(Ace Books, 1970). He explained how he had to support himself after his father, “an executive with a rubber company,” died and left the family without an income.
As Lizzie expressed to Ronald Haver in 1991, “Daddy had to quit school and go to work, to help support the family; and his father just kind of fell apart.”
That's putting it lightly. According to Pylant, Henry, Sr. was depressed, suffered a nervous breakdown, and subsequently committed suicide:
Not only did Robert Montgomery have to cope with the tragedy of his father's death, he had to face a financial crisis as well as the social stigma of having a suicide in the family. Henry Montgomery's nervous breakdown was also a public reminder of the scandal that unfolded in newspapers a generation earlier when Archibald Montgomery, Robert's grandfather, was accused of being an insane alcoholic. The charges against Robert's grandfather were dismissed, yet the damage had been done to the family name. Whispers of a nervous breakdown, insanity, alcoholism and suicide were devastating to a prominent family's social standing. Wire reports of Henry Montgomery's suicide caused the story to be spread in newspapers across the country.
On October 25 and 28, 1884, respectively,
The Brooklyn Eagle
published the articles, “Is He Insane? The Predicament of a Well-Known South Brooklyn Man” and “The Montgomery Suit: Withdrawal of the Suit at the Insistence of the Family,” both about Archibald.
On June 25, 1922,
The Philadelpia Inquirer
published the item below titled “Man Jumps To Death From Brooklyn Bridge: Hundreds See Suicide From Trolley To Rail”:
A man believed to be Henry Montgomery, of Brooklyn, leaped to his death from the Brooklyn Bridge this evening, in the view of hundreds of pedestrians and surface car and elevated train passengers. He leaped from a passing car to the bridge roadway, stepped to the rail without looking back and jumped.
On June 26, 1922,
The Denver Post
published the following item under the heading “Wealthy N.Y. Rubber Firm Head Drowns Himself In River”:
Henry Montgomery, 45 years old, of Brooklyn, wealthy retired president of the New York Rubber company, committed suicide late Sunday afternoon by jumping into the East River. Montgomery, who had been suffering from a nervous breakdown which forced his retirement ten months before, had apparently planned to take his own life, and left instructions for notifying his relatives.
Either way, Henry (Sr.) left his family penniless, and his son Robert (Henry, Jr.) was forced to pick up the slackâas a railroad mechanic and oil tanker deckhandâand he was none too pleased about it. Fortunately, by the late 1920s, and following ineffectual attempts to become a writer, he became an established Broadway actor, joining his stage peers in the mass migration into film as
talkies
came into play.
But his subsequent tumultuous relationship with Lizzie may have been ignited by the resentment and the frustration he experienced in his pre-acting days. No doubt those years helped to foster a strong work ethic that he would later instill in Lizzie. But initially, it was no pleasant experience. What's more, a future family tragedy would further loosen and then only entangle the father-daughter link between Elizabeth and Robert Montgomery.
Elizabeth and her father did not always see eye to eye, and they were definitely on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but their lives were in many ways similar. He was educated at exclusive private schools, as she would be later (at his instruction). She made her theatrical stage debut at six years old in
Red Riding Hood's World
(a French language stage production at the aristocratic Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles); his theatrical film premiere occurred much later in life (with the comedy,
Three Live Ghosts
, in 1929); but they both loved acting (after his initial objection to her vocational choice).
Contracted with MGM, Robert would later be pigeonholed as that carefree leading man; just as Lizzie would later be typecast as a lighthearted leading witch. And just as she would later distance herself from
Samantha
(with a list of edgy TV and motion picture roles), Robert tried to break the happy-go-lucky mold and waxed
psychotic
in several feature films, including:
The Big House
(a prison movie released in 1930 that set the pattern for similar future films) and
Night Must Fall
(a 1937 thriller in which he played a mysterious brutal killer who terrorized the countryside).
The latter earned him an Academy Award nomination. He received a second Oscar nod in 1941 for
Here Comes Mr. Jordan
.
On a flight to his next fight, boxer
Joe Pendleton's
(Robert) soul is prematurely snatched from his body by the newly deemed
Heavenly Messenger 7013
(Edward Everett Horton) when his plane crashes. Before the matter can be rectified by
7013's
supervisor, the celestial
Mr. Jordan
(Claude Raines),
Joe's
body is cremated; so
Jordan
grants him the use of the body of wealthy
Bruce Farnsworth
(original character unseen), who's just been murdered by his wife (Rita Johnson). As
Joe
attempts to remake
Farnsworth's
unworthy life in his own clean-cut image, he falls for
Betty Logan
(Evelyn Keyes).
