Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone, and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information, the show that brings you the secret histories and little known facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows and more. We are your dueling Darren's of Details. You're Larry Taits of Tedium. Your uncle Arthur is of awesomely inaned facts twitching up god knows how many hours of mid century trivia.
My name's Jordan Runtogg and I'm Alex Heigel.
And today we are talking about one of the pillars of my beloved.
Nicket night TV programming block.
It's one half of the supernatural women on sitcoms in the mid sixties, dimming their shine for totally mediocre Dude's Access.
No not, I Dream of Jeannie.
The other one, though, as we'll discuss their basically sister shows. I'm talking about Bewitched. Premiering sixty years ago this September, it quickly became one of the highest rated shows on television, airing for eight seasons on ABC between nineteen sixty four
and nineteen seventy two. Bewitched follows the adventures of a friendly witch named Samantha, played by the legendary Elizabeth Montgomery, who marries a mortal named Darren famously played by two different men named Dick, and her attempts to live as an ordinary suburban housewife.
Hilarity ensues.
I don't have super deep emotions about this show, and in fact, I think, yeah, how could you really? Upon revisiting it, I am thoroughly charmed by Elizabeth Montgomery. I forgot like how great she is to watch, and like fun she is and everything. Yeah, but I as a kid, I think I gave the edge to Genie on a Dream of Genie because first of all, I like space and Tony Nelson was an astronaut and I thought the whole Middle Eastern thing was more cool and exotic.
But I also love to be witch problematic of you come on the bottle like I having a clubhouse.
I was like that bottles pretty cool.
Ooh, I don't know. We'll see if you get canceled yet. No, I'm kidding, that's all fine, don't panic about that, like I know you will. Haiger.
What do you think about Bewitch? Do you like it better than the Brady Bunch? Yes, because it's got a witch in it.
Oh yeah, fair. I remember watching this and also I dream of Genie, but I took absolutely nothing from them, sure, like in one ear and out the other man. And I think it's because like in those days, like I didn't really have like a sense of narrative television because everything was I was watching was syndicated. Yeah, So I was just like I was like, there, I don't know these plots. I don't know anything, and I kind of gravitate towards that still, like I am one of those
blasphemous X Files fans. That's like I wish every single episode was Monster of the Week. I don't care about the overch and kids, like I'm bad like that. But so because of that, I just don't remember anything about this, like there was nothing to golm Onto except I also remember finding Elizabeth Montgomery like charming as hell. Yes, And I remember and Dora, Yeah, I feel like you'd like
Andorra Yeah yeah, Wisecracker love it. And I just remember then reading about like in all of my coffee table books about the mid middle of the twentieth century that I read of a lot of which probably shared with you, that you know, they switched Dix and that was such
a big thing. But yeah, man, I don't know. I I think at the vague sense of disappointment is my only kind of of well just to being like this isn't witchy, oh, or like yeah, this isn't you know because I'm watching this in like nineteen ninety four five, I was like, I had an established notion of witchcraft by the already, Yeah, as any child should. So yeah, going back to this, I was like, I don't I don't understand this, but I understand Elizabeth Montgomery. So you
thought there was a bait and switch. Yeah, yeah, I was deceived by the amount of black magic that I was promised. The black magic too suburban drama. Yeah was unequal. It was uneven. Okay, So I have a pretty robust foundation. I just don't remember any of them other than that I watched them. But I mean that's what mid century sitcoms are for. You watch them, you don't get invested. Although I do say.
I feel like Bewitched is important in the history of television because it's one of the first shows where it's dirty laundry was aired in public in real time.
Because, as we'll touch.
On with the Dicks with with the Dicks, yes, several of the cast members died mid series, and Dick Yark had to be replace after five seasons by Dick Sergeant
as Darren the male lead. So, as far as I'm concerned, Bewitch was like behind the scenes TV drama one oh one and helped pave the way for stuff like each true Hollywood stories because you know, everyone kind of knew that there was some dirt and shadiness under the slick sitcom veneer, and they sent producers of those kinds of docudrama TV shows to start looking at like you know, the Brady Bunch or a Dream of Genie or family Affair stuff like that. So anyway, I feel like Bewitched
has an important place in TV history for that. It just seems tailor made for these people. Magazine expose's and we'll be quoting from a few.
Yeah, I mean, I can't summon up any feelings. Even my usual bile has left me. I'm just like, yeah, give Elizabeth Montgomery her flowers. Whatever. Man, she's cute. She did the wiggle, the face wiggle thing face wiggle, that's fine. She worked hard and she did good things for a lot of people.
As we're talking about cool cool lady, and I should have saved this at the very end, but I'm gonna say it to you now because I think it'll maybe flavor of the rest of this episode for you. Did you know that her last performance, it came out just after she died, by her request, was a voiceover performance for your beloved Batman, the animated series. She played a barmaid. That was her last performance. Yeah, I love that.
I think they dedicated the episode to her. Oh that's wonderful. Yeah, she's super cool.
But aside from dirt and behind the scenes stories allow me to over intellectualize some of the precise reasons why Bewitch has meant so much to so many. As initially conceived and even outlined in the show bible, the focus of the show wasn't supposed to be on magic or witchcraft,
as you noted. Instead, it was a subversion of an old and tired plot line where a working class man marries a woman and afterwards finds out that she's from an extremely rich family, and the man then struggles to maintain his stubborn insistence that they live within their means. This obviously meant a lot more in the sixties, when men were supposed to be the breadwinner and the head
of the household and all that. So, in short, Bewitch was about a man trying to maintain social norms and retain his dominance despite the fact that his wife is far more powerful. And in that way, it's a very powerful proto feminist concept, at least as far as nineteen sixty four network sitcoms were concerned. Interestingly, Elizabeth Montgomery actually refused to wear a brawl in later seasons, and it's
a subtle nod to the women's liberation movement. Oh, I bet it was subtle, But I mean, it's just like a crazy thing that can like sneak onto a network sitcom in like nineteen seventies. Yeah, the Witch was expected to be subservient, lesser than her man, and that's just
not who she was. One of the early writers of The Witch, Danny Arnold, believed that the main theme of the show is the conflict of a powerful woman and a husband who cannot deal with that power, and also the woman's mother who's furious that she married beneath her station. In February nineteen sixty four, just a few months before Bewitch premiered, Betty Freudan, the legendary.
Freedom I talk about a Freudian slip. Oh wow, I'll keep that.
Betty fri Dan, the legendary feminist writer philosopher. I don't even know how you'd sum up her work, who wrote The Feminine Mystique, wrote a two part essay for the TV Guide called Television and the Feminine Mystique, in which she lamented the fact that women on sitcoms were quote simplistic, manipulative, and insecure household drudges whose time was spent in dreaming
of love and plotting revenge on their husbands. But Samantha Stevens, the witch from Bewitched, was very different, and her mother, who hates that she married a mortal, speaks of Samantha's household duties in language that seems to.
Come straight from the feminine mystique.
She's basically saying, you know you're better than this, Be who you are. It's funny because in recent years and Dora, who is conceived as a metalsome mother in law character archetype for the show, has actually gained more sympathy than Darren Stevens, the every man who married a witch and wants her to, you know, act like a normal housewife. Many evolved in the making of Bewitch said that they deliberately intended the show to be analogous to real life
mixed marriages. Darren and Samantha decided to conceal Sam's true identity, while in real life many couples concealed the race, ethnicity, or religion of one of their spouses. And the LGBTQ community also embraced Bewitch because many related to Samantha feeling as though she just to disguise her true self in order to pass in a much more dull, homogeneous world. This despite the fact that her true self is quite literally magical.
So there's a lot to unpack. Yeah, and I mean, I think this whole era is just so fascinating to me because as a horror dork, because you know, it's so much of it is directly traceable to Universal Studios, really shaping the nature of how we thought about this stuff, because you know, those films were so gigantic in their era, but by this time when the television comes along, they had really started to slow. They were well into their meat.
S Abbott and Costello face, I love what you hate that yeah, and you know, of the canonical sort of monsters that we think of like Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, Mummy, and Wet Beast, they only produced the Mummy and the and the monster creature from the Black Lagoon. Oh yeah, they afore mentioned Wet Beast. The only produced those as originals. But what they had done was release a lot of their stuff to cables or cable not television, to local
affiliates for rebroadcasts. And that's when you get the whole horror host thing with well Vampiro is the first one and Zacherlee out of Philadelphia. But you know, all that stuff is really ripe for reimagining it in the same context or getting these same readings from it. I mean, famously, Brida Frankenstein is like one of the gayest movies ever made because the director, James Whale, was an openly gay man in Hollywood, which was like practically a death sentence
at the time. But that movie has been tremendously reclaimed by the queer community, and so is have all of them to an extent, because it's all about being an outsider, and that's such a fascinating thing to bring into the context of a sitcom because it is like, you know, the whole narrative that's been shoved down our throat by boomers and everything was in the era of post war prosperity that followed, like society became boring and like not really if you were trying to struggle for basic human
rights during that period. But it's funny. It is interesting to see how some people look at it, or how it can be read as this idea of Darren, like the central all American male figure essentially trying and failing to keep anything that is, you know, not the conformist,
white picket fence lifestyle in check. And I think that's a really wonderful reading of it that prefigures much of the civil rights movement, much of the queer movement, much of the counterculture movement, the new left that was about to happen in the following decade, Which is my over intellectualization of it. You know, you have like literally white America, white straight male America not realizing what it was about to have to reckon with.
That's so much more articulate the top of your head than what I literally wrote down, which annoys me. No, I mean, and that's fascinating for me because to bring an outsider perspective to the most insider of platforms network TV, sitcom in the mid sixties when there are only three networks. I just find that such a weird dichotomy.
And we talked about this in the context of Adam's Family as well, But Adam's family is such it has a different pedigree because it came from that whole macabre Edward Gorey New Yorker aesthetic as opposed to monsters, but they're both all. They're all fascinating for it, especially in mediums of film and television. You can see the generations start to take control of this, like there's a reason that Tim Burton and like the usc well more than any like. I mean, he's the biggest one because he
came out of Disney, that comes to my mind. But like you see the people who grew up with these mid century fascinations start to create stuff based on it. We talked about it last week with Tales from the Crypt where it was like all of those guys who were the first generation of this fifties culture that bewitch is it on the continuum of eventually started being able
to shape culture. In there in their nostalgia, and we got all this stuff that looked back to the era, and sadly, it was by and large straight white guys, so we didn't really get the repressed reading. But it has popped up.
Man.
I mean there's Clive Barker is like, you know, perennially sadly perennially like number two or three to Stephen King and I don't know Dean Koomts in terms of like horror books, but Clive Barker has always been quite edgier than either of those guys, because a ton of his stuff is about sex and violence. And I forget if
he's identifies as gay or bisexual. But you know, Night Breed, which is one of the great failures of Hollywood, was like an explicitly very queer coded movie that he was at the reins of after getting the juice to make it because of the success of Hell Raiser, Clive Barker having created Pinhead, who he does not like it when we call him Pinhead, but it is. I mean, it's fascinating. I love the queer reading of horror films and anything horror jacent, you know, because the second you start talking
about othering. It comes up in those readings, and quite a few of them were made by gay people. Child's Play was written by Tom n He as a gay man. You know. That's why Chucky has gone on to have like a non binary child towards the end of the franchise. But yeah, it's fascinating to see. I think it's very interesting to see that reading of queer othering into all of these situations or other other ring. You know, race goes into it, political affiliations goes into it, played out
in stuff that is ostensibly kitchy and lightweight. Yeah.
Yeah, that's what I find so fascinating about it. And also, I mean, going back to the feminist reading, I make a point in this episode to not discuss the two thousand and five movie with Nicole Gimmin and Will Ferrell because.
It was so bad.
But it was written by Nora Efron, who's, like, you know, has writible background as a writer, I mean, one of the most brilliant screenwriters of the twentieth century. So it kind of follows in that linear like the fact that she chose to do that even though it got.
Horrible, horrible reviews. Yeah, well, it's hard to find the tone because like I think, having Will Ferrell in as like an ostensibly in control, dominant male figure is like totally false. I mean they should have gone with like yeah, John Hamm or somebody that is effectively authoritarian and square enough, whereas like Will Ferrell, you're just automatically a conditioned to
be like ah the buffoon. So it's yeah. And that's why I think a lot of the updates at tonally getting this kind of stuff like Mars Attacks partially succeeds, but like Rob Zombie did Monsters and it's it's hard to get the camp right. It's hard to get the attitude correct. Anyway, shut up, let's too bowitch. Oh wait. First, in the middle of all this pontificating, thank you as always to our supporters on KOFE, drop us a message. I love bantering, whether it's gift or textual. And you
guys put for you in the tank. It's so great to hear personal stories of what the show means to you or what you take from it. And we are keeping track of suggestions. I promise you, I say, whether it's gift or jif no, no, no, I see I see the vein in your neck. You can see it.
Oh all right, Well, there's a lot to unpack, and this is probably a contender for the longest episode we've ever done. It's ten thirty PM. I'm jet lagged in sick, so let's get right to it. No fact teases for you this episode, Ladies and gentlemen, here is everything you didn't know about be Witched. Oh man, Well, we're starting off on kind of a bummer note here. Of folks, I'm sad to report that this beloved sitcom has its
origins and a truly hilarious good executive brainstorming. Harry Ackerman, who led the television production studio screen Gems, wanted to make a show about a witch.
Cool and I'm on board.
That's all he had, folks, That's that's what he's got. A bunch of witch movies were owned by the Screen Gems parent company, Columbia Pictures, and so it seemed like money on the table as far as old Harry was concerned. And to flesh out this groundbreaking premise, you put in a call of Soul Sachs, an experienced radio and TV writer who's responsible for episodes of Ozzie and Harriet. My
favorite husband. I married Joan and many others. They dined at the legendary Hollywood Musso and Frank seen in the opening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
If I recall, I think that's where Leo and Brad are eating with it. Was it Alpacino? Who's their their agent in that Alpucino is in the dinner scene, I think, But I think it's there. I think it's there. Yeah, what a picture.
Yes, So Saul Sacks and Harry Ackerman go to Musso and Frank and they talk it through and Saul expands this idea into a witch marring immortal, and within three weeks he turned in a pilot script that he called The Witch of Westport, which is kind of a great title, like arguably better than Bewitched.
Maybe I like the alliteration. Yeah, I'm a sucker for literation.
The script followed the adventures of a witch named Cassandra, who falls in love with and marries Mortal. The series would focus on Cassandra's attempts to adapt to her life as a suburban housewife in Westpark, Connecticut. Now Sechs would freely admit that he borrowed heavy air quotes the idea from a pair of movies nineteen fifty eight's Bail Booken Candle, and perhaps most obviously, a nineteen forty two movie called I Married a Witch.
Kind of gives away the lead the guy.
Yeah, it does what it says on the ten although this movie kind of seems great.
Have you ever heard of this movie? No? I have not. I kind of.
Think you would like it. It's about a woman living in the sixteen sixties New England who vows to get revenge after she sentenced to burn at the Steak for being accused of being a witch. Correctly, I assume being a witch. Centuries later, her soul was accidentally set free and roams the earth, and she develops an interest in a local politician. But then she discovers that the politician is descended from the people who had her killed.
Hilarity, I think, insus.
I'm pretty sure she should have killed them. Yeah, I think that's ques terrifically. I think that's what she's grappling with.
Yeah, yeah, okay.
Salt Sacks was open about these influences, one because they were so obvious, and two, as we mentioned, the production company owned them so he could proceed without fear of lawsuits.
After writing the pilot, he received a show creator credit.
And basically backed off and had no involvement in the show for the rest of its run. He didn't really do anything after this either. He basically just counted his money for the rest of his life until his death in twenty eleven at age one hundred. Hell yeah, right,
So for this you do the one good thing. You take an executive a's like one word idea, couple it with stuff that already exists, do the bare minimum and bang on a script in three weeks, and then just sit back and cash checks for the rest of your life.
Until you live to a hundred. That's Hollywood, baby. Hell yeah. The only downside about his long life means.
That he unfortunately I was alive when the two thousand and five movie came out.
Who did that? We studio? Now the director, I don't know. Oh yeah, nor Efron didn't just write it, she directed it too. O man, Oh that's tough. It's funny to me that you hate it so much. I mean, they took some standtrack, stand track, stand track.
They took my beloved mid century media and made a mockery of it.
It's nothing sacred. I hate to tell you, Bud, But there's probably gonna be a lot more of that coming up.
Yeah, yeah, well no, I think the boomer stuff has been mined. That's that's the only stuff I care about.
Hey, we still can hold out hope for my mother of the Car, a gritty reboot. I can see it now. I can see it now. It's like it's gonna be like, there's gonna be a mournful lower register, single piano key rendition. If I'm in love with my car. I was going to say, drive my car.
Actually, oh, that's better.
And then like there's like a shot fades in someone going out to dilapidated garage and ripping off a dust cover of a car, but you also see that there's chains over the car. And then it's like we do like a probably a medium maybe a two shot of the woman talking to the man and she's like, there's a lot about my family, you don't know, Darren. And then we get another slow interruption. I was gonna say, yeah. Then the lights pop on, yeah, and then it kicks
into I don't know, probably new metal. Maybe I think the kids are back into that these days, or like a vapor wave. No, not vaporway. Yeah, like a new metal cover of Drive My Car. We could maybe get Jack Antonof on that. I know he's a favorite of yours with what he does with the Beatles work. And then it kicks up and then it ramps into like a Christine esque series of car murders. Yeah what kind of car? I don't care, that's I material, Okay, all right.
They would be what's the funniest car? An AMC, Gremlin, ya Spectra, kiasol, Oh, what's the square one? A Scion or a Yugo? You go pretty funny and old? Yougo pontiac az tech Ooh also good? Also good? And then it has to come back. It has to come back to Geometros. Yeah, it has to come back to Satan in some way, Like it's like a blood and there has to be like a woke twist on it. So it's like it would be something about how she was like prisoned in a car for like it was.
Like a dashboard Satan, a dashboard devil or something on like springs.
But then like there's actual light behind the eyes. Yeah yeah, or it's just like yeah, or it's like she was like it would go back to like her being cursed by like a cabal of like the seventies, like blood sacrifice, Satan worshiping, like business guys, a glowing pine air freshener. Oh that's good, that's good.
That's good, Like that represents her soul or something or as sentience.
Yeah, and then we get like a histrionically wailing Berkeley Grad to be like baby, you can drop that, and then it's like and then like coming December twenty twenty five. Everything we pitch on here is a verbal contract. So someone who's someone who's this money when that comes out.
I was just texting a friend of the pod Dora a little while ago, and it never occurred to me the line from driving my car, but you could do something in between.
That's a really obscene sounding line. Never occurred to me. Who cares, there's your Beatles' reference. Oh yeah, well.
The script for The Witch of Westport made its way around Hollywood and screen. Jam's first choice for the lead was a woman named Tammy Grimes, who was a Broadway star. She won a Best Actress Tony in nineteen sixty one for playing Molly Brown in The Unsinkable Molly Brown used my Titanic drinkable.
You love the unsinkable Molly Brown so much.
I love a brassy Southern lady who survives the Titanic. Well, what's not the love?
Yeah. Ultimately, Tandy Crimes.
Backed out of playing the lead on Bewitched because she found the idea too far fetched, reportedly wondering why the witch in question wouldn't use her powers to either stop wars or deal with Los Angeles traffic. Those were the two examples she provided, stopping wars or stopping LA traffic.
Yeah, that's fair, that's fair. Actors are special people, they are. I don't know. I always with witchcraft and anything. I'm really I'm just always like, like I believe that they believe in it, But I'm always just like, why does this always just come down to like people in strip malls lighting candles, like strip malls that you go into. Yeah, yeah, strike that. I don't want to make them witchy women mad at me.
Yeah, yeah, I'm keeping it for that recent Yeah. The script for The Witches of Westport eventually landed on the desk of William Asher. Asher was a director and producer who directed one hundred and ten of I Love Lucy's one hundred and seventy nine episodes, as well as some of my beloved Beach Party Franking in that teen movies.
He just got married to an actress named Elizabeth Montgomery, whom he'd met while directing her in the TV movie Johnny Cool and this Guy yuh For being like kind of a dumpyfore something balding guy, he had something going for him.
Though he was married.
While directing Johnny Coole, he was having affairs with three separate women on the set before getting serious with Elizabeth Montgomery, and they were deeply in love and soon after their marriage in nineteen sixty three, they wanted to find a project to work on together so they could be together all the time, ideally a sitcom which provided more of a stable routine that would allow them to start a family.
The Witch of Westport fit the bill perfectly. They began work on the pilot, making alterations the Salt Sacks original script. The title was changed to Bewitched because it just just because cleaner, and Cassandra was named Samantha. Apparently, Elizabeth Montgomery didn't like Cassandra because she thought it was too connected to the evil witches of Greek mythology.
Oh a little anti Greek, little anti Greek bias going on. I love this. This just got interesting for me. Cassandra was a temple priestess. Now I thought she was like a I was gonna say, yeah, wasn't she the one who claimed to Yeah yeah, Trojan princess and priestess. Oh she was the one who was cursed so that she had visions of the future, but that no one would believe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean same.
ABC was pitched the show, but they turned it down initially because I this is kind of a hilarious reason, but I guess kind of makes sense given that it was the sixties. They were worried that a show with a witch's a main character would repel audiences in the highly religious South.
Oh yeah, absolutely, Yeah, yeah, that was a smart call. They were right, No, it was those people are crazy.
It was only when Chevy came on as a sponsor that they realized that maybe this had the potential to make a ton of money after all, and they ended up greenlighting it.
So. Elizabeth Montgomery, the star of Bewitched, is a fascinating woman. Aside from her obvious charm that captivated Jordan and I at an early age. And many others. It's not even it's that asexual what it's like at that age, it was just purely being like she seems neat or was it sexual for you? She was a real pretty lady, just a pretty lady who was magical and powerful anyway. Elizabeth Montgomery, the start of The Bewitched, is a fascinating woman,
incredibly talented, driven as well as big hearted. She made over two hundred guest appearances on TV before Bewitch came along, and she got an Emmy nomination for an episode of The Untouchables. She also starred in Broadway productions like The Miracle Worker and Late Love. I don't know what that is? It sounds weird. Well, the Miracle Worker, I do is the hell in kellor one? No? Yeah, I don't know
what is late nevermind, I don't care. She's also sadly or finely depending on your point of view, a NEPO.
Baby, depending on who's listening and whether or not they have access to our coffee.
Pitge Yeah, yeah, yeah, yuh. Her father was actor Robert Montgomery, who was a big star in the thirties and forties before he began hosting his own anthology television series Predictably Tight Robert Montgomery Presents from nineteen fifty to nineteen fifty seven. I've never heard of this, neither of I. Elizabeth made her debut on this show, but the father daughter relationship was a tense one. She struggled to escape his shadow, and he didn't make that easier by being a critic
of everything in her life. He didn't want her to follow in his footsteps and become an actress, and then he became deeply jealous of her when her fame eclipsed his own. Friends would say that Elizabeth presented her father but also desperately tried to please him on some level, and that push pool tied her in knots it's a good metaphor, too many metaphors. No, No, it's good. Push and pull in yeah, push pull, you make a not yeah. Elizabeth asked Robert if he would provide narration for the
pilot episode of Bewitched, and he refused. She then asked him if he'd play her father in the series, and he also refused. That Later in her career, when she appeared in the TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden, which, for those of you not in the Know is about the woman who famously took an axe and gave her parents forty wax. Robert Montgomery took that as a personal affront. He reportedly told her, you would star in that. Uh. He criticized her posture, her gait, and her affection for
finding familial dynamics. In other dimensions of that she liked older men. He would openly accuse her of trying to replace him with the relationships that she had with older men in her life. That's weird.
It's an inside thought, yeah yeah, Or it's like something you like grouse about with mother, but not.
You know, all those fifties weirdos called their wives mother. John Lennon called Yoka mother.
But that was for entirely different weird reason, much more on settling reason.
Uh, moving on, moving on, moving on. He had been buried twice before Asher, who was twelve years or senior, and she seemed to be drawn to bad boys in the parlance of the times, or what we today would call dirtbacks, charitably men struggling with substance abuse issues and their mental health. Her second husband was the incredibly named Gig Young, an actor who famously struggled with alcoholism for
many years. Actually was the original choice for the Waco Kid, the Gene Wilder character in Blazing Saddles, but he collapsed while shooting his first scene because he was brying out. That's awful.
I think he was like literally like turning green because his inside were just so destroyed. And mel Brooks had the recast like over the Weekend.
Young died in October of nineteen seventy eight after shooting his wife of three weeks before turning the gun onto himself. That is a fast turnaround time. There was no note found and a motive was never determined and a fun Now we're just pulling in every single one of your connections. Go ahead, Jordan, bring this in. Take me, take us home to the Beach Boys.
Yes, Gig Young was being treated by the therapist Eugene Landy, the ethically dubious, unscrupulous therapist who brainwashed Brian Wilson, kidnapped him from his family, and tried to sign himself on to various Beach Boys contracts before he lost his license in a flurry of lawsuits. Let's job, Jean. That worked out real great for gig Young. Some excellent therapy.
Yeah, good Lord, So you know, naturally men were drawn to Elizabeth Montgomery being just a charming A charming lady with improbable bone structure, my new favorite turn affairs. She was rumored to have had an affair with Gary Cooper on the movie The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell, also famous for his line in Putting on the Ritz. Oh yeah, Dean Martin was smitten with her when they filmed Who's been Sleeping in My Bed? Answer? Well, I mean I would give it to Dino. He could. He could have
pulled that out on a man. Was charm personified in the fifties. Oh, Elvis Presley made overtures to her when he and Gig Young were co starring in Kid Galahad. But Montgomery's anti Greek prejudice, I have to assume would have played a role in shooting him down. Gig Young got upset. I cannot believe that's that guy's name. What is it short for gigathin Giggless Gigathy Gary.
It's not, it's just a it's a totally separate stage name. His name is Byron Byron bar which is also a great.
Name, and he went with gig Young. Yep, huh, Gig Young. Anyway, Gig got upset when he saw Elvis flirting with her on the set, and Presley called him an apple, and he was not wrong. Many years later, in a positively Sex in the City esque twist, Elizabeth Montgomery was connected with ballet star Alexander Godeneuve, who later became a successful
actor with films like Witness and Die Hard. He was a severe alcoholic, and his split from Montgomery sent him in a downward spile that essentially resulted in him drinking himself to death.
His body was found on the same day that Elizabeth Montgomery died, but he'd been dead for days.
You said that, like it was days days. He said that, like it was supposed to be like conciliatory. Note.
Oh no, it wasn't like for days. It wasn't like we found out about her death. And I was like, oh, oh, okay, you know what I mean.
Yeah. We'd also like to give an honorable mention to the second role that Montgomery not so secretly played on the show in season three, the twin Cousin, a trope so expertly weaponized later on in Twin Peaks, in which Cheryl Lee playing both Laura Palmer and her identical cousin, except for when she's wearing glasses Maddie. The wild and crazy character of Serena was basically created to give Montgomery more to do after playing the perpetually perky, buttoned up Samantha.
She loved putting on a dark wig and a go go dress and being slightly edgy on set to keep up with the illusion. As one such measure of this edgy, she asked that the character be credited to the false stage name of Pandora Spocks. Get it is that Greek spos? Is that a Greek name? A. Despite being this obvious pun, many presumably horny men sent fan letters, possibly from prison, to miss Spocks. Even the crew people were just dumber in the fifties. Even the crew were fooled by this
flimsy illusion. A producer on set started hitting on her, not realizing that it was Elizabeth Montgomery, the wife of the director, merely clad in a wig. Ah, here's a fun and creepy bit. Ashure would allude to sometimes taking Elizabeth Montgomery, in costume as Serena Spocks to a cheap motel after shooting for the day. That's fine, consenting it whatever consenting adults want to do in the privacy of
a CD hotel is AOK by me. And the last thing would drop about cousin Serena is that her character's makeup was supposedly the inspiration for Tim Curry's look as Doctor frank Enferd in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Is that great? I love all that?
Yeah, Now we have to move on to the male lead of the show, Darren Stevens, the hapless mortal who's Samantha throws it all away for or Mary's Way. There was a persistent rumor that producers originally wanted Dick Sargent, the man who would go on to be the replacement Darren a few years later, but he was cast in another project during the audition process. That's not quite accurate. He was the top choice much earlier, when Tammy Grimes was being considered for the part of Samantha, before Asher
and Elizabeth Montgomery got involved. Funnily enough, instead of doing Bewitched, Sergent was cast in a short lived sitcom alongside Tammy Grimes, where he played her twin brother, So Many Twins and Dick's and stuff Is that weird? Molly Browns not for My Friday. Richard Krena was the next actor off of the part of Darren. But hell yeah, he was just spent several years on the real McCoy's and he wanted to try something else rather than a sitcom, so we passed as well.
What else Richard Crowna Do I just know him from uh he's Rambo's handler.
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
He's that great speech about how boned they are because they pissed off John Rambo. Yeah, this man, he says eight things that would make a goat sick something something like that.
But that's just a whole other twist to Darren Stevens on Bewitched.
Could have been virtud Yeah, I like that. I like that.
But Bill Asher and Elizabeth Montgomery always wanted Dick York as Darren now took Curek had an impressive list of acting credits and film, Broadway and on TV. He began his acting career as a child, performing in radio shows in Chicago, where his family moved when he was very young. One of his radio roles was Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy, which was the kind of role you could have had in the thirties.
What kind of a show is that? Was it?
When I was like, like I found a nickel on the ground and I gave it to somebody. He was a depression. He was finally like I'm eating an apple and you all can listen.
Is that from the plucky orphan genre? Like the famous Annie orphan Annie? Yeah? Well I yes, famous amos orphan Annie? Yeah? Except he also was Jack Armstrong also an orphan? I old please.
It was the thirties, probably like one in two people fifty one that show went off the air. This was the radio version, so it was probably earlier, earlier, Noah.
It was carried by CBS, NBC and then finally ABC All Radio. It was a creation of General Mills, okay, intended to promote wheaties.
What was the plot? Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy?
What what I mean? Singing about wheaties? Literally first apparently and I'm just this is going off wikipedia. I haven't fact fact chestice, but the first commercial jingle on the radio was for wheaties in nineteen twenty six, and that was great fact on the Jack Armstrong Show, Have you tried wheaties? Their whole wheat with all of the brand. Won't you try wheaties, for wheat is the best food of man. Wow, that's curiously byronic, speaking of poetry, which
is the best food of man? Yeah right. They're crispy and crunchy the whole year through. Jack Armstrong never tires of them, and neither will you. So just buy wheaties the best breakfast food in the land. That's a I like the last tuo. Just buy them. It sounds like something Christopher walk of, So just just buy buy them. It's your problem, five wheaties.
Who was it? I think it was Kevin Pollock had a bit where hecause he a he famously does a really really dead on Christopher Walking impression.
Is goes for walking selling skills. It's not entertaining that this is even more interesting. The guy who created Jack Armstrong also created Betty Crocker. Oh that's wild.
Yeah, how about that like the character or like actually founded the brand. Uh.
Samuel Chester Gaale, vice president of advertising at General Mills, I'm still unable to find anything that this guy actually with the show. Actually yeah, oh wait, he's a popular athlete friends his friends. That's good. He's a family so he wasn't frequently Uncle Jim, an industrialist would have to visit an exotic part of the world for business, and he would take Jack Armstrong and his friends, the Fairfield siblings along with him. They were just like travelogs. I
guess really. Oh and then in the final season the program was renamed Armstrong of the SBI when Jack graduated from high school and became a fed the SBI. Yeah, I assume that's because they were uncomfortable saying FBI or something. But yeah, the kid literally graduated high school and became a fed. Well that's sickening. Oh and this goes, dude,
this goes all the way down. A Jack Armstrong animated TV pilot was developed by Hanna Barbera, and then negotiations fell through and the plan series was reworked into what would become Johnny Quest. Whoa, oh that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, wow, that's wild, far out man. That was one of our better conversational detours. That was very good.
I did not know Jack Armstrong, the all American boy, would would prove so fertile.
No no, no, but yeah, that was Dick York's earliest roles.
Fertile and breedable submissive. Sorry what that.
Was one of Dick York's earliest roles his upbringing was Dickensian. You're about to get real bummed out now. I highly advise you to fast forward about a minute. Otherwise, gimme you know if you're suffering from seasonal effective disorder in these days, I'd like to quote from a nineteen eighty nine People magazine piece, Homelessness and poverty are more than abstractions to Dick York, who believes the seed of his acting career were sown during his Depression era childhood in Chicago.
You had to be an actor growing up then, he says, he didn't want your parents to know that you knew your toys were secondhand. His parents, Bernard, a sometimes salesman, and Betty, a seamstress, acted too, telling him they'd eaten when York knew they hadn't. As a boy, York saw his father struggle with other men for food discarded in a garbage can when they didn't have rent, which was often someone had to stay inside the family apartment at all times to prevent the landlord from.
Walking everybody else out.
When he was eleven, an infant brother died, but the family couldn't afford to bury him. So York and his father slipped into a graveyard at night and laid the youngster to rest in a coffin and craft it from a shoebox.
Oh that's a new low for us, dude, that's yeah. Yeah, eleven year old burying an infant at night in a shoe box.
M yeah, yeah, his whole story. It gets worse and then it gets slightly better, and then it gets worse again.
Yeah. Yeah.
Dick York's talent, which was initially spotted by a porochial school none, ultimately got him out and led him to Broadway. He was in a play called Tea and Sympathy alongside the actress Debora Kerr, and he was so good that Paul Newman once boarded his subway car and approached York to say, I'm not going this direction, but I just wanted to tell you how great you were and Tea
and Sympathy, which I love. Dick York spotted Elizabeth Montgomery in the hall the day he showed up to audition to play Darren, and he reminded him of his own wife, Joey. As he later said, I walked into the office more confident than I've ever been in my life, and he bluffs his way through the audition by basically pretending mentally that they were already married. He got the gig, but he was nursing a terrible hidden secret, which we'll get too later.
Cliffhanger, Done, done, done. I can't get over that. Never saying a bad word about that man again. That is well, okay, sorry, I take that back, but that is maybe a new low for this show. Yeah, no, it's rough.
Yeah, Well, Dick York had another less hidden secret. Unfortunately, the whole pretending they were married thing got a little too real during the production of the show, and York supposedly developed feelings for Montgomery and made them fairly obvious. It's worth noting that he was also on a ton of pain killers at the time for reasons that we'll mention later, so his inhibitions were lowered.
There were times when he would just.
Be lying down on a couch resting while the others were filming, staring at Elizabeth Montgomery. This understandably creeped her out.
She didn't like Dick York that way, and also she was married to the show's director producer, who was a relatively frequent presence on the set, but his behavior just got worse and worse over the years, to the point where Elizabeth Montgomery actually complained that she didn't want to work with him quite as closely, you'll notice that after season three, while the plotlines became less romantic comedy centric and began to stress the magical fantastical elements more, just
so that they would have to be.
In fewer two shots.
Basically, this is a testament to how bad it must have gotten with York, because presumably, as a beautiful actress coming up in the fifties and early sixties, she heard terrible stuff from men on a daily basis, so this must have been uniquely terrible.
Though she was very cordial when speaking about him in interviews in later years. I read a.
Report that she never spoke to Dick York again after he left the show in nineteen sixty nine. So yeah, but we'll tell you some stories about Dick York later that will also make you want a weep. So it kind of complicated. Man kind of cancels out, Okay, gross, we'll.
Save those for later. Yeah, Okay.
Also, while we're on the topic of Samantha and Darren, Stevens' sexual relations. They are apparently the first sitcom couple to
share a bed, with some caveats. The ones who preceded them were married in real life Daisy and Lucy and I Love Lucy, Ozzy and Harriet Nelson in the Adventures of Ozzy and Harriet, and Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns in Mary Kay and Johnny, which most people haven't heard of, but it's widely hailed as the first sitcom from I think it's like nineteen forty seven or something.
It was super early.
Other entries are The Flintstones, which are animated and the Monsters.
I think we're a close runner up to be Witched.
Because it also premiered in nineteen sixty four, the same year as Bewitched. But I wouldn't count it because they're not a human couple.
They're months. Oh, come off it. I mean Herma's a monster. What is Lily a vampire? She's like a vampire?
Just yeah, yeah, although I got I mean, the Stevens aren't a human couple either, because he's a mortal and she's a witch, so maybe that shouldn't count either.
Do we have like a southern guy on hand? We can contact about miscegenation. I'm imagining a guy in a bow string tie and like a seersucker suit coming on and be like, now a witch is positively offensive for witches to cohabitate with. Man, it's a very good frank underword voice. We don't speak his name, he's can't.
We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right back with more too much information in.
Just a moment.
Ohigo, tell us a little bit about the meddling mother in law to end all meddling mother in law, sweet indoor. Yeah, I still have a hard time believing that this entire series wasn't just an elaborate setup to a My mother in law is a real witch joke, which is actually how they sold its sponsors.
Incredible. Yeah, and what's your feed? Is your favorite Indora line?
Oh yeah, well it was actually spoken to her by her strange husband. And Dora, your charm is ageless, so sad about the rest of you.
Good stuff. It's a good line. Yeah. She and Dora is played by the legendary screen actress Agnes moorehead Steady. She's a native of Clinton, Massachusetts, the town where young Jordan cut his teeth as a Buddying Team trivia host under his mentor the great DJJBJ. So do with that what you will, listeners.
I always always love Agnus Morehead. She's a a hometown girl. Oh yeah, yeah, that was a little Minnesota. Yeah, like I can't, I can't do a boss then.
No, I'm trying to give you a second. Probably with all the blue hairs out in Medved they go for they go for Agnes. This is my girl.
A lot of the what's her name who played in Harold Maud She's from uh Ruth Gordon.
Ruth Gordon's from Quincy, Massachusetts.
Yeah, a lot of those like like like I mean this affectionately like tough old broads are from Massachusetts.
Oh yeah, you almost got it there, you slipped into it.
I never I never had never You never I never had it? Yeah. No. The only the only word I could actually say was some degree of authenticity is noth North.
No, Yeah, that's a good one. Uh Well, Old Morehead veteran of Orson Wells famous Mercury players. She appeared in Citizen Kane as the mother of the titular character and got it four Oscar noombs before Bewitched even came around. Also if one for another Wells joint, the Magnificent Amberson's and also Hush Ellipses, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Charlotte. I didn't do that intentionally, but it's funnier, it's cleaner. In addition to her talent, she was kind of a badass, and
like Dick York overcame a horrifying upbringing. Morehead would later recall going four days without food at one point in her early acting career and that it had taught her the value of a dollar. All this being said, though, it does make a certain amount of sense that she wouldn't have been exactly thrilled to be a mother in law in a sitcom, and she got the role totally
by chance. The producer was struggling to come up with an actress who had the right combination of gravitas and playfulness to play the role of the mother in law who terrorizes her daughter's husband. Elizabeth Montgomery was strolling through Bloomingdale's one day in New York City and she heard that voice dune meme with the mom saying use the voice,
and it's Agnes Morehead's voice. She followed it through the store until she was confronted by the site of Morehead herself with a high quaffed orange Bouffont style hairdoo wrapped in pink tool. Montgomery recalled that Morehead looked like this oversized being of cotton candy. I love that. She approached her on the spot, and according to an interview, their exchange went like this, Ms Morehead, would you be interested in doing a series? No? No, well, I don't know why.
Once Morehead warmed to the idea, Montgomery went straight to the producers and exclaimed, I found mother tremendousness has just done dead pan in knocks on the door, knocks on the door, eyes completely blank and completely stoic. I found Mother Norman Bates Morehead. Heads. Yeah. Moorehead had some serious terms that were part of her conditions for joining Bewitched. She was deeply religious and had serious problems with portraying a witch. Hilariously, and Dora gets its name from a
biblical passage supposedly at her request and or recommendation. In the first Book of Samuel, there's a story about Saul consulting the Witch of Endor to use her powers to connect him with the deceased Samuel. Samuel becomes Samantha and Endoor became Indora. Fine. I guess that's where Steven Spielberg got it too, or George Lucas got Endored the Moons of Endor. Oh really? Oh wow? Maybe I don't know who cares. I didn't read that part of the Bible,
skimmed it, got the cliff notes. I don't watch that part of Star Wars. Morehead's concerns were all so practical. She accepted the role in the condition that she only had to appear in eight out of every twelve episodes, which would leave her time to pursue other projects. It's a story that's similar to that of Natalie Shaeffer, who took the part of Missus Howell and Jordan's beloved Gilligan's Island, thinking that the show pilot would never go to series,
and then bursting into tears when it did. Morehead, for her part, did not expect Bewitch to be a hit, even going so far as to dismiss the scripts as hack in a nineteen sixty five interview with TV Guide at a time when it's worth noting be Witch was basically the biggest sitcom on television. She would later say elsewhere that the show was not breathtaking. She's just a
tremendous bit of passive aggression. I'm banking that. Despite the six Emmy gnoms she earned for her work on the show, Morehead was always quick to note that she used to earn nods for a little something called the Oscars. As she told the New York Daily News in nineteen sixty five, I've been in movies and played theater from coast to coast, so I was quite well known before Bewitched, and I
don't particularly want to be identified as the witch. Even so, she remained with Bewitched until its run ended in nineteen seventy two, largely due to her fondness of working with Elizabeth Montgomery and the og Darren Dick York. She would have, as we will get to, a tougher relationship with New Dick Sergeant Deputy to Darin, who would go on to describe her Morehead as a tough old bird.
Moorhead died of cancer on April thirtieth, nineteen seventy four, at the age of seventy three. She was outlived by her mother, who was one hundred and six. Oh, higel you'll here, this will interest you. Morehead was one of the many people who developed cancer while war working on the nineteen fifty six John Wayne movie The Conqueror, which was shot in Iron City, Utah, just downwind from above
ground atomic bomb testing. These are truly horrifying stats. Of the two hundred and twenty cast and crew, ninety one of them developed some form of cancer within the next twenty five years, and forty six of them would die of the disease, So a little less than a quarter of the cast died from cancer that's believed to be triggered by the above ground radiation. Tho included John Wayne himself,
Susan Haywood, and the film's director, Dick Powell. Actors on the set to Bewitched recall hearing Morehead discussing her concern about the radioactive fallout, which is horrifying. It even bugged her years later that she'd.
Been exposed to that that's so sad.
I don't know where else to put this, and it's sort of not even worth really going into other than it serves as a transition to talk about another Bewitch performer. But the years, there have been rumors that Agnes Moorehead was gay. And supposedly had an affair with Debbie Reynolds.
Heh yeah, good for her.
I'm ninety percent sure that this was one of the so called revelations in the gossipy memoir that reynolds ex husband Eddie Fisher, published in nineteen ninety nine.
Woh, he was such a bitch.
Yeah, a book that was so trashy that it caused their daughter, Carrie Fisher. Yes, that Carrie Fisher to quip I'm going to have my DNA fumigated after that, an incredible line.
That's why she was a punch up writer. Yep.
Reynolds herself dismissed these lesbian rumors as malicious tales put around by one of Agnes Moorehead's ex husbands during their divorce, but Moore had herself tease these stories during her lifetime. In a nineteen seventy three interview, journalist Bose Hadley gave her the opportunity to confirm or deny these rumors, and Moorehead decided to play coy. The exchange went like this,
just one more question. Numerous Hollywood actresses, Garbo Gish, Dietrich Gene, author Kay Francis, Barbara Stanwick, Duluah Bankhead, del Rio, Janet Gainer, et cetera, et cetera. Have enjoyed lesbian or by relationships?
Have you ever?
And Moreheads quoted as saying, yes, you'd love to put me in their excellent company, even if I don't belong in the same category. Brackets smiles, Riley, you don't. Those ladies, she says, were more beautiful than me.
Hmmm, cooy of her. That's great, that's great.
A big source of these rumors was Uncle Arthur himself, Paul Lynde, who was also a bitch yes, semi closeted in his lifetime. Lynde, who lives Morehead by almost a decade, was pretty unambiguous in interviews, offering this all time sound bite.
If I wasn't so sick, I could do a Paul lynd voice, But I well, the whole world.
No z Agnes was a lesbian, I mean, classy as hell, but at all time.
But one of them.
I can't see this, but one of the all time Hollywood doe.
Can I say? I'd have to bleep that, yeah, probably okay.
Lynde also told a story in which she supposedly caught one of her husband's cheating on her. Agnes screamed at him that if he could have a mistress, so could she. Oh Paul Land a messy, messy, messy man. Oh Pauland I love Pauland this is the perfect segue to talk about one of my favorite performers of all time, Templeton. Templeton, Yes before Me, which he was famous as Harry McAfee, the Dad and Bye Bye Birdie. No, he's a rat guy and the center square on Hollywood Squares.
No, he's a rat guy.
Yeah, he will be the rat guy in the Charlotte's Web. An made an adaptation Humbaull.
That was good. I used.
There are periods of my life, but I would speak in Pauland's voice for extended stretches.
I missed those days.
He's probably famous to most non millennials for his role in the daytime staple Hollywood Squares, which began in nineteen sixty six.
I forgot it started that early and.
Gave birth to some truly incredible one liners delivered in Lyn's distinctive nasal snarl.
Can I share a few of them? Right now? Hit us? Lightning around? Do you want to be? Can you do a land? Nor do you want to ask.
Yeah, because under the setup for those who haven't actually watched Hollywood Squares, the host Peter Marshall would ask Paul a question and he would.
Answer to ask me some of these questions. Why do motorcyclists wear leather because chiffon wrinkles? Medium phony, You're the world's most popular fruit. What are you humbo? That's good? The Great Whiter George Bernard Shaw once wrote, It's such a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children? What is that?
A whipping?
Got me for a daytime TV in like nineteen seventy. The Great White is one of the most feared animals, Paul, what is the Great White?
This is amazing. A sheriff in Alabama.
In Alice in Wonderland who kept crying I'm late, I'm late, Alice, and her mother is sick about it. Diamond should not be kept with your family. Jewels, why they're so cold? So half of this is like borsch belt garbage. I'm sorry. The tin man wanted a heart and the lion want encourage. What did the straw man want? He wanted the tin man to notice him. That's good. Yeah, in what state was Abraham Lincolnborn.
This is great, like the rest of us, naked and screaming, Yeah, that's funny.
What's one thing you should never do in bed? Pine and laugh? Eddie Fisher recently said I am sorry. I am sorry for them both. Who was he referring to his fans? That's solid. According to Tony Randall, every woman I've been intimate with in my life has been what bitterly disappointed.
I need though I wish i'd worked. There's a time I could do a really good ball in that I can't do it right now. I'm sad. I'm whiffing it all right. I was devastated to discover years later that all these lines were written for Paul by a staff of writers. I just thought for years that he came up with it on the spot, but no one could
deliver them like he could. Mel Brooks wants to describe Paul In as being capable of getting laughs by reading quote a phone book, Tornado alert or seed catalog, and I'd like the second fat although it's kind of a love him or hate him scenario. Paul himself told a story on Carson about a man coming up to him and saying it's you stay right there. I have to get my wife.
She can't stand you. That's good, Yeah, that's pretty good.
Incidentally, it's believed that he borrowed his distinctive nasal delivery from another Bewitched bit player, Alice Ghostly, who played Esmeralda the hapless Witch Made Made Witch Witch Made. Yeah, it makes sense considering both of them cut their teeth in a review called New Faces of nineteen fifty two, which launched both of their careers, as well as that of Earth A Kit Ah Earth a Kit Alice Ghostly and Paul lynd on stage together.
That sounds devastating, Yeah for all parties involved. Yeah yeah.
Speaking of legendary friends from his pre famed days, pauland once shared an apartment building with Marlon Brando when they were both young and hungry and in Marlin's case, very hungry. The building had communal kitchens.
And very hung.
The building had communal kitchens, and Lynde claimed that Brando would steal his food from the fridge all the time. It's a testament to his talent that Paul Land made such an impression and Bewitched those people assumed that he was a series regular. But Uncle Arthur was only in ten of the show's two hundred and fifty four episodes.
He also appeared in a pre Uncle Arthur role as Samantha's nervous driving teacher, and he was so well received that Montgomery and Asher decided to write him a recurring role. Lynd had a complicated relationship to his talents, though he wanted to be recognized as a serious actor. He said, we live in a world that needs laughter. Now I've decided that if I can make people laugh, I'm making
a more important contribution. His time on Hollywood Squares made him rich enough to buy Errol Flynn's old Hollywood mansion, but Lynde himself was a deeply troubled man.
Tell him why. In addition to not living up to his own expectations as an actor, Paul had to contend with being a gay man in Hollywood, which meant being grading on the Paul Lynde to Curve closeted. He explained his status as a lifelong bachelor by claiming that his high school sweetheart had broken his heart and he was
still too hurt to give other women a chance. In nineteen seventy six, People magazine profile described a man named stan Fine Smith as Linden sounds like one of those made up anchor names and anchorman Wes Mantooth Stan Fine Smith described a man named Stan fin Smith as Lynde's hairstylist, sweet mate and chauffeur bodyguard. Those barely veiled euphemisms were about as close as Linde ever came to coming out
in his lifetime. Despite his campy and flamboyant television persona, Lynn's prime life and sexual orientation were never directly or acknowledged or discussed in the media. Later in his life, he was offered gay roles, but he always refused them. He said in the aforementioned People cover story that he was glad his following was quote straight before declaring, gay people killed Judy Garland, but they're not going to kill me. True. What do you mean true? I believe it. I'll believe anything.
I'm a very credulous person. In private, though he reportedly criticized famed anti gay activist Anita Bryant, saying she attacked my people. Lynd was also haunted by a tragedy that occurred on July eighteenth, nineteen sixty five, when a young actor named James being, Davidson fell from the eighth floor balcony of Lynde's room at San Francisco's Sir Francis Drake Hotel. The incident was reportedly result of horsing around after the
pair had spent hours drinking. Davidson supposedly said, watch me do a trick like a toddler would. The next thing, Lynde realized he was dangling by his fingertips from a tiny ledge outside the window. At first, Linden thought this was a prank and assumed the guy was actually standing on a ledge lower down, but he was actually faced and hanging on by his fingertips, much like Harrison Ford in one of the most iconic composite shots in film history, as deckred at the end of Blade Runner, Tears and
Rain and so forth. Unfortunately, Bing had a zero point two four bac could not hoist himself back in and hung there for two minutes, eighty feet above the street. Lynd grabbed his arms and tried to haul him back inside, but failed, and Davidson fell eight stories onto the street below and died instantly, too soon following the tragic death of Liam Payne. I didn't do it. It was that devil, alcohol and cocaine and fame, et cetera, tears and rain.
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. It's so funny how all that tears in ren speech is just like this could have easily been like a fully gay queer like queen speech, like something creed to the Desert or something yeah yeah, imagining like Guy Pierce in like full drag makeup, delivering delivering that line at the end of Priscilla. This accident was actually a witness, not Liam Payne or Guy Pierce in drag. Was witnessed by two police officers
standing outside who did clear lind of wrongdoing. The whispers about the incident dogged him for years, basically insinuating that he had something to do with it, and he was haunted by the memory for the rest of his life, supposedly saying that's the end of my career shortly after it happened. If that wasn't the only reason for his
burgeoning alcoholism, it deserved to be. But Lynde was a famously mean drunk who could decimate his friends verbally when the mood took him, and it also landed him in numerous scrapes with the law. One famous, possibly apocryphal story claims that he led cops and a drunken high speed chase through the valley one night before crashing into a male.
When the police came to the car with their guns drawn, he supposedly lowered his window and said, I'll have a cheeseburger, hold the onions and a large sprite.
I'll have a cheeseburger, hauled the onions and a lot spry.
This was incorporated into the script for a Groundhog Day. As those of you who remember that episode will remember, he got sober shortly before his fatal heart attack on January tenth, nineteen eighty two, at the age of fifty five, and doctor said that his heart resembled that of a ninety year old man. He simply loved too hard.
Well, that story was a bummer, and you know what, go on, here's another one. Let's talk about the sad story of Gladys Kravits.
It sounds like one of those like anthologies. Is the mysterious case of Gladys Kravitz.
Well, she was the nosy next door neighbor, and apparently the term Gladys Kravitz, you know, entered the popular lexicon.
Like as like a devastating put down.
Yeah, I was like, you're acting a real Gladys Kravit.
So I don't really remember hearing that. Are you just locked into the pol invoice now for like the rest of your life, like you can't shake it? Like Austin Butler and Elvis was that Paul In, I didn't hear that you're really Gladys If you're real Gladys Kravitz.
Oh, that's an old time radio voice, but.
Also like it sort of dovetails into the Hannibal lecter at some point. It's all in this continuous like yeah, raspy, sassy seois.
That's because I'm sick too, as a different level of.
Oh, I wasn't criticizing you. I was. I was saying that was a hopeful thing, and I hope you're locked into the Paul invoice for the rest of your life.
I mean, now I really want to like, I'm really sad because I could do it. I'm sure my father is very proud listening to this right now. I could do it pretty well, but I'm kind of I'm kind of blowing it here.
I think you're doing a great job. Oh, thank thank you. Thank you Chief.
The whole gag with Gladys Kravitz was that she was this nosy neighbor who would see the various magical supernatural goings on in the Stevens house, but everyone just thought she was nuts. Her husband, Abder Kravitz, assumed she quote
hadn't taken her medicine fun aside. The role of Abner Kravitz was originally offered to Jim Backus, the voice of Mister Magoo, who turned it down because he was already working on Gilligan's Island as Thurston Howl, the Third That man would have owned network sitcoms in the sixties.
Can you imagine if you'd been on both?
Everyone's favorite busy body, Gladys was played by the comedic actress Alice Pierce. She was a character actress with a distinctive chin I guess called a weak chin. I hate the use that term, but that's the description I always see. It was the result of a childhood injury where she fell from a playground swing and landed on her chin and her jawn never developed. It was just god horrifying,
but she made it work. She turned herself into a very popular character actress that was not the worst thing to happen to poor Alex Pears as far as her health was concerned. Four months before getting cast on Bewitched, she was given a terminal cancer diagnosis. She told none of her coworkers of the condition, and other than being a little tired on the set every now and then,
no one suspected her of being ill. She died in March nineteen sixty six, just as the show was wrapping its second season, and was awarded a posthumous Outstanding Supporting Actress Emmy.
Award two months later. This is nice.
Though William Asher gave her widower a gig on the show directing, he basically put his career on hold to take care of her, so it was both a nice distraction and a way to get his career moving again, which I think is nice. Sandra Gould later took over the role of Gladys Kravitz for the remainder of the series.
And this is just one of three roles.
That were unceremoniously recast midstream un Bewitched. In addition to Gladys Kravitz and of course Darren Stevens, which we talk about later, there was also the wife of Darren's boss, mister Tate.
Her name was Louise Tate.
She was initially played by Irene Vernon until the second season wrapped in nineteen sixty six, when writer Danny Arnold left the show. During this period under less than friendly circumstances, apparently, Elizabeth Montgomery William Asher pressured Irene Vernon the follow suit due to their friendship Cold World these mid sixties sitcoms. The role of Louise Tate was later taken over by Casey Rogers, who was apparently named after the Casey at Bat poem.
What oh you know not Casey Jones A Casey at the bat? Excuse me? You know Casey at the bat? Do I don't put words in my mouth, don't put things in my head. Yeah.
It's about like a baseball team from the fictional town of Mudville's losing by two runs in the last inning. Both the team and its fans believe they can win. Of Casey Mudville star player gets to bat. Whoever, Casey's scheduled to be the fifth batter of the inning and the first two batters failed to get on base. Yeah, it's a poem about baseball.
You wouldn't you wouldn't get it, No, I wouldn't.
One actress who was not replaced when she died.
Was Aunt Clara.
She was played by actress Marion Lorne, who straight up died.
In nineteen sixty eight. I don't know why I wrote straight up there who died in nineteen sixty eight.
Apparently the producers did not deem her role as particularly essential to the show, and thus did not recast her with a rando. This is possibly because the eccentric character was largely based on the actress who played her. Aunt Clara's obsession with door knobs was based on maryon Lauren's own real life collection. She'd assembled over a thousand antique door openers.
Isn't that great? I love people collect things, okay, sure, yeah, I mean yeah we do. But antique to just knobs, yeah it's kind of cool. Okay. But bed knobs and broomsticks, you know, you know, she makes her a purpose. Those are different. Those are different.
Oh, you're right, different knobs, an idiot, different knobs.
Get off my show. I feel like a different kind of knob right now. Who was waiting for that to come up?
Much like Alice Pears, Maryon Lauren was given a posthumous.
Emmy for her role on Bewitched Good.
But we talked about Darren's boss, the advertising executive Larry Tait a little while.
He was played by the character actor David White, and he was reportedly very sweet.
He insisted that Tate's son on the show be named after his own son, Jonathan, who he'd raised as a single father after his wife died due to complications during her second pregnancy. Sad Tragically, Jonathan was a passenger on pan Am flight one oh three, which was blown up by terras over Lockabye, Scotland on December twenty first, nineteen eighty eight, killing all two hundred and fifty nine on board. Very very famous terrorist attack. I actually don't know who
it was. I so rebrogated by Libyan nationalists.
Oh yeah.
In two thousand and three, Gadaffie accepted Libby's responsibility for the Lockabe bombing and paid compensation for the victims of the families, although he maintained he had never given the order for the attack.
I don't know I feel about Libya.
Uh well, the bad guys in Back to the Future and true in Goadaffi.
So that's kind of all I need yeah, that's fair.
David White essentially ever recovered from the death of his son and died two years later of a heart attack. He's interred with his son's remains in a niche at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. I've actually visited him. The only marginally funny story, if you could call it that, is that Scott Michaels, the proprietor of the former Hollywood Death Tour and the host of the Dearly Departed podcast, one
of my favorite podcasts. They do a great episode on Bewitched, which I listened to in preparation for this, bought his own niche at Hollywood Forever and it happened to be directly beneath David Whites. The funny part is that Scott was always terrified of this creepy bust that got made on Bewitched as some plot point. I don't know what it is. I forget exactly it was. Magic was involved somehow, I'm not sure, but it's this really creepy looking bust
of Larry Tait. For some reason, David White, the actor played Larry Tate, has included it in his niche, which is like a little cubby hole at the Mausoleum Hollywood Forever. So now Scott Michaels, he's gonna spend eternity directly beneath like this monument to his kindred trauma. This like scary bust from Bewitched that like always used to freaking out as a kid.
That's gonna be like right above him on the shelf, above him. Good, that's all. Well. Rehearsals for the which pilot began on November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, the day a Bostonian died and forever cultured the world and gave us madmen and feminism CCR, CCR, so many other things that were so important.
I've been told, Uh, wow, American Pie. They really missed the mark on the yeah all line.
Yeah. I wonder if there's like a local like Southy parodist who can take a crack at that America call it like Bostonian pie or some shit that would suck. According to biographer Herbie Pallato, the aforma mentioned Bostonian's death was especially hard on Elizabeth Montgomery and her husband William Asher, who were friends with John F. Kennedy. Asher to even co produced the birthday party at which Marilyn Monroe famous hornily saying happy Birthday to JFK. And Sinatra was the
other co producer. That's gross.
He was probably less sad by JFK's assassination.
So they were just trafficking women, right like that was just like a we passed the blonde a round situation. Oh, I have to assume Kennedy was a monster. Kennedy was a monster. I'm sorry that whole don't maybe don't get me on a rant with the Kennedy's.
I actually don't know as much as you probably think I know about JFK's sexual escapades.
Oh yeah, I mean he probably had what can be considered a sex addiction. Yeah, I actually I did hear that. I think he said something insane and just that in weird situations like making people watch or like just people like hanging out just three different people, three different women a night, supposedly and you know teens. Oh, you know, just gross. But he was handsome and he was the first Catholic president, so that's okay.
Maybe that was why his back was so screwed up. It's a pretty pretty genial laugh for a terrible joke. I feel like he's he's probably he was Pillow Princess. I feel like he just laid back and made the women do all the work. He gives that, he gives that energy. Actually, Pillow Princess, I've never heard that.
I don't know what that is. You have old detour here about Palm Springs and Gilligan's Island. We're cutting that.
Oh no, no, I mean the weird thing about Gilligan Island was that they also were filming the pilot on the day JFK was assassinated, and you can see on shots of the middow pulling out of the harbor, the flag is at half mast because you know, in the morning for JFK.
So I think it's weird.
On the day of the first read through of Bewitched was also the day JFK was killed. Two huge bits of mid century Americana television were birthed on the day JFK was killed.
Good most good, Uh, Okay. The pilot of Bewitched is actually really odd given the way that the rest of the series was made. It's been given a sort of faux professorial voiceover, which gives the episode the feel of a sociological documentary. She's kind of a favorite satirical technique at the time. The episode follows Samantha and Darren meeting, falling in love, and getting married. Whilst on their honeymoon,
Samantha drops the bomb that she's a witch. Darren then goes to the bar complains to the bartender that he married a witch. The bartender then offers up an absolute, absolutely predictable. God, they men just use this show as an excuse to just talk about how much they hated their wives, right, yeah, and every writer in the world. Yeah, And mother in law's bartender hits them back with you got to do just like that, just what I done, pal,
learn to live with it. Darren makes her promise to give up her powers, but when they inexplicably go have dinner at his rude ex's house, as newly married couples are wont to do, Yeah, I don't really get that. Yeah, she uses her magic to get even in her own words, it's harder to break the habit than she thought, much like fentanyl the Bosonian's death. That joke said that doesn't have legs. It's funny for you and me, But the assassination of JFK and the loss of our national innocence.
That particular straw that finally broke our camel's back of a country built on blood. Ah sadly was not the only thing that marked Elizabeth Montgomery's time During this stretch of the show. She was pregnant, which in the sixties could be treated as a rare form of cancer if you were in show business. I mean, they used to go to such extreme lanes to shoot around it and stuff, and they did for here. Rather than go the I Love Lucy route and write it into the program, they
decided to shoot around it. This was partially because Samantha and Darren were newly married in the show, and it was deemed unseemly for her to already be showing unless it was like a shotgun witch wedding, which sounds like a sixth whoa yeah, shotgun witch wedding playing at the Whiskey ram Alem. It was a little early in the show's life to welcome in a new child the hideous cross breeding of a witch wife and a mortal husband, so she was given looser clothing to disguise the bump.
Body doubles were occasionally used, but for her next two pregnancies they did decide to work it into the script. Her son, Robert Asher was born in nineteen sixty five as daughter Tabitha appeared in the series, and daughter Rebecca Asher was born in nineteen sixty nine as Adam Stevens was born into the series. Tabitha became a beloved character on the show and later anchored a short lived spin off of her own in the late seventies, which we
know nothing about. It was a major point of suspense as Samantha and Darren waited to see if she had inherit did her mother's powers, and she did as they
learned when random things started flying around. This is actually a theme that's explored well in the a little bit too much at times comic book series and Amazon show The Boys, where they have like this genetically They have like a genetically engineered like Superman, and it's revealed that he spent like the first eighteen years of his life locked in an isolation room with like a neutron bomb strapped to his chest because he was so like when he came out, he like killed his mom and then
massacred everyone else with laser vision, and it kept happening, so that wonders I wonder if like which children are are in control of their powers until a certain age. I would guess not like a first communion or a bar mitzvah.
It's probably like the way that children aren't really in charge of their their their voices.
They just kind of like scream and like spew it out there. Yeah. Probably yeah, And if you do that with spells. Man much to consider.
This is we're getting dark in this episode Give me children?
When can which children control their power? Yeah? And avoid killing their parents or loved ones miscegenation bull Connor. During the second season of the show, five different babies played Tabitha because you had to throw one out at the end of the day. Just kidding. They had to throw them all out at the end of the day, just like the doughnuts babies, babies craft services. They will go
in the same dumpster. Uh dark Ah. It's easier to shoot with twins, as you remember from our full House episode, because with young characters, child actors are only allowed to work a fraction as much as their adult colleagues. The Olsen twins in particular also had to wear baby dentures, which is a horrifying thing. Speaking of child labor, lowers.
John Landis was violating them when he killed these people, two children and Vic Morro just a reminder, is he the new enemy of the pond as he just supplanted? His son is just a real piece of who's his son? You always? Oh he is? Oh Max Landis. He's like a legendary like Hollywood fail son. He uh. He wrote like one good script and has just been like everything else has been just a failure or at least not a hit. And he has been accused of being a
disgusting garbage human. He's just always like combative on Twitter with people. Yeah, he's like a NEPO baby m One of the twins, Aaron Murphy, would say that the whole magical aspect of the show left her confused as a little girl. She recalled the time when her real life mother asked her what she wanted for breakfast, and she answered eggs. The only problem was they were out of them, and Aaron quipped back, that's no problem, mom, let's twitch some up and she was serious. Isn't that cute? Yeah?
Twitch has a weird context these days. First always thought about tweaking like meth, and now it's just that video game platform where people have whole careers just playing video games. How long do you spend on this? Anyway, it seems like the goodest place as any to observe that. Maureen McCormick, Everyone's beloved Marcia Brady played two unrelated bit parts on
Bewitched prior to achieving her start. I'm on the Brady Bunch first, and a fantasy sequence as Darren and Samantha's future child before Tabitha and then again is Andorra under a spell that made her look like a child.
I cannot believe we've met it this far without talking about the famous nose twitch that Samantha does to cast the spells, although you'll notice it's not really a nose twitch but a wiggle of the upper lip. In any event, it's really hard to do. Go ahead, try it now, Higel, try it now, everyone, Try it now.
You can't. No, you do it? Yeah? No, no, I'm not doing it. I don't have that much control over that part of my face. It's just it's all the sneering, burned out the muscles.
I actually no, it's just my chin. Never mind, No, No, it's really hard. H but apparently it's really easy for Elizabeth Montgomery because it was just something that she did in real life. The nose twitch gesture was inspired by something William Asher saw her do whenever she was frustrated. She would screw up her mouth, which had the unintended
effect of wiggling her nose. And while they were developing the show and looking for some kind of trademark gesture for Samantha to do to activate her magic, Asher suggested she do that nose twitching things she always did. Unfortunately, Montgomery had no idea what he was talking about. You know, the nose twitch thing you do, he said, And apparently she was unaware of this tick and not too pleased about having it pointed out.
After a lengthy back.
And forth, which you know, people who have been in relationships for a long time know exactly what it's like.
You know the thing, what thing? You know the thing?
Do the thing, she got so frustrated that she did the thing organically, and he goes up, But there there's the thing, and that led to a famous TV gesture. She tells the story a little differently. She related to the journey news Bill said to me, once before I ever did Bewitched, you do a funny thing with your nose whenever you get impatient. Then he asked me to do it for him, and I couldn't. I didn't know what he meant. Then one night, my nose twitched and
Bill said, that's it, and then I knew. We were at a Dodgers game once and the bases were loaded. There were two outs and Sandy Kofax was coming up, and Bill said to me, come on, Liz, twitch.
So I did, and Sandy Kofax walked and the winning runs scored.
Then I was at a Chicago Cubs game and I twitched my nose for Ernie Banks, who hadn't hit anything all day. When I twitched, Ernie hit the ball right out of the park.
That's cute. I like that.
It's easy to forget now, but a huge part of the Witch's appeal or all the imaginative special effects which made it look wildly different from any other sitcom on television. Obviously, this was long before CGI, so all these were practical effects achieved by hard working stage hands. The most famous were pop offs or pop ins. I've heard both, where people or objects would appear and disappear in a blink of an eye. And this was achieved through the time
honored practice of turning the camera off and on. Not exactly that hard technologically, but hard to do physically. Casey Rodgers, who played Larry Tate's wife Louise, talked about.
How everyone got really good at knowing how.
To freeze and hold really still while the cameraman stopped rolling in a pa grabbed a purse out of her hand or something whatever they wanted to disappear. Montgomery told The New York Times in a contemporary profile, it took a lot of practice before I learned to hold my hands perfectly still. But even that's much easier than the scene in which I was supposed to clean up my
kitchen by witchery. I sort of went swoosh with my arms raised, and then I had to leave them up in the air, aching while the crew rushed in and swept and dusted and got the kitchen immaculate before the scene resumed. I'm getting better at it, I guess. I almost never flinch over coil anymore, no matter what happens.
For coil, well, I mean, you have to keep your arms up in the air and freeze for like, you know, a couple minutes while they're like running around everything neat and so that they could turn the camera back on and make it look like, you know, in the blink.
Of an eye. I'm not familiar with the process. I'm just wondering what would have happened that caused would cause her to recoil just like, oh no, I don't want to do this. Oh yeah.
They eventually gave her something that kind of resembled crutches to rest her arms, to make it a little easier for when a character popped in and out in a different set of clothes.
This is really interesting to me.
The director made sure that the actor's shoes were fixed in place on the stage with glue while the actor dashed backstage and changed costumes, and then slipped back into the shoes that were glued onto the floor, ensuring that they were in the exact same mark. I think that's cool. Yeah, yeah, less cool. Some actors received minor burns from the pyrotechnics that were used when they had popped in the screen.
Oh that's like when John Land has killed those kids.
And I was gonna say, more like more like Michael Jackson getting his hair burned on the pepsiad.
Or James Headfield being engulfed and on stage Pyro in front of like two hundred thousand and hard rock fans in Moscow.
I think, oh, and did another band that to come on and like save the day?
And oh no they did not know. That's the famous bit is that, uh you know Axel, Axel could have Guns and Roses could have gone on and uh after James Headfield was literally horribly burned. Uh always in Montreal, I was incorrect. Oh yeah, apologies to Canada, uh and
Russia whoever? Uh yeah, James Henfield like literally walked into an on stage tower of flame and was horrifically burned, and Guns and Roses had a tremendous opportunity to come in and save the day, and Axel Rose was like as as I think it's Jason Newstead the Metallica basis at the time. He said something like we go backstage and Axel sit there with a glasses champagne smoking a cigarette, going like, yeah, my voice doesn't feel up to it. So then all the Canadians, Uh.
Right, James Hepfield was given fuel and given fire, either of which he desired.
The fuel was Jegermeister. I don't think he felt so good about the actual fire. No, maybe that song was a form of potent like it was working something out like John Lennon and Mother give it fool, give me fuck beat that which I desired. Just therapist is over there, Like, yes, James, how does that really make you feel bad? I could have something to do with my mom.
Yeah, that's a new That's one of the best you doing, James Hetfield in therapy and Freudian analysis.
That's one of the best.
That's one of the best bits you've ever done.
I really worked on his uh the the one the yip that he does like live uh oh wow, the precisely timed end of yell of voice crack. It's actually also frequently used in a lot of appellation ballad singing. Is there more going on with James Hetfield than I expect? Well, I do find it hilarious that he is literally the son of an opera singer and a truck driver, which is like, yes, that voice came out of that pairing. Yeah, nothing about that is weird to me. Nope, Well, from James.
Hetfield, we go back to the special effects used on Bewitched.
We are halfway through the outline.
Other effects included fast motion film, backwards motion film, and invisible wires for levitation. Samantha's self operating vacuum cleaner was outfitted with a motor on the bottom instead of brushes, and was operated remotely off stage.
An electric light bulb.
I love this one appears to light up when Samantha handles it thanks to wires threaded up her long sleeved shirt connected to a twelve vault battery. For a scene where Samantha has a fight with Darren and walks out on him, she goes invisible, thus creating the appearance of her suitcases magically flying out of the closet, packing themselves
and walking down the stairs on their own. Those effect was achieved by a special effects man walking on planks above the set, manipulating wires attached to the luggage like puppet strings. He's basically playing luggage like Marioness. I think that's cool.
Hollywood magic.
Yeah, movie back or TV magic. It seems quaint today, but the amount of effort that went into these effects is really staggering. I like to quote for the New York Times piece once again, the chief special effects man, Dick Albane, has been doing this.
Kind of thing for over twenty.
Years, and he says he still spends sleepless nights trying to visualize all the special riggings and stands dripping with perspiration the first time they're tried. Of course, we rig everything two ways, he says, so that if it doesn't work the first time, we can get it to happen on the second. That way, we're sure that most of the stunts will work. But there's a certain element of danger to the performers. When you're blowing up lamps with
powder charges. There has to be I'm responsible for any injuries in their California state law, so you can be sure that I'm careful.
I love that. That reminds me of the in Gremlins when they blew up the theater and a young, fresh faced Zach Callaghan was asking the pyro guy, and the pyro guy said something like, oh, it'll be big, or like I put enough in there, or something like that.
I just always think of the Keith Moon on the who are on the on the Smothers Brothers in the sineteen sixty seven and just I think he bribed like a stage hand to put like four times as much explosives in his drum kit cost John and Twistle was hearing now Pete towsend his hearing and singed his hair, and Keith had his arms sliced that when a symbol turned into shrapnel just sliced all his arms.
It certainly didn't have any effect on his drumming. Oh that's why I forgot your anti Keith Moon. You're not anti. I just don't think it's really all that cracked up to me. It made me go on my whole thing about British drummers. I genuinely don't think I know, because I thought we don't have time for this. Come on.
I think like certain British drummers like have a real difficulty, especially the ones who are like some of that incredibly patronizing generation of British musicians who like Eric Burden were like we rescued Black American music from the garbage bin. It's like, no, you didn't go yourself like you arrogant troll of a man. But like all of those guys like Ginger Baker, Keith Moon, a lot of those guys I do not think they can swing, especially for playing
like ripped off black music. I mean, and Ginger Baker is the worst one of them all for me, he
just plays. He plays like marching band rudiments on drums, like everything is just which is like exactly the same thing Lars Alder gets dragged for in Metallica is that all of his films are just like eighth notes around the kit, just like the way that you do when you see a drum kit and you go, you know, I mean, there's a part in Crosswords in the Isolated Guitar, the Isolated drum track and Crossroads the other day, and it's just like there's a part where he's just going
the kick drum like sounds like a Toddler programming and drum machine and the only two. Though I'm sure there are some British funk drummers. It's if there is such a thing, which is hard to believe. But no, I'm bonhom and and and particularly bill Ward were the best bonhom I think because he was just wasted all the time, probably for Billboard two. But both of those guys were big fans of Gene Croupa and actually our mutual well he's a guy whose work I read, but I believe
you actually know him. Hank Steamer has a whole blog called Dark Forces Swing, which is about the intersection of heavy metal and jazz and it is very cool. He has interviewed Bill Ward about it, uh and and and just knowing that. John Bonham has also talked about Gene Crouper, like those guys listen to to swing band music. Same with Charlie Watts. Now that I think, god, I hate
Charlie Watts. All of those guys who were like, well, actually I'm a jazz drummer and I'm just slum playing this, I'm like, well, you suck at this, so I can't imagine how good you are at your real job. Please surprise me.
Weren't the Stones famous, like their songs would always like start at one tempo and and can't keep tempo.
He can't get he does this thing that people talk about like he is this one thing about lifting the high hat or opening the high hat before like a downbeat or before the snare hit. And there's a debate in the drummer community as to whether or not this is like an error that people make before when they start drumming and have to be trained out of, or like the essence of Charlie Watts's genius, they're just like, well, yeah, children learn how to do like children do that because
you can't. You're like, you're trained not to coordinate the high hat with the the snare hit. But people can't stop themselves from doing that, so they will open or close the high hat before the snarehead and then all the pro Charlie Watts people are like, oh, but it gives his songs, It gives it such a propulse of lift, Like I can't even keep one tempo for like an entire song. Man. A lot of those songs just like end up ten clicks after Oh he plays to the song.
Whatever Rolling Stones drummer is is Keith Richard's right hand and that's the be all end all of it. Do you show how much Keith Richards hated Bill Wyman? No, I didn't know that. Why because he married seventeen year olds. Well, I don't think so. I think he just was curmudgeingly about everything. Well yeah, yeah, and and didn't want to do things.
And and well he was like he like lied about his age. He was like significantly older than the others. I think he was like ten years older than the rest of the Stones.
Well, he certainly didn't have a head start on the musically. No, I think he just like had a namp. Yeah, yeah, was that the story with him? Yeah? Yeah, dogship bassist. Where were we?
Back to Bewitched and the magic of Bewitched. Most of the magic took place within the Stephens Home of one one six ' four Morning Glory Circle, an upper middle class neighborhood located either in Westport, Connecticut, as the pilot would dictate, or Patterson, New York. There were differing accounts throughout the series. I love when shows, like in the pre DVD like Rewatch Era, can't keep their own storyline straight.
Like yeah, no, no, I don't care. Was the dividing line there the dicks?
No, they just like at the same house was located at different times in different states.
Yeah, I guess they didn't have like script supervisors for this. Yeah No.
Until very recently, like very recently. The facade of the Stephens Home was located on the Columbia later Warner Brothers
Ranch in beautiful downtown Burbank. The facade was actually modeled on a real house in Santa Monica where the nineteen fifty nine movie Gidget was filmed, and they constructed this facsimile backstage where Gidget Goes to Rome in nineteen sixty three at the Gidget sequel, the same year that be Wish Pilot was filmed, and when the Gidget story was adapted for an ABC sitcom starring Sally Field, they used the facade for that show as well, and it also appeared in I Dream of Genie as the home owns
by Tony Nelson's boss, Doctor Bellows, and it was seen briefly in an episode of The Monkeys and Home Improvement, and most recently in WandaVision. This little fake street known as Blondie Street for the fifty sitcom that was shot there, is, or at least was a mecca for pop culture heads. They used so many of these facades on so many
different shows. The Tates exteriors were shot at the I Dream of Genie House, so Genie and Major Nelson lived at the Tates House, and Gladys Kravitz, the nosy neighbor, lived at a home that was used for the Donna Reed Show and was later used for The Partridge Family. Is the house where the Partridge Family lived?
Is that that? It's like the same house? Yeah? Right, Like I don't know, that's fine.
It's like the televisual equivalent of like The Wrecking Crew. For me, it's like, oh wow, you're on like everything, notice it, because you could just blend in right.
Yeah.
The exterior of the Stevens House on Bewitch was also featured in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.
I think it was Clark Griswold's childhood home.
Unfortunately, this time last year, Warner Brothers decided to raise the ranch to make way for office buildings.
The iconic Friends.
Fountain, which also could be seen in various episodes of be Wished, was moved to a different place on a Willer Brothers lot, but little else was spared, and pieces of pop culture history from titles like Father Knows Best, Mock from the Middle, The Three Stooges, Dennis the Menace, Lethal Weapon, Hocus Pocus, Pushing Daisies, Hazel, The Waltons, plus
all the other shows we just mentioned were destroyed. Fittingly, the Bewitched House facade was demolished on Friday the thirteenth in October twenty twenty three, and as the final insult. One of the last shows to shoot on the ranch was Young Sheldon, and that production depicted all the demolition in the background as the result of a tornado.
God a nindig.
It seems like something that be I mean, their house facades.
It seems like something that would have been pretty easy.
To like build a small sound stage four and like Nope, Celtic Tour, well not even that's just.
Like the tour. Yeah, no, people don't care. Universal backlots so cool. David zaslov Kan's entire movies to make the numbers jump before an earning scull, you think he gives a about a house facade. True. It is truly amazing, though, how judicious film crews can be with small backlots like the ones on these shows, and the producers of the
which were justice thrifty with their wardrobe budget. According to actress Casey Rodgers, who played Louise Tate, the minor cast would simply wear their own clothes from home a week prior to the shoot. They were expected to come to the studio with the selection from which the costume team would make their picks and then iron them. Speaking of costumes, Agnes Moorehead often wore a starburst brooch on the show with eight point five characters of old Mine Diamonds, which
I guess means more racist. Is there, extra good, extra bloody. Yeah. Montgomery had always admired the pin, and when Morehead died, she willed it to her, which is so classic and so sweet. As a general design note on the show, the color green is a major motif. You'd see it in Samantha's outfits, or the Stevens home carpet, or various emerald accents. And this is their way of playing up the witchy folklore that most people would have had in their mind at this time period, which was from the
Wizard of Oz. Speaking of themes un bewitched loosely defined, another one was alcohol. The characters on this show got drunk so much on camera that there is a fan website compiling all of the drinking incidents that happened, complete with location and episode numbers. You read somewhere that they were drinking real alcohol.
That's what I heard.
It wouldn't surprise me. Man. It's like back when people just made pictures of like Martini's for themselves. From all the pain of the prosperity, all that pain of by a house for five dollars money, it's not going to drink itself. Speaking yet again, of themes. In an even more broad sense, we can't forget the theme tune to
the show. At one point, producers of the show, using common producer thought patterns, wanted to use the song Bewitched, Bothered and Bewilders from the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Heart musical pal Joey as the show's theme song. Ultimately, they decided to use an original song instead because it was cheaper, probably presumably that's the real reason. Though familiar to fans as an instrumental, the theme song was supposed to have lyrics.
Singer Jerry Vale, who is most famous for being summarily mocked by the rat Pack, who called him Jerry Fail in a devastating burn, initially agreed to record the theme but the deal fell through it the last minute, supposedly because the lyrics weren't finished in time Jesus Christ, Buddy, this is the Night like nineteen sixties lyrics Warren Peace.
The song has though been recorded with lyrics by the likes of Steve Lawrence, the Wonderful Peggy Lee and Jimmy Smith, the Man who Blew Everybody's mind on the Hammond B three organ and basically set a new standard for how you have to play that instrument that people still cannot escape from. Yeah, as you meditate on that, we'll be right back with more too much information after these messages.
Yow Wow Be, which premiere on September seventeenth, nineteen sixty four, a Thursday night, at nine pm Eastern. There were some protests in advance of the launch, mostly from viewers in the Bible Belt States who are afraid that the show would promote devil worship. Hell yeah, But those concerns quickly fell by the wayside as viewers were charmed by the
premise and particularly by Elizabeth Montgomery. By the end of its first season, Be, which was ABC's number one show and the best rated sitcom on all three networks, coming second only to Bonanza.
Bonanza was a real juggernaut back then.
Creator Saul Sachs would say an interview with the Television Academy, it was a hit immediately, the first one of its kind supernatural shows on television. It's been done since the Greeks where a supernatural being comes to life. He's not wrong about it being the first. It beat The Adams Family by a day and the Monsters by a week.
Out of fantasy shows around this realm. The press coverage was slightly skeptical at first, with The New York Times sniffing there were laughs in the scene, to be sure, but they were attended by some grounds or apprehension too many trick camera effects and supernatural gimmickry could rather quickly irlitate the effectiveness of the show's premise. However, they quickly changed their tune and joined the rapturous and honestly in twenty twenty four pretty hilarious press coverage of the show.
I'd like to read excerpts from two pieces. The first from The Gray Lady herself from November twenty second, nineteen sixty four, a year to the day after the assassination of JFK and the initial pilot rehearsals. This is the New York Times article the Bewitching Miss Montgomery. If any of the poor biddies incarcerated at Salem had even the most elementary acquaintance with sorcery, they would surely have arranged to return almost three hundred years later as Elizabeth Montgomery.
Miss Montgomery's existence on be wished as the golden dimpled queen of the new television season, her crown firmly affixed by the latest Nielsen ratings, must certainly be the most desirable of all reincarnations. ABC describes Samantha as someone yearning to be quote a normal woman scrubbing floors, a premise which becomes patently ridiculous after one look at Miss Montgomery.
A product of the Westlake School in Los Angeles and the spent School in the Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York, she enjoys being a witch as long as it's a young and pretty one. A pal of sorceress jokes is already beginning. A plague or however, bank clerk's invited her to twitch up a little money, and friends ask her to give a little magical help when sticking refrigerator trays. In a couple of years, she mused, I may get a little tired of these jokes.
It would take less than a couple of years.
That was a New York Times article. This one from Time Magazine is even funnier. The girl with a necromantic nose. It's from October thirtieth, nineteen sixty four.
That's gross and weird. Necromancy is just raising the dead. I didn't write it.
Yeah, many a man is convinced the witch lives under his roof. With the arrival of the present TV season, many another is probably wishing he could exchange his incumbent Hag.
For Elizabeth Montgomery.
Pretty and blonde with a turned up nose, she hardly suggests cauldrons full of rat guts and eels, but she plays a thoroughbred sorceress married to an advertising executive on ABC's Bewitched.
Like she's drifting into the mid Atlantic accent as this goes, Oh.
Yah, yeah, yeah, see that are Paul Lind's. She's done over two hundred TV shows, a Broadway play, in three movies. She was Dino Martin's fiance and Who's been sleeping in My bed? She's been a divorcee herself a couple of times. Her first husband was Freddie Camon Harvard fifty one, descendant of Albert Gallatin, fourth Secretary of the Treasury. Since Elizabeth was only an actor's daughter, she knocked Freddie out of the social register when she married him in nineteen fifty four.
Jesus Christ, just as.
Robert Montgomery himself depaganated Buffy Harkness when he married her in nineteen fifty.
I feel like I'm taking acid, is what. None of those words are in the Bible.
Well, the social register, you know, the social register is This is all in a profile of Elizabeth Montgomery in Time magazine talking about how she married somebody out of her social standing and result and as a result, dragged him off the social register, which is hilarious considering what we were talking about about the premise of this show, a mixed social standing couple. Cavin was not out of
the book long, however. Elizabeth divorcedhim in nineteen fifty five, then was married for six years to actor Gig Young. Her current husband is William Asher, who directs Bewitched. They live in Malibu with their infant son, an, a Siamese cat named Zip Zip. She no longer gives yeah, she no longer gives interviews to magazines that are doing spreads on children of famous parents. She's her own girl. Oh wow,
her father's a Republican, says gig Young, reminiscing Fondley. Why would you interview somebody's ex husband who then would talk about her father's political affiliations. Her father's a Republican, says gig Young, reminiscing Fondley. And she's probably a Democrat.
She may.
She may soon be worth a fortune on her own too. As part owner of Bewitched, she gets twenty percent of the show's profits, which will amount to two million if the program lasts for more than three seasons, which it probably will.
Maybe killing print Media was not a mistake. Yeah, it's pretty astonishing. Given the success of Bewitch. The production company that made it, Screen Gems, they were eager for a follow up to pitch a rival network enter I Dream of Genie nineteen sixty five sadly did not tape it's pilot on the days of any prominent assassinations. That game, Malcolm, Oh, that game went to writer Sidney Sheldon, future romantic suspense thriller novelist who is then working as a TV writer.
I hate all of those words in that name. He felt bad about working on a rival show because he'd been close with Bewitch director William Asher after working with him on The Patty Duke Show years earlier. So Sheldon gave Asher a call, and Asher gave his blessing. I think he liked helped them flesh out the idea a bit too. She's a genie, But what do you want print, got a bottle of it? Yeah, little boy, to have a clubhouse. Look like some day we're gonna naval Did
that do anything for you? The I Dream of Genie and Bewitch became something of sister shows. They both taped at Columbia Studios on Sunset and Gower, and also nine miles away at the Columbia Movie Ranch, where as you mentioned, they exchanged housing facades. Despite the fact that Bewitch took place in a New York suburb or Connecticut, and I
Dream of Genie took place in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Bewitched, I Dream of Genie, the Monkeys, the Parture Family, and the Flying Nun all had their makeup done in the same room, and Sally Field, the titular Flying Nun, recalled Barbara Eden, singing all the time she was getting her makeup done, which would drive Elizabeth Montgomery insane. Despite this, the pair were reportedly very close, according to Barbara Eden, at least as she told the Sydney Morning Harold, Elizabeth
and I were on the same lot. I'd see her every morning. We were both pregnant together. Both had our babies around the same time. We chatted a lot. If there was any perceived rivalry, it was the producer's invention. Samantha, meanwhile, was rumored to be privately in by the similarities between the two shows, possibly just a dose of good old women competing with women in there because Barbara Eden was quickly television's newest hot slut. In reality, the shows were
not truly competitors. They didn't air at the same time, and Bewitched thoroughly stomped I Dream of Genie in the ratings. That show never even broke the top twenty during its original run. That's crazy, And back to the dis Dick Sargent, who took over as Darren, had a small role on Igam of Dreney as a lawyer, just six months before he took over the co star slot on Bewitched. I promise you were going to get to the Dicks. The Flintstones crossover. Speaking of crossover, I don't know why I've
read the title heading there. Speaking of crossovers, Bewitched had a crossover episode with another ABC show, The Flintstones. Screen Gems owned a twenty percent steak in Hannah Barbera. The animation studio behind the cartoon sitcom. They handled the opening for Bewitched. As you recall, so ABC got some synergy going by having a cartoon Samantha and Darren drop into Bedrock as the Flintstones new Neighbors time travel multiverse. I don't know, yeah, I don't know how that worked, Hanna
Barbara really had. It was just all over the place. I mean this, we already tied him into this episode once. How they turned a Jack Armstrong pilot into Johnny Quest Stay in her lane, Hanna Barbera, And now we have
to get to the racism. Perhaps the most notorious episode of Bewitched is a nineteen seventy Christmas episode called Sisters at Heart, and it is a very special episode in all meetings of the phrase, it is the only instance where you could plausibly describe something as the heartwarming blackface episode.
Yeah hear us out. This episode was actually written collaboratively by twenty two students of Mis Marcella Saunders tenth grade English class at Jefferson High School in south central Los Angeles. MSS Saunders was a twenty three year old teacher who found that her students struggle with reading and interpreting text. But she knew they were all big Bewitched fans, so she started typing up scripts of various episodes and incorporating
those into her lesson plans. She wrote to screen Gems to share her story with the producers, and Elizabeth Montgomery and William Asher were so touched that they invited them down to visit the studio and even cover their travel expenses. Saunders thanked them by sharing an original plot line that all the students had collaborated on, and the writers were so impressed that they adapted into a full length episode.
There is possibly some money that changed Anne, but Montgomery made it clear whose idea was at the start of the episode, which featured a tape segment shouting out the class and explaining the genesis of the episode. That was all necessary because the plot involves mister Brockway, who is an openly racist owner of a toy company Darren is
working with at his ad agency. Brockway refused to allow Darren to handle his account since he mistakenly believed that Darren was married to a black woman who was actually the white of Darren's co workers. Meanwhile, that coworker's daughter was Tabitha's close friend and spending the weekend with the Stevens. Tabitha liked to pretend that the two were sisters and tried to make them both the same color so that they'd be twins, because she's a witch and she can,
like you know. Unfortunately, she got the spell wrong, and Tabitha ended up with black poka dots on her face, while her friend Lisa had white spots. In the end, Samantha explained that all men and women are brothers and sisters despite the color of their skin, and to prove a point, she used her magic to zap everyone at their Christmas party into blackface when the aforementioned openly racist
mister Brockway arrived. Rather than throwing him into a murderous rage, this allowed him to see the air of his ways, and he gave Darren the account and his heart grew three sizes that day. The episode won an Emmy Hilarious Wonderful Stuff. Elizabeth Montgomery declared it her favorite.
It makes sense because it plays on the whole mixed marriage metaphor of a witch is immortal.
I mean, it wasn't Amos and Andy still on the air nineteen seventy Oh, I don't know, no, no, yeah, you're right, that wasn't Yeah, Amos Andy had got Amos and Andy. There was a spin off called Amos Andy's Music Hall that stopped in nineteen sixty. Wow, Amos and Andy stopped in nineteen fifty five. So yeah, yikes, not too long out from that. But hey, witchcraft, they don't call it that old black magic for nothing? Am I right? Folks?
Wow? Wow?
Can we keep that? Judges? I just go nuts. No, it actually is quite stup because there's a whole ton of like racial stuff tied up in witchcraft because of voodoo and like, oh yeah, you know, one of the first zombie movies that came out, I Walked With a Zombie, is actually about not the Night of the Living Dead concept, which was the dead returning to life, which is coined by George Romero, but the idea of actual Haitian voodoo, which is putting people under like a trance to do
your bidding and in a state akin to living death, but not actually being dead. So that was like, honestly the first time a lot of people had been exposed to just any Haitian culture. Year did that movie come out nineteen forty three, So American attitude towards Witchcraft were influenced by that because it was a very influential film, So I brought it back. Thank you? Still racist as yeah?
Yeah yeah, but is it racist if the people who wrote it were little black kids?
No? Yeah, I don't really understand.
How like being zapping everybody in the black face at the end, I'm.
Saying, if this dude was that racist, he probably just would have walked in and started shooting right like, or got outside and burned across, Like, how does being confront with the thing you hate most make you tolerate it? That's white panic, Like, that's why this is why white people left the fucking cities and created the suburbs, honestly, because they started they started looking around, and it sure didn't result in brotherhood.
That story in that King Cole when he moved in this like Canoga Park or some like nice part of LA and a bunch of his neighbors like showed up to basically petition him, and they said, like, you know, we don't want any desirables moving into our neighborhood. And he said, if I see any undesirables, I'll let you know. Yeah, I think they still like burnt crosses on his lawn or something.
Ah, and that like wasn't this country.
Yeah, it was LA, which I mean, I guess LA, especially them, was not exactly as liberal as we see it today. But I mean, I don't know. Nineteen ninety two, never mind, there's an incredible documentary I think, directed by John Singleton. I'm pretty sure John Singleton just called I Think LA ninety two and it's all not found footage but like news footage and handheld cam quarter footage of the LA riots after the Rodney King verdict.
It is astonishing.
It is an incredible documentary anyway, on the topic of magic, I guess this whole episode bad Sameway. Another notable string of episodes occurred during the same season, season seven, for an eight part story arc in which Samantha, Darren, and Indorra traveled to Salem, Massachusetts for the Centennial Witch's Convention.
This was the first time that.
The show had shot on location, and many assumed it was because the show had fallen out of the top ten and even the top twenty by this point, but.
In truth, it was for a much more practical reason.
The sound stage where they filmed and caught on fire, destroying a significant portion of the sets, and yet this wasn't the biggest catastrophe the producers had to contend with. They had already replaced two minor characters without announcement and had another die on them, But then tragedy struck with their male Dick York. And now we finally get to the Darren drama, also known as the Tale of the Two Dicks.
Yes, it's funny. I'm I'm sorry, it's funny.
You know that Dick Sergent's real name is Dick Cox.
I did. It's true? Good for him. Yeah, I always was pressure to one of the guys who played Michael Myers a Dick Warlock. Oh wow, a hell of a name, man. Yeah, but he kind of looks like a wolf's dick. No, does he low hanging fruit with that joke, But he's kind of gnarled.
It's funny where you don't know what he looks like. Yeah, this is extra funny to me because my dad's name Dick, and it was always an endless source of amusement for me and my friends.
Sorry, he's listening right now. I'm sure.
I hope he's aware of that. I assume he is. My middle name is Richard too. So a lot of my close friends call me Dick. You don't though, No, no, I don't.
I'll let you sit with that.
Yes, like all this section their dick, his back might bewitch cast just got jacked delivered in the my neck, my back, cadence.
No, this is fine, this is fine. Okay, that's fine.
So we teased this earlier, but Dick York arrived at his audition for Bewished with a secret He was nursing a deeply painful chronic back injury, which my father also has. It began when he was making a nineteen fifty nine movie called They Came to Cadora, starring Gary Cooper and Tab Hunter, another fascinating mid century figure Edrita Hayworth. Dick York was on set operating a hand car along railway tracks.
You know those things in like Thelony Tunes episodes, look like see saws that you pop up and down.
Yeah.
When the director yelled cut, suddenly one of the extras reached up and pulled himself up on the opposite side that Dick was on by using the handle. But Dick was about to lift up so, as he described it in a nineteen ninety two interview with Film Facts Magazine. Instead of lifting up the expected weight, I was suddenly jarring lifting his entire weight off the flatbed one hundred and eighty pounds or so. The muscles alongside the right side of my back tore.
They just snapped and let loose.
And that was the start of it, all the pain, the painkillers, the addiction, the lost career. I didn't attend to the problem. Then I continued to work through it. His spine never healed correctly, and it basically meant he was inexcruciating pain at all times. The disks in his spine slowly crumbled, and over the years he shrunk from six foot one to five foot ten. At the time, there was no surgery to correct the problem, so Dick York coped with an ever increasing dosage of pain killers.
This allowed him to work through the first four seasons of Bewitched, but over time they became less and less able to keep up with the fourteen hour days and the physical demands of the roles.
Very relied a lot on physical comedy.
It got to the point where Darren Less scripts were kept permanently on hand in case he wasn't well enough to work on any given week, fans of the show will notice to their round. Season three, Darren was traveling out of town on business great deal, and even when he was home, a lot of setups were contrived to
allow him to sit down or reclimb. They even built an angled like wall perch seat thing for him to sit on during takes, similar to what they did for the actor playing the Tin Man and the Wizard of Oz. Because the costume didn't have any like knees or anything able to allow him to bend. When he was in pain, he could barely walk, and when he was on pills he could baible to remember his lines.
So all in all, this was less than ideal.
And now we're at a section I like to call pulling their dick out.
The incident.
Matters with Dick came to a head in early sixty nine, though sadly not morehead, when the cast and crew were hard at work on an episode called Seriously this is what it was called Dad, I can't say it.
He does his thing.
He started the day sick and skipped lunch to see the doctor, who gave him a B twelve shot instead of his usual novaque and in courtizone health in the sixties. He then had to come back and do a special effect shot that required him to be suspended fifteen feet in the air.
This, plus the hot lights, the.
Medication, and the exhaustion, not to mention the pain, it was all less than ideal. York tells the story in his autobiography, The Seesaw Girl and Me. I was too sick to go on. I had a temperature of one hundred and five, was full of strong antibiotics for almost ten days. I went to work that day, but I was sick. I lay in my dressing room after being in makeup, waiting to be called on set. They knew I was feeling pretty rotten, and they tried to give
me time to rest. I kept having chills. It was the middle of the summer and it was wearing a sheepskin jacket, and I was chilling, shaking all over. Then, while sitting on a scaffolding with Maurice Evans being lit for a special effects scene, they were setting an inky. It was a little tiny spotlight that was supposed to just be flickering over my eyes. That flick flickering, flickering made me feel weird. I was sitting on this platform up in the air, and I turned to a friend
of mine on the site. He was just down below, and I said, I think I have to get down. He started to help me down, and that's the last thing I remember until I woke up on the floor. That's about all I'll remember of the incident. I managed to bite a very large hole in the side of my tongue before they could pry my teeth apart. Oh, he basically had a seizure. Essentially, he was immediately rushed to the hospital, never to return to the Bewitch set again.
Bill Asher paid him a visit while he was recovering and asked him if he wanted to hang it up. York replied, if it's all right with you, Billy, and with that, Dick Yorke left the sitcom to devote himself to his recovery. The only public comment he made at the time in relation to his departure from the series was to the Sacramento Bee in March of nineteen sixty nine. Five years was Liz's husband on Bewitched. There are no hard feelings. I just want a chance to do other
stage and movie roles. But privately, he was devastated describing his onset collapse as quote the worst day of my life because I felt like I'd failed everybody. It was the only thing that I started that I didn't finish. I felt so guilty and I felt embarrassed that I let everybody down.
And now ran a section called dick swapping that is just so sad man. Oh it gets so much worse. Oh great.
The whole situation left Bill Asher in a tough spot. They'd finished out the fifth season by filming Darren less episodes and mixing them in with the ones that had already shot with Dick York, so his absence seemed a little less obvious, But once those aired, Asher considered canceling the show altogether. As we'll talk about Elizabeth Montgomery had already grown tired of doing it, but ratings were still high.
When she tried to quit after the end of the fifth season, the network responded by not only giving her a pay raise, but offering her twenty percent share of the series and greater creative control. So the Beast had to be fed. Though they were down a leading man, divorce was seen as out of the question, and killing him off seemed a little too gothic. Especially considering Elizabeth Montgomery was now pregnant and they're about to have another
baby on the show. It just seemed sad for it to be a single mom whose husband.
Had just died.
So they decided to go with the least subtle solution and simply replaced dick Yorke with another actor with no explanation. Asher simply assumed that viewers would understand that this was an actor playing a role and they had to get a new actor. It was a ruthlessly pragmatic decision, but ultimately he decided that the best explanation was none at all. In doing so, they birth the phenomenon known in TV
circles as the Darren syndrome. It's happened a lot over the years see Laurie from That seventy show, Bobby Draper from mad Men, Chris and the Partridge Family, and many others. My favorite is Becky from Roseanne because they made constant jokes about it on the show. In one episode, the family watched Bewitched on TV and the deputy Becky Sarah Chalk I think her name is, remarked that she preferred the second Theren, because of course she did.
Yeah, Sarah chalk Is from Scrubs, Rick and Morty. Oh yeah, yeah, and you're forgetting Aunt Viv from Fresh Prince of bel Air.
Yeah, well, I thought she was only in the first episode and then she and Will Smith had a big falling out.
Well she was, Yeah, basically that's been the rumor. I thought.
She like literally has quoted and interviews of being like, I'm not going to work with that all Will Smith.
Ever again, Yeah, she's claiming now that she was offered a really bad deal and also in an abusive marriage. She did say that Smith got her fired at one point. Oh aw, but yeah, I don't know. Wacky. Yeah. The Roseanne almost funny.
I remember the first Becky came back like later on for some reason. I think she left to go to college, and then when she was done, she came back to the show. And whenever her character entered the room, Roseanne or whoever was in the room, John Gooman wouldever be like, where have you been?
It is great? This is really funny.
The obvious choice for Darren two point zero was Dick Sargeant, who not only bore a passic resemblance to York, but it also been an early contender for the Roles. We mentioned he had a rough time getting integrated in the cast. However, during his first read through, Agnes moorehead in Dora, who was very close to Dick York, stood up and announced I don't like change, before sitting back down.
Me.
That's probably why Sergeant would recall hear is a tough old bird or tough old broad or something. Yeah, but his relationship with Elizabeth Montgomery was better than hers with York's, possibly because he was gay and they didn't have that same weirdness that tainted her relationship with Dick York.
Maybe yeah, I don't know.
The first episode he films seemed to be a nod to the unusual circumstances called Samantha's Better Halves, and Dora splits Darren into two personalities, one gregarious and another all business, and Samantha can be heard moaning stuff like but I only want one Darren, which is pretty on the nose.
And there are a lot of people who thought that the script was a jab from writers who were angry that the producers hadn't stuck by Dick York and just ended the series or tried to coax him back or something. Reviews for Dick Sergeant were tepid. As Variety wrote in case anyone noticed, and assuredly a large number did, Hubby Darren is not quite the same as before. That's because he used to be Dick York and now he's Dick Sergent. Whether the unspoken change will be accepted by the audience
remains to be seen. Some might find it odd to see Samantha just as affectionate with a man who seemingly unbeknownst to her as a stranger. Generally, be Witch fans tended to prefer Dick York, who portrayed Darren as a much more reactive and hysterical.
Figure, rather than Sergeant, who was much more restrained. Uh.
Dick Sergent would later act in a movie called Hardcore, where George C. Scott discovers that his missing daughter is doing porn.
Have you heard of this? No? I haven't. Nineteen seventy nine. Peter Boyle's in this. Paul Schrader wrote and directed it So music by Jack Nietzsche.
Wow, Okay, this is like hitting all the bases. The Wikipedia intrograph is kind of nuts. It's plot follows a conservative Midwestern businessman whose teenage daughter goes missing. In California with the help of a prostitute. His search leads him to the illicit subculture of pornography inclording snuff films.
Schrader developed it with John Millius. It all comes back, ye, judge, Oh my god.
The poster is incredible. It's just the phrase, oh my god, that's my daughter over black text with George C. Scott in the lower corner with his head in his hands.
It is funny because he's making He does that exact same thing an Exorcist three in like twenty one years later. Uh, he's up there.
With Michael Kaine in terms of like, was it pay I'll do it?
Yeah, exactly. I think he was drunk for a lot of it. Yeah. Originally born Baby was in this oh weird as the Jersey Sky character.
Yeah, oh yeah's he couldn't pull off conservative Midwestern dad.
In his contract, George C. Scott stipulated the production include five break days for the actor due to his drinking problem at the time. Yeah, I have I've got a drinking problem.
Can I have like five days off? It was a week or a month.
I need about five days off for I assume per month, just for the odd bender God love him. Five break days built in essentially, I guess if he was too hungover up to work. It was like it was like vacation days. It was rolling over. Anyway, this gets so much worse. Yeah, it does bad reviews with the least that God and her infinite cruelty had in store for Dick York. He was more or less on his back for a year due to a combination of prescription prescription
that's kind of funny word. He was more or less on his back for a year due to a combination of prescription drug abuse and pain. He dropped pills cold turkey in nineteen seventy one, though, which is not generally the preferred way to drop anything. I'm told. He moved in with his mother to spare his wife the sight of his ongoing suffering, describing his withdrawal process to the La Times as six months of hell. I had a
band playing in my head bagpipes night and day. It just went on and on and on and on and on. The fans whisper to you, and the walls whisper to you. And you look at the television and sometimes it flashes in a certain way that sends you into a fit, and you know that your wife has put her hand in your mouth so you won't bite off your tongue. You can't sleep, you hallucinate. I used to make a tape recording of rain so I could listen to the rain lying in bed at night, to drown out those
damned bagpipes. That sounds like hell on earth. I love the Scottish. I love bagpipes, but a tattoo, I gotta say, man, I was pretty goddamn sick of them after like two days in Scotland. I can't image image of you in Scotland. I hadn't no idea you've ever gone to Scotland. That's that's pretty hilarious to me. For some reason. H Glasgow and Edinburgh was part of like a cruise around the northern UK. Whoa, it seems like something I'd be into. It was fun. I just mostly that's where I really
fell in love with Ireland. I didn't know that. Oh so yeah, I couldn't drink though. That was I could drink there, but I couldn't drink on the boat. That was the drag. Anyway. That is a truly horrific withdrawal story. But once again things got worse. Yeah. After that, York found himself relieved when the hallucinations stopped, but then the
ordinary pain returned. He was rendered unable to act beyond small bit parts because his teeth had rotted out due to his drug abuse, and with limited residuals from bewitched, York took his savings and bought an apartment building in West Covina. The plan was to live out the rest of his days there, but it didn't quite happen that way, because when tenants had difficulty paying their rent, York refused to evict them, seemingly recalling the similar circumstances of his
own youth. This caused him, however, to fall behind on his mortgage payments, and the bank foreclosed. York and his wife ended up cleaning units in the building they once owned in order to make ends meet, and by nineteen seventy six they were living on welfare checks. Three packa day smoker, York developed emphysema started wearing an oxygen canister.
When his wife's father died, they flew home to the small town of Rockford, Michigan, and while there, he collapsed in the yard of his in law's home due to his emphysema. York never returned to California, instead moved into the home that his father in law had recently vacated
after dying. And it was there in this tiny red bungalow that bedridden slowly dying of emphysema and surviving on six hundred and fifty dollars a month from the Screen Actors Guild, that York embarked on his later life career end of life career as just a saint. He started. It started with a friend asking him to record an inspirational message for a young girl who was comatosed, and gradually he started doing more and more of these tapes
for others who were home. This eventually blossomed into a full scale crusade to help the homeless, which was a cause near and dear to his heart given his impoverished upbringing. During the Great Depression, York found an organization called Acting for Life, which he ran from his living room, calling politicians, business people, and the general public to contribute supplies, money,
and sleeping bags. He even tried to pressure Congress to convert dozens of military bases recently scheduled for abandonment by a federal commission into homeless shelters. At one point, he was also active in trying to save a whale trapped in ice. I'm just now learning. Despite the circumstances of his life, York preached optimism. I've been blessed, he told a reporter. I have no complaints. I've been surrounded by people in radio, on stage, and in motion pictures and
television who love me. The things that have gone wrong have simply been physical things. And he told another one in what is a quote that will haunt me for the rest of my days? I feel wonderful. It's just my body that's dying. In nineteen eighty nine, People magazine did a big profile on him, and we're just going to quote it in full because we love to see you suffer. A few miles outside Grand Rapids mission and
I put on my podcast or voice for it. A few miles outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, stands a small red house with a flat roof. Inside the cramped living room, a man dressed in a bathrobe, slippers, and knee socks talks animatedly while a hose feeds oxygen to his depleted lungs. His tall, once robust frame is now fragile, the result of a degenerating spine. When he tries to walk and
Fisima leaves him breathless after three steps. But when he speaks, it is with a clear, strong, and very familiar voice, the voice of Dick York, who played Darren Stevens, a mortal married to a witch on the popular sixties sitcom Bewitched. Reports are I'm dying, he says. Tethered to a twenty five foot oxygen lifeline, York, sixty, hasn't been outside since July. Physically, his world, which once included a six figure income in a house in the Hallwood Hills, has been reduced largely
to this green walled room. And yet, after a twenty year downslide during which he battled an addiction to painkillers, saw the bank foreclothes in the apartment building that was his only asset, and ended up living on welfare, York is filled by the boundless energy of a man with a cause. Encouraged by Joan, his wife of thirty seven years, and using his second lifeline, the phone, York has worked
furiously to gather aid for the needy. There is no program drug addiction homelessness that I would not give whatever I can, says York. I'm fortunate I still have my voice. He continued, I must be crazy to think that one guy with a hose up his nose, living on a six hundred and fifty dollars a month pension in this little house in Michigan can make a difference, says Yorke,
trying to laugh. But you know I'm not crazy. As evidence, he describes the three hundred sleeping bags he rounded up for the homeless in Chicago and Detroit, the five thousand cans of grapefruitus he helped deliver to the Dwelling Place Project for the Homeless and Grand Rapids, the twelve thousand surplus Navy jackets he had to shelters in Chicago. He is also content, say the Yorks. There's no difference in how things are today from when we were in Hollywood,
says Joan. It's all been thrilling and it still is. They say, the show goes on, it may just be a different performance. Ouch though their kids have scattered, Dick says he feels the warmth of their support. My dad helped people his whole life, says son Matthew, who now lives in Covina, California. I wouldn't expect anything else from him. Looking back, Matthew adds, our poorest time financially was our
richest in love. I don't love things, Dick explains, a flower the sky people, they're different, but I don't have strong ties to my grandmother's teacup, or to anyone else's teacups, or blankets or boots, all the worldly goods he passes on to the needy. I don't know how I do it, he admits, it just gets done. I have one rule. Don't give me anything you don't want me to give away. Three years after that profile was published, Dick York died
of emphysema in February of nineteen ninety two. Jesus Christ Jordan.
The only time we broke was mister Roger's episode, I believe. But this is a close second. Yes, that's a rough one.
The line from like a deposed actress. They say the show must go on, but maybe it's just a different performance that is horrifying, like that should have been in Sunset Boulevard.
Whoof which I saw on Broadway and it was incredible. By the way, is the best thing I've ever seen on Broadway.
Pussycat Doll, The Whole Share Singer, and Eddie Murphy Baby.
Mama, No, She's not an Eddie Murphy baby. That's racist, just wrong, right, I cut that. All right, Let's bring this, let's land this plane. Man one am for you. The Witch dropped from number eleven in the ratings said number twenty four in nineteen seventy. Some of this was a negative response to Dick Sergeant, but it was also a result of changing tastes.
Shows like All in the Family were.
Coming along, paving the way for a new type of sitcom that reflected reality instead of a fantastical, idealized family that didn't really exist. Bewitch was the last of the so called fantasy sitcoms that premiered in the mid sixties, the Adams Family and the Monsters, which only lasted two years from sixty four to sixty six, and Odrew of Genie, which wrapped in nineteen seventy. Also after eight years, everyone associated with Bewitched was kind of getting tired of it.
The writers had resorted to recycling premises in even repeating much of the same dialogue. They started doing this with episodes that were filmed in black and white before the show was shot in color in the third season, so I think they kind of viewed it as like remakes with you know, beautiful technicolor, and then once Dick Sargent into the picture, there was all the more reason to
have remix because now they got a whole new actor. Also, this was back in the era when they crammed like thirty episodes into a season, which.
Is kind of insane.
Yeah, so it kind of makes sense that they were like trying to cut corners. But no one was more tired of Bewitched than Elizabeth Montgomery. As were previously mentioned, she tried to quit the show after season five, but ABC offered her the world, and so she signed on for another five seasons.
But she appeared visibly bored.
In these later episodes, which is kind of hilarious to watch. Bewitched historian Yes there is such a thing, and author Herbie Pilato is quoted as saying Elizabeth was tired of Bewitched and tried to quit the fifth season, but ABC offered hers so much money she couldn't refuse. But you can see by the final season that she's plodding through each episode brawless as a nod the Women's liberation and
didn't want to be there. In addition to being creatively unfulfilling, the set was tense because her relationship with husband William Asher was deteriorating. He apparently slept around a lot, and Elizabeth started an affair with the show's director, Richard Michaels, which that's a risky, risky move to Minefield. Husban produced the show having an affair with the director of the show,
So yeah, it's like a French farce. By the time the last season of Bewitch wrapped in nineteen seventy two, there was still two years on the contract, but Sdbuwish historian Harvey Palato says everyone thinks ABC canceled the show because of low ratings, but Elizabeth Montgomery canceled the show. When the final episode was broadcast on March twenty fifth, nineteen seventy two, it had fallen to number seventy two
in the ratings. All concerned decided it was time to move on after eight years and two hundred and fifty four episodes. To make up for the final two years on the contract, Bill Asher offered up a sitcom starring Paul lynd my beloved Paul Lynde with the less than imaginative title The Paul Lynn Show, and they even used some of the same sets and a lot of the
same bit players from Bewitched. The show made a play for social relevance with an all in the family style generation gap plot where Lynn's daughter and her slacker husband moved him with Paul moved him with lynd But they lacked any discussion of topical issues, and so it just didn't have any degree of social realism and it really tanked when it premiered.
It's like one of the great TV flops.
A lot of it is because Paul's stick kind of started grading on people, like, you know, a little paul In goes a long.
Way, Ain't that the truth? Brother.
He couldn't anchor a series, so it was canceled after its first season.
Elizabeth Montgomery, for her part, wanted to get as far away from Samantha Stevens as was humanly possible, and thus she became the Queen of TV movies, ultimately racking up eight Emmy nominations. She played a sexual assault victim in the unimaginably titled A Case of Rape and an axe killer in the Legend of Lizzie Borden, which was fitting because it was later revealed that she was distantly related
to Lizzie bordon That's cool. Yeah. She also appeared in the police drama alongside OJ Simpson as two detectives who are romantically involved, this one with the slightly better title A Killing Affair, OJ Simpson, Yeah, that guy got away with murder. Funnily enough, she had a gallery wall filled with from all of her movies, but none from Bewitched. Although she was very kind to fans and always answered her fan mail personally, Elizabeth Montgomery was by all accounts,
a pretty neat lady. Aside from her acting, she worked tirelessly for animal rights causes and used her stature to take a stand for feminist platforms like the Equal Rights Amendment and reproductive rights. She was also one of the first stars to support AIDS victims and campaigned for gay rights, which many in the LGBT community felt was an undercurrent of the show. In a nineteen ninety two interview, Montgomery was asked if Bewitched was an allegory about closeted homosexuality.
She answered, don't think that didn't enter our minds. At the time. We talked about it on the set that this was about people not being allowed to be who they really are. If you think about it, Bewitched is about repression in general and all the frustration in trouble it can cause. She was co grand Marshal for the nineteen ninety two Gay Pride Parade in Los Angeles, alongside
her former co star, a newly out Dick Sergeant. When asked why, she offered the possibly apocryphal reply, I did it for the love of Dick, well for applause.
Elizabeth Montgomery was filming Deadline for Murder in the spring of nineteen ninety five when she started to feel sick. She assumed it was just the flu and waited until shooting Rap to go to the doctor's. It turned out that it was colon cancer. Ope, I don't have colon cancer.
But coughs into a napkin spotted with blood. Yeah.
I don't really understand how the symptoms relate, but by this point the disease was inop. I sometimes I have trouble like regulating Mike cadence of.
Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
By this point, the disease was inoperable, and she opted to return home to her twenty sixth room Beverly Hills Mansion, where she jokingly requested a Pina.
Colada IV drip. Funny Lady.
She sent her family away from her deathbed, preferring the dialge just six weeks after the diagnosis. She didn't want anyone to see her that way, recalled ex husband William Masher,
with whom she remained friends. Then she slipped away, and Asher reportedly deeply regretted his affairs by the end of his life and tearfully admitted to his friends, it was all my fault that we got divorced, and he never really got over her sad Yes, Montgomery was actually married at the time of her death to former Falcon Crest
star Robert Foxworth. They were together for twenty years before they got married just eighteen months before she died, but she was such a private person that most obits said she was single, and they got lots of other things wrong too. They listed her age as fifty seven rather than sixty two and listed her name as Elizabeth A. Montgomery, despite the fact that her actual middle name was Victoria, as I mentioned earlier. Her final work to be aired was a voiceover part as a barmaid on Your Beloved
Batman the animated series. Television executives are more of the content to continue making a buck off the cooling corpse of Bewitched. In nineteen seventy seven, just five years after Bewitched went off the air, they launched the spin off Tabitha The Stars showed Lisa Hartman as Tabitha, the daughter of Samantha and Darren, who was also a witch. In reality, with the timeline, Tabitha would have been about twelve, but the series aged her up to her.
Early twenties to make it more appealing sexy. Yeah, I don't know.
I guess there's more to do with a adult actress than a teenage character.
I don't know.
Moving on, Tabitha's TV parents never guest starred on the show. It's just probably for the best because it kind of looks terrible and.
It lasted only a year. I think.
Over the ensuing decades, multiple networks have attempted to reanimate the corpse of Bewitched. In twenty eleven, CBS ordered a script for a be Witch remake from writer Mark Lawrence and producers Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher, the married duo who also produced the two thousand and five film remake,
which we will pointedly not speak about. In twenty four Routine NBC committed to a follow up series that would have followed Samantha's granddaughter, but nothing happened with that, and in twenty eighteen Blackish creator Can You Barrass salto be Wished revamp? Mercifully, none of these have come the pass, although Sony apparently has an animated series in the works which focuses on Tabitha as a teenager, which sounds like bootleg Sabrina the teenage Witch.
Yeah who cares?
Yeah no, yeah, well it is the Witching Hour on the East Coast. I am sick and jet lagged and tired. We have done twenty four pages on this, folks. I have nothing left to say about Bewitched, so higl Instead, before we sign off, let's discuss who could defeat God? Genie or Samantha.
Tweeted us, using the hashtag which nineteen sixty sitcom Idol Supernatural Idol Supernatural Idol could find and kill God Lily Munster. No, no, no, we got a limited the Geni or Samantha Mortisia Adams. Yeah, the car and my mother of the car M M. Gilligan by accident. Uh, the racist boss from Bewitched. God has turned black for an episode and so furious mister Brockway I believe his name was killed God using a suit of armor forged by the KKK. I just gave
so many Southern people ideas for fanfic. I can really apologize for that well in this episode that veered from some of our I hope you will, folks all have fun listening to this episode, which sworned to new heights of distracted googling and plunge to new depths of absolute human suffering. Thanks for listening. Has been too much information. I don't know what I'm doing here, and I'm Alex Hagel, I'm Jordan Talk. We'll catch you next time. Too Much
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