Twitch Upon a Star by Herbie J. Pilato Read Free Book Online

director Vincent Sherman standing between the two.
    Davis never came to such blows with Robert Montgomery on the set of June Bride , but she came close. She explained in Chandler’s book:
    He was an excellent actor, but addicted to scene stealing. He would add business in his close-ups which didn’t match mine, so that there would only be one way to cut the film—his way. Mr. Montgomery understood films. (Director) Windust, who was not a film man at all, never noticed, and I couldn’t have cared less. Montgomery was welcome to all the close-ups he wanted. I act with my whole body.
    In 1991, Elizabeth told Ronald Haver that her father and Davis didn’t get along. After Lizzie had moved out of the Montgomery homestead, Robert would call and invite her to dinner.
    â€œI can’t,” she’d reply. “I’m going over to Bette’s.”
    â€œOh,” he’d say, and hang up.
    After meeting at various social events in New York, Davis became somewhat of a mentor for the young ingénue. In fact, while only in her late teens, Lizzie was invited by Davis to her home in Maine on a street named, “appropriately enough,” Elizabeth said, “Witch Way.” That name represented Davis’ reputation and not Bewitched , which was years from creation. But for the moment, the witch reference seemed to fit Davis and, as Lizzie told Haver, “She knew that.”
    One weekend on Witch Way, Lizzie and Bette picked beans from Davis’ garden and later strung them inside the house, while sitting in front of her fireplace. Shortly after, an argument ensued between the two, Davis stalked out of the room, and then stopped in her tracks. She turned to face Lizzie and said, “ Betty —when they do the story of my life, you should play me, and I’m not sure that’s a compliment.” Lizzie thought that was funny; Bette Davis was the only person Elizabeth Montgomery ever allowed to call her “Betty.”

    According to James Pylant’s Bewitching Family Tree :
    Elizabeth Montgomery’s death certificate gives her mother’s maiden name as Elizabeth Allen, a Kentucky native. The 1930 federal census of Los Angeles County, California, shows Robert Montgomery, age twenty-five, born in New York, Actor, Motion Pictures , and wife Elizabeth A., also twenty-five, born in Kentucky, and a fifty-year-old servant lived on Black-wood Drive in Los Angeles. The age at first married for both was twenty-three. The couple had married on 14 April 1928 in New York, and the following year they moved to Hollywood when Robert signed a contract with M-G-M. Elizabeth was the couple’s second child. Tragically, their first born, Martha Bryan Montgomery, died at age fourteen months in 1931.
    In May 1965, Movie TV Secrets magazine published the article, “Witches Are People Too,” by Jackie Thomas. It explained how Robert was devastated by the loss; how tiny Martha’s death left him in a state of severe depression that immobilized him for months. A friend who knew the Montgomerys described his condition:
    I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone as shaken as Bob. All his life seemed to be invested in that child; when she died something in him died with her. I don’t think he has ever really recovered. Something inside him was twisted and destroyed by Martha’s death.
    Lizzie was interviewed for that same article. She addressed her father’s strict reign over her youth, one that seemingly increased with time, as if in gradual reaction and retaliation to her infant sister’s death, a young sibling she never knew. Little by little, her father’s stern rule nibbled away at her self-esteem until the day she died in 1995. But thirty years before in May 1965, it was a different story.
    She said she was too sure of a great many things. Being the daughter of a star had its effect on her. Not that her father went out of his way to make things easier for