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Liz Montgomery's provocative question:
"HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO TRY
MY SOURDOUGH BREAD?"
by Jane Ardmore
TV Radio Mirror
September 1966
Could this be Elizabeth Montgomery, Important TV Star, Big Celebrity In Any Man's Town, Owner Of One Of The Sexiest Looks Around? It could--in fact, it definately is.
If you had visited Elizabeth's house during her recent vacation from ABC-TV's "Bewitched," you could not only have tried her sourdough bread (it has a special, slightly sour taste, hence the name) but also her homemade mayonnaise (from an old family recipe), not to mention her "famous" beef stew.
Away from the klieg lights, Elizabeth Montgomery happens to be a very domestic gal. Not only that--she's very good at being very domestic!
Says her husband Bill Asher, the lucky recipient of Elizabeth's household talents (not to mention acting talents, since he is the director of her show), "You know how good she is at her job. I've never known an actress with a more professional approach. Yet, at home, she is with the babies (sons Billy, 3, Bobby, almost 1), the grocery list, the house, the cat, the dog...
"I don't know how she does it but she's able to encompass so much. She has a knack, a feeling for all this, an enthusiasm even for the grocery list and, you'll just never believe this but it's true--for needlepoint!"
Would you believe--Elizabeth Montgomery doing needlepoint? At the moment, she's got two going. The smaller one depicts an owl in a tree and will make a pillow. The larger piece will be a rug. It shows mice all around the outside, with a picture of the Asher's' cat in the middle. Elizabeth got a good start on them on her vacation, has the owl canvas in her dressingroom now that she's before the cameras again. She works on it between takes. She picked up the canvases in New York, where she and Bill spent the first part of their vacation. They'd stayed at the Regency Hotel and the first thing they did after checking in was take a walking tour of Manhattan. They dropped in at the galleries and they shopped. Elizabeth bought the first new formal gown she's had in "twenty million years," a beautiful red and gold chiffon number.
She wore it at the Emmy Awards, where "Bewitched" was nominated and Bill walked off with the top director award. "It is a positively beautiful gown," says Liz, "but I'll probably never wear it again. I'm back to blue jeans and tennis shoes now that we're back home and that's just fine with me." In New York, though, she went glamorous. They saw all the shows, caught one, "Man Of La Mancha," with her dad, Robert Montgomery, and his wife. They found a marvelous Italian restaurant on 12th Street in the Village, went to all their old favorites--Sardi's East and Sardi's West, The Lobster and Luchow's.
And best of all, they went, for a long weekend, to Pawling, to Elizabeth's mother's place, the country home where Elizabeth spent all the wonderful summers of her childhood with her brother and her cousins. "It was great fun being there," she says. "I love being with my mother and I hadn't seen her since she was here last fall when the baby was born. She always comes for the babies. You know, there's something about your family you never really appreciate until you get just a little older.
"My brother was at Pawling and so were my cousin Panda, her husband Pete, their little girl Lucy and their two dogs, Maude and Curtis--don't you just love the names? Maude is a poodle and slightly retarded, but just so sweet. She was a strange little puppy but my cousin is incredible with animals and this poodle is so great with their baby, she's like a stuffed animal. And Curtis, let's see, what is he? A griffin, I guess, one of those short-haired, pointed dogs, ugly, ooh, but so nice. They also have a monkey, Donald, who is very fond of ladies but not too fond of men. My brother Skip and my husband Bill are the only two men Donald tolerates, so at the moment he's being boarded somewhere. And Mom has Thrupenny, the poodle, and my cousin Cush (Panda's brother, Arthur Cushman) has the most beautiful black Larbrador he uses for hunting. They all live at Pawling. Mother's house is there, of course, and then there's a dirt road and Cush lives kind of down at the bottom of the road, then there's Panda's and Peter's house and Panda's mother lives up at the other end. We went up Friday evening and had a marvelous dinner, just sat around and celbrated--I don't know exactly what we were celbrating, it was just great fun being there.
"My cousin Panda and I have always been terrribly close. I sometimes don't see her for a year but that has nothing to do with it. If I ever had a problem--I can't conceive of having one but if I did--I'd call her and there'd be no 'why' and 'where have you been,' we're just close and I guess we always will be.
"Last year, when we went back and took Billy, Cush wasn't there. So this is the first time my husband met my cousin Cush, who was always really more of a big brother to me, as he was to Panda. He and Panda are wonderful together, not like some brothers and sisters. We kids all stuck together in the old days. There were older kids and then Panda and me and younger kids; the older ones sort of watched out for the others.
"Cush and the older kids could go hunting and we couldn't, but as we got a little older, they'd take us along. Then there were tea dances and that sort of thing and when we were old enough to have champagne they'd take us to the Versailles where Edith Piaf used to sing. We loved her and went there a lot.
"Cush and my brother Skip didn't care about horses but Panda and I did. And as our kids get older, there will be horses again. Panda's Lucy rides the dog, she doesn't need a horse. I think it would be marvelous to take the children back for the summer when they're a little older. Lucy is just a year older than my son Billy; Skip's children are a little older, the boy, eight, the girl, almost seven. It will be family again they'll stick together as we did when we were little."
Along the country road near Pawling, Bill and Elizabeth found some wonderful antique things--a couple of old door stops, a wooden candle holder, a diningroom table and some ladder-back chairs with woven seats. All of them are now installed in the house in Beverly Hills...where the Ashers spent the rest of their vacation.
From New York, they'd brought Billy a green plush snake like the one Lucy had, with marvelous eyes and its head resting on crossed hands. You wind it up and it plays Little Egypt's theme song and Billy is crazy about it. All he had to hear was the word snake once, and that was it. At two, he's saying all sorts of words. He heard Elizabeth call Bill honey, now he calls them both honey. Or, at least, he called them both honey until he heard Elizabeth call the cat Dum Dum, now he's calling them both Dum Dum. He and his baby brother, Robert, love to lie on the floor and laugh at each other and Billy crawls under the baby's crib and thumps the bottom of the crib, which simply delights the baby.
All the Ashers spend a lot of time in the pool. Billy wears a Mae West ("I used to call them swimming brassieres when I was little") and swims after his father like mad. The other day Elizabeth was on the raft with both babies and Billy jumped off the raft, into, the water, without his Mae West. But Mama just reached in, grabbed an arm and pulled him out sputtering.
Elizabeth and Bill spent a lot of time with the youngsters during this last vacation and Elizabeth ran the house while her housekeeper took time off. She cooked all the meals--deliciously, of course--but she didn't impress her son Billy.
"The baby will eat anything he can chew," she says. "He's only got two teeth. But Billy is finicky. Not that this worries me. I figure that when he gets hungry, he'll eat. When I was little, I didn't eat much. Neither did Bill when he was a kid. My brother and I were both skinny little things, all bones, elbows and knees. So I don't worry about Billy, he's got a marvelous build, anyway. I just watch him so he doesn't eat between meals. That's the problem. I don't believe in feeding him between meals when he doesn't eat at meals."
Elizabeth is a marvelous mother. Her husband Bill says it's absolutely spooky how good she is with the children. Actually, her great domesticity is just part of the zest she has for everything.
She loves sports and the newest kick is golf. This is something she's always wanted to do. Up in the country, when she was fourteen or so, she and her cousin Panda used to knock golfballs around the course, not really knowing what they were doing. "It was like every hole was par 12." But for her birthday, on April 15, Bill surprised her with the most beautiful set of clubs, and on vacation they played every day.
"I've been kind of pleased and Bill's quite proud of me," she says, "because there have been a couple of times when I've been quite good. On the eighth hole at Los Robles, where we usually play, they have this dogleg and one day I smacked a tee shot a good 200 yards, which almost tickled me to death. It's funny, you do it right and you don't feel a thing; you hit it wrong, your fingers tingle, your arms ache and your hair stands on end. I was so excited about that 200 yard shot, I proceeded to dump three balls right into the pond."
They've played with Frank and Sherry Nau (Sherry used to be Billy's executive secretary) and had such fun because Frank is 6'5 and Sherry is 5'1, and when Frank swings it's the longest arc in the world. No carts, incidentally, for the Ashers. They walk every inch of the golf course and Elizabeth, over the vacation, lost ten pounds.
The "witch twitch" at play!
And they saw baseball. Not in New York. They didn't get to Shea Stadium in New York because baseball was rained out while they were there. But back home they were rooting for the Dodgers as usual. And twice, Elizabeth has done something she never did before...she "twitched in" runs!
"It was so funny. It was the night Sandy Koufax was up at bat and you know it's not difficult to walk Sandy because he isn't, by his own admission, the world's greatest hitter. The bases were loaded. It's now ball 2, strike 2, and we're dying, so I did my witch twitch and now it's ball 3 and I did it again. It's ball 4 and, by golly, if he wasn't walked and it went into a run. Brian (Bill's son from a previous marriage) was with us and the kids were hysterical, it was so funny. and then I did it again in a game where Lefevre was up and he walked in a run." This may just get to be a habit! Last year she almost wore the twitch out getting the Dodgers the pennant.
And now Elizabeth's back twitching on the set. And you've never seen a witch that was more tan, more radiant, more full of zip. For she has a secret, this Elizabeth. She loves what she does and does what she loves and that includes working and playing and being Bill's wife, and--naturally--baking sourdough bread.