Speaker 1: Too Much Information is a production of iHeartRadio. Hello everyone,
Speaker 1: and welcome to another episode of Too Much Information, the
Speaker 1: show that brings you the secret histories and little known
Speaker 1: facts and figures behind your favorite movies, music, TV shows
Speaker 1: and more. We are your dueling Darren's of Details. You're
Speaker 1: Larry Taits of Tedium. Your uncle Arthur is of awesomely
Speaker 1: inaned facts twitching up god knows how many hours of
Speaker 1: mid century trivia.
Speaker 2: My name's Jordan Runtogg and I'm Alex Heigel.
Speaker 1: And today we are talking about one of the pillars
Speaker 1: of my beloved.
Speaker 2: Nicket night TV programming block.
Speaker 1: It's one half of the supernatural women on sitcoms in
Speaker 1: the mid sixties, dimming their shine for totally mediocre Dude's Access.
Speaker 2: No not, I Dream of Jeannie.
Speaker 1: The other one, though, as we'll discuss their basically sister shows.
Speaker 1: I'm talking about Bewitched. Premiering sixty years ago this September,
Speaker 1: it quickly became one of the highest rated shows on television,
Speaker 1: airing for eight seasons on ABC between nineteen sixty four
Speaker 1: and nineteen seventy two. Bewitched follows the adventures of a
Speaker 1: friendly witch named Samantha, played by the legendary Elizabeth Montgomery,
Speaker 1: who marries a mortal named Darren famously played by two
Speaker 1: different men named Dick, and her attempts to live as
Speaker 1: an ordinary suburban housewife.
Speaker 2: Hilarity ensues.
Speaker 1: I don't have super deep emotions about this show, and
Speaker 1: in fact, I think, yeah, how could you really? Upon
Speaker 1: revisiting it, I am thoroughly charmed by Elizabeth Montgomery. I
Speaker 1: forgot like how great she is to watch, and like
Speaker 1: fun she is and everything. Yeah, but I as a kid,
Speaker 1: I think I gave the edge to Genie on a
Speaker 1: Dream of Genie because first of all, I like space
Speaker 1: and Tony Nelson was an astronaut and I thought the
Speaker 1: whole Middle Eastern thing was more cool and exotic.
Speaker 2: But I also love to be witch problematic of you
Speaker 2: come on the bottle like I having a clubhouse.
Speaker 1: I was like that bottles pretty cool.
Speaker 2: Ooh, I don't know. We'll see if you get canceled yet. No,
Speaker 2: I'm kidding, that's all fine, don't panic about that, like
Speaker 2: I know you will. Haiger.
Speaker 1: What do you think about Bewitch? Do you like it
Speaker 1: better than the Brady Bunch? Yes, because it's got a
Speaker 1: witch in it.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, fair. I remember watching this and also I
Speaker 2: dream of Genie, but I took absolutely nothing from them, sure,
Speaker 2: like in one ear and out the other man. And
Speaker 2: I think it's because like in those days, like I
Speaker 2: didn't really have like a sense of narrative television because
Speaker 2: everything was I was watching was syndicated. Yeah, So I
Speaker 2: was just like I was like, there, I don't know
Speaker 2: these plots. I don't know anything, and I kind of
Speaker 2: gravitate towards that still, like I am one of those
Speaker 2: blasphemous X Files fans. That's like I wish every single
Speaker 2: episode was Monster of the Week. I don't care about
Speaker 2: the overch and kids, like I'm bad like that. But
Speaker 2: so because of that, I just don't remember anything about this,
Speaker 2: like there was nothing to golm Onto except I also
Speaker 2: remember finding Elizabeth Montgomery like charming as hell. Yes, And
Speaker 2: I remember and Dora, Yeah, I feel like you'd like
Speaker 2: Andorra Yeah yeah, Wisecracker love it. And I just remember
Speaker 2: then reading about like in all of my coffee table
Speaker 2: books about the mid middle of the twentieth century that
Speaker 2: I read of a lot of which probably shared with you,
Speaker 2: that you know, they switched Dix and that was such
Speaker 2: a big thing. But yeah, man, I don't know. I
Speaker 2: I think at the vague sense of disappointment is my
Speaker 2: only kind of of well just to being like this
Speaker 2: isn't witchy, oh, or like yeah, this isn't you know
Speaker 2: because I'm watching this in like nineteen ninety four five,
Speaker 2: I was like, I had an established notion of witchcraft
Speaker 2: by the already, Yeah, as any child should. So yeah,
Speaker 2: going back to this, I was like, I don't I
Speaker 2: don't understand this, but I understand Elizabeth Montgomery. So you
Speaker 2: thought there was a bait and switch. Yeah, yeah, I
Speaker 2: was deceived by the amount of black magic that I
Speaker 2: was promised. The black magic too suburban drama. Yeah was unequal.
Speaker 2: It was uneven. Okay, So I have a pretty robust foundation.
Speaker 2: I just don't remember any of them other than that
Speaker 2: I watched them. But I mean that's what mid century
Speaker 2: sitcoms are for. You watch them, you don't get invested.
Speaker 2: Although I do say.
Speaker 1: I feel like Bewitched is important in the history of
Speaker 1: television because it's one of the first shows where it's
Speaker 1: dirty laundry was aired in public in real time.
Speaker 2: Because, as we'll touch.
Speaker 1: On with the Dicks with with the Dicks, yes, several
Speaker 1: of the cast members died mid series, and Dick Yark
Speaker 1: had to be replace after five seasons by Dick Sergeant
Speaker 1: as Darren the male lead. So, as far as I'm concerned,
Speaker 1: Bewitch was like behind the scenes TV drama one oh
Speaker 1: one and helped pave the way for stuff like each
Speaker 1: true Hollywood stories because you know, everyone kind of knew
Speaker 1: that there was some dirt and shadiness under the slick
Speaker 1: sitcom veneer, and they sent producers of those kinds of
Speaker 1: docudrama TV shows to start looking at like you know,
Speaker 1: the Brady Bunch or a Dream of Genie or family
Speaker 1: Affair stuff like that. So anyway, I feel like Bewitched
Speaker 1: has an important place in TV history for that. It
Speaker 1: just seems tailor made for these people. Magazine expose's and
Speaker 1: we'll be quoting from a few.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, I can't summon up any feelings. Even
Speaker 2: my usual bile has left me. I'm just like, yeah,
Speaker 2: give Elizabeth Montgomery her flowers. Whatever. Man, she's cute. She
Speaker 2: did the wiggle, the face wiggle thing face wiggle, that's fine.
Speaker 2: She worked hard and she did good things for a
Speaker 2: lot of people.
Speaker 1: As we're talking about cool cool lady, and I should
Speaker 1: have saved this at the very end, but I'm gonna
Speaker 1: say it to you now because I think it'll maybe
Speaker 1: flavor of the rest of this episode for you. Did
Speaker 1: you know that her last performance, it came out just
Speaker 1: after she died, by her request, was a voiceover performance
Speaker 1: for your beloved Batman, the animated series. She played a barmaid.
Speaker 1: That was her last performance. Yeah, I love that.
Speaker 2: I think they dedicated the episode to her. Oh that's wonderful. Yeah,
Speaker 2: she's super cool.
Speaker 1: But aside from dirt and behind the scenes stories allow
Speaker 1: me to over intellectualize some of the precise reasons why
Speaker 1: Bewitch has meant so much to so many. As initially
Speaker 1: conceived and even outlined in the show bible, the focus
Speaker 1: of the show wasn't supposed to be on magic or witchcraft,
Speaker 1: as you noted. Instead, it was a subversion of an
Speaker 1: old and tired plot line where a working class man
Speaker 1: marries a woman and afterwards finds out that she's from
Speaker 1: an extremely rich family, and the man then struggles to
Speaker 1: maintain his stubborn insistence that they live within their means.
Speaker 1: This obviously meant a lot more in the sixties, when
Speaker 1: men were supposed to be the breadwinner and the head
Speaker 1: of the household and all that. So, in short, Bewitch
Speaker 1: was about a man trying to maintain social norms and
Speaker 1: retain his dominance despite the fact that his wife is
Speaker 1: far more powerful. And in that way, it's a very
Speaker 1: powerful proto feminist concept, at least as far as nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty four network sitcoms were concerned. Interestingly, Elizabeth Montgomery actually
Speaker 1: refused to wear a brawl in later seasons, and it's
Speaker 1: a subtle nod to the women's liberation movement. Oh, I
Speaker 1: bet it was subtle, But I mean, it's just like
Speaker 1: a crazy thing that can like sneak onto a network
Speaker 1: sitcom in like nineteen seventies. Yeah, the Witch was expected
Speaker 1: to be subservient, lesser than her man, and that's just
Speaker 1: not who she was. One of the early writers of
Speaker 1: The Witch, Danny Arnold, believed that the main theme of
Speaker 1: the show is the conflict of a powerful woman and
Speaker 1: a husband who cannot deal with that power, and also
Speaker 1: the woman's mother who's furious that she married beneath her station.
Speaker 1: In February nineteen sixty four, just a few months before
Speaker 1: Bewitch premiered, Betty Freudan, the legendary.
Speaker 2: Freedom I talk about a Freudian slip. Oh wow, I'll
Speaker 2: keep that.
Speaker 1: Betty fri Dan, the legendary feminist writer philosopher. I don't
Speaker 1: even know how you'd sum up her work, who wrote
Speaker 1: The Feminine Mystique, wrote a two part essay for the
Speaker 1: TV Guide called Television and the Feminine Mystique, in which
Speaker 1: she lamented the fact that women on sitcoms were quote simplistic, manipulative,
Speaker 1: and insecure household drudges whose time was spent in dreaming
Speaker 1: of love and plotting revenge on their husbands. But Samantha Stevens,
Speaker 1: the witch from Bewitched, was very different, and her mother,
Speaker 1: who hates that she married a mortal, speaks of Samantha's
Speaker 1: household duties in language that seems to.
Speaker 2: Come straight from the feminine mystique.
Speaker 1: She's basically saying, you know you're better than this, Be
Speaker 1: who you are. It's funny because in recent years and Dora,
Speaker 1: who is conceived as a metalsome mother in law character
Speaker 1: archetype for the show, has actually gained more sympathy than
Speaker 1: Darren Stevens, the every man who married a witch and
Speaker 1: wants her to, you know, act like a normal housewife.
Speaker 1: Many evolved in the making of Bewitch said that they
Speaker 1: deliberately intended the show to be analogous to real life
Speaker 1: mixed marriages. Darren and Samantha decided to conceal Sam's true identity,
Speaker 1: while in real life many couples concealed the race, ethnicity,
Speaker 1: or religion of one of their spouses. And the LGBTQ
Speaker 1: community also embraced Bewitch because many related to Samantha feeling
Speaker 1: as though she just to disguise her true self in
Speaker 1: order to pass in a much more dull, homogeneous world.
Speaker 1: This despite the fact that her true self is quite
Speaker 1: literally magical.
Speaker 2: So there's a lot to unpack. Yeah, and I mean,
Speaker 2: I think this whole era is just so fascinating to
Speaker 2: me because as a horror dork, because you know, it's
Speaker 2: so much of it is directly traceable to Universal Studios,
Speaker 2: really shaping the nature of how we thought about this stuff,
Speaker 2: because you know, those films were so gigantic in their era,
Speaker 2: but by this time when the television comes along, they
Speaker 2: had really started to slow. They were well into their meat.
Speaker 2: S Abbott and Costello face, I love what you hate
Speaker 2: that yeah, and you know, of the canonical sort of
Speaker 2: monsters that we think of like Frankenstein, Dracula, Wolfman, Mummy,
Speaker 2: and Wet Beast, they only produced the Mummy and the
Speaker 2: and the monster creature from the Black Lagoon. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: they afore mentioned Wet Beast. The only produced those as originals.
Speaker 2: But what they had done was release a lot of
Speaker 2: their stuff to cables or cable not television, to local
Speaker 2: affiliates for rebroadcasts. And that's when you get the whole
Speaker 2: horror host thing with well Vampiro is the first one
Speaker 2: and Zacherlee out of Philadelphia. But you know, all that
Speaker 2: stuff is really ripe for reimagining it in the same
Speaker 2: context or getting these same readings from it. I mean, famously,
Speaker 2: Brida Frankenstein is like one of the gayest movies ever
Speaker 2: made because the director, James Whale, was an openly gay
Speaker 2: man in Hollywood, which was like practically a death sentence
Speaker 2: at the time. But that movie has been tremendously reclaimed
Speaker 2: by the queer community, and so is have all of
Speaker 2: them to an extent, because it's all about being an outsider,
Speaker 2: and that's such a fascinating thing to bring into the
Speaker 2: context of a sitcom because it is like, you know,
Speaker 2: the whole narrative that's been shoved down our throat by
Speaker 2: boomers and everything was in the era of post war
Speaker 2: prosperity that followed, like society became boring and like not
Speaker 2: really if you were trying to struggle for basic human
Speaker 2: rights during that period. But it's funny. It is interesting
Speaker 2: to see how some people look at it, or how
Speaker 2: it can be read as this idea of Darren, like
Speaker 2: the central all American male figure essentially trying and failing
Speaker 2: to keep anything that is, you know, not the conformist,
Speaker 2: white picket fence lifestyle in check. And I think that's
Speaker 2: a really wonderful reading of it that prefigures much of
Speaker 2: the civil rights movement, much of the queer movement, much
Speaker 2: of the counterculture movement, the new left that was about
Speaker 2: to happen in the following decade, Which is my over
Speaker 2: intellectualization of it. You know, you have like literally white America,
Speaker 2: white straight male America not realizing what it was about
Speaker 2: to have to reckon with.
Speaker 1: That's so much more articulate the top of your head
Speaker 1: than what I literally wrote down, which annoys me. No,
Speaker 1: I mean, and that's fascinating for me because to bring
Speaker 1: an outsider perspective to the most insider of platforms network TV,
Speaker 1: sitcom in the mid sixties when there are only three networks.
Speaker 1: I just find that such a weird dichotomy.
Speaker 2: And we talked about this in the context of Adam's
Speaker 2: Family as well, But Adam's family is such it has
Speaker 2: a different pedigree because it came from that whole macabre
Speaker 2: Edward Gorey New Yorker aesthetic as opposed to monsters, but
Speaker 2: they're both all. They're all fascinating for it, especially in
Speaker 2: mediums of film and television. You can see the generations
Speaker 2: start to take control of this, like there's a reason
Speaker 2: that Tim Burton and like the usc well more than
Speaker 2: any like. I mean, he's the biggest one because he
Speaker 2: came out of Disney, that comes to my mind. But
Speaker 2: like you see the people who grew up with these
Speaker 2: mid century fascinations start to create stuff based on it.
Speaker 2: We talked about it last week with Tales from the
Speaker 2: Crypt where it was like all of those guys who
Speaker 2: were the first generation of this fifties culture that bewitch
Speaker 2: is it on the continuum of eventually started being able
Speaker 2: to shape culture. In there in their nostalgia, and we
Speaker 2: got all this stuff that looked back to the era,
Speaker 2: and sadly, it was by and large straight white guys,
Speaker 2: so we didn't really get the repressed reading. But it
Speaker 2: has popped up.
Speaker 1: Man.
Speaker 2: I mean there's Clive Barker is like, you know, perennially
Speaker 2: sadly perennially like number two or three to Stephen King
Speaker 2: and I don't know Dean Koomts in terms of like
Speaker 2: horror books, but Clive Barker has always been quite edgier
Speaker 2: than either of those guys, because a ton of his
Speaker 2: stuff is about sex and violence. And I forget if
Speaker 2: he's identifies as gay or bisexual. But you know, Night Breed,
Speaker 2: which is one of the great failures of Hollywood, was
Speaker 2: like an explicitly very queer coded movie that he was
Speaker 2: at the reins of after getting the juice to make
Speaker 2: it because of the success of Hell Raiser, Clive Barker
Speaker 2: having created Pinhead, who he does not like it when
Speaker 2: we call him Pinhead, but it is. I mean, it's fascinating.
Speaker 2: I love the queer reading of horror films and anything
Speaker 2: horror jacent, you know, because the second you start talking
Speaker 2: about othering. It comes up in those readings, and quite
Speaker 2: a few of them were made by gay people. Child's
Speaker 2: Play was written by Tom n He as a gay man.
Speaker 2: You know. That's why Chucky has gone on to have
Speaker 2: like a non binary child towards the end of the franchise.
Speaker 2: But yeah, it's fascinating to see. I think it's very
Speaker 2: interesting to see that reading of queer othering into all
Speaker 2: of these situations or other other ring. You know, race
Speaker 2: goes into it, political affiliations goes into it, played out
Speaker 2: in stuff that is ostensibly kitchy and lightweight. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what I find so fascinating about it. And also,
Speaker 1: I mean, going back to the feminist reading, I make
Speaker 1: a point in this episode to not discuss the two
Speaker 1: thousand and five movie with Nicole Gimmin and Will Ferrell because.
Speaker 2: It was so bad.
Speaker 1: But it was written by Nora Efron, who's, like, you know,
Speaker 1: has writible background as a writer, I mean, one of
Speaker 1: the most brilliant screenwriters of the twentieth century. So it
Speaker 1: kind of follows in that linear like the fact that
Speaker 1: she chose to do that even though it got.
Speaker 2: Horrible, horrible reviews. Yeah, well, it's hard to find the
Speaker 2: tone because like I think, having Will Ferrell in as
Speaker 2: like an ostensibly in control, dominant male figure is like
Speaker 2: totally false. I mean they should have gone with like yeah,
Speaker 2: John Hamm or somebody that is effectively authoritarian and square enough,
Speaker 2: whereas like Will Ferrell, you're just automatically a conditioned to
Speaker 2: be like ah the buffoon. So it's yeah. And that's
Speaker 2: why I think a lot of the updates at tonally
Speaker 2: getting this kind of stuff like Mars Attacks partially succeeds,
Speaker 2: but like Rob Zombie did Monsters and it's it's hard
Speaker 2: to get the camp right. It's hard to get the
Speaker 2: attitude correct. Anyway, shut up, let's too bowitch. Oh wait. First,
Speaker 2: in the middle of all this pontificating, thank you as
Speaker 2: always to our supporters on KOFE, drop us a message.
Speaker 2: I love bantering, whether it's gift or textual. And you
Speaker 2: guys put for you in the tank. It's so great
Speaker 2: to hear personal stories of what the show means to
Speaker 2: you or what you take from it. And we are
Speaker 2: keeping track of suggestions. I promise you, I say, whether
Speaker 2: it's gift or jif no, no, no, I see I
Speaker 2: see the vein in your neck. You can see it.
Speaker 1: Oh all right, Well, there's a lot to unpack, and
Speaker 1: this is probably a contender for the longest episode we've
Speaker 1: ever done. It's ten thirty PM. I'm jet lagged in sick,
Speaker 1: so let's get right to it. No fact teases for
Speaker 1: you this episode, Ladies and gentlemen, here is everything you
Speaker 1: didn't know about be Witched. Oh man, Well, we're starting
Speaker 1: off on kind of a bummer note here. Of folks,
Speaker 1: I'm sad to report that this beloved sitcom has its
Speaker 1: origins and a truly hilarious good executive brainstorming. Harry Ackerman,
Speaker 1: who led the television production studio screen Gems, wanted to
Speaker 1: make a show about a witch.
Speaker 2: Cool and I'm on board.
Speaker 1: That's all he had, folks, That's that's what he's got.
Speaker 1: A bunch of witch movies were owned by the Screen
Speaker 1: Gems parent company, Columbia Pictures, and so it seemed like
Speaker 1: money on the table as far as old Harry was concerned.
Speaker 1: And to flesh out this groundbreaking premise, you put in
Speaker 1: a call of Soul Sachs, an experienced radio and TV
Speaker 1: writer who's responsible for episodes of Ozzie and Harriet. My
Speaker 1: favorite husband. I married Joan and many others. They dined
Speaker 1: at the legendary Hollywood Musso and Frank seen in the
Speaker 1: opening of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Speaker 2: If I recall, I think that's where Leo and Brad
Speaker 2: are eating with it. Was it Alpacino? Who's their their
Speaker 2: agent in that Alpucino is in the dinner scene, I think,
Speaker 2: But I think it's there. I think it's there. Yeah,
Speaker 2: what a picture.
Speaker 1: Yes, So Saul Sacks and Harry Ackerman go to Musso
Speaker 1: and Frank and they talk it through and Saul expands
Speaker 1: this idea into a witch marring immortal, and within three
Speaker 1: weeks he turned in a pilot script that he called
Speaker 1: The Witch of Westport, which is kind of a great title,
Speaker 1: like arguably better than Bewitched.
Speaker 2: Maybe I like the alliteration. Yeah, I'm a sucker for literation.
Speaker 1: The script followed the adventures of a witch named Cassandra,
Speaker 1: who falls in love with and marries Mortal. The series
Speaker 1: would focus on Cassandra's attempts to adapt to her life
Speaker 1: as a suburban housewife in Westpark, Connecticut. Now Sechs would
Speaker 1: freely admit that he borrowed heavy air quotes the idea
Speaker 1: from a pair of movies nineteen fifty eight's Bail Booken Candle,
Speaker 1: and perhaps most obviously, a nineteen forty two movie called
Speaker 1: I Married a Witch.
Speaker 2: Kind of gives away the lead the guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it does what it says on the ten although
Speaker 1: this movie kind of seems great.
Speaker 2: Have you ever heard of this movie? No? I have not.
Speaker 2: I kind of.
Speaker 1: Think you would like it. It's about a woman living
Speaker 1: in the sixteen sixties New England who vows to get
Speaker 1: revenge after she sentenced to burn at the Steak for
Speaker 1: being accused of being a witch. Correctly, I assume being
Speaker 1: a witch. Centuries later, her soul was accidentally set free
Speaker 1: and roams the earth, and she develops an interest in
Speaker 1: a local politician. But then she discovers that the politician
Speaker 1: is descended from the people who had her killed.
Speaker 2: Hilarity, I think, insus.
Speaker 1: I'm pretty sure she should have killed them. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think that's ques terrifically. I think that's what she's grappling with.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, okay.
Speaker 1: Salt Sacks was open about these influences, one because they
Speaker 1: were so obvious, and two, as we mentioned, the production
Speaker 1: company owned them so he could proceed without fear of lawsuits.
Speaker 2: After writing the pilot, he received a show creator credit.
Speaker 1: And basically backed off and had no involvement in the
Speaker 1: show for the rest of its run. He didn't really
Speaker 1: do anything after this either. He basically just counted his
Speaker 1: money for the rest of his life until his death
Speaker 1: in twenty eleven at age one hundred. Hell yeah, right,
Speaker 1: So for this you do the one good thing. You
Speaker 1: take an executive a's like one word idea, couple it
Speaker 1: with stuff that already exists, do the bare minimum and
Speaker 1: bang on a script in three weeks, and then just
Speaker 1: sit back and cash checks for the rest of your life.
Speaker 2: Until you live to a hundred. That's Hollywood, baby. Hell yeah.
Speaker 2: The only downside about his long life means.
Speaker 1: That he unfortunately I was alive when the two thousand
Speaker 1: and five movie came out.
Speaker 2: Who did that? We studio? Now the director, I don't know.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, nor Efron didn't just write it, she directed
Speaker 2: it too. O man, Oh that's tough. It's funny to
Speaker 2: me that you hate it so much. I mean, they
Speaker 2: took some standtrack, stand track, stand track.
Speaker 1: They took my beloved mid century media and made a
Speaker 1: mockery of it.
Speaker 2: It's nothing sacred. I hate to tell you, Bud, But
Speaker 2: there's probably gonna be a lot more of that coming up.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, well no, I think the boomer stuff has
Speaker 1: been mined. That's that's the only stuff I care about.
Speaker 2: Hey, we still can hold out hope for my mother
Speaker 2: of the Car, a gritty reboot. I can see it now.
Speaker 2: I can see it now. It's like it's gonna be like,
Speaker 2: there's gonna be a mournful lower register, single piano key rendition.
Speaker 2: If I'm in love with my car. I was going
Speaker 2: to say, drive my car.
Speaker 1: Actually, oh, that's better.
Speaker 2: And then like there's like a shot fades in someone
Speaker 2: going out to dilapidated garage and ripping off a dust
Speaker 2: cover of a car, but you also see that there's
Speaker 2: chains over the car. And then it's like we do
Speaker 2: like a probably a medium maybe a two shot of
Speaker 2: the woman talking to the man and she's like, there's
Speaker 2: a lot about my family, you don't know, Darren. And
Speaker 2: then we get another slow interruption. I was gonna say, yeah.
Speaker 2: Then the lights pop on, yeah, and then it kicks
Speaker 2: into I don't know, probably new metal. Maybe I think
Speaker 2: the kids are back into that these days, or like
Speaker 2: a vapor wave. No, not vaporway. Yeah, like a new
Speaker 2: metal cover of Drive My Car. We could maybe get
Speaker 2: Jack Antonof on that. I know he's a favorite of
Speaker 2: yours with what he does with the Beatles work. And
Speaker 2: then it kicks up and then it ramps into like
Speaker 2: a Christine esque series of car murders. Yeah what kind
Speaker 2: of car? I don't care, that's I material, Okay, all right.
Speaker 2: They would be what's the funniest car? An AMC, Gremlin,
Speaker 2: ya Spectra, kiasol, Oh, what's the square one? A Scion
Speaker 2: or a Yugo? You go pretty funny and old? Yougo
Speaker 2: pontiac az tech Ooh also good? Also good? And then
Speaker 2: it has to come back. It has to come back
Speaker 2: to Geometros. Yeah, it has to come back to Satan
Speaker 2: in some way, Like it's like a blood and there
Speaker 2: has to be like a woke twist on it. So
Speaker 2: it's like it would be something about how she was
Speaker 2: like prisoned in a car for like it was.
Speaker 1: Like a dashboard Satan, a dashboard devil or something on
Speaker 1: like springs.
Speaker 2: But then like there's actual light behind the eyes. Yeah yeah,
Speaker 2: or it's just like yeah, or it's like she was
Speaker 2: like it would go back to like her being cursed
Speaker 2: by like a cabal of like the seventies, like blood sacrifice,
Speaker 2: Satan worshiping, like business guys, a glowing pine air freshener.
Speaker 2: Oh that's good, that's good.
Speaker 1: That's good, Like that represents her soul or something or
Speaker 1: as sentience.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then we get like a histrionically wailing Berkeley
Speaker 2: Grad to be like baby, you can drop that, and
Speaker 2: then it's like and then like coming December twenty twenty five.
Speaker 2: Everything we pitch on here is a verbal contract. So
Speaker 2: someone who's someone who's this money when that comes out.
Speaker 1: I was just texting a friend of the pod Dora
Speaker 1: a little while ago, and it never occurred to me
Speaker 1: the line from driving my car, but you could do
Speaker 1: something in between.
Speaker 2: That's a really obscene sounding line. Never occurred to me.
Speaker 2: Who cares, there's your Beatles' reference. Oh yeah, well.
Speaker 1: The script for The Witch of Westport made its way
Speaker 1: around Hollywood and screen. Jam's first choice for the lead
Speaker 1: was a woman named Tammy Grimes, who was a Broadway star.
Speaker 1: She won a Best Actress Tony in nineteen sixty one
Speaker 1: for playing Molly Brown in The Unsinkable Molly Brown used
Speaker 1: my Titanic drinkable.
Speaker 2: You love the unsinkable Molly Brown so much.
Speaker 1: I love a brassy Southern lady who survives the Titanic. Well,
Speaker 1: what's not the love?
Speaker 2: Yeah. Ultimately, Tandy Crimes.
Speaker 1: Backed out of playing the lead on Bewitched because she
Speaker 1: found the idea too far fetched, reportedly wondering why the
Speaker 1: witch in question wouldn't use her powers to either stop
Speaker 1: wars or deal with Los Angeles traffic. Those were the
Speaker 1: two examples she provided, stopping wars or stopping LA traffic.
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's fair, that's fair. Actors are special people, they are.
Speaker 2: I don't know. I always with witchcraft and anything. I'm
Speaker 2: really I'm just always like, like I believe that they
Speaker 2: believe in it, But I'm always just like, why does
Speaker 2: this always just come down to like people in strip
Speaker 2: malls lighting candles, like strip malls that you go into. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: strike that. I don't want to make them witchy women
Speaker 2: mad at me.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I'm keeping it for that recent Yeah. The
Speaker 1: script for The Witches of Westport eventually landed on the
Speaker 1: desk of William Asher. Asher was a director and producer
Speaker 1: who directed one hundred and ten of I Love Lucy's
Speaker 1: one hundred and seventy nine episodes, as well as some
Speaker 1: of my beloved Beach Party Franking in that teen movies.
Speaker 1: He just got married to an actress named Elizabeth Montgomery,
Speaker 1: whom he'd met while directing her in the TV movie
Speaker 1: Johnny Cool and this Guy yuh For being like kind
Speaker 1: of a dumpyfore something balding guy, he had something going
Speaker 1: for him.
Speaker 2: Though he was married.
Speaker 1: While directing Johnny Coole, he was having affairs with three
Speaker 1: separate women on the set before getting serious with Elizabeth Montgomery,
Speaker 1: and they were deeply in love and soon after their
Speaker 1: marriage in nineteen sixty three, they wanted to find a
Speaker 1: project to work on together so they could be together
Speaker 1: all the time, ideally a sitcom which provided more of
Speaker 1: a stable routine that would allow them to start a family.
Speaker 1: The Witch of Westport fit the bill perfectly. They began
Speaker 1: work on the pilot, making alterations the Salt Sacks original script.
Speaker 1: The title was changed to Bewitched because it just just
Speaker 1: because cleaner, and Cassandra was named Samantha. Apparently, Elizabeth Montgomery
Speaker 1: didn't like Cassandra because she thought it was too connected
Speaker 1: to the evil witches of Greek mythology.
Speaker 2: Oh a little anti Greek, little anti Greek bias going on.
Speaker 2: I love this. This just got interesting for me. Cassandra
Speaker 2: was a temple priestess. Now I thought she was like
Speaker 2: a I was gonna say, yeah, wasn't she the one
Speaker 2: who claimed to Yeah yeah, Trojan princess and priestess. Oh
Speaker 2: she was the one who was cursed so that she
Speaker 2: had visions of the future, but that no one would believe. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean same.
Speaker 1: ABC was pitched the show, but they turned it down
Speaker 1: initially because I this is kind of a hilarious reason,
Speaker 1: but I guess kind of makes sense given that it
Speaker 1: was the sixties. They were worried that a show with
Speaker 1: a witch's a main character would repel audiences in the
Speaker 1: highly religious South.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, absolutely, Yeah, yeah, that was a smart call.
Speaker 2: They were right, No, it was those people are crazy.
Speaker 1: It was only when Chevy came on as a sponsor
Speaker 1: that they realized that maybe this had the potential to
Speaker 1: make a ton of money after all, and they ended
Speaker 1: up greenlighting it.
Speaker 2: So. Elizabeth Montgomery, the star of Bewitched, is a fascinating woman.
Speaker 2: Aside from her obvious charm that captivated Jordan and I
Speaker 2: at an early age. And many others. It's not even
Speaker 2: it's that asexual what it's like at that age, it
Speaker 2: was just purely being like she seems neat or was
Speaker 2: it sexual for you? She was a real pretty lady,
Speaker 2: just a pretty lady who was magical and powerful anyway.
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Montgomery, the start of The Bewitched, is a fascinating woman,
Speaker 2: incredibly talented, driven as well as big hearted. She made
Speaker 2: over two hundred guest appearances on TV before Bewitch came along,
Speaker 2: and she got an Emmy nomination for an episode of
Speaker 2: The Untouchables. She also starred in Broadway productions like The
Speaker 2: Miracle Worker and Late Love. I don't know what that is?
Speaker 2: It sounds weird. Well, the Miracle Worker, I do is
Speaker 2: the hell in kellor one? No? Yeah, I don't know
Speaker 2: what is late nevermind, I don't care. She's also sadly
Speaker 2: or finely depending on your point of view, a NEPO.
Speaker 1: Baby, depending on who's listening and whether or not they
Speaker 1: have access to our coffee.
Speaker 2: Pitge Yeah, yeah, yeah, yuh. Her father was actor Robert Montgomery,
Speaker 2: who was a big star in the thirties and forties
Speaker 2: before he began hosting his own anthology television series Predictably
Speaker 2: Tight Robert Montgomery Presents from nineteen fifty to nineteen fifty seven.
Speaker 2: I've never heard of this, neither of I. Elizabeth made
Speaker 2: her debut on this show, but the father daughter relationship
Speaker 2: was a tense one. She struggled to escape his shadow,
Speaker 2: and he didn't make that easier by being a critic
Speaker 2: of everything in her life. He didn't want her to
Speaker 2: follow in his footsteps and become an actress, and then
Speaker 2: he became deeply jealous of her when her fame eclipsed
Speaker 2: his own. Friends would say that Elizabeth presented her father
Speaker 2: but also desperately tried to please him on some level,
Speaker 2: and that push pool tied her in knots it's a
Speaker 2: good metaphor, too many metaphors. No, No, it's good. Push
Speaker 2: and pull in yeah, push pull, you make a not yeah.
Speaker 2: Elizabeth asked Robert if he would provide narration for the
Speaker 2: pilot episode of Bewitched, and he refused. She then asked
Speaker 2: him if he'd play her father in the series, and
Speaker 2: he also refused. That Later in her career, when she
Speaker 2: appeared in the TV movie The Legend of Lizzie Borden, which,
Speaker 2: for those of you not in the Know is about
Speaker 2: the woman who famously took an axe and gave her
Speaker 2: parents forty wax. Robert Montgomery took that as a personal affront.
Speaker 2: He reportedly told her, you would star in that. Uh.
Speaker 2: He criticized her posture, her gait, and her affection for
Speaker 2: finding familial dynamics. In other dimensions of that she liked
Speaker 2: older men. He would openly accuse her of trying to
Speaker 2: replace him with the relationships that she had with older
Speaker 2: men in her life. That's weird.
Speaker 1: It's an inside thought, yeah yeah, Or it's like something
Speaker 1: you like grouse about with mother, but not.
Speaker 2: You know, all those fifties weirdos called their wives mother.
Speaker 2: John Lennon called Yoka mother.
Speaker 1: But that was for entirely different weird reason, much more
Speaker 1: on settling reason.
Speaker 2: Uh, moving on, moving on, moving on. He had been
Speaker 2: buried twice before Asher, who was twelve years or senior,
Speaker 2: and she seemed to be drawn to bad boys in
Speaker 2: the parlance of the times, or what we today would
Speaker 2: call dirtbacks, charitably men struggling with substance abuse issues and
Speaker 2: their mental health. Her second husband was the incredibly named
Speaker 2: Gig Young, an actor who famously struggled with alcoholism for
Speaker 2: many years. Actually was the original choice for the Waco Kid,
Speaker 2: the Gene Wilder character in Blazing Saddles, but he collapsed
Speaker 2: while shooting his first scene because he was brying out.
Speaker 2: That's awful.
Speaker 1: I think he was like literally like turning green because
Speaker 1: his inside were just so destroyed. And mel Brooks had
Speaker 1: the recast like over the Weekend.
Speaker 2: Young died in October of nineteen seventy eight after shooting
Speaker 2: his wife of three weeks before turning the gun onto himself.
Speaker 2: That is a fast turnaround time. There was no note
Speaker 2: found and a motive was never determined and a fun
Speaker 2: Now we're just pulling in every single one of your connections.
Speaker 2: Go ahead, Jordan, bring this in. Take me, take us
Speaker 2: home to the Beach Boys.
Speaker 1: Yes, Gig Young was being treated by the therapist Eugene Landy,
Speaker 1: the ethically dubious, unscrupulous therapist who brainwashed Brian Wilson, kidnapped
Speaker 1: him from his family, and tried to sign himself on
Speaker 1: to various Beach Boys contracts before he lost his license
Speaker 1: in a flurry of lawsuits. Let's job, Jean. That worked
Speaker 1: out real great for gig Young. Some excellent therapy.
Speaker 2: Yeah, good Lord, So you know, naturally men were drawn
Speaker 2: to Elizabeth Montgomery being just a charming A charming lady
Speaker 2: with improbable bone structure, my new favorite turn affairs. She
Speaker 2: was rumored to have had an affair with Gary Cooper
Speaker 2: on the movie The Court Martial of Billy Mitchell, also
Speaker 2: famous for his line in Putting on the Ritz. Oh yeah,
Speaker 2: Dean Martin was smitten with her when they filmed Who's
Speaker 2: been Sleeping in My Bed? Answer? Well, I mean I
Speaker 2: would give it to Dino. He could. He could have
Speaker 2: pulled that out on a man. Was charm personified in
Speaker 2: the fifties. Oh, Elvis Presley made overtures to her when
Speaker 2: he and Gig Young were co starring in Kid Galahad.
Speaker 2: But Montgomery's anti Greek prejudice, I have to assume would
Speaker 2: have played a role in shooting him down. Gig Young
Speaker 2: got upset. I cannot believe that's that guy's name. What
Speaker 2: is it short for gigathin Giggless Gigathy Gary.
Speaker 1: It's not, it's just a it's a totally separate stage name.
Speaker 1: His name is Byron Byron bar which is also a great.
Speaker 2: Name, and he went with gig Young. Yep, huh, Gig Young. Anyway,
Speaker 2: Gig got upset when he saw Elvis flirting with her
Speaker 2: on the set, and Presley called him an apple, and
Speaker 2: he was not wrong. Many years later, in a positively
Speaker 2: Sex in the City esque twist, Elizabeth Montgomery was connected
Speaker 2: with ballet star Alexander Godeneuve, who later became a successful
Speaker 2: actor with films like Witness and Die Hard. He was
Speaker 2: a severe alcoholic, and his split from Montgomery sent him
Speaker 2: in a downward spile that essentially resulted in him drinking
Speaker 2: himself to death.
Speaker 1: His body was found on the same day that Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Montgomery died, but he'd been dead for days.
Speaker 2: You said that, like it was days days. He said that,
Speaker 2: like it was supposed to be like conciliatory. Note.
Speaker 1: Oh no, it wasn't like for days. It wasn't like
Speaker 1: we found out about her death. And I was like, oh, oh, okay,
Speaker 1: you know what I mean.
Speaker 2: Yeah. We'd also like to give an honorable mention to
Speaker 2: the second role that Montgomery not so secretly played on
Speaker 2: the show in season three, the twin Cousin, a trope
Speaker 2: so expertly weaponized later on in Twin Peaks, in which
Speaker 2: Cheryl Lee playing both Laura Palmer and her identical cousin,
Speaker 2: except for when she's wearing glasses Maddie. The wild and
Speaker 2: crazy character of Serena was basically created to give Montgomery
Speaker 2: more to do after playing the perpetually perky, buttoned up Samantha.
Speaker 2: She loved putting on a dark wig and a go
Speaker 2: go dress and being slightly edgy on set to keep
Speaker 2: up with the illusion. As one such measure of this edgy,
Speaker 2: she asked that the character be credited to the false
Speaker 2: stage name of Pandora Spocks. Get it is that Greek spos?
Speaker 2: Is that a Greek name? A. Despite being this obvious pun,
Speaker 2: many presumably horny men sent fan letters, possibly from prison,
Speaker 2: to miss Spocks. Even the crew people were just dumber
Speaker 2: in the fifties. Even the crew were fooled by this
Speaker 2: flimsy illusion. A producer on set started hitting on her,
Speaker 2: not realizing that it was Elizabeth Montgomery, the wife of
Speaker 2: the director, merely clad in a wig. Ah, here's a
Speaker 2: fun and creepy bit. Ashure would allude to sometimes taking
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Montgomery, in costume as Serena Spocks to a cheap
Speaker 2: motel after shooting for the day. That's fine, consenting it
Speaker 2: whatever consenting adults want to do in the privacy of
Speaker 2: a CD hotel is AOK by me. And the last
Speaker 2: thing would drop about cousin Serena is that her character's
Speaker 2: makeup was supposedly the inspiration for Tim Curry's look as
Speaker 2: Doctor frank Enferd in The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Is
Speaker 2: that great? I love all that?
Speaker 1: Yeah, Now we have to move on to the male
Speaker 1: lead of the show, Darren Stevens, the hapless mortal who's
Speaker 1: Samantha throws it all away for or Mary's Way. There
Speaker 1: was a persistent rumor that producers originally wanted Dick Sargent,
Speaker 1: the man who would go on to be the replacement
Speaker 1: Darren a few years later, but he was cast in
Speaker 1: another project during the audition process. That's not quite accurate.
Speaker 1: He was the top choice much earlier, when Tammy Grimes
Speaker 1: was being considered for the part of Samantha, before Asher
Speaker 1: and Elizabeth Montgomery got involved. Funnily enough, instead of doing Bewitched,
Speaker 1: Sergent was cast in a short lived sitcom alongside Tammy Grimes,
Speaker 1: where he played her twin brother, So Many Twins and
Speaker 1: Dick's and stuff Is that weird? Molly Browns not for
Speaker 1: My Friday. Richard Krena was the next actor off of
Speaker 1: the part of Darren. But hell yeah, he was just
Speaker 1: spent several years on the real McCoy's and he wanted
Speaker 1: to try something else rather than a sitcom, so we
Speaker 1: passed as well.
Speaker 2: What else Richard Crowna Do I just know him from
Speaker 2: uh he's Rambo's handler.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: He's that great speech about how boned they are because
Speaker 2: they pissed off John Rambo. Yeah, this man, he says
Speaker 2: eight things that would make a goat sick something something
Speaker 2: like that.
Speaker 1: But that's just a whole other twist to Darren Stevens
Speaker 1: on Bewitched.
Speaker 2: Could have been virtud Yeah, I like that. I like that.
Speaker 1: But Bill Asher and Elizabeth Montgomery always wanted Dick York
Speaker 1: as Darren now took Curek had an impressive list of
Speaker 1: acting credits and film, Broadway and on TV. He began
Speaker 1: his acting career as a child, performing in radio shows
Speaker 1: in Chicago, where his family moved when he was very young.
Speaker 1: One of his radio roles was Jack Armstrong, the All
Speaker 1: American Boy, which was the kind of role you could
Speaker 1: have had in the thirties.
Speaker 2: What kind of a show is that? Was it?
Speaker 1: When I was like, like I found a nickel on
Speaker 1: the ground and I gave it to somebody. He was
Speaker 1: a depression. He was finally like I'm eating an apple
Speaker 1: and you all can listen.
Speaker 2: Is that from the plucky orphan genre? Like the famous
Speaker 2: Annie orphan Annie? Yeah? Well I yes, famous amos orphan Annie? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Except he also was Jack Armstrong also an orphan? I
Speaker 2: old please.
Speaker 1: It was the thirties, probably like one in two people
Speaker 1: fifty one that show went off the air. This was
Speaker 1: the radio version, so it was probably earlier, earlier, Noah.
Speaker 2: It was carried by CBS, NBC and then finally ABC
Speaker 2: All Radio. It was a creation of General Mills, okay,
Speaker 2: intended to promote wheaties.
Speaker 1: What was the plot? Jack Armstrong, the All American Boy?
Speaker 2: What what I mean? Singing about wheaties? Literally first apparently
Speaker 2: and I'm just this is going off wikipedia. I haven't
Speaker 2: fact fact chestice, but the first commercial jingle on the
Speaker 2: radio was for wheaties in nineteen twenty six, and that
Speaker 2: was great fact on the Jack Armstrong Show, Have you
Speaker 2: tried wheaties? Their whole wheat with all of the brand.
Speaker 2: Won't you try wheaties, for wheat is the best food
Speaker 2: of man. Wow, that's curiously byronic, speaking of poetry, which
Speaker 2: is the best food of man? Yeah right. They're crispy
Speaker 2: and crunchy the whole year through. Jack Armstrong never tires
Speaker 2: of them, and neither will you. So just buy wheaties
Speaker 2: the best breakfast food in the land. That's a I
Speaker 2: like the last tuo. Just buy them. It sounds like
Speaker 2: something Christopher walk of, So just just buy buy them.
Speaker 2: It's your problem, five wheaties.
Speaker 1: Who was it? I think it was Kevin Pollock had
Speaker 1: a bit where hecause he a he famously does a
Speaker 1: really really dead on Christopher Walking impression.
Speaker 2: Is goes for walking selling skills. It's not entertaining that
Speaker 2: this is even more interesting. The guy who created Jack
Speaker 2: Armstrong also created Betty Crocker. Oh that's wild.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how about that like the character or like actually
Speaker 1: founded the brand. Uh.
Speaker 2: Samuel Chester Gaale, vice president of advertising at General Mills,
Speaker 2: I'm still unable to find anything that this guy actually
Speaker 2: with the show. Actually yeah, oh wait, he's a popular
Speaker 2: athlete friends his friends. That's good. He's a family so
Speaker 2: he wasn't frequently Uncle Jim, an industrialist would have to
Speaker 2: visit an exotic part of the world for business, and
Speaker 2: he would take Jack Armstrong and his friends, the Fairfield
Speaker 2: siblings along with him. They were just like travelogs. I
Speaker 2: guess really. Oh and then in the final season the
Speaker 2: program was renamed Armstrong of the SBI when Jack graduated
Speaker 2: from high school and became a fed the SBI. Yeah,
Speaker 2: I assume that's because they were uncomfortable saying FBI or something.
Speaker 2: But yeah, the kid literally graduated high school and became
Speaker 2: a fed. Well that's sickening. Oh and this goes, dude,
Speaker 2: this goes all the way down. A Jack Armstrong animated
Speaker 2: TV pilot was developed by Hanna Barbera, and then negotiations
Speaker 2: fell through and the plan series was reworked into what
Speaker 2: would become Johnny Quest. Whoa, oh that makes a lot
Speaker 2: of sense.
Speaker 1: Yeah, wow, that's wild, far out man. That was one
Speaker 1: of our better conversational detours. That was very good.
Speaker 2: I did not know Jack Armstrong, the all American boy,
Speaker 2: would would prove so fertile.
Speaker 1: No no, no, but yeah, that was Dick York's earliest roles.
Speaker 2: Fertile and breedable submissive. Sorry what that.
Speaker 1: Was one of Dick York's earliest roles his upbringing was Dickensian.
Speaker 1: You're about to get real bummed out now. I highly
Speaker 1: advise you to fast forward about a minute. Otherwise, gimme
Speaker 1: you know if you're suffering from seasonal effective disorder in
Speaker 1: these days, I'd like to quote from a nineteen eighty
Speaker 1: nine People magazine piece, Homelessness and poverty are more than
Speaker 1: abstractions to Dick York, who believes the seed of his
Speaker 1: acting career were sown during his Depression era childhood in Chicago.
Speaker 1: You had to be an actor growing up then, he says,
Speaker 1: he didn't want your parents to know that you knew
Speaker 1: your toys were secondhand. His parents, Bernard, a sometimes salesman,
Speaker 1: and Betty, a seamstress, acted too, telling him they'd eaten
Speaker 1: when York knew they hadn't. As a boy, York saw
Speaker 1: his father struggle with other men for food discarded in
Speaker 1: a garbage can when they didn't have rent, which was
Speaker 1: often someone had to stay inside the family apartment at
Speaker 1: all times to prevent the landlord from.
Speaker 2: Walking everybody else out.
Speaker 1: When he was eleven, an infant brother died, but the
Speaker 1: family couldn't afford to bury him. So York and his
Speaker 1: father slipped into a graveyard at night and laid the
Speaker 1: youngster to rest in a coffin and craft it from
Speaker 1: a shoebox.
Speaker 2: Oh that's a new low for us, dude, that's yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 2: eleven year old burying an infant at night in a
Speaker 2: shoe box.
Speaker 1: M yeah, yeah, his whole story. It gets worse and
Speaker 1: then it gets slightly better, and then it gets worse again.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Dick York's talent, which was initially spotted by a porochial
Speaker 1: school none, ultimately got him out and led him to Broadway.
Speaker 1: He was in a play called Tea and Sympathy alongside
Speaker 1: the actress Debora Kerr, and he was so good that
Speaker 1: Paul Newman once boarded his subway car and approached York
Speaker 1: to say, I'm not going this direction, but I just
Speaker 1: wanted to tell you how great you were and Tea
Speaker 1: and Sympathy, which I love. Dick York spotted Elizabeth Montgomery
Speaker 1: in the hall the day he showed up to audition
Speaker 1: to play Darren, and he reminded him of his own wife, Joey.
Speaker 1: As he later said, I walked into the office more
Speaker 1: confident than I've ever been in my life, and he
Speaker 1: bluffs his way through the audition by basically pretending mentally
Speaker 1: that they were already married. He got the gig, but
Speaker 1: he was nursing a terrible hidden secret, which we'll get
Speaker 1: too later.
Speaker 2: Cliffhanger, Done, done, done. I can't get over that. Never
Speaker 2: saying a bad word about that man again. That is well, okay, sorry,
Speaker 2: I take that back, but that is maybe a new
Speaker 2: low for this show. Yeah, no, it's rough.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Well, Dick York had another less hidden secret. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: the whole pretending they were married thing got a little
Speaker 1: too real during the production of the show, and York
Speaker 1: supposedly developed feelings for Montgomery and made them fairly obvious.
Speaker 1: It's worth noting that he was also on a ton
Speaker 1: of pain killers at the time for reasons that we'll
Speaker 1: mention later, so his inhibitions were lowered.
Speaker 2: There were times when he would just.
Speaker 1: Be lying down on a couch resting while the others
Speaker 1: were filming, staring at Elizabeth Montgomery. This understandably creeped her out.
Speaker 1: She didn't like Dick York that way, and also she
Speaker 1: was married to the show's director producer, who was a
Speaker 1: relatively frequent presence on the set, but his behavior just
Speaker 1: got worse and worse over the years, to the point
Speaker 1: where Elizabeth Montgomery actually complained that she didn't want to
Speaker 1: work with him quite as closely, you'll notice that after
Speaker 1: season three, while the plotlines became less romantic comedy centric
Speaker 1: and began to stress the magical fantastical elements more, just
Speaker 1: so that they would have to be.
Speaker 2: In fewer two shots.
Speaker 1: Basically, this is a testament to how bad it must
Speaker 1: have gotten with York, because presumably, as a beautiful actress
Speaker 1: coming up in the fifties and early sixties, she heard
Speaker 1: terrible stuff from men on a daily basis, so this
Speaker 1: must have been uniquely terrible.
Speaker 2: Though she was very cordial when speaking about him in
Speaker 2: interviews in later years. I read a.
Speaker 1: Report that she never spoke to Dick York again after
Speaker 1: he left the show in nineteen sixty nine. So yeah,
Speaker 1: but we'll tell you some stories about Dick York later
Speaker 1: that will also make you want a weep. So it
Speaker 1: kind of complicated. Man kind of cancels out, Okay, gross, we'll.
Speaker 2: Save those for later. Yeah, Okay.
Speaker 1: Also, while we're on the topic of Samantha and Darren, Stevens'
Speaker 1: sexual relations. They are apparently the first sitcom couple to
Speaker 1: share a bed, with some caveats. The ones who preceded
Speaker 1: them were married in real life Daisy and Lucy and
Speaker 1: I Love Lucy, Ozzy and Harriet Nelson in the Adventures
Speaker 1: of Ozzy and Harriet, and Mary Kay and Johnny Stearns
Speaker 1: in Mary Kay and Johnny, which most people haven't heard of,
Speaker 1: but it's widely hailed as the first sitcom from I
Speaker 1: think it's like nineteen forty seven or something.
Speaker 2: It was super early.
Speaker 1: Other entries are The Flintstones, which are animated and the Monsters.
Speaker 2: I think we're a close runner up to be Witched.
Speaker 1: Because it also premiered in nineteen sixty four, the same
Speaker 1: year as Bewitched. But I wouldn't count it because they're
Speaker 1: not a human couple.
Speaker 2: They're months. Oh, come off it. I mean Herma's a monster.
Speaker 2: What is Lily a vampire? She's like a vampire?
Speaker 1: Just yeah, yeah, although I got I mean, the Stevens
Speaker 1: aren't a human couple either, because he's a mortal and
Speaker 1: she's a witch, so maybe that shouldn't count either.
Speaker 2: Do we have like a southern guy on hand? We
Speaker 2: can contact about miscegenation. I'm imagining a guy in a
Speaker 2: bow string tie and like a seersucker suit coming on
Speaker 2: and be like, now a witch is positively offensive for
Speaker 2: witches to cohabitate with. Man, it's a very good frank
Speaker 2: underword voice. We don't speak his name, he's can't.
Speaker 1: We're gonna take a quick break, but we'll be right
Speaker 1: back with more too much information in.
Speaker 2: Just a moment.
Speaker 1: Ohigo, tell us a little bit about the meddling mother
Speaker 1: in law to end all meddling mother in law, sweet indoor. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I still have a hard time believing that this entire
Speaker 1: series wasn't just an elaborate setup to a My mother
Speaker 1: in law is a real witch joke, which is actually
Speaker 1: how they sold its sponsors.
Speaker 2: Incredible. Yeah, and what's your feed? Is your favorite Indora line?
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well it was actually spoken to her by
Speaker 1: her strange husband. And Dora, your charm is ageless, so
Speaker 1: sad about the rest of you.
Speaker 2: Good stuff. It's a good line. Yeah. She and Dora
Speaker 2: is played by the legendary screen actress Agnes moorehead Steady.
Speaker 2: She's a native of Clinton, Massachusetts, the town where young
Speaker 2: Jordan cut his teeth as a Buddying Team trivia host
Speaker 2: under his mentor the great DJJBJ. So do with that
Speaker 2: what you will, listeners.
Speaker 1: I always always love Agnus Morehead. She's a a hometown girl.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, yeah, that was a little Minnesota. Yeah, like
Speaker 1: I can't, I can't do a boss then.
Speaker 2: No, I'm trying to give you a second. Probably with
Speaker 2: all the blue hairs out in Medved they go for
Speaker 2: they go for Agnes. This is my girl.
Speaker 1: A lot of the what's her name who played in
Speaker 1: Harold Maud She's from uh Ruth Gordon.
Speaker 2: Ruth Gordon's from Quincy, Massachusetts.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a lot of those like like like I mean
Speaker 1: this affectionately like tough old broads are from Massachusetts.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, you almost got it there, you slipped into it.
Speaker 1: I never I never had never You never I never
Speaker 1: had it? Yeah. No. The only the only word I
Speaker 1: could actually say was some degree of authenticity is noth North.
Speaker 2: No, Yeah, that's a good one. Uh Well, Old Morehead
Speaker 2: veteran of Orson Wells famous Mercury players. She appeared in
Speaker 2: Citizen Kane as the mother of the titular character and
Speaker 2: got it four Oscar noombs before Bewitched even came around.
Speaker 2: Also if one for another Wells joint, the Magnificent Amberson's
Speaker 2: and also Hush Ellipses, Hush, Sweet Charlotte, Charlotte. I didn't
Speaker 2: do that intentionally, but it's funnier, it's cleaner. In addition
Speaker 2: to her talent, she was kind of a badass, and
Speaker 2: like Dick York overcame a horrifying upbringing. Morehead would later
Speaker 2: recall going four days without food at one point in
Speaker 2: her early acting career and that it had taught her
Speaker 2: the value of a dollar. All this being said, though,
Speaker 2: it does make a certain amount of sense that she
Speaker 2: wouldn't have been exactly thrilled to be a mother in
Speaker 2: law in a sitcom, and she got the role totally
Speaker 2: by chance. The producer was struggling to come up with
Speaker 2: an actress who had the right combination of gravitas and
Speaker 2: playfulness to play the role of the mother in law
Speaker 2: who terrorizes her daughter's husband. Elizabeth Montgomery was strolling through
Speaker 2: Bloomingdale's one day in New York City and she heard
Speaker 2: that voice dune meme with the mom saying use the voice,
Speaker 2: and it's Agnes Morehead's voice. She followed it through the
Speaker 2: store until she was confronted by the site of Morehead
Speaker 2: herself with a high quaffed orange Bouffont style hairdoo wrapped
Speaker 2: in pink tool. Montgomery recalled that Morehead looked like this
Speaker 2: oversized being of cotton candy. I love that. She approached
Speaker 2: her on the spot, and according to an interview, their
Speaker 2: exchange went like this, Ms Morehead, would you be interested
Speaker 2: in doing a series? No? No, well, I don't know why.
Speaker 2: Once Morehead warmed to the idea, Montgomery went straight to
Speaker 2: the producers and exclaimed, I found mother tremendousness has just
Speaker 2: done dead pan in knocks on the door, knocks on
Speaker 2: the door, eyes completely blank and completely stoic. I found
Speaker 2: Mother Norman Bates Morehead. Heads. Yeah. Moorehead had some serious
Speaker 2: terms that were part of her conditions for joining Bewitched.
Speaker 2: She was deeply religious and had serious problems with portraying
Speaker 2: a witch. Hilariously, and Dora gets its name from a
Speaker 2: biblical passage supposedly at her request and or recommendation. In
Speaker 2: the first Book of Samuel, there's a story about Saul
Speaker 2: consulting the Witch of Endor to use her powers to
Speaker 2: connect him with the deceased Samuel. Samuel becomes Samantha and
Speaker 2: Endoor became Indora. Fine. I guess that's where Steven Spielberg
Speaker 2: got it too, or George Lucas got Endored the Moons
Speaker 2: of Endor. Oh really? Oh wow? Maybe I don't know
Speaker 2: who cares. I didn't read that part of the Bible,
Speaker 2: skimmed it, got the cliff notes. I don't watch that
Speaker 2: part of Star Wars. Morehead's concerns were all so practical.
Speaker 2: She accepted the role in the condition that she only
Speaker 2: had to appear in eight out of every twelve episodes,
Speaker 2: which would leave her time to pursue other projects. It's
Speaker 2: a story that's similar to that of Natalie Shaeffer, who
Speaker 2: took the part of Missus Howell and Jordan's beloved Gilligan's Island,
Speaker 2: thinking that the show pilot would never go to series,
Speaker 2: and then bursting into tears when it did. Morehead, for
Speaker 2: her part, did not expect Bewitch to be a hit,
Speaker 2: even going so far as to dismiss the scripts as
Speaker 2: hack in a nineteen sixty five interview with TV Guide
Speaker 2: at a time when it's worth noting be Witch was
Speaker 2: basically the biggest sitcom on television. She would later say
Speaker 2: elsewhere that the show was not breathtaking. She's just a
Speaker 2: tremendous bit of passive aggression. I'm banking that. Despite the
Speaker 2: six Emmy gnoms she earned for her work on the show,
Speaker 2: Morehead was always quick to note that she used to
Speaker 2: earn nods for a little something called the Oscars. As
Speaker 2: she told the New York Daily News in nineteen sixty five,
Speaker 2: I've been in movies and played theater from coast to coast,
Speaker 2: so I was quite well known before Bewitched, and I
Speaker 2: don't particularly want to be identified as the witch. Even so,
Speaker 2: she remained with Bewitched until its run ended in nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy two, largely due to her fondness of working with
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Montgomery and the og Darren Dick York. She would have,
Speaker 2: as we will get to, a tougher relationship with New
Speaker 2: Dick Sergeant Deputy to Darin, who would go on to
Speaker 2: describe her Morehead as a tough old bird.
Speaker 1: Moorhead died of cancer on April thirtieth, nineteen seventy four,
Speaker 1: at the age of seventy three. She was outlived by
Speaker 1: her mother, who was one hundred and six. Oh, higel
Speaker 1: you'll here, this will interest you. Morehead was one of
Speaker 1: the many people who developed cancer while war working on
Speaker 1: the nineteen fifty six John Wayne movie The Conqueror, which
Speaker 1: was shot in Iron City, Utah, just downwind from above
Speaker 1: ground atomic bomb testing. These are truly horrifying stats. Of
Speaker 1: the two hundred and twenty cast and crew, ninety one
Speaker 1: of them developed some form of cancer within the next
Speaker 1: twenty five years, and forty six of them would die
Speaker 1: of the disease, So a little less than a quarter
Speaker 1: of the cast died from cancer that's believed to be
Speaker 1: triggered by the above ground radiation. Tho included John Wayne himself,
Speaker 1: Susan Haywood, and the film's director, Dick Powell. Actors on
Speaker 1: the set to Bewitched recall hearing Morehead discussing her concern
Speaker 1: about the radioactive fallout, which is horrifying. It even bugged
Speaker 1: her years later that she'd.
Speaker 2: Been exposed to that that's so sad.
Speaker 1: I don't know where else to put this, and it's
Speaker 1: sort of not even worth really going into other than
Speaker 1: it serves as a transition to talk about another Bewitch performer.
Speaker 1: But the years, there have been rumors that Agnes Moorehead
Speaker 1: was gay. And supposedly had an affair with Debbie Reynolds.
Speaker 2: Heh yeah, good for her.
Speaker 1: I'm ninety percent sure that this was one of the
Speaker 1: so called revelations in the gossipy memoir that reynolds ex
Speaker 1: husband Eddie Fisher, published in nineteen ninety nine.
Speaker 2: Woh, he was such a bitch.
Speaker 1: Yeah, a book that was so trashy that it caused
Speaker 1: their daughter, Carrie Fisher. Yes, that Carrie Fisher to quip
Speaker 1: I'm going to have my DNA fumigated after that, an
Speaker 1: incredible line.
Speaker 2: That's why she was a punch up writer. Yep.
Speaker 1: Reynolds herself dismissed these lesbian rumors as malicious tales put
Speaker 1: around by one of Agnes Moorehead's ex husbands during their divorce,
Speaker 1: but Moore had herself tease these stories during her lifetime.
Speaker 1: In a nineteen seventy three interview, journalist Bose Hadley gave
Speaker 1: her the opportunity to confirm or deny these rumors, and
Speaker 1: Moorehead decided to play coy. The exchange went like this,
Speaker 1: just one more question. Numerous Hollywood actresses, Garbo Gish, Dietrich Gene,
Speaker 1: author Kay Francis, Barbara Stanwick, Duluah Bankhead, del Rio, Janet Gainer,
Speaker 1: et cetera, et cetera. Have enjoyed lesbian or by relationships?
Speaker 2: Have you ever?
Speaker 1: And Moreheads quoted as saying, yes, you'd love to put
Speaker 1: me in their excellent company, even if I don't belong
Speaker 1: in the same category. Brackets smiles, Riley, you don't. Those ladies,
Speaker 1: she says, were more beautiful than me.
Speaker 2: Hmmm, cooy of her. That's great, that's great.
Speaker 1: A big source of these rumors was Uncle Arthur himself,
Speaker 1: Paul Lynde, who was also a bitch yes, semi closeted
Speaker 1: in his lifetime. Lynde, who lives Morehead by almost a decade,
Speaker 1: was pretty unambiguous in interviews, offering this all time sound bite.
Speaker 2: If I wasn't so sick, I could do a Paul
Speaker 2: lynd voice, But I well, the whole world.
Speaker 1: No z Agnes was a lesbian, I mean, classy as hell,
Speaker 1: but at all time.
Speaker 2: But one of them.
Speaker 1: I can't see this, but one of the all time
Speaker 1: Hollywood doe.
Speaker 2: Can I say? I'd have to bleep that, yeah, probably okay.
Speaker 1: Lynde also told a story in which she supposedly caught
Speaker 1: one of her husband's cheating on her. Agnes screamed at
Speaker 1: him that if he could have a mistress, so could she.
Speaker 1: Oh Paul Land a messy, messy, messy man. Oh Pauland
Speaker 1: I love Pauland this is the perfect segue to talk
Speaker 1: about one of my favorite performers of all time, Templeton. Templeton,
Speaker 1: Yes before Me, which he was famous as Harry McAfee,
Speaker 1: the Dad and Bye Bye Birdie. No, he's a rat
Speaker 1: guy and the center square on Hollywood Squares.
Speaker 2: No, he's a rat guy.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he will be the rat guy in the Charlotte's Web.
Speaker 1: An made an adaptation Humbaull.
Speaker 2: That was good. I used.
Speaker 1: There are periods of my life, but I would speak
Speaker 1: in Pauland's voice for extended stretches.
Speaker 2: I missed those days.
Speaker 1: He's probably famous to most non millennials for his role
Speaker 1: in the daytime staple Hollywood Squares, which began in nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty six.
Speaker 2: I forgot it started that early and.
Speaker 1: Gave birth to some truly incredible one liners delivered in
Speaker 1: Lyn's distinctive nasal snarl.
Speaker 2: Can I share a few of them? Right now? Hit us?
Speaker 2: Lightning around? Do you want to be? Can you do
Speaker 2: a land? Nor do you want to ask.
Speaker 1: Yeah, because under the setup for those who haven't actually
Speaker 1: watched Hollywood Squares, the host Peter Marshall would ask Paul
Speaker 1: a question and he would.
Speaker 2: Answer to ask me some of these questions. Why do
Speaker 2: motorcyclists wear leather because chiffon wrinkles? Medium phony, You're the
Speaker 2: world's most popular fruit. What are you humbo? That's good?
Speaker 2: The Great Whiter George Bernard Shaw once wrote, It's such
Speaker 2: a wonderful thing. What a crime to waste it on children?
Speaker 2: What is that?
Speaker 1: A whipping?
Speaker 2: Got me for a daytime TV in like nineteen seventy.
Speaker 2: The Great White is one of the most feared animals, Paul,
Speaker 2: what is the Great White?
Speaker 1: This is amazing. A sheriff in Alabama.
Speaker 2: In Alice in Wonderland who kept crying I'm late, I'm late, Alice,
Speaker 2: and her mother is sick about it. Diamond should not
Speaker 2: be kept with your family. Jewels, why they're so cold?
Speaker 2: So half of this is like borsch belt garbage. I'm sorry.
Speaker 2: The tin man wanted a heart and the lion want encourage.
Speaker 2: What did the straw man want? He wanted the tin
Speaker 2: man to notice him. That's good. Yeah, in what state
Speaker 2: was Abraham Lincolnborn.
Speaker 1: This is great, like the rest of us, naked and screaming, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's funny.
Speaker 2: What's one thing you should never do in bed? Pine
Speaker 2: and laugh? Eddie Fisher recently said I am sorry. I
Speaker 2: am sorry for them both. Who was he referring to
Speaker 2: his fans? That's solid. According to Tony Randall, every woman
Speaker 2: I've been intimate with in my life has been what
Speaker 2: bitterly disappointed.
Speaker 1: I need though I wish i'd worked. There's a time
Speaker 1: I could do a really good ball in that I
Speaker 1: can't do it right now. I'm sad. I'm whiffing it
Speaker 1: all right. I was devastated to discover years later that
Speaker 1: all these lines were written for Paul by a staff
Speaker 1: of writers. I just thought for years that he came
Speaker 1: up with it on the spot, but no one could
Speaker 1: deliver them like he could. Mel Brooks wants to describe
Speaker 1: Paul In as being capable of getting laughs by reading
Speaker 1: quote a phone book, Tornado alert or seed catalog, and
Speaker 1: I'd like the second fat although it's kind of a
Speaker 1: love him or hate him scenario. Paul himself told a
Speaker 1: story on Carson about a man coming up to him
Speaker 1: and saying it's you stay right there. I have to
Speaker 1: get my wife.
Speaker 2: She can't stand you. That's good, Yeah, that's pretty good.
Speaker 1: Incidentally, it's believed that he borrowed his distinctive nasal delivery
Speaker 1: from another Bewitched bit player, Alice Ghostly, who played Esmeralda
Speaker 1: the hapless Witch Made Made Witch Witch Made. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: makes sense considering both of them cut their teeth in
Speaker 1: a review called New Faces of nineteen fifty two, which
Speaker 1: launched both of their careers, as well as that of
Speaker 1: Earth A Kit Ah Earth a Kit Alice Ghostly and
Speaker 1: Paul lynd on stage together.
Speaker 2: That sounds devastating, Yeah for all parties involved. Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: Speaking of legendary friends from his pre famed days, pauland
Speaker 1: once shared an apartment building with Marlon Brando when they
Speaker 1: were both young and hungry and in Marlin's case, very hungry.
Speaker 1: The building had communal kitchens.
Speaker 2: And very hung.
Speaker 1: The building had communal kitchens, and Lynde claimed that Brando
Speaker 1: would steal his food from the fridge all the time.
Speaker 1: It's a testament to his talent that Paul Land made
Speaker 1: such an impression and Bewitched those people assumed that he
Speaker 1: was a series regular. But Uncle Arthur was only in
Speaker 1: ten of the show's two hundred and fifty four episodes.
Speaker 1: He also appeared in a pre Uncle Arthur role as
Speaker 1: Samantha's nervous driving teacher, and he was so well received
Speaker 1: that Montgomery and Asher decided to write him a recurring role.
Speaker 1: Lynd had a complicated relationship to his talents, though he
Speaker 1: wanted to be recognized as a serious actor. He said,
Speaker 1: we live in a world that needs laughter. Now I've
Speaker 1: decided that if I can make people laugh, I'm making
Speaker 1: a more important contribution. His time on Hollywood Squares made
Speaker 1: him rich enough to buy Errol Flynn's old Hollywood mansion,
Speaker 1: but Lynde himself was a deeply troubled man.
Speaker 2: Tell him why. In addition to not living up to
Speaker 2: his own expectations as an actor, Paul had to contend
Speaker 2: with being a gay man in Hollywood, which meant being
Speaker 2: grading on the Paul Lynde to Curve closeted. He explained
Speaker 2: his status as a lifelong bachelor by claiming that his
Speaker 2: high school sweetheart had broken his heart and he was
Speaker 2: still too hurt to give other women a chance. In
Speaker 2: nineteen seventy six, People magazine profile described a man named
Speaker 2: stan Fine Smith as Linden sounds like one of those
Speaker 2: made up anchor names and anchorman Wes Mantooth Stan Fine
Speaker 2: Smith described a man named Stan fin Smith as Lynde's hairstylist,
Speaker 2: sweet mate and chauffeur bodyguard. Those barely veiled euphemisms were
Speaker 2: about as close as Linde ever came to coming out
Speaker 2: in his lifetime. Despite his campy and flamboyant television persona,
Speaker 2: Lynn's prime life and sexual orientation were never directly or
Speaker 2: acknowledged or discussed in the media. Later in his life,
Speaker 2: he was offered gay roles, but he always refused them.
Speaker 2: He said in the aforementioned People cover story that he
Speaker 2: was glad his following was quote straight before declaring, gay
Speaker 2: people killed Judy Garland, but they're not going to kill me. True.
Speaker 2: What do you mean true? I believe it. I'll believe anything.
Speaker 2: I'm a very credulous person. In private, though he reportedly
Speaker 2: criticized famed anti gay activist Anita Bryant, saying she attacked
Speaker 2: my people. Lynd was also haunted by a tragedy that
Speaker 2: occurred on July eighteenth, nineteen sixty five, when a young
Speaker 2: actor named James being, Davidson fell from the eighth floor
Speaker 2: balcony of Lynde's room at San Francisco's Sir Francis Drake Hotel.
Speaker 2: The incident was reportedly result of horsing around after the
Speaker 2: pair had spent hours drinking. Davidson supposedly said, watch me
Speaker 2: do a trick like a toddler would. The next thing,
Speaker 2: Lynde realized he was dangling by his fingertips from a
Speaker 2: tiny ledge outside the window. At first, Linden thought this
Speaker 2: was a prank and assumed the guy was actually standing
Speaker 2: on a ledge lower down, but he was actually faced
Speaker 2: and hanging on by his fingertips, much like Harrison Ford
Speaker 2: in one of the most iconic composite shots in film history,
Speaker 2: as deckred at the end of Blade Runner, Tears and
Speaker 2: Rain and so forth. Unfortunately, Bing had a zero point
Speaker 2: two four bac could not hoist himself back in and
Speaker 2: hung there for two minutes, eighty feet above the street.
Speaker 2: Lynd grabbed his arms and tried to haul him back inside,
Speaker 2: but failed, and Davidson fell eight stories onto the street
Speaker 2: below and died instantly, too soon following the tragic death
Speaker 2: of Liam Payne. I didn't do it. It was that devil,
Speaker 2: alcohol and cocaine and fame, et cetera, tears and rain.
Speaker 2: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. It's so funny
Speaker 2: how all that tears in ren speech is just like
Speaker 2: this could have easily been like a fully gay queer
Speaker 2: like queen speech, like something creed to the Desert or
Speaker 2: something yeah yeah, imagining like Guy Pierce in like full
Speaker 2: drag makeup, delivering delivering that line at the end of Priscilla.
Speaker 2: This accident was actually a witness, not Liam Payne or
Speaker 2: Guy Pierce in drag. Was witnessed by two police officers
Speaker 2: standing outside who did clear lind of wrongdoing. The whispers
Speaker 2: about the incident dogged him for years, basically insinuating that
Speaker 2: he had something to do with it, and he was
Speaker 2: haunted by the memory for the rest of his life,
Speaker 2: supposedly saying that's the end of my career shortly after
Speaker 2: it happened. If that wasn't the only reason for his
Speaker 2: burgeoning alcoholism, it deserved to be. But Lynde was a
Speaker 2: famously mean drunk who could decimate his friends verbally when
Speaker 2: the mood took him, and it also landed him in
Speaker 2: numerous scrapes with the law. One famous, possibly apocryphal story
Speaker 2: claims that he led cops and a drunken high speed
Speaker 2: chase through the valley one night before crashing into a male.
Speaker 2: When the police came to the car with their guns drawn,
Speaker 2: he supposedly lowered his window and said, I'll have a cheeseburger,
Speaker 2: hold the onions and a large sprite.
Speaker 1: I'll have a cheeseburger, hauled the onions and a lot spry.
Speaker 2: This was incorporated into the script for a Groundhog Day.
Speaker 2: As those of you who remember that episode will remember,
Speaker 2: he got sober shortly before his fatal heart attack on
Speaker 2: January tenth, nineteen eighty two, at the age of fifty five,
Speaker 2: and doctor said that his heart resembled that of a
Speaker 2: ninety year old man. He simply loved too hard.
Speaker 1: Well, that story was a bummer, and you know what,
Speaker 1: go on, here's another one. Let's talk about the sad
Speaker 1: story of Gladys Kravits.
Speaker 2: It sounds like one of those like anthologies. Is the
Speaker 2: mysterious case of Gladys Kravitz.
Speaker 1: Well, she was the nosy next door neighbor, and apparently
Speaker 1: the term Gladys Kravitz, you know, entered the popular lexicon.
Speaker 2: Like as like a devastating put down.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I was like, you're acting a real Gladys Kravit.
Speaker 2: So I don't really remember hearing that. Are you just
Speaker 2: locked into the pol invoice now for like the rest
Speaker 2: of your life, like you can't shake it? Like Austin
Speaker 2: Butler and Elvis was that Paul In, I didn't hear
Speaker 2: that you're really Gladys If you're real Gladys Kravitz.
Speaker 1: Oh, that's an old time radio voice, but.
Speaker 2: Also like it sort of dovetails into the Hannibal lecter
Speaker 2: at some point. It's all in this continuous like yeah, raspy,
Speaker 2: sassy seois.
Speaker 1: That's because I'm sick too, as a different level of.
Speaker 2: Oh, I wasn't criticizing you. I was. I was saying
Speaker 2: that was a hopeful thing, and I hope you're locked
Speaker 2: into the Paul invoice for the rest of your life.
Speaker 1: I mean, now I really want to like, I'm really
Speaker 1: sad because I could do it. I'm sure my father
Speaker 1: is very proud listening to this right now. I could
Speaker 1: do it pretty well, but I'm kind of I'm kind
Speaker 1: of blowing it here.
Speaker 2: I think you're doing a great job. Oh, thank thank you.
Speaker 2: Thank you Chief.
Speaker 1: The whole gag with Gladys Kravitz was that she was
Speaker 1: this nosy neighbor who would see the various magical supernatural
Speaker 1: goings on in the Stevens house, but everyone just thought
Speaker 1: she was nuts. Her husband, Abder Kravitz, assumed she quote
Speaker 1: hadn't taken her medicine fun aside. The role of Abner
Speaker 1: Kravitz was originally offered to Jim Backus, the voice of
Speaker 1: Mister Magoo, who turned it down because he was already
Speaker 1: working on Gilligan's Island as Thurston Howl, the Third That
Speaker 1: man would have owned network sitcoms in the sixties.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine if you'd been on both?
Speaker 1: Everyone's favorite busy body, Gladys was played by the comedic
Speaker 1: actress Alice Pierce. She was a character actress with a
Speaker 1: distinctive chin I guess called a weak chin. I hate
Speaker 1: the use that term, but that's the description I always see.
Speaker 1: It was the result of a childhood injury where she
Speaker 1: fell from a playground swing and landed on her chin
Speaker 1: and her jawn never developed. It was just god horrifying,
Speaker 1: but she made it work. She turned herself into a
Speaker 1: very popular character actress that was not the worst thing
Speaker 1: to happen to poor Alex Pears as far as her
Speaker 1: health was concerned. Four months before getting cast on Bewitched,
Speaker 1: she was given a terminal cancer diagnosis. She told none
Speaker 1: of her coworkers of the condition, and other than being
Speaker 1: a little tired on the set every now and then,
Speaker 1: no one suspected her of being ill. She died in
Speaker 1: March nineteen sixty six, just as the show was wrapping
Speaker 1: its second season, and was awarded a posthumous Outstanding Supporting
Speaker 1: Actress Emmy.
Speaker 2: Award two months later. This is nice.
Speaker 1: Though William Asher gave her widower a gig on the
Speaker 1: show directing, he basically put his career on hold to
Speaker 1: take care of her, so it was both a nice
Speaker 1: distraction and a way to get his career moving again,
Speaker 1: which I think is nice. Sandra Gould later took over
Speaker 1: the role of Gladys Kravitz for the remainder of the series.
Speaker 2: And this is just one of three roles.
Speaker 1: That were unceremoniously recast midstream un Bewitched. In addition to
Speaker 1: Gladys Kravitz and of course Darren Stevens, which we talk
Speaker 1: about later, there was also the wife of Darren's boss,
Speaker 1: mister Tate.
Speaker 2: Her name was Louise Tate.
Speaker 1: She was initially played by Irene Vernon until the second
Speaker 1: season wrapped in nineteen sixty six, when writer Danny Arnold
Speaker 1: left the show. During this period under less than friendly circumstances, apparently,
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Montgomery William Asher pressured Irene Vernon the follow suit
Speaker 1: due to their friendship Cold World these mid sixties sitcoms.
Speaker 1: The role of Louise Tate was later taken over by
Speaker 1: Casey Rogers, who was apparently named after the Casey at
Speaker 1: Bat poem.
Speaker 2: What oh you know not Casey Jones A Casey at
Speaker 2: the bat? Excuse me? You know Casey at the bat?
Speaker 2: Do I don't put words in my mouth, don't put
Speaker 2: things in my head. Yeah.
Speaker 1: It's about like a baseball team from the fictional town
Speaker 1: of Mudville's losing by two runs in the last inning.
Speaker 1: Both the team and its fans believe they can win.
Speaker 1: Of Casey Mudville star player gets to bat. Whoever, Casey's
Speaker 1: scheduled to be the fifth batter of the inning and
Speaker 1: the first two batters failed to get on base. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's a poem about baseball.
Speaker 2: You wouldn't you wouldn't get it, No, I wouldn't.
Speaker 1: One actress who was not replaced when she died.
Speaker 2: Was Aunt Clara.
Speaker 1: She was played by actress Marion Lorne, who straight up died.
Speaker 2: In nineteen sixty eight. I don't know why I wrote
Speaker 2: straight up there who died in nineteen sixty eight.
Speaker 1: Apparently the producers did not deem her role as particularly
Speaker 1: essential to the show, and thus did not recast her
Speaker 1: with a rando. This is possibly because the eccentric character
Speaker 1: was largely based on the actress who played her. Aunt
Speaker 1: Clara's obsession with door knobs was based on maryon Lauren's
Speaker 1: own real life collection. She'd assembled over a thousand antique
Speaker 1: door openers.
Speaker 2: Isn't that great? I love people collect things, okay, sure, yeah,
Speaker 2: I mean yeah we do. But antique to just knobs,
Speaker 2: yeah it's kind of cool. Okay. But bed knobs and broomsticks,
Speaker 2: you know, you know, she makes her a purpose. Those
Speaker 2: are different. Those are different.
Speaker 1: Oh, you're right, different knobs, an idiot, different knobs.
Speaker 2: Get off my show. I feel like a different kind
Speaker 2: of knob right now. Who was waiting for that to
Speaker 2: come up?
Speaker 1: Much like Alice Pears, Maryon Lauren was given a posthumous.
Speaker 2: Emmy for her role on Bewitched Good.
Speaker 1: But we talked about Darren's boss, the advertising executive Larry
Speaker 1: Tait a little while.
Speaker 2: He was played by the character actor David White, and
Speaker 2: he was reportedly very sweet.
Speaker 1: He insisted that Tate's son on the show be named
Speaker 1: after his own son, Jonathan, who he'd raised as a
Speaker 1: single father after his wife died due to complications during
Speaker 1: her second pregnancy. Sad Tragically, Jonathan was a passenger on
Speaker 1: pan Am flight one oh three, which was blown up
Speaker 1: by terras over Lockabye, Scotland on December twenty first, nineteen
Speaker 1: eighty eight, killing all two hundred and fifty nine on board.
Speaker 1: Very very famous terrorist attack. I actually don't know who
Speaker 1: it was. I so rebrogated by Libyan nationalists.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: In two thousand and three, Gadaffie accepted Libby's responsibility for
Speaker 1: the Lockabe bombing and paid compensation for the victims of
Speaker 1: the families, although he maintained he had never given the
Speaker 1: order for the attack.
Speaker 2: I don't know I feel about Libya.
Speaker 1: Uh well, the bad guys in Back to the Future
Speaker 1: and true in Goadaffi.
Speaker 2: So that's kind of all I need yeah, that's fair.
Speaker 1: David White essentially ever recovered from the death of his
Speaker 1: son and died two years later of a heart attack.
Speaker 1: He's interred with his son's remains in a niche at
Speaker 1: the Hollywood Forever Cemetery. I've actually visited him. The only
Speaker 1: marginally funny story, if you could call it that, is
Speaker 1: that Scott Michaels, the proprietor of the former Hollywood Death
Speaker 1: Tour and the host of the Dearly Departed podcast, one
Speaker 1: of my favorite podcasts. They do a great episode on Bewitched,
Speaker 1: which I listened to in preparation for this, bought his
Speaker 1: own niche at Hollywood Forever and it happened to be
Speaker 1: directly beneath David Whites. The funny part is that Scott
Speaker 1: was always terrified of this creepy bust that got made
Speaker 1: on Bewitched as some plot point. I don't know what
Speaker 1: it is. I forget exactly it was. Magic was involved somehow,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, but it's this really creepy looking bust
Speaker 1: of Larry Tait. For some reason, David White, the actor
Speaker 1: played Larry Tate, has included it in his niche, which
Speaker 1: is like a little cubby hole at the Mausoleum Hollywood Forever.
Speaker 1: So now Scott Michaels, he's gonna spend eternity directly beneath
Speaker 1: like this monument to his kindred trauma. This like scary
Speaker 1: bust from Bewitched that like always used to freaking out
Speaker 1: as a kid.
Speaker 2: That's gonna be like right above him on the shelf,
Speaker 2: above him. Good, that's all. Well. Rehearsals for the which
Speaker 2: pilot began on November twenty second, nineteen sixty three, the
Speaker 2: day a Bostonian died and forever cultured the world and
Speaker 2: gave us madmen and feminism CCR, CCR, so many other
Speaker 2: things that were so important.
Speaker 1: I've been told, Uh, wow, American Pie. They really missed
Speaker 1: the mark on the yeah all line.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I wonder if there's like a local like Southy
Speaker 2: parodist who can take a crack at that America call
Speaker 2: it like Bostonian pie or some shit that would suck.
Speaker 2: According to biographer Herbie Pallato, the aforma mentioned Bostonian's death
Speaker 2: was especially hard on Elizabeth Montgomery and her husband William Asher,
Speaker 2: who were friends with John F. Kennedy. Asher to even
Speaker 2: co produced the birthday party at which Marilyn Monroe famous
Speaker 2: hornily saying happy Birthday to JFK. And Sinatra was the
Speaker 2: other co producer. That's gross.
Speaker 1: He was probably less sad by JFK's assassination.
Speaker 2: So they were just trafficking women, right like that was
Speaker 2: just like a we passed the blonde a round situation. Oh,
Speaker 2: I have to assume Kennedy was a monster. Kennedy was
Speaker 2: a monster. I'm sorry that whole don't maybe don't get
Speaker 2: me on a rant with the Kennedy's.
Speaker 1: I actually don't know as much as you probably think
Speaker 1: I know about JFK's sexual escapades.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean he probably had what can be
Speaker 2: considered a sex addiction. Yeah, I actually I did hear that.
Speaker 2: I think he said something insane and just that in
Speaker 2: weird situations like making people watch or like just people
Speaker 2: like hanging out just three different people, three different women
Speaker 2: a night, supposedly and you know teens. Oh, you know,
Speaker 2: just gross. But he was handsome and he was the
Speaker 2: first Catholic president, so that's okay.
Speaker 1: Maybe that was why his back was so screwed up.
Speaker 1: It's a pretty pretty genial laugh for a terrible joke.
Speaker 1: I feel like he's he's probably he was Pillow Princess.
Speaker 1: I feel like he just laid back and made the
Speaker 1: women do all the work. He gives that, he gives
Speaker 1: that energy. Actually, Pillow Princess, I've never heard that.
Speaker 2: I don't know what that is. You have old detour
Speaker 2: here about Palm Springs and Gilligan's Island. We're cutting that.
Speaker 1: Oh no, no, I mean the weird thing about Gilligan
Speaker 1: Island was that they also were filming the pilot on
Speaker 1: the day JFK was assassinated, and you can see on
Speaker 1: shots of the middow pulling out of the harbor, the
Speaker 1: flag is at half mast because you know, in the
Speaker 1: morning for JFK.
Speaker 2: So I think it's weird.
Speaker 1: On the day of the first read through of Bewitched
Speaker 1: was also the day JFK was killed. Two huge bits
Speaker 1: of mid century Americana television were birthed on the day
Speaker 1: JFK was killed.
Speaker 2: Good most good, Uh, Okay. The pilot of Bewitched is
Speaker 2: actually really odd given the way that the rest of
Speaker 2: the series was made. It's been given a sort of
Speaker 2: faux professorial voiceover, which gives the episode the feel of
Speaker 2: a sociological documentary. She's kind of a favorite satirical technique
Speaker 2: at the time. The episode follows Samantha and Darren meeting,
Speaker 2: falling in love, and getting married. Whilst on their honeymoon,
Speaker 2: Samantha drops the bomb that she's a witch. Darren then
Speaker 2: goes to the bar complains to the bartender that he
Speaker 2: married a witch. The bartender then offers up an absolute,
Speaker 2: absolutely predictable. God, they men just use this show as
Speaker 2: an excuse to just talk about how much they hated
Speaker 2: their wives, right, yeah, and every writer in the world. Yeah,
Speaker 2: And mother in law's bartender hits them back with you
Speaker 2: got to do just like that, just what I done, pal,
Speaker 2: learn to live with it. Darren makes her promise to
Speaker 2: give up her powers, but when they inexplicably go have
Speaker 2: dinner at his rude ex's house, as newly married couples
Speaker 2: are wont to do, Yeah, I don't really get that. Yeah,
Speaker 2: she uses her magic to get even in her own words,
Speaker 2: it's harder to break the habit than she thought, much
Speaker 2: like fentanyl the Bosonian's death. That joke said that doesn't
Speaker 2: have legs. It's funny for you and me, But the
Speaker 2: assassination of JFK and the loss of our national innocence.
Speaker 2: That particular straw that finally broke our camel's back of
Speaker 2: a country built on blood. Ah sadly was not the
Speaker 2: only thing that marked Elizabeth Montgomery's time During this stretch
Speaker 2: of the show. She was pregnant, which in the sixties
Speaker 2: could be treated as a rare form of cancer if
Speaker 2: you were in show business. I mean, they used to
Speaker 2: go to such extreme lanes to shoot around it and stuff,
Speaker 2: and they did for here. Rather than go the I
Speaker 2: Love Lucy route and write it into the program, they
Speaker 2: decided to shoot around it. This was partially because Samantha
Speaker 2: and Darren were newly married in the show, and it
Speaker 2: was deemed unseemly for her to already be showing unless
Speaker 2: it was like a shotgun witch wedding, which sounds like
Speaker 2: a sixth whoa yeah, shotgun witch wedding playing at the
Speaker 2: Whiskey ram Alem. It was a little early in the
Speaker 2: show's life to welcome in a new child the hideous
Speaker 2: cross breeding of a witch wife and a mortal husband,
Speaker 2: so she was given looser clothing to disguise the bump.
Speaker 2: Body doubles were occasionally used, but for her next two
Speaker 2: pregnancies they did decide to work it into the script.
Speaker 2: Her son, Robert Asher was born in nineteen sixty five
Speaker 2: as daughter Tabitha appeared in the series, and daughter Rebecca
Speaker 2: Asher was born in nineteen sixty nine as Adam Stevens
Speaker 2: was born into the series. Tabitha became a beloved character
Speaker 2: on the show and later anchored a short lived spin
Speaker 2: off of her own in the late seventies, which we
Speaker 2: know nothing about. It was a major point of suspense
Speaker 2: as Samantha and Darren waited to see if she had
Speaker 2: inherit did her mother's powers, and she did as they
Speaker 2: learned when random things started flying around. This is actually
Speaker 2: a theme that's explored well in the a little bit
Speaker 2: too much at times comic book series and Amazon show
Speaker 2: The Boys, where they have like this genetically They have
Speaker 2: like a genetically engineered like Superman, and it's revealed that
Speaker 2: he spent like the first eighteen years of his life
Speaker 2: locked in an isolation room with like a neutron bomb
Speaker 2: strapped to his chest because he was so like when
Speaker 2: he came out, he like killed his mom and then
Speaker 2: massacred everyone else with laser vision, and it kept happening,
Speaker 2: so that wonders I wonder if like which children are
Speaker 2: are in control of their powers until a certain age.
Speaker 2: I would guess not like a first communion or a
Speaker 2: bar mitzvah.
Speaker 1: It's probably like the way that children aren't really in
Speaker 1: charge of their their their voices.
Speaker 2: They just kind of like scream and like spew it
Speaker 2: out there. Yeah. Probably yeah, And if you do that
Speaker 2: with spells. Man much to consider.
Speaker 1: This is we're getting dark in this episode Give me children?
Speaker 2: When can which children control their power? Yeah? And avoid
Speaker 2: killing their parents or loved ones miscegenation bull Connor. During
Speaker 2: the second season of the show, five different babies played
Speaker 2: Tabitha because you had to throw one out at the
Speaker 2: end of the day. Just kidding. They had to throw
Speaker 2: them all out at the end of the day, just
Speaker 2: like the doughnuts babies, babies craft services. They will go
Speaker 2: in the same dumpster. Uh dark Ah. It's easier to
Speaker 2: shoot with twins, as you remember from our full House episode,
Speaker 2: because with young characters, child actors are only allowed to
Speaker 2: work a fraction as much as their adult colleagues. The
Speaker 2: Olsen twins in particular also had to wear baby dentures,
Speaker 2: which is a horrifying thing. Speaking of child labor, lowers.
Speaker 2: John Landis was violating them when he killed these people,
Speaker 2: two children and Vic Morro just a reminder, is he
Speaker 2: the new enemy of the pond as he just supplanted?
Speaker 2: His son is just a real piece of who's his son?
Speaker 2: You always? Oh he is? Oh Max Landis. He's like
Speaker 2: a legendary like Hollywood fail son. He uh. He wrote
Speaker 2: like one good script and has just been like everything
Speaker 2: else has been just a failure or at least not
Speaker 2: a hit. And he has been accused of being a
Speaker 2: disgusting garbage human. He's just always like combative on Twitter
Speaker 2: with people. Yeah, he's like a NEPO baby m One
Speaker 2: of the twins, Aaron Murphy, would say that the whole
Speaker 2: magical aspect of the show left her confused as a
Speaker 2: little girl. She recalled the time when her real life
Speaker 2: mother asked her what she wanted for breakfast, and she
Speaker 2: answered eggs. The only problem was they were out of them,
Speaker 2: and Aaron quipped back, that's no problem, mom, let's twitch
Speaker 2: some up and she was serious. Isn't that cute? Yeah?
Speaker 2: Twitch has a weird context these days. First always thought
Speaker 2: about tweaking like meth, and now it's just that video
Speaker 2: game platform where people have whole careers just playing video games.
Speaker 2: How long do you spend on this? Anyway, it seems
Speaker 2: like the goodest place as any to observe that. Maureen McCormick,
Speaker 2: Everyone's beloved Marcia Brady played two unrelated bit parts on
Speaker 2: Bewitched prior to achieving her start. I'm on the Brady
Speaker 2: Bunch first, and a fantasy sequence as Darren and Samantha's
Speaker 2: future child before Tabitha and then again is Andorra under
Speaker 2: a spell that made her look like a child.
Speaker 1: I cannot believe we've met it this far without talking
Speaker 1: about the famous nose twitch that Samantha does to cast
Speaker 1: the spells, although you'll notice it's not really a nose
Speaker 1: twitch but a wiggle of the upper lip. In any event,
Speaker 1: it's really hard to do. Go ahead, try it now, Higel,
Speaker 1: try it now, everyone, Try it now.
Speaker 2: You can't. No, you do it? Yeah? No, no, I'm
Speaker 2: not doing it. I don't have that much control over
Speaker 2: that part of my face. It's just it's all the sneering,
Speaker 2: burned out the muscles.
Speaker 1: I actually no, it's just my chin. Never mind, No, No,
Speaker 1: it's really hard. H but apparently it's really easy for
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Montgomery because it was just something that she did
Speaker 1: in real life. The nose twitch gesture was inspired by
Speaker 1: something William Asher saw her do whenever she was frustrated.
Speaker 1: She would screw up her mouth, which had the unintended
Speaker 1: effect of wiggling her nose. And while they were developing
Speaker 1: the show and looking for some kind of trademark gesture
Speaker 1: for Samantha to do to activate her magic, Asher suggested
Speaker 1: she do that nose twitching things she always did. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: Montgomery had no idea what he was talking about. You know,
Speaker 1: the nose twitch thing you do, he said, And apparently
Speaker 1: she was unaware of this tick and not too pleased
Speaker 1: about having it pointed out.
Speaker 2: After a lengthy back.
Speaker 1: And forth, which you know, people who have been in
Speaker 1: relationships for a long time know exactly what it's like.
Speaker 2: You know the thing, what thing? You know the thing?
Speaker 1: Do the thing, she got so frustrated that she did
Speaker 1: the thing organically, and he goes up, But there there's
Speaker 1: the thing, and that led to a famous TV gesture.
Speaker 1: She tells the story a little differently. She related to
Speaker 1: the journey news Bill said to me, once before I
Speaker 1: ever did Bewitched, you do a funny thing with your
Speaker 1: nose whenever you get impatient. Then he asked me to
Speaker 1: do it for him, and I couldn't. I didn't know
Speaker 1: what he meant. Then one night, my nose twitched and
Speaker 1: Bill said, that's it, and then I knew. We were
Speaker 1: at a Dodgers game once and the bases were loaded.
Speaker 1: There were two outs and Sandy Kofax was coming up,
Speaker 1: and Bill said to me, come on, Liz, twitch.
Speaker 2: So I did, and Sandy Kofax walked and the winning
Speaker 2: runs scored.
Speaker 1: Then I was at a Chicago Cubs game and I
Speaker 1: twitched my nose for Ernie Banks, who hadn't hit anything
Speaker 1: all day. When I twitched, Ernie hit the ball right
Speaker 1: out of the park.
Speaker 2: That's cute. I like that.
Speaker 1: It's easy to forget now, but a huge part of
Speaker 1: the Witch's appeal or all the imaginative special effects which
Speaker 1: made it look wildly different from any other sitcom on television. Obviously,
Speaker 1: this was long before CGI, so all these were practical
Speaker 1: effects achieved by hard working stage hands. The most famous
Speaker 1: were pop offs or pop ins. I've heard both, where
Speaker 1: people or objects would appear and disappear in a blink
Speaker 1: of an eye. And this was achieved through the time
Speaker 1: honored practice of turning the camera off and on. Not
Speaker 1: exactly that hard technologically, but hard to do physically. Casey Rodgers,
Speaker 1: who played Larry Tate's wife Louise, talked about.
Speaker 2: How everyone got really good at knowing how.
Speaker 1: To freeze and hold really still while the cameraman stopped
Speaker 1: rolling in a pa grabbed a purse out of her
Speaker 1: hand or something whatever they wanted to disappear. Montgomery told
Speaker 1: The New York Times in a contemporary profile, it took
Speaker 1: a lot of practice before I learned to hold my
Speaker 1: hands perfectly still. But even that's much easier than the
Speaker 1: scene in which I was supposed to clean up my
Speaker 1: kitchen by witchery. I sort of went swoosh with my
Speaker 1: arms raised, and then I had to leave them up
Speaker 1: in the air, aching while the crew rushed in and
Speaker 1: swept and dusted and got the kitchen immaculate before the
Speaker 1: scene resumed. I'm getting better at it, I guess. I
Speaker 1: almost never flinch over coil anymore, no matter what happens.
Speaker 1: For coil, well, I mean, you have to keep your
Speaker 1: arms up in the air and freeze for like, you know,
Speaker 1: a couple minutes while they're like running around everything neat
Speaker 1: and so that they could turn the camera back on
Speaker 1: and make it look like, you know, in the blink.
Speaker 2: Of an eye. I'm not familiar with the process. I'm
Speaker 2: just wondering what would have happened that caused would cause
Speaker 2: her to recoil just like, oh no, I don't want
Speaker 2: to do this. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: They eventually gave her something that kind of resembled crutches
Speaker 1: to rest her arms, to make it a little easier
Speaker 1: for when a character popped in and out in a
Speaker 1: different set of clothes.
Speaker 2: This is really interesting to me.
Speaker 1: The director made sure that the actor's shoes were fixed
Speaker 1: in place on the stage with glue while the actor
Speaker 1: dashed backstage and changed costumes, and then slipped back into
Speaker 1: the shoes that were glued onto the floor, ensuring that
Speaker 1: they were in the exact same mark. I think that's cool. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: less cool. Some actors received minor burns from the pyrotechnics
Speaker 1: that were used when they had popped in the screen.
Speaker 2: Oh that's like when John Land has killed those kids.
Speaker 1: And I was gonna say, more like more like Michael
Speaker 1: Jackson getting his hair burned on the pepsiad.
Speaker 2: Or James Headfield being engulfed and on stage Pyro in
Speaker 2: front of like two hundred thousand and hard rock fans
Speaker 2: in Moscow.
Speaker 1: I think, oh, and did another band that to come
Speaker 1: on and like save the day?
Speaker 2: And oh no they did not know. That's the famous
Speaker 2: bit is that, uh you know Axel, Axel could have
Speaker 2: Guns and Roses could have gone on and uh after
Speaker 2: James Headfield was literally horribly burned. Uh always in Montreal,
Speaker 2: I was incorrect. Oh yeah, apologies to Canada, uh and
Speaker 2: Russia whoever? Uh yeah, James Henfield like literally walked into
Speaker 2: an on stage tower of flame and was horrifically burned,
Speaker 2: and Guns and Roses had a tremendous opportunity to come
Speaker 2: in and save the day, and Axel Rose was like
Speaker 2: as as I think it's Jason Newstead the Metallica basis
Speaker 2: at the time. He said something like we go backstage
Speaker 2: and Axel sit there with a glasses champagne smoking a cigarette,
Speaker 2: going like, yeah, my voice doesn't feel up to it.
Speaker 2: So then all the Canadians, Uh.
Speaker 1: Right, James Hepfield was given fuel and given fire, either
Speaker 1: of which he desired.
Speaker 2: The fuel was Jegermeister. I don't think he felt so
Speaker 2: good about the actual fire. No, maybe that song was
Speaker 2: a form of potent like it was working something out
Speaker 2: like John Lennon and Mother give it fool, give me
Speaker 2: fuck beat that which I desired. Just therapist is over there, Like, yes, James,
Speaker 2: how does that really make you feel bad? I could
Speaker 2: have something to do with my mom.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a new That's one of the best you doing,
Speaker 1: James Hetfield in therapy and Freudian analysis.
Speaker 2: That's one of the best.
Speaker 1: That's one of the best bits you've ever done.
Speaker 2: I really worked on his uh the the one the
Speaker 2: yip that he does like live uh oh wow, the
Speaker 2: precisely timed end of yell of voice crack. It's actually
Speaker 2: also frequently used in a lot of appellation ballad singing.
Speaker 2: Is there more going on with James Hetfield than I expect? Well,
Speaker 2: I do find it hilarious that he is literally the
Speaker 2: son of an opera singer and a truck driver, which
Speaker 2: is like, yes, that voice came out of that pairing. Yeah,
Speaker 2: nothing about that is weird to me. Nope, Well, from James.
Speaker 1: Hetfield, we go back to the special effects used on Bewitched.
Speaker 2: We are halfway through the outline.
Speaker 1: Other effects included fast motion film, backwards motion film, and
Speaker 1: invisible wires for levitation. Samantha's self operating vacuum cleaner was
Speaker 1: outfitted with a motor on the bottom instead of brushes,
Speaker 1: and was operated remotely off stage.
Speaker 2: An electric light bulb.
Speaker 1: I love this one appears to light up when Samantha
Speaker 1: handles it thanks to wires threaded up her long sleeved
Speaker 1: shirt connected to a twelve vault battery. For a scene
Speaker 1: where Samantha has a fight with Darren and walks out
Speaker 1: on him, she goes invisible, thus creating the appearance of
Speaker 1: her suitcases magically flying out of the closet, packing themselves
Speaker 1: and walking down the stairs on their own. Those effect
Speaker 1: was achieved by a special effects man walking on planks
Speaker 1: above the set, manipulating wires attached to the luggage like
Speaker 1: puppet strings. He's basically playing luggage like Marioness. I think
Speaker 1: that's cool.
Speaker 2: Hollywood magic.
Speaker 1: Yeah, movie back or TV magic. It seems quaint today,
Speaker 1: but the amount of effort that went into these effects
Speaker 1: is really staggering. I like to quote for the New
Speaker 1: York Times piece once again, the chief special effects man,
Speaker 1: Dick Albane, has been doing this.
Speaker 2: Kind of thing for over twenty.
Speaker 1: Years, and he says he still spends sleepless nights trying
Speaker 1: to visualize all the special riggings and stands dripping with
Speaker 1: perspiration the first time they're tried. Of course, we rig
Speaker 1: everything two ways, he says, so that if it doesn't
Speaker 1: work the first time, we can get it to happen
Speaker 1: on the second. That way, we're sure that most of
Speaker 1: the stunts will work. But there's a certain element of
Speaker 1: danger to the performers. When you're blowing up lamps with
Speaker 1: powder charges. There has to be I'm responsible for any
Speaker 1: injuries in their California state law, so you can be
Speaker 1: sure that I'm careful.
Speaker 2: I love that. That reminds me of the in Gremlins
Speaker 2: when they blew up the theater and a young, fresh
Speaker 2: faced Zach Callaghan was asking the pyro guy, and the
Speaker 2: pyro guy said something like, oh, it'll be big, or
Speaker 2: like I put enough in there, or something like that.
Speaker 1: I just always think of the Keith Moon on the
Speaker 1: who are on the on the Smothers Brothers in the
Speaker 1: sineteen sixty seven and just I think he bribed like
Speaker 1: a stage hand to put like four times as much
Speaker 1: explosives in his drum kit cost John and Twistle was
Speaker 1: hearing now Pete towsend his hearing and singed his hair,
Speaker 1: and Keith had his arms sliced that when a symbol
Speaker 1: turned into shrapnel just sliced all his arms.
Speaker 2: It certainly didn't have any effect on his drumming. Oh
Speaker 2: that's why I forgot your anti Keith Moon. You're not anti.
Speaker 2: I just don't think it's really all that cracked up
Speaker 2: to me. It made me go on my whole thing
Speaker 2: about British drummers. I genuinely don't think I know, because
Speaker 2: I thought we don't have time for this. Come on.
Speaker 2: I think like certain British drummers like have a real difficulty,
Speaker 2: especially the ones who are like some of that incredibly
Speaker 2: patronizing generation of British musicians who like Eric Burden were
Speaker 2: like we rescued Black American music from the garbage bin.
Speaker 2: It's like, no, you didn't go yourself like you arrogant
Speaker 2: troll of a man. But like all of those guys
Speaker 2: like Ginger Baker, Keith Moon, a lot of those guys
Speaker 2: I do not think they can swing, especially for playing
Speaker 2: like ripped off black music. I mean, and Ginger Baker
Speaker 2: is the worst one of them all for me, he
Speaker 2: just plays. He plays like marching band rudiments on drums,
Speaker 2: like everything is just which is like exactly the same
Speaker 2: thing Lars Alder gets dragged for in Metallica is that
Speaker 2: all of his films are just like eighth notes around
Speaker 2: the kit, just like the way that you do when
Speaker 2: you see a drum kit and you go, you know,
Speaker 2: I mean, there's a part in Crosswords in the Isolated Guitar,
Speaker 2: the Isolated drum track and Crossroads the other day, and
Speaker 2: it's just like there's a part where he's just going
Speaker 2: the kick drum like sounds like a Toddler programming and
Speaker 2: drum machine and the only two. Though I'm sure there
Speaker 2: are some British funk drummers. It's if there is such
Speaker 2: a thing, which is hard to believe. But no, I'm
Speaker 2: bonhom and and and particularly bill Ward were the best
Speaker 2: bonhom I think because he was just wasted all the time,
Speaker 2: probably for Billboard two. But both of those guys were
Speaker 2: big fans of Gene Croupa and actually our mutual well
Speaker 2: he's a guy whose work I read, but I believe
Speaker 2: you actually know him. Hank Steamer has a whole blog
Speaker 2: called Dark Forces Swing, which is about the intersection of
Speaker 2: heavy metal and jazz and it is very cool. He
Speaker 2: has interviewed Bill Ward about it, uh and and and
Speaker 2: just knowing that. John Bonham has also talked about Gene Crouper,
Speaker 2: like those guys listen to to swing band music. Same
Speaker 2: with Charlie Watts. Now that I think, god, I hate
Speaker 2: Charlie Watts. All of those guys who were like, well,
Speaker 2: actually I'm a jazz drummer and I'm just slum playing this,
Speaker 2: I'm like, well, you suck at this, so I can't
Speaker 2: imagine how good you are at your real job. Please
Speaker 2: surprise me.
Speaker 1: Weren't the Stones famous, like their songs would always like
Speaker 1: start at one tempo and and can't keep tempo.
Speaker 2: He can't get he does this thing that people talk
Speaker 2: about like he is this one thing about lifting the
Speaker 2: high hat or opening the high hat before like a
Speaker 2: downbeat or before the snare hit. And there's a debate
Speaker 2: in the drummer community as to whether or not this
Speaker 2: is like an error that people make before when they
Speaker 2: start drumming and have to be trained out of, or
Speaker 2: like the essence of Charlie Watts's genius, they're just like, well, yeah,
Speaker 2: children learn how to do like children do that because
Speaker 2: you can't. You're like, you're trained not to coordinate the
Speaker 2: high hat with the the snare hit. But people can't
Speaker 2: stop themselves from doing that, so they will open or
Speaker 2: close the high hat before the snarehead and then all
Speaker 2: the pro Charlie Watts people are like, oh, but it
Speaker 2: gives his songs, It gives it such a propulse of lift,
Speaker 2: Like I can't even keep one tempo for like an
Speaker 2: entire song. Man. A lot of those songs just like
Speaker 2: end up ten clicks after Oh he plays to the song.
Speaker 2: Whatever Rolling Stones drummer is is Keith Richard's right hand
Speaker 2: and that's the be all end all of it. Do
Speaker 2: you show how much Keith Richards hated Bill Wyman? No,
Speaker 2: I didn't know that. Why because he married seventeen year olds. Well,
Speaker 2: I don't think so. I think he just was curmudgeingly
Speaker 2: about everything. Well yeah, yeah, and and didn't want to
Speaker 2: do things.
Speaker 1: And and well he was like he like lied about
Speaker 1: his age. He was like significantly older than the others.
Speaker 1: I think he was like ten years older than the
Speaker 1: rest of the Stones.
Speaker 2: Well, he certainly didn't have a head start on the musically. No,
Speaker 2: I think he just like had a namp. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: was that the story with him? Yeah? Yeah, dogship bassist.
Speaker 2: Where were we?
Speaker 1: Back to Bewitched and the magic of Bewitched. Most of
Speaker 1: the magic took place within the Stephens Home of one
Speaker 1: one six ' four Morning Glory Circle, an upper middle
Speaker 1: class neighborhood located either in Westport, Connecticut, as the pilot
Speaker 1: would dictate, or Patterson, New York. There were differing accounts
Speaker 1: throughout the series. I love when shows, like in the
Speaker 1: pre DVD like Rewatch Era, can't keep their own storyline straight.
Speaker 2: Like yeah, no, no, I don't care. Was the dividing
Speaker 2: line there the dicks?
Speaker 1: No, they just like at the same house was located
Speaker 1: at different times in different states.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess they didn't have like script supervisors for this.
Speaker 2: Yeah No.
Speaker 1: Until very recently, like very recently. The facade of the
Speaker 1: Stephens Home was located on the Columbia later Warner Brothers
Speaker 1: Ranch in beautiful downtown Burbank. The facade was actually modeled
Speaker 1: on a real house in Santa Monica where the nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty nine movie Gidget was filmed, and they constructed this
Speaker 1: facsimile backstage where Gidget Goes to Rome in nineteen sixty
Speaker 1: three at the Gidget sequel, the same year that be
Speaker 1: Wish Pilot was filmed, and when the Gidget story was
Speaker 1: adapted for an ABC sitcom starring Sally Field, they used
Speaker 1: the facade for that show as well, and it also
Speaker 1: appeared in I Dream of Genie as the home owns
Speaker 1: by Tony Nelson's boss, Doctor Bellows, and it was seen
Speaker 1: briefly in an episode of The Monkeys and Home Improvement,
Speaker 1: and most recently in WandaVision. This little fake street known
Speaker 1: as Blondie Street for the fifty sitcom that was shot there, is,
Speaker 1: or at least was a mecca for pop culture heads.
Speaker 1: They used so many of these facades on so many
Speaker 1: different shows. The Tates exteriors were shot at the I
Speaker 1: Dream of Genie House, so Genie and Major Nelson lived
Speaker 1: at the Tates House, and Gladys Kravitz, the nosy neighbor,
Speaker 1: lived at a home that was used for the Donna
Speaker 1: Reed Show and was later used for The Partridge Family.
Speaker 1: Is the house where the Partridge Family lived?
Speaker 2: Is that that? It's like the same house? Yeah? Right,
Speaker 2: Like I don't know, that's fine.
Speaker 1: It's like the televisual equivalent of like The Wrecking Crew.
Speaker 1: For me, it's like, oh wow, you're on like everything,
Speaker 1: notice it, because you could just blend in right.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: The exterior of the Stevens House on Bewitch was also
Speaker 1: featured in National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation.
Speaker 2: I think it was Clark Griswold's childhood home.
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, this time last year, Warner Brothers decided to raise
Speaker 1: the ranch to make way for office buildings.
Speaker 2: The iconic Friends.
Speaker 1: Fountain, which also could be seen in various episodes of
Speaker 1: be Wished, was moved to a different place on a
Speaker 1: Willer Brothers lot, but little else was spared, and pieces
Speaker 1: of pop culture history from titles like Father Knows Best,
Speaker 1: Mock from the Middle, The Three Stooges, Dennis the Menace,
Speaker 1: Lethal Weapon, Hocus Pocus, Pushing Daisies, Hazel, The Waltons, plus
Speaker 1: all the other shows we just mentioned were destroyed. Fittingly,
Speaker 1: the Bewitched House facade was demolished on Friday the thirteenth
Speaker 1: in October twenty twenty three, and as the final insult.
Speaker 1: One of the last shows to shoot on the ranch
Speaker 1: was Young Sheldon, and that production depicted all the demolition
Speaker 1: in the background as the result of a tornado.
Speaker 2: God a nindig.
Speaker 1: It seems like something that be I mean, their house facades.
Speaker 2: It seems like something that would have been pretty easy.
Speaker 1: To like build a small sound stage four and like Nope,
Speaker 1: Celtic Tour, well not even that's just.
Speaker 2: Like the tour. Yeah, no, people don't care. Universal backlots
Speaker 2: so cool. David zaslov Kan's entire movies to make the
Speaker 2: numbers jump before an earning scull, you think he gives
Speaker 2: a about a house facade. True. It is truly amazing, though,
Speaker 2: how judicious film crews can be with small backlots like
Speaker 2: the ones on these shows, and the producers of the
Speaker 2: which were justice thrifty with their wardrobe budget. According to
Speaker 2: actress Casey Rodgers, who played Louise Tate, the minor cast
Speaker 2: would simply wear their own clothes from home a week
Speaker 2: prior to the shoot. They were expected to come to
Speaker 2: the studio with the selection from which the costume team
Speaker 2: would make their picks and then iron them. Speaking of costumes,
Speaker 2: Agnes Moorehead often wore a starburst brooch on the show
Speaker 2: with eight point five characters of old Mine Diamonds, which
Speaker 2: I guess means more racist. Is there, extra good, extra bloody. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Montgomery had always admired the pin, and when Morehead died,
Speaker 2: she willed it to her, which is so classic and
Speaker 2: so sweet. As a general design note on the show,
Speaker 2: the color green is a major motif. You'd see it
Speaker 2: in Samantha's outfits, or the Stevens home carpet, or various
Speaker 2: emerald accents. And this is their way of playing up
Speaker 2: the witchy folklore that most people would have had in
Speaker 2: their mind at this time period, which was from the
Speaker 2: Wizard of Oz. Speaking of themes un bewitched loosely defined,
Speaker 2: another one was alcohol. The characters on this show got
Speaker 2: drunk so much on camera that there is a fan
Speaker 2: website compiling all of the drinking incidents that happened, complete
Speaker 2: with location and episode numbers. You read somewhere that they
Speaker 2: were drinking real alcohol.
Speaker 1: That's what I heard.
Speaker 2: It wouldn't surprise me. Man. It's like back when people
Speaker 2: just made pictures of like Martini's for themselves. From all
Speaker 2: the pain of the prosperity, all that pain of by
Speaker 2: a house for five dollars money, it's not going to
Speaker 2: drink itself. Speaking yet again, of themes. In an even
Speaker 2: more broad sense, we can't forget the theme tune to
Speaker 2: the show. At one point, producers of the show, using
Speaker 2: common producer thought patterns, wanted to use the song Bewitched,
Speaker 2: Bothered and Bewilders from the Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Heart
Speaker 2: musical pal Joey as the show's theme song. Ultimately, they
Speaker 2: decided to use an original song instead because it was cheaper,
Speaker 2: probably presumably that's the real reason. Though familiar to fans
Speaker 2: as an instrumental, the theme song was supposed to have lyrics.
Speaker 2: Singer Jerry Vale, who is most famous for being summarily
Speaker 2: mocked by the rat Pack, who called him Jerry Fail
Speaker 2: in a devastating burn, initially agreed to record the theme
Speaker 2: but the deal fell through it the last minute, supposedly
Speaker 2: because the lyrics weren't finished in time Jesus Christ, Buddy,
Speaker 2: this is the Night like nineteen sixties lyrics Warren Peace.
Speaker 2: The song has though been recorded with lyrics by the
Speaker 2: likes of Steve Lawrence, the Wonderful Peggy Lee and Jimmy Smith,
Speaker 2: the Man who Blew Everybody's mind on the Hammond B
Speaker 2: three organ and basically set a new standard for how
Speaker 2: you have to play that instrument that people still cannot
Speaker 2: escape from. Yeah, as you meditate on that, we'll be
Speaker 2: right back with more too much information after these messages.
Speaker 1: Yow Wow Be, which premiere on September seventeenth, nineteen sixty four,
Speaker 1: a Thursday night, at nine pm Eastern. There were some
Speaker 1: protests in advance of the launch, mostly from viewers in
Speaker 1: the Bible Belt States who are afraid that the show
Speaker 1: would promote devil worship. Hell yeah, But those concerns quickly
Speaker 1: fell by the wayside as viewers were charmed by the
Speaker 1: premise and particularly by Elizabeth Montgomery. By the end of
Speaker 1: its first season, Be, which was ABC's number one show
Speaker 1: and the best rated sitcom on all three networks, coming
Speaker 1: second only to Bonanza.
Speaker 2: Bonanza was a real juggernaut back then.
Speaker 1: Creator Saul Sachs would say an interview with the Television Academy,
Speaker 1: it was a hit immediately, the first one of its
Speaker 1: kind supernatural shows on television. It's been done since the
Speaker 1: Greeks where a supernatural being comes to life. He's not
Speaker 1: wrong about it being the first. It beat The Adams
Speaker 1: Family by a day and the Monsters by a week.
Speaker 1: Out of fantasy shows around this realm. The press coverage
Speaker 1: was slightly skeptical at first, with The New York Times
Speaker 1: sniffing there were laughs in the scene, to be sure,
Speaker 1: but they were attended by some grounds or apprehension too
Speaker 1: many trick camera effects and supernatural gimmickry could rather quickly
Speaker 1: irlitate the effectiveness of the show's premise. However, they quickly
Speaker 1: changed their tune and joined the rapturous and honestly in
Speaker 1: twenty twenty four pretty hilarious press coverage of the show.
Speaker 1: I'd like to read excerpts from two pieces. The first
Speaker 1: from The Gray Lady herself from November twenty second, nineteen
Speaker 1: sixty four, a year to the day after the assassination
Speaker 1: of JFK and the initial pilot rehearsals. This is the
Speaker 1: New York Times article the Bewitching Miss Montgomery. If any
Speaker 1: of the poor biddies incarcerated at Salem had even the
Speaker 1: most elementary acquaintance with sorcery, they would surely have arranged
Speaker 1: to return almost three hundred years later as Elizabeth Montgomery.
Speaker 1: Miss Montgomery's existence on be wished as the golden dimpled
Speaker 1: queen of the new television season, her crown firmly affixed
Speaker 1: by the latest Nielsen ratings, must certainly be the most
Speaker 1: desirable of all reincarnations. ABC describes Samantha as someone yearning
Speaker 1: to be quote a normal woman scrubbing floors, a premise
Speaker 1: which becomes patently ridiculous after one look at Miss Montgomery.
Speaker 1: A product of the Westlake School in Los Angeles and
Speaker 1: the spent School in the Academy of Dramatic Arts in
Speaker 1: New York, she enjoys being a witch as long as
Speaker 1: it's a young and pretty one. A pal of sorceress
Speaker 1: jokes is already beginning. A plague or however, bank clerk's
Speaker 1: invited her to twitch up a little money, and friends
Speaker 1: ask her to give a little magical help when sticking
Speaker 1: refrigerator trays. In a couple of years, she mused, I
Speaker 1: may get a little tired of these jokes.
Speaker 2: It would take less than a couple of years.
Speaker 1: That was a New York Times article. This one from
Speaker 1: Time Magazine is even funnier. The girl with a necromantic nose.
Speaker 1: It's from October thirtieth, nineteen sixty four.
Speaker 2: That's gross and weird. Necromancy is just raising the dead.
Speaker 2: I didn't write it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, many a man is convinced the witch lives under
Speaker 1: his roof. With the arrival of the present TV season,
Speaker 1: many another is probably wishing he could exchange his incumbent Hag.
Speaker 2: For Elizabeth Montgomery.
Speaker 1: Pretty and blonde with a turned up nose, she hardly
Speaker 1: suggests cauldrons full of rat guts and eels, but she
Speaker 1: plays a thoroughbred sorceress married to an advertising executive on
Speaker 1: ABC's Bewitched.
Speaker 2: Like she's drifting into the mid Atlantic accent as this goes, Oh.
Speaker 1: Yah, yeah, yeah, see that are Paul Lind's. She's done
Speaker 1: over two hundred TV shows, a Broadway play, in three movies.
Speaker 1: She was Dino Martin's fiance and Who's been sleeping in
Speaker 1: My bed? She's been a divorcee herself a couple of times.
Speaker 1: Her first husband was Freddie Camon Harvard fifty one, descendant
Speaker 1: of Albert Gallatin, fourth Secretary of the Treasury. Since Elizabeth
Speaker 1: was only an actor's daughter, she knocked Freddie out of
Speaker 1: the social register when she married him in nineteen fifty four.
Speaker 2: Jesus Christ, just as.
Speaker 1: Robert Montgomery himself depaganated Buffy Harkness when he married her
Speaker 1: in nineteen fifty.
Speaker 2: I feel like I'm taking acid, is what. None of
Speaker 2: those words are in the Bible.
Speaker 1: Well, the social register, you know, the social register is
Speaker 1: This is all in a profile of Elizabeth Montgomery in
Speaker 1: Time magazine talking about how she married somebody out of
Speaker 1: her social standing and result and as a result, dragged
Speaker 1: him off the social register, which is hilarious considering what
Speaker 1: we were talking about about the premise of this show,
Speaker 1: a mixed social standing couple. Cavin was not out of
Speaker 1: the book long, however. Elizabeth divorcedhim in nineteen fifty five,
Speaker 1: then was married for six years to actor Gig Young.
Speaker 1: Her current husband is William Asher, who directs Bewitched. They
Speaker 1: live in Malibu with their infant son, an, a Siamese
Speaker 1: cat named Zip Zip. She no longer gives yeah, she
Speaker 1: no longer gives interviews to magazines that are doing spreads
Speaker 1: on children of famous parents. She's her own girl. Oh wow,
Speaker 1: her father's a Republican, says gig Young, reminiscing Fondley. Why
Speaker 1: would you interview somebody's ex husband who then would talk
Speaker 1: about her father's political affiliations. Her father's a Republican, says
Speaker 1: gig Young, reminiscing Fondley. And she's probably a Democrat.
Speaker 2: She may.
Speaker 1: She may soon be worth a fortune on her own too.
Speaker 1: As part owner of Bewitched, she gets twenty percent of
Speaker 1: the show's profits, which will amount to two million if
Speaker 1: the program lasts for more than three seasons, which it
Speaker 1: probably will.
Speaker 2: Maybe killing print Media was not a mistake. Yeah, it's
Speaker 2: pretty astonishing. Given the success of Bewitch. The production company
Speaker 2: that made it, Screen Gems, they were eager for a
Speaker 2: follow up to pitch a rival network enter I Dream
Speaker 2: of Genie nineteen sixty five sadly did not tape it's
Speaker 2: pilot on the days of any prominent assassinations. That game, Malcolm, Oh,
Speaker 2: that game went to writer Sidney Sheldon, future romantic suspense
Speaker 2: thriller novelist who is then working as a TV writer.
Speaker 2: I hate all of those words in that name. He
Speaker 2: felt bad about working on a rival show because he'd
Speaker 2: been close with Bewitch director William Asher after working with
Speaker 2: him on The Patty Duke Show years earlier. So Sheldon
Speaker 2: gave Asher a call, and Asher gave his blessing. I
Speaker 2: think he liked helped them flesh out the idea a
Speaker 2: bit too. She's a genie, But what do you want print,
Speaker 2: got a bottle of it? Yeah, little boy, to have
Speaker 2: a clubhouse. Look like some day we're gonna naval Did
Speaker 2: that do anything for you? The I Dream of Genie
Speaker 2: and Bewitch became something of sister shows. They both taped
Speaker 2: at Columbia Studios on Sunset and Gower, and also nine
Speaker 2: miles away at the Columbia Movie Ranch, where as you mentioned,
Speaker 2: they exchanged housing facades. Despite the fact that Bewitch took
Speaker 2: place in a New York suburb or Connecticut, and I
Speaker 2: Dream of Genie took place in Cocoa Beach, Florida. Bewitched,
Speaker 2: I Dream of Genie, the Monkeys, the Parture Family, and
Speaker 2: the Flying Nun all had their makeup done in the
Speaker 2: same room, and Sally Field, the titular Flying Nun, recalled
Speaker 2: Barbara Eden, singing all the time she was getting her
Speaker 2: makeup done, which would drive Elizabeth Montgomery insane. Despite this,
Speaker 2: the pair were reportedly very close, according to Barbara Eden,
Speaker 2: at least as she told the Sydney Morning Harold, Elizabeth
Speaker 2: and I were on the same lot. I'd see her
Speaker 2: every morning. We were both pregnant together. Both had our
Speaker 2: babies around the same time. We chatted a lot. If
Speaker 2: there was any perceived rivalry, it was the producer's invention. Samantha, meanwhile,
Speaker 2: was rumored to be privately in by the similarities between
Speaker 2: the two shows, possibly just a dose of good old
Speaker 2: women competing with women in there because Barbara Eden was
Speaker 2: quickly television's newest hot slut. In reality, the shows were
Speaker 2: not truly competitors. They didn't air at the same time,
Speaker 2: and Bewitched thoroughly stomped I Dream of Genie in the ratings.
Speaker 2: That show never even broke the top twenty during its
Speaker 2: original run. That's crazy, And back to the dis Dick Sargent,
Speaker 2: who took over as Darren, had a small role on
Speaker 2: Igam of Dreney as a lawyer, just six months before
Speaker 2: he took over the co star slot on Bewitched. I
Speaker 2: promise you were going to get to the Dicks. The
Speaker 2: Flintstones crossover. Speaking of crossover, I don't know why I've
Speaker 2: read the title heading there. Speaking of crossovers, Bewitched had
Speaker 2: a crossover episode with another ABC show, The Flintstones. Screen
Speaker 2: Gems owned a twenty percent steak in Hannah Barbera. The
Speaker 2: animation studio behind the cartoon sitcom. They handled the opening
Speaker 2: for Bewitched. As you recall, so ABC got some synergy
Speaker 2: going by having a cartoon Samantha and Darren drop into
Speaker 2: Bedrock as the Flintstones new Neighbors time travel multiverse. I
Speaker 2: don't know, yeah, I don't know how that worked, Hanna
Speaker 2: Barbara really had. It was just all over the place.
Speaker 2: I mean this, we already tied him into this episode once.
Speaker 2: How they turned a Jack Armstrong pilot into Johnny Quest
Speaker 2: Stay in her lane, Hanna Barbera, And now we have
Speaker 2: to get to the racism. Perhaps the most notorious episode
Speaker 2: of Bewitched is a nineteen seventy Christmas episode called Sisters
Speaker 2: at Heart, and it is a very special episode in
Speaker 2: all meetings of the phrase, it is the only instance
Speaker 2: where you could plausibly describe something as the heartwarming blackface episode.
Speaker 2: Yeah hear us out. This episode was actually written collaboratively
Speaker 2: by twenty two students of Mis Marcella Saunders tenth grade
Speaker 2: English class at Jefferson High School in south central Los Angeles.
Speaker 2: MSS Saunders was a twenty three year old teacher who
Speaker 2: found that her students struggle with reading and interpreting text.
Speaker 2: But she knew they were all big Bewitched fans, so
Speaker 2: she started typing up scripts of various episodes and incorporating
Speaker 2: those into her lesson plans. She wrote to screen Gems
Speaker 2: to share her story with the producers, and Elizabeth Montgomery
Speaker 2: and William Asher were so touched that they invited them
Speaker 2: down to visit the studio and even cover their travel expenses.
Speaker 2: Saunders thanked them by sharing an original plot line that
Speaker 2: all the students had collaborated on, and the writers were
Speaker 2: so impressed that they adapted into a full length episode.
Speaker 2: There is possibly some money that changed Anne, but Montgomery
Speaker 2: made it clear whose idea was at the start of
Speaker 2: the episode, which featured a tape segment shouting out the
Speaker 2: class and explaining the genesis of the episode. That was
Speaker 2: all necessary because the plot involves mister Brockway, who is
Speaker 2: an openly racist owner of a toy company Darren is
Speaker 2: working with at his ad agency. Brockway refused to allow
Speaker 2: Darren to handle his account since he mistakenly believed that
Speaker 2: Darren was married to a black woman who was actually
Speaker 2: the white of Darren's co workers. Meanwhile, that coworker's daughter
Speaker 2: was Tabitha's close friend and spending the weekend with the Stevens.
Speaker 2: Tabitha liked to pretend that the two were sisters and
Speaker 2: tried to make them both the same color so that
Speaker 2: they'd be twins, because she's a witch and she can,
Speaker 2: like you know. Unfortunately, she got the spell wrong, and
Speaker 2: Tabitha ended up with black poka dots on her face,
Speaker 2: while her friend Lisa had white spots. In the end,
Speaker 2: Samantha explained that all men and women are brothers and
Speaker 2: sisters despite the color of their skin, and to prove
Speaker 2: a point, she used her magic to zap everyone at
Speaker 2: their Christmas party into blackface when the aforementioned openly racist
Speaker 2: mister Brockway arrived. Rather than throwing him into a murderous rage,
Speaker 2: this allowed him to see the air of his ways,
Speaker 2: and he gave Darren the account and his heart grew
Speaker 2: three sizes that day. The episode won an Emmy Hilarious
Speaker 2: Wonderful Stuff. Elizabeth Montgomery declared it her favorite.
Speaker 1: It makes sense because it plays on the whole mixed
Speaker 1: marriage metaphor of a witch is immortal.
Speaker 2: I mean, it wasn't Amos and Andy still on the
Speaker 2: air nineteen seventy Oh, I don't know, no, no, yeah,
Speaker 2: you're right, that wasn't Yeah, Amos Andy had got Amos
Speaker 2: and Andy. There was a spin off called Amos Andy's
Speaker 2: Music Hall that stopped in nineteen sixty. Wow, Amos and
Speaker 2: Andy stopped in nineteen fifty five. So yeah, yikes, not
Speaker 2: too long out from that. But hey, witchcraft, they don't
Speaker 2: call it that old black magic for nothing? Am I right? Folks?
Speaker 1: Wow? Wow?
Speaker 2: Can we keep that? Judges? I just go nuts. No,
Speaker 2: it actually is quite stup because there's a whole ton
Speaker 2: of like racial stuff tied up in witchcraft because of
Speaker 2: voodoo and like, oh yeah, you know, one of the
Speaker 2: first zombie movies that came out, I Walked With a Zombie,
Speaker 2: is actually about not the Night of the Living Dead concept,
Speaker 2: which was the dead returning to life, which is coined
Speaker 2: by George Romero, but the idea of actual Haitian voodoo,
Speaker 2: which is putting people under like a trance to do
Speaker 2: your bidding and in a state akin to living death,
Speaker 2: but not actually being dead. So that was like, honestly
Speaker 2: the first time a lot of people had been exposed
Speaker 2: to just any Haitian culture. Year did that movie come
Speaker 2: out nineteen forty three, So American attitude towards Witchcraft were
Speaker 2: influenced by that because it was a very influential film,
Speaker 2: So I brought it back. Thank you? Still racist as yeah?
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, but is it racist if the people who
Speaker 1: wrote it were little black kids?
Speaker 2: No? Yeah, I don't really understand.
Speaker 1: How like being zapping everybody in the black face at
Speaker 1: the end, I'm.
Speaker 2: Saying, if this dude was that racist, he probably just
Speaker 2: would have walked in and started shooting right like, or
Speaker 2: got outside and burned across, Like, how does being confront
Speaker 2: with the thing you hate most make you tolerate it?
Speaker 2: That's white panic, Like, that's why this is why white
Speaker 2: people left the fucking cities and created the suburbs, honestly,
Speaker 2: because they started they started looking around, and it sure
Speaker 2: didn't result in brotherhood.
Speaker 1: That story in that King Cole when he moved in
Speaker 1: this like Canoga Park or some like nice part of
Speaker 1: LA and a bunch of his neighbors like showed up
Speaker 1: to basically petition him, and they said, like, you know,
Speaker 1: we don't want any desirables moving into our neighborhood. And
Speaker 1: he said, if I see any undesirables, I'll let you know. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think they still like burnt crosses on his lawn
Speaker 1: or something.
Speaker 2: Ah, and that like wasn't this country.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was LA, which I mean, I guess LA,
Speaker 1: especially them, was not exactly as liberal as we see
Speaker 1: it today. But I mean, I don't know. Nineteen ninety two,
Speaker 1: never mind, there's an incredible documentary I think, directed by
Speaker 1: John Singleton. I'm pretty sure John Singleton just called I
Speaker 1: Think LA ninety two and it's all not found footage
Speaker 1: but like news footage and handheld cam quarter footage of
Speaker 1: the LA riots after the Rodney King verdict.
Speaker 2: It is astonishing.
Speaker 1: It is an incredible documentary anyway, on the topic of magic,
Speaker 1: I guess this whole episode bad Sameway. Another notable string
Speaker 1: of episodes occurred during the same season, season seven, for
Speaker 1: an eight part story arc in which Samantha, Darren, and
Speaker 1: Indorra traveled to Salem, Massachusetts for the Centennial Witch's Convention.
Speaker 2: This was the first time that.
Speaker 1: The show had shot on location, and many assumed it
Speaker 1: was because the show had fallen out of the top
Speaker 1: ten and even the top twenty by this point, but.
Speaker 2: In truth, it was for a much more practical reason.
Speaker 1: The sound stage where they filmed and caught on fire,
Speaker 1: destroying a significant portion of the sets, and yet this
Speaker 1: wasn't the biggest catastrophe the producers had to contend with.
Speaker 1: They had already replaced two minor characters without announcement and
Speaker 1: had another die on them, But then tragedy struck with
Speaker 1: their male Dick York. And now we finally get to
Speaker 1: the Darren drama, also known as the Tale of the
Speaker 1: Two Dicks.
Speaker 2: Yes, it's funny. I'm I'm sorry, it's funny.
Speaker 1: You know that Dick Sergent's real name is Dick Cox.
Speaker 2: I did. It's true? Good for him. Yeah, I always
Speaker 2: was pressure to one of the guys who played Michael
Speaker 2: Myers a Dick Warlock. Oh wow, a hell of a name, man. Yeah,
Speaker 2: but he kind of looks like a wolf's dick. No,
Speaker 2: does he low hanging fruit with that joke, But he's
Speaker 2: kind of gnarled.
Speaker 1: It's funny where you don't know what he looks like. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is extra funny to me because my dad's name Dick,
Speaker 1: and it was always an endless source of amusement for
Speaker 1: me and my friends.
Speaker 2: Sorry, he's listening right now. I'm sure.
Speaker 1: I hope he's aware of that. I assume he is.
Speaker 1: My middle name is Richard too. So a lot of
Speaker 1: my close friends call me Dick. You don't though, No, no,
Speaker 1: I don't.
Speaker 2: I'll let you sit with that.
Speaker 1: Yes, like all this section their dick, his back might
Speaker 1: bewitch cast just got jacked delivered in the my neck,
Speaker 1: my back, cadence.
Speaker 2: No, this is fine, this is fine. Okay, that's fine.
Speaker 1: So we teased this earlier, but Dick York arrived at
Speaker 1: his audition for Bewished with a secret He was nursing
Speaker 1: a deeply painful chronic back injury, which my father also has.
Speaker 1: It began when he was making a nineteen fifty nine
Speaker 1: movie called They Came to Cadora, starring Gary Cooper and
Speaker 1: Tab Hunter, another fascinating mid century figure Edrita Hayworth. Dick
Speaker 1: York was on set operating a hand car along railway tracks.
Speaker 1: You know those things in like Thelony Tunes episodes, look
Speaker 1: like see saws that you pop up and down.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: When the director yelled cut, suddenly one of the extras
Speaker 1: reached up and pulled himself up on the opposite side
Speaker 1: that Dick was on by using the handle. But Dick
Speaker 1: was about to lift up so, as he described it
Speaker 1: in a nineteen ninety two interview with Film Facts Magazine.
Speaker 1: Instead of lifting up the expected weight, I was suddenly
Speaker 1: jarring lifting his entire weight off the flatbed one hundred
Speaker 1: and eighty pounds or so. The muscles alongside the right
Speaker 1: side of my back tore.
Speaker 2: They just snapped and let loose.
Speaker 1: And that was the start of it, all the pain,
Speaker 1: the painkillers, the addiction, the lost career. I didn't attend
Speaker 1: to the problem. Then I continued to work through it.
Speaker 1: His spine never healed correctly, and it basically meant he
Speaker 1: was inexcruciating pain at all times. The disks in his
Speaker 1: spine slowly crumbled, and over the years he shrunk from
Speaker 1: six foot one to five foot ten. At the time,
Speaker 1: there was no surgery to correct the problem, so Dick
Speaker 1: York coped with an ever increasing dosage of pain killers.
Speaker 1: This allowed him to work through the first four seasons
Speaker 1: of Bewitched, but over time they became less and less
Speaker 1: able to keep up with the fourteen hour days and
Speaker 1: the physical demands of the roles.
Speaker 2: Very relied a lot on physical comedy.
Speaker 1: It got to the point where Darren Less scripts were
Speaker 1: kept permanently on hand in case he wasn't well enough
Speaker 1: to work on any given week, fans of the show
Speaker 1: will notice to their round. Season three, Darren was traveling
Speaker 1: out of town on business great deal, and even when
Speaker 1: he was home, a lot of setups were contrived to
Speaker 1: allow him to sit down or reclimb. They even built
Speaker 1: an angled like wall perch seat thing for him to
Speaker 1: sit on during takes, similar to what they did for
Speaker 1: the actor playing the Tin Man and the Wizard of Oz.
Speaker 1: Because the costume didn't have any like knees or anything
Speaker 1: able to allow him to bend. When he was in pain,
Speaker 1: he could barely walk, and when he was on pills
Speaker 1: he could baible to remember his lines.
Speaker 2: So all in all, this was less than ideal.
Speaker 1: And now we're at a section I like to call
Speaker 1: pulling their dick out.
Speaker 2: The incident.
Speaker 1: Matters with Dick came to a head in early sixty nine,
Speaker 1: though sadly not morehead, when the cast and crew were
Speaker 1: hard at work on an episode called Seriously this is
Speaker 1: what it was called Dad, I can't say it.
Speaker 2: He does his thing.
Speaker 1: He started the day sick and skipped lunch to see
Speaker 1: the doctor, who gave him a B twelve shot instead
Speaker 1: of his usual novaque and in courtizone health in the sixties.
Speaker 1: He then had to come back and do a special
Speaker 1: effect shot that required him to be suspended fifteen feet
Speaker 1: in the air.
Speaker 2: This, plus the hot lights, the.
Speaker 1: Medication, and the exhaustion, not to mention the pain, it
Speaker 1: was all less than ideal. York tells the story in
Speaker 1: his autobiography, The Seesaw Girl and Me. I was too
Speaker 1: sick to go on. I had a temperature of one
Speaker 1: hundred and five, was full of strong antibiotics for almost
Speaker 1: ten days. I went to work that day, but I
Speaker 1: was sick. I lay in my dressing room after being
Speaker 1: in makeup, waiting to be called on set. They knew
Speaker 1: I was feeling pretty rotten, and they tried to give
Speaker 1: me time to rest. I kept having chills. It was
Speaker 1: the middle of the summer and it was wearing a
Speaker 1: sheepskin jacket, and I was chilling, shaking all over. Then,
Speaker 1: while sitting on a scaffolding with Maurice Evans being lit
Speaker 1: for a special effects scene, they were setting an inky.
Speaker 1: It was a little tiny spotlight that was supposed to
Speaker 1: just be flickering over my eyes. That flick flickering, flickering
Speaker 1: made me feel weird. I was sitting on this platform
Speaker 1: up in the air, and I turned to a friend
Speaker 1: of mine on the site. He was just down below,
Speaker 1: and I said, I think I have to get down.
Speaker 1: He started to help me down, and that's the last
Speaker 1: thing I remember until I woke up on the floor.
Speaker 1: That's about all I'll remember of the incident. I managed
Speaker 1: to bite a very large hole in the side of
Speaker 1: my tongue before they could pry my teeth apart. Oh,
Speaker 1: he basically had a seizure. Essentially, he was immediately rushed
Speaker 1: to the hospital, never to return to the Bewitch set again.
Speaker 1: Bill Asher paid him a visit while he was recovering
Speaker 1: and asked him if he wanted to hang it up.
Speaker 1: York replied, if it's all right with you, Billy, and
Speaker 1: with that, Dick Yorke left the sitcom to devote himself
Speaker 1: to his recovery. The only public comment he made at
Speaker 1: the time in relation to his departure from the series
Speaker 1: was to the Sacramento Bee in March of nineteen sixty nine.
Speaker 1: Five years was Liz's husband on Bewitched. There are no
Speaker 1: hard feelings. I just want a chance to do other
Speaker 1: stage and movie roles. But privately, he was devastated describing
Speaker 1: his onset collapse as quote the worst day of my
Speaker 1: life because I felt like I'd failed everybody. It was
Speaker 1: the only thing that I started that I didn't finish.
Speaker 1: I felt so guilty and I felt embarrassed that I
Speaker 1: let everybody down.
Speaker 2: And now ran a section called dick swapping that is
Speaker 2: just so sad man. Oh it gets so much worse.
Speaker 2: Oh great.
Speaker 1: The whole situation left Bill Asher in a tough spot.
Speaker 1: They'd finished out the fifth season by filming Darren less
Speaker 1: episodes and mixing them in with the ones that had
Speaker 1: already shot with Dick York, so his absence seemed a
Speaker 1: little less obvious, But once those aired, Asher considered canceling
Speaker 1: the show altogether. As we'll talk about Elizabeth Montgomery had
Speaker 1: already grown tired of doing it, but ratings were still high.
Speaker 1: When she tried to quit after the end of the
Speaker 1: fifth season, the network responded by not only giving her
Speaker 1: a pay raise, but offering her twenty percent share of
Speaker 1: the series and greater creative control. So the Beast had
Speaker 1: to be fed. Though they were down a leading man,
Speaker 1: divorce was seen as out of the question, and killing
Speaker 1: him off seemed a little too gothic. Especially considering Elizabeth
Speaker 1: Montgomery was now pregnant and they're about to have another
Speaker 1: baby on the show. It just seemed sad for it
Speaker 1: to be a single mom whose husband.
Speaker 2: Had just died.
Speaker 1: So they decided to go with the least subtle solution
Speaker 1: and simply replaced dick Yorke with another actor with no explanation.
Speaker 1: Asher simply assumed that viewers would understand that this was
Speaker 1: an actor playing a role and they had to get
Speaker 1: a new actor. It was a ruthlessly pragmatic decision, but
Speaker 1: ultimately he decided that the best explanation was none at all.
Speaker 1: In doing so, they birth the phenomenon known in TV
Speaker 1: circles as the Darren syndrome. It's happened a lot over
Speaker 1: the years see Laurie from That seventy show, Bobby Draper
Speaker 1: from mad Men, Chris and the Partridge Family, and many others.
Speaker 1: My favorite is Becky from Roseanne because they made constant
Speaker 1: jokes about it on the show. In one episode, the
Speaker 1: family watched Bewitched on TV and the deputy Becky Sarah
Speaker 1: Chalk I think her name is, remarked that she preferred
Speaker 1: the second Theren, because of course she did.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Sarah chalk Is from Scrubs, Rick and Morty. Oh yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: and you're forgetting Aunt Viv from Fresh Prince of bel Air.
Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I thought she was only in the first
Speaker 1: episode and then she and Will Smith had a big
Speaker 1: falling out.
Speaker 2: Well she was, Yeah, basically that's been the rumor. I thought.
Speaker 1: She like literally has quoted and interviews of being like,
Speaker 1: I'm not going to work with that all Will Smith.
Speaker 2: Ever again, Yeah, she's claiming now that she was offered
Speaker 2: a really bad deal and also in an abusive marriage.
Speaker 2: She did say that Smith got her fired at one point.
Speaker 2: Oh aw, but yeah, I don't know. Wacky. Yeah. The
Speaker 2: Roseanne almost funny.
Speaker 1: I remember the first Becky came back like later on
Speaker 1: for some reason. I think she left to go to college,
Speaker 1: and then when she was done, she came back to
Speaker 1: the show. And whenever her character entered the room, Roseanne
Speaker 1: or whoever was in the room, John Gooman wouldever be like,
Speaker 1: where have you been?
Speaker 2: It is great? This is really funny.
Speaker 1: The obvious choice for Darren two point zero was Dick Sargeant,
Speaker 1: who not only bore a passic resemblance to York, but
Speaker 1: it also been an early contender for the Roles. We
Speaker 1: mentioned he had a rough time getting integrated in the cast. However,
Speaker 1: during his first read through, Agnes moorehead in Dora, who
Speaker 1: was very close to Dick York, stood up and announced
Speaker 1: I don't like change, before sitting back down.
Speaker 2: Me.
Speaker 1: That's probably why Sergeant would recall hear is a tough
Speaker 1: old bird or tough old broad or something. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: his relationship with Elizabeth Montgomery was better than hers with York's,
Speaker 1: possibly because he was gay and they didn't have that
Speaker 1: same weirdness that tainted her relationship with Dick York.
Speaker 2: Maybe yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: The first episode he films seemed to be a nod
Speaker 1: to the unusual circumstances called Samantha's Better Halves, and Dora
Speaker 1: splits Darren into two personalities, one gregarious and another all business,
Speaker 1: and Samantha can be heard moaning stuff like but I
Speaker 1: only want one Darren, which is pretty on the nose.
Speaker 1: And there are a lot of people who thought that
Speaker 1: the script was a jab from writers who were angry
Speaker 1: that the producers hadn't stuck by Dick York and just
Speaker 1: ended the series or tried to coax him back or something.
Speaker 1: Reviews for Dick Sergeant were tepid. As Variety wrote in
Speaker 1: case anyone noticed, and assuredly a large number did, Hubby
Speaker 1: Darren is not quite the same as before. That's because
Speaker 1: he used to be Dick York and now he's Dick Sergent.
Speaker 1: Whether the unspoken change will be accepted by the audience
Speaker 1: remains to be seen. Some might find it odd to
Speaker 1: see Samantha just as affectionate with a man who seemingly
Speaker 1: unbeknownst to her as a stranger. Generally, be Witch fans
Speaker 1: tended to prefer Dick York, who portrayed Darren as a
Speaker 1: much more reactive and hysterical.
Speaker 2: Figure, rather than Sergeant, who was much more restrained. Uh.
Speaker 1: Dick Sergent would later act in a movie called Hardcore,
Speaker 1: where George C. Scott discovers that his missing daughter is
Speaker 1: doing porn.
Speaker 2: Have you heard of this? No? I haven't. Nineteen seventy nine.
Speaker 2: Peter Boyle's in this. Paul Schrader wrote and directed it
Speaker 2: So music by Jack Nietzsche.
Speaker 1: Wow, Okay, this is like hitting all the bases. The
Speaker 1: Wikipedia intrograph is kind of nuts. It's plot follows a
Speaker 1: conservative Midwestern businessman whose teenage daughter goes missing. In California
Speaker 1: with the help of a prostitute. His search leads him
Speaker 1: to the illicit subculture of pornography inclording snuff films.
Speaker 2: Schrader developed it with John Millius. It all comes back, ye, judge,
Speaker 2: Oh my god.
Speaker 1: The poster is incredible. It's just the phrase, oh my god,
Speaker 1: that's my daughter over black text with George C. Scott
Speaker 1: in the lower corner with his head in his hands.
Speaker 2: It is funny because he's making He does that exact
Speaker 2: same thing an Exorcist three in like twenty one years later. Uh,
Speaker 2: he's up there.
Speaker 1: With Michael Kaine in terms of like, was it pay
Speaker 1: I'll do it?
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. I think he was drunk for a lot
Speaker 2: of it. Yeah. Originally born Baby was in this oh
Speaker 2: weird as the Jersey Sky character.
Speaker 1: Yeah, oh yeah's he couldn't pull off conservative Midwestern dad.
Speaker 2: In his contract, George C. Scott stipulated the production include
Speaker 2: five break days for the actor due to his drinking
Speaker 2: problem at the time. Yeah, I have I've got a
Speaker 2: drinking problem.
Speaker 1: Can I have like five days off? It was a
Speaker 1: week or a month.
Speaker 2: I need about five days off for I assume per month,
Speaker 2: just for the odd bender God love him. Five break
Speaker 2: days built in essentially, I guess if he was too
Speaker 2: hungover up to work. It was like it was like
Speaker 2: vacation days. It was rolling over. Anyway, this gets so
Speaker 2: much worse. Yeah, it does bad reviews with the least
Speaker 2: that God and her infinite cruelty had in store for
Speaker 2: Dick York. He was more or less on his back
Speaker 2: for a year due to a combination of prescription prescription
Speaker 2: that's kind of funny word. He was more or less
Speaker 2: on his back for a year due to a combination
Speaker 2: of prescription drug abuse and pain. He dropped pills cold
Speaker 2: turkey in nineteen seventy one, though, which is not generally
Speaker 2: the preferred way to drop anything. I'm told. He moved
Speaker 2: in with his mother to spare his wife the sight
Speaker 2: of his ongoing suffering, describing his withdrawal process to the
Speaker 2: La Times as six months of hell. I had a
Speaker 2: band playing in my head bagpipes night and day. It
Speaker 2: just went on and on and on and on and on.
Speaker 2: The fans whisper to you, and the walls whisper to you.
Speaker 2: And you look at the television and sometimes it flashes
Speaker 2: in a certain way that sends you into a fit,
Speaker 2: and you know that your wife has put her hand
Speaker 2: in your mouth so you won't bite off your tongue.
Speaker 2: You can't sleep, you hallucinate. I used to make a
Speaker 2: tape recording of rain so I could listen to the
Speaker 2: rain lying in bed at night, to drown out those
Speaker 2: damned bagpipes. That sounds like hell on earth. I love
Speaker 2: the Scottish. I love bagpipes, but a tattoo, I gotta say, man,
Speaker 2: I was pretty goddamn sick of them after like two
Speaker 2: days in Scotland. I can't image image of you in Scotland.
Speaker 2: I hadn't no idea you've ever gone to Scotland. That's
Speaker 2: that's pretty hilarious to me. For some reason. H Glasgow
Speaker 2: and Edinburgh was part of like a cruise around the
Speaker 2: northern UK. Whoa, it seems like something I'd be into.
Speaker 2: It was fun. I just mostly that's where I really
Speaker 2: fell in love with Ireland. I didn't know that. Oh
Speaker 2: so yeah, I couldn't drink though. That was I could
Speaker 2: drink there, but I couldn't drink on the boat. That
Speaker 2: was the drag. Anyway. That is a truly horrific withdrawal story.
Speaker 2: But once again things got worse. Yeah. After that, York
Speaker 2: found himself relieved when the hallucinations stopped, but then the
Speaker 2: ordinary pain returned. He was rendered unable to act beyond
Speaker 2: small bit parts because his teeth had rotted out due
Speaker 2: to his drug abuse, and with limited residuals from bewitched,
Speaker 2: York took his savings and bought an apartment building in
Speaker 2: West Covina. The plan was to live out the rest
Speaker 2: of his days there, but it didn't quite happen that way,
Speaker 2: because when tenants had difficulty paying their rent, York refused
Speaker 2: to evict them, seemingly recalling the similar circumstances of his
Speaker 2: own youth. This caused him, however, to fall behind on
Speaker 2: his mortgage payments, and the bank foreclosed. York and his
Speaker 2: wife ended up cleaning units in the building they once
Speaker 2: owned in order to make ends meet, and by nineteen
Speaker 2: seventy six they were living on welfare checks. Three packa
Speaker 2: day smoker, York developed emphysema started wearing an oxygen canister.
Speaker 2: When his wife's father died, they flew home to the
Speaker 2: small town of Rockford, Michigan, and while there, he collapsed
Speaker 2: in the yard of his in law's home due to
Speaker 2: his emphysema. York never returned to California, instead moved into
Speaker 2: the home that his father in law had recently vacated
Speaker 2: after dying. And it was there in this tiny red
Speaker 2: bungalow that bedridden slowly dying of emphysema and surviving on
Speaker 2: six hundred and fifty dollars a month from the Screen
Speaker 2: Actors Guild, that York embarked on his later life career
Speaker 2: end of life career as just a saint. He started.
Speaker 2: It started with a friend asking him to record an
Speaker 2: inspirational message for a young girl who was comatosed, and
Speaker 2: gradually he started doing more and more of these tapes
Speaker 2: for others who were home. This eventually blossomed into a
Speaker 2: full scale crusade to help the homeless, which was a
Speaker 2: cause near and dear to his heart given his impoverished upbringing.
Speaker 2: During the Great Depression, York found an organization called Acting
Speaker 2: for Life, which he ran from his living room, calling politicians,
Speaker 2: business people, and the general public to contribute supplies, money,
Speaker 2: and sleeping bags. He even tried to pressure Congress to
Speaker 2: convert dozens of military bases recently scheduled for abandonment by
Speaker 2: a federal commission into homeless shelters. At one point, he
Speaker 2: was also active in trying to save a whale trapped
Speaker 2: in ice. I'm just now learning. Despite the circumstances of
Speaker 2: his life, York preached optimism. I've been blessed, he told
Speaker 2: a reporter. I have no complaints. I've been surrounded by
Speaker 2: people in radio, on stage, and in motion pictures and
Speaker 2: television who love me. The things that have gone wrong
Speaker 2: have simply been physical things. And he told another one
Speaker 2: in what is a quote that will haunt me for
Speaker 2: the rest of my days? I feel wonderful. It's just
Speaker 2: my body that's dying. In nineteen eighty nine, People magazine
Speaker 2: did a big profile on him, and we're just going
Speaker 2: to quote it in full because we love to see
Speaker 2: you suffer. A few miles outside Grand Rapids mission and
Speaker 2: I put on my podcast or voice for it. A
Speaker 2: few miles outside Grand Rapids, Michigan, stands a small red
Speaker 2: house with a flat roof. Inside the cramped living room,
Speaker 2: a man dressed in a bathrobe, slippers, and knee socks
Speaker 2: talks animatedly while a hose feeds oxygen to his depleted lungs.
Speaker 2: His tall, once robust frame is now fragile, the result
Speaker 2: of a degenerating spine. When he tries to walk and
Speaker 2: Fisima leaves him breathless after three steps. But when he speaks,
Speaker 2: it is with a clear, strong, and very familiar voice,
Speaker 2: the voice of Dick York, who played Darren Stevens, a
Speaker 2: mortal married to a witch on the popular sixties sitcom Bewitched.
Speaker 2: Reports are I'm dying, he says. Tethered to a twenty
Speaker 2: five foot oxygen lifeline, York, sixty, hasn't been outside since July. Physically,
Speaker 2: his world, which once included a six figure income in
Speaker 2: a house in the Hallwood Hills, has been reduced largely
Speaker 2: to this green walled room. And yet, after a twenty
Speaker 2: year downslide during which he battled an addiction to painkillers,
Speaker 2: saw the bank foreclothes in the apartment building that was
Speaker 2: his only asset, and ended up living on welfare, York
Speaker 2: is filled by the boundless energy of a man with
Speaker 2: a cause. Encouraged by Joan, his wife of thirty seven years,
Speaker 2: and using his second lifeline, the phone, York has worked
Speaker 2: furiously to gather aid for the needy. There is no
Speaker 2: program drug addiction homelessness that I would not give whatever
Speaker 2: I can, says York. I'm fortunate I still have my voice.
Speaker 2: He continued, I must be crazy to think that one
Speaker 2: guy with a hose up his nose, living on a
Speaker 2: six hundred and fifty dollars a month pension in this
Speaker 2: little house in Michigan can make a difference, says Yorke,
Speaker 2: trying to laugh. But you know I'm not crazy. As evidence,
Speaker 2: he describes the three hundred sleeping bags he rounded up
Speaker 2: for the homeless in Chicago and Detroit, the five thousand
Speaker 2: cans of grapefruitus he helped deliver to the Dwelling Place
Speaker 2: Project for the Homeless and Grand Rapids, the twelve thousand
Speaker 2: surplus Navy jackets he had to shelters in Chicago. He
Speaker 2: is also content, say the Yorks. There's no difference in
Speaker 2: how things are today from when we were in Hollywood,
Speaker 2: says Joan. It's all been thrilling and it still is.
Speaker 2: They say, the show goes on, it may just be
Speaker 2: a different performance. Ouch though their kids have scattered, Dick
Speaker 2: says he feels the warmth of their support. My dad
Speaker 2: helped people his whole life, says son Matthew, who now
Speaker 2: lives in Covina, California. I wouldn't expect anything else from him.
Speaker 2: Looking back, Matthew adds, our poorest time financially was our
Speaker 2: richest in love. I don't love things, Dick explains, a
Speaker 2: flower the sky people, they're different, but I don't have
Speaker 2: strong ties to my grandmother's teacup, or to anyone else's teacups,
Speaker 2: or blankets or boots, all the worldly goods he passes
Speaker 2: on to the needy. I don't know how I do it,
Speaker 2: he admits, it just gets done. I have one rule.
Speaker 2: Don't give me anything you don't want me to give away.
Speaker 2: Three years after that profile was published, Dick York died
Speaker 2: of emphysema in February of nineteen ninety two. Jesus Christ Jordan.
Speaker 1: The only time we broke was mister Roger's episode, I believe.
Speaker 1: But this is a close second. Yes, that's a rough one.
Speaker 2: The line from like a deposed actress. They say the
Speaker 2: show must go on, but maybe it's just a different
Speaker 2: performance that is horrifying, like that should have been in
Speaker 2: Sunset Boulevard.
Speaker 1: Whoof which I saw on Broadway and it was incredible.
Speaker 1: By the way, is the best thing I've ever seen
Speaker 1: on Broadway.
Speaker 2: Pussycat Doll, The Whole Share Singer, and Eddie Murphy Baby.
Speaker 1: Mama, No, She's not an Eddie Murphy baby. That's racist,
Speaker 1: just wrong, right, I cut that. All right, Let's bring this,
Speaker 1: let's land this plane. Man one am for you. The
Speaker 1: Witch dropped from number eleven in the ratings said number
Speaker 1: twenty four in nineteen seventy. Some of this was a
Speaker 1: negative response to Dick Sergeant, but it was also a
Speaker 1: result of changing tastes.
Speaker 2: Shows like All in the Family were.
Speaker 1: Coming along, paving the way for a new type of
Speaker 1: sitcom that reflected reality instead of a fantastical, idealized family
Speaker 1: that didn't really exist. Bewitch was the last of the
Speaker 1: so called fantasy sitcoms that premiered in the mid sixties,
Speaker 1: the Adams Family and the Monsters, which only lasted two
Speaker 1: years from sixty four to sixty six, and Odrew of Genie,
Speaker 1: which wrapped in nineteen seventy. Also after eight years, everyone
Speaker 1: associated with Bewitched was kind of getting tired of it.
Speaker 1: The writers had resorted to recycling premises in even repeating
Speaker 1: much of the same dialogue. They started doing this with
Speaker 1: episodes that were filmed in black and white before the
Speaker 1: show was shot in color in the third season, so
Speaker 1: I think they kind of viewed it as like remakes
Speaker 1: with you know, beautiful technicolor, and then once Dick Sargent
Speaker 1: into the picture, there was all the more reason to
Speaker 1: have remix because now they got a whole new actor. Also,
Speaker 1: this was back in the era when they crammed like
Speaker 1: thirty episodes into a season, which.
Speaker 2: Is kind of insane.
Speaker 1: Yeah, so it kind of makes sense that they were
Speaker 1: like trying to cut corners. But no one was more
Speaker 1: tired of Bewitched than Elizabeth Montgomery. As were previously mentioned,
Speaker 1: she tried to quit the show after season five, but
Speaker 1: ABC offered her the world, and so she signed on
Speaker 1: for another five seasons.
Speaker 2: But she appeared visibly bored.
Speaker 1: In these later episodes, which is kind of hilarious to watch.
Speaker 1: Bewitched historian Yes there is such a thing, and author
Speaker 1: Herbie Pilato is quoted as saying Elizabeth was tired of
Speaker 1: Bewitched and tried to quit the fifth season, but ABC
Speaker 1: offered hers so much money she couldn't refuse. But you
Speaker 1: can see by the final season that she's plodding through
Speaker 1: each episode brawless as a nod the Women's liberation and
Speaker 1: didn't want to be there. In addition to being creatively unfulfilling,
Speaker 1: the set was tense because her relationship with husband William
Speaker 1: Asher was deteriorating. He apparently slept around a lot, and
Speaker 1: Elizabeth started an affair with the show's director, Richard Michaels,
Speaker 1: which that's a risky, risky move to Minefield. Husban produced
Speaker 1: the show having an affair with the director of the show,
Speaker 1: So yeah, it's like a French farce. By the time
Speaker 1: the last season of Bewitch wrapped in nineteen seventy two,
Speaker 1: there was still two years on the contract, but Sdbuwish
Speaker 1: historian Harvey Palato says everyone thinks ABC canceled the show
Speaker 1: because of low ratings, but Elizabeth Montgomery canceled the show.
Speaker 1: When the final episode was broadcast on March twenty fifth,
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy two, it had fallen to number seventy two
Speaker 1: in the ratings. All concerned decided it was time to
Speaker 1: move on after eight years and two hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: four episodes. To make up for the final two years
Speaker 1: on the contract, Bill Asher offered up a sitcom starring
Speaker 1: Paul lynd my beloved Paul Lynde with the less than
Speaker 1: imaginative title The Paul Lynn Show, and they even used
Speaker 1: some of the same sets and a lot of the
Speaker 1: same bit players from Bewitched. The show made a play
Speaker 1: for social relevance with an all in the family style
Speaker 1: generation gap plot where Lynn's daughter and her slacker husband
Speaker 1: moved him with Paul moved him with lynd But they
Speaker 1: lacked any discussion of topical issues, and so it just
Speaker 1: didn't have any degree of social realism and it really
Speaker 1: tanked when it premiered.
Speaker 2: It's like one of the great TV flops.
Speaker 1: A lot of it is because Paul's stick kind of
Speaker 1: started grading on people, like, you know, a little paul
Speaker 1: In goes a long.
Speaker 2: Way, Ain't that the truth? Brother.
Speaker 1: He couldn't anchor a series, so it was canceled after
Speaker 1: its first season.
Speaker 2: Elizabeth Montgomery, for her part, wanted to get as far
Speaker 2: away from Samantha Stevens as was humanly possible, and thus
Speaker 2: she became the Queen of TV movies, ultimately racking up
Speaker 2: eight Emmy nominations. She played a sexual assault victim in
Speaker 2: the unimaginably titled A Case of Rape and an axe
Speaker 2: killer in the Legend of Lizzie Borden, which was fitting
Speaker 2: because it was later revealed that she was distantly related
Speaker 2: to Lizzie bordon That's cool. Yeah. She also appeared in
Speaker 2: the police drama alongside OJ Simpson as two detectives who
Speaker 2: are romantically involved, this one with the slightly better title
Speaker 2: A Killing Affair, OJ Simpson, Yeah, that guy got away
Speaker 2: with murder. Funnily enough, she had a gallery wall filled
Speaker 2: with from all of her movies, but none from Bewitched.
Speaker 2: Although she was very kind to fans and always answered
Speaker 2: her fan mail personally, Elizabeth Montgomery was by all accounts,
Speaker 2: a pretty neat lady. Aside from her acting, she worked
Speaker 2: tirelessly for animal rights causes and used her stature to
Speaker 2: take a stand for feminist platforms like the Equal Rights
Speaker 2: Amendment and reproductive rights. She was also one of the
Speaker 2: first stars to support AIDS victims and campaigned for gay rights,
Speaker 2: which many in the LGBT community felt was an undercurrent
Speaker 2: of the show. In a nineteen ninety two interview, Montgomery
Speaker 2: was asked if Bewitched was an allegory about closeted homosexuality.
Speaker 2: She answered, don't think that didn't enter our minds. At
Speaker 2: the time. We talked about it on the set that
Speaker 2: this was about people not being allowed to be who
Speaker 2: they really are. If you think about it, Bewitched is
Speaker 2: about repression in general and all the frustration in trouble
Speaker 2: it can cause. She was co grand Marshal for the
Speaker 2: nineteen ninety two Gay Pride Parade in Los Angeles, alongside
Speaker 2: her former co star, a newly out Dick Sergeant. When
Speaker 2: asked why, she offered the possibly apocryphal reply, I did
Speaker 2: it for the love of Dick, well for applause.
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Montgomery was filming Deadline for Murder in the spring
Speaker 1: of nineteen ninety five when she started to feel sick.
Speaker 1: She assumed it was just the flu and waited until
Speaker 1: shooting Rap to go to the doctor's. It turned out
Speaker 1: that it was colon cancer. Ope, I don't have colon cancer.
Speaker 2: But coughs into a napkin spotted with blood. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I don't really understand how the symptoms relate, but by
Speaker 1: this point the disease was inop. I sometimes I have
Speaker 1: trouble like regulating Mike cadence of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: By this point, the disease was inoperable, and she opted
Speaker 1: to return home to her twenty sixth room Beverly Hills Mansion,
Speaker 1: where she jokingly requested a Pina.
Speaker 2: Colada IV drip. Funny Lady.
Speaker 1: She sent her family away from her deathbed, preferring the
Speaker 1: dialge just six weeks after the diagnosis. She didn't want
Speaker 1: anyone to see her that way, recalled ex husband William Masher,
Speaker 1: with whom she remained friends. Then she slipped away, and
Speaker 1: Asher reportedly deeply regretted his affairs by the end of
Speaker 1: his life and tearfully admitted to his friends, it was
Speaker 1: all my fault that we got divorced, and he never
Speaker 1: really got over her sad Yes, Montgomery was actually married
Speaker 1: at the time of her death to former Falcon Crest
Speaker 1: star Robert Foxworth. They were together for twenty years before
Speaker 1: they got married just eighteen months before she died, but
Speaker 1: she was such a private person that most obits said
Speaker 1: she was single, and they got lots of other things
Speaker 1: wrong too. They listed her age as fifty seven rather
Speaker 1: than sixty two and listed her name as Elizabeth A. Montgomery,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that her actual middle name was Victoria,
Speaker 1: as I mentioned earlier. Her final work to be aired
Speaker 1: was a voiceover part as a barmaid on Your Beloved
Speaker 1: Batman the animated series. Television executives are more of the
Speaker 1: content to continue making a buck off the cooling corpse
Speaker 1: of Bewitched. In nineteen seventy seven, just five years after
Speaker 1: Bewitched went off the air, they launched the spin off
Speaker 1: Tabitha The Stars showed Lisa Hartman as Tabitha, the daughter
Speaker 1: of Samantha and Darren, who was also a witch. In reality,
Speaker 1: with the timeline, Tabitha would have been about twelve, but
Speaker 1: the series aged her up to her.
Speaker 2: Early twenties to make it more appealing sexy. Yeah, I
Speaker 2: don't know.
Speaker 1: I guess there's more to do with a adult actress
Speaker 1: than a teenage character.
Speaker 2: I don't know.
Speaker 1: Moving on, Tabitha's TV parents never guest starred on the show.
Speaker 1: It's just probably for the best because it kind of
Speaker 1: looks terrible and.
Speaker 2: It lasted only a year. I think.
Speaker 1: Over the ensuing decades, multiple networks have attempted to reanimate
Speaker 1: the corpse of Bewitched. In twenty eleven, CBS ordered a
Speaker 1: script for a be Witch remake from writer Mark Lawrence
Speaker 1: and producers Douglas Wick and Lucy Fisher, the married duo
Speaker 1: who also produced the two thousand and five film remake,
Speaker 1: which we will pointedly not speak about. In twenty four
Speaker 1: Routine NBC committed to a follow up series that would
Speaker 1: have followed Samantha's granddaughter, but nothing happened with that, and
Speaker 1: in twenty eighteen Blackish creator Can You Barrass salto be
Speaker 1: Wished revamp? Mercifully, none of these have come the pass,
Speaker 1: although Sony apparently has an animated series in the works
Speaker 1: which focuses on Tabitha as a teenager, which sounds like
Speaker 1: bootleg Sabrina the teenage Witch.
Speaker 2: Yeah who cares?
Speaker 1: Yeah no, yeah, well it is the Witching Hour on
Speaker 1: the East Coast. I am sick and jet lagged and tired.
Speaker 1: We have done twenty four pages on this, folks. I
Speaker 1: have nothing left to say about Bewitched, so higl Instead,
Speaker 1: before we sign off, let's discuss who could defeat God?
Speaker 1: Genie or Samantha.
Speaker 2: Tweeted us, using the hashtag which nineteen sixty sitcom Idol
Speaker 2: Supernatural Idol Supernatural Idol could find and kill God Lily Munster. No, no, no,
Speaker 2: we got a limited the Geni or Samantha Mortisia Adams. Yeah,
Speaker 2: the car and my mother of the car M M.
Speaker 2: Gilligan by accident. Uh, the racist boss from Bewitched. God
Speaker 2: has turned black for an episode and so furious mister
Speaker 2: Brockway I believe his name was killed God using a
Speaker 2: suit of armor forged by the KKK. I just gave
Speaker 2: so many Southern people ideas for fanfic. I can really
Speaker 2: apologize for that well in this episode that veered from
Speaker 2: some of our I hope you will, folks all have
Speaker 2: fun listening to this episode, which sworned to new heights
Speaker 2: of distracted googling and plunge to new depths of absolute
Speaker 2: human suffering. Thanks for listening. Has been too much information.
Speaker 2: I don't know what I'm doing here, and I'm Alex Hagel,
Speaker 2: I'm Jordan Talk. We'll catch you next time. Too Much
Speaker 2: Information was a production of iHeartRadio. The show's executive producers
Speaker 2: are Noel Brown and Jordan Runtog. The show's supervising producer
Speaker 2: is Michael Alder June. The show was researched, written and
Speaker 2: hosted by Jordan Runtog and Alex.
Speaker 1: Heigel, with original music by Seth Applebaum and the Ghost
Speaker 1: Funk Orchestra.
Speaker 2: If you like what you heard, please subscribe and leave
Speaker 2: us a review.
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