Every day, that lovely witch Samantha
causes Liz Montgomery to commit six of

But, oh how Samantha keeps her from violating the seventh!

By Louise Ronka (submitted by Milo)

   Bewitching, they both are. Alike, they are not (At least, so far!) Samantha - who practices black magic so hilariously on ABC-TV's Bewitched - has been known to get her way by means as dark and devious as night. Elizabeth Montgomery - who plays Samantha and lends her all the real charms she possesses so abundantly - is as honest as the day. She has an aversion to every form of deviousness, particularly people who say things behind her back. "Why don't they come to me?" she asks forthrightly. "Get it out in the open? These pinpricks dropped here and there can gain a horrible amount of distortion and momentum - and for what? I don't bite! I even like to think I'm reasonable." And, being both reasonable and honest, Liz should be first to admit the influence Samantha is having on her own life and character.

    Pride, for instance. Liz is proud of Samantha's success - with certain very Liz-like reservations.

   "Wonderful, yes" she says. "Of course, it's wonderful that the show's a success." Then she adds, in utter honesty, "But what if it all were built on nothing? Then I'd be on the way to a breakdown right now. I really would - because success is just a sometime thing. They hand it to you and say, 'Here, you can hold this for a while. Cherish it and treat it very, very gently, because it's not really yours.'

   "Bill and I and our family," Liz emphasizes, referring to her husband, producer William Asher, their tiny son and the new baby they're expecting, "that's for as long as life. That's the rock. That's to come home to. If this were lost, or even damaged, it would be an awful, awful thing."

   "But something given to you only to hold for a few minutes, like success, well, when the time comes to give it back, you just give it back. That's all there is to it. It's not the end of everything. In a way, it's not the end of anything. Except a little borrowed time.

   So, you see, there are limits to our young star's pride. And no pride whatsoever in her limitations, as compared with the art of witchcraft. "It might be handy if each of us could have her Samantha," Liz admits wistfully, "and, between the times, keep her in the - well, you know - broom closet."

   Which leads us to the next of her deadly sins.

   Lust. Liz really lusts for Samantha's gifts of necromancy, when it comes to her sheer cussedness of inanimate objects (and, sometimes, the people who use them). Necromancy means magic of course.

   "Dull pencils," she gives us a for-instance. "Samantha would do something about them if she were any friend of mine. I've never been able to stand them. Never!"

   But what could a nose - however magically bewitched - do about dull pencils?

   "Sharpen them! What else?" Liz counters firmly.

   "Switchboard operators who leave you out in space somewhere," she continues, warming to the subject. "You know the experience? Oh, you must. I'm calling someone at his office. The girl says, 'Thank you." She says, 'Just a minute.' And she goes away. Nothing happens then. Absolutely nothing. Except you get older. Minute after minute after minute. Not even the dial sound meaning they've hung up on you." Liz looks quite unhappy.

   "I've learned from it," she goes on, "but I'm afraid it's worthless information - which wrecks my theory that experience is never wasted. What I've learned is that you've got to hang up and dial again. Because they're not coming back. They never do."

   "Samantha, now, would light up that switchboard till it was utter chaos! Vindictive wench. But I - natural born long-sufferer that I am - just call again."

   "There is the driver who rides your bumper every minute," Liz says now, enthusiastically, "not a yard -and-a-half behind you. I personally would appreciate it if Samantha would throw a magnetic curtain around him so he could never come closer than a hundred yards to anyone. Lord, but they make me nervous! And the driver ahead of you who wants to make a left just when you want to make a left, too - but they only get halfway around, so you're stuck where you are. And by the time they do make it, the light's red again - not to mention me. I hate to say it, but the power of my nose is greatly overrated."

   "And the Bakersfield turnoff . . . pardon me!"

   The story of the Bakersfield turnoff is truly heart-rending, and perhaps familiar to anyone who has been around freeways.

   When Elizabeth and Bewitched and producer-director-husband Bill Asher set up shop in Hollywood, the Ashers lived in Malibu; and one way to get from Malibu to Hollywood is by the Ventura Freeway, which by and by turns into the Hollywood Freeway because - oh, never mind.

   Anyway, freeways intimidate Liz, so she stays in the right lane. And somewhere down the line on the Ventura Freeway, there is a sign that says "Right Lane - Exit Only." But, by then, the mind is so dazed and mutilated by signs that it registers nothing. Hence, morning after morning, Liz would drive numbly right off the Ventura Freeway and find herself, jaw set and eyes glazed, hurtling north toward Bakersfield - a fine place, but exactly where she didn't want to go.

   It was all precisely as if Endora had thrown her a curve, and she was disoriented in time and space, walloping along hell-for-leather toward a destination she did not want, in a direction not of her choosing, and having no idea what to do about it.

   "Samantha would have done something," she says today, "but all I could think of was to stop the car, roll up the windows and sit there and scream. Witches have greater resources. I know that for sure." At such times, Liz has a really sinful feeling:

   Anger! It positively riles her that Samantha - who could do so much for her - has done so little.

   "There have been times," says our witchy friend's best-known collaborator, "when I could have used Samantha in my corner! Last summer, for instance, when baby William Asher was taking his own sweet time. Which babies will do, and not even Madison Avenue powerhouses can hurry them."

   "Well, here was everybody chewing their nails and Samantha carefully looking the other way and pretending it was none of her business - though, in a manner of speaking, it was. Her business, I mean."

   Samantha, one gathers, isn't being one whit more useful this time, either, though the expected baby will be every bit as much hers as Liz's. (The story-line says so, come midseason!)

   "Also, " resumes Miss M., "I have had the wish - very unworthy - that Samantha would step into those small domestic scuffles that crop up every now and then in the happiest marriages. I mean by that, naturally, step in on my side. Show my otherwise flawless husband the error of his ways. But what the silly witch usually does is show me the error of mine. I guess that's the catch to the Samanthas: They're not always reliable."

   At which point, our star hears her name called and is off with a murmured "Pardon me." Interviewing an actress on a shooting set is a very glamorous experience for a writer. You can have your leg broken by flying props. You can have coffee spilled down you're your neck by flying prop men. You can have long periods of uninterrupted conversation, frequently as much as fifteen seconds, before the next frantic face appears in the door of the portable dressing room. You feel like calling for Endora, Samantha's super-witch mother. But she's too busy, too, gulling people into thinking she's an actress named Agnes Moorehead. You can also look around you - and anticipate the next confession.

   "All right," says Liz, back again, this time trailing a retinue that fusses with her hair, her wardrobe, her script and each other. "Except there's not room enough here to swing a cat by the tail. Of course," she adds thoughtfully, "you could always get yourself another hobby."

   Covetousness. Everything about you whispers how much Liz covets one ability of Samantha's above all others: The ability to fly away at will - to be at two different places at almost one and the same time!

   Her portable dressing room on the Screen Gems' lot features a color picture of New York that is top-heavy with nostalgia. Armchair psychiatrists would diagnose homesickness immediately and they'd be correct, up to a point. It's the one of Central Park South taken from the northwest, across the park itself, and is guaranteed to reduce all displaced Manhattanites to tears. Nothing could shake Liz up worse - except shot of Pawling, New York, her very favorite place in the world. Its presence in her dressing room must be pure masochism.

   Liz permits herself a small, undiplomatic sigh, the kind the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce penalizes with excommunication. "What's Samantha done for me?" she sighs. "Well, moved us into Beverly Hills - which is, at least, less than a sleeper-jump to the studio. But, to be truthful, I wouldn't be terribly mad if she wanted to move the whole show back to New York."

   "Oh, I love it here - it isn't that! But everyone has her special place, and New York is mine. Still, that's asking a lot of an apprentice witch. It's more in the heavy-duty line. Endora's"

   It doesn't take a necromancer to guess the arrival of a second child will plant Liz's roots more deeply in California soil. But, down in her heart, she'll always have a special fondness for Pawling, which has been "home grounds" for generations of Montgomerys - and for New York City, where she got her first youthful taste of TV in such dramatic shows as Robert Montgomery Presents.

   Those were exciting years. And years whose memories have helped incite Samantha's alter ego to still another sin.

   Envy. How Liz envies Samantha for the latter's truly "overnight" success! No need for carving out her own little niche in the world, without benefit or blame from the family's past reputation.

   The years before Bewitched were those when Liz was trying so honestly to prove that she was something more than Robert Montgomery's daughter (and certainly nothing less). "The years," Liz recalls, "when it seemed as though my identity - professional or what have you - was going under for the third time. There's too much of my father in me to enjoy that kind of drowning."

   "Once, at a party, I almost caught myself falling into a dismal clinker. A guest said to me, ' My name's George so-and-so - I didn't catch yours.' And I actually started to say, 'How do you do, my name is Robert Montgomery's daughter!'

   "I guess you know this isn't one of my favorite subjects. My father is, but the 'submerged identity' bit isn't. You can imagine how it must have been when I was getting my first toehold as me - and my father got the assignment as television director to the President of the United States!"

   Even Samantha, Liz admits, would find it hard to conjure up someone with a name magical enough to compete with a national hero like Eisenhower. "This girl has her limitations, too," says Liz - not without a certain smug satisfaction.

   Right up to recent times, Elizabeth Montgomery's prepared studio biography has been sprinkled with liberal references to her famous father, with little or no mention of her husband and her happy marriage - the very things that lead Liz into the sixth "deadly sin"!

   Greed. Liz is an absolute glutton for time. She's greedy for the precious hours and minutes Samantha can gain so easily, just by stopping the clock.

   "I'd stretch the clock, if I could," Liz twinkles. "It's just a pity I have only so much time!" And it is a pity - for someone with gusto for life. "The truth is," as she herself admits, "I don't have an awful lot of gripes. I'm unbelievably happy. Sickeningly, probably, from your point of view! I'm Pollyanna and Goody Two-Shoes and Mary Martin singing about Kansas in August, and nothing can be done about it. Bill and I and our perfect child, we have it all. You have to believe it."

   The show can't go on.

   "I've been asked if it won't be a terrible letdown when the show stops being, as all shows must. Letdown? Letdown from what? Look, we love the show, Bill and I. But it's the secondary thing with us. The - let me sound oracular for a minute - the rock of our being is us, the family, the home."

   "Some people," Liz adds soberly, "look ahead into the years and are afraid, and it makes me sorry that they are. There - well, for instance, there can be something sad about beauty parlors. The faces of middle age and the senior faces, they can be so very lovely! Yet people fight them, fight time. As if we could." Time, to Elizabeth Montgomery Asher, is a friend - one she'd like to see much more of. But she won't, because Samantha wouldn't dream of letting her commit the seventh deadly sin:

   Sloth. Now, where would Samantha be if Liz ever got lazy? Off TV, that's for sure. She'll never let that happen - not so long as she can "persuade" Liz to keep up such a busy schedule both at the studio and at home.

   Of course, Liz couldn't begin to manage that schedule if she didn't love being Samantha so much. However, there's something she loves even more, something beyond idle chatter of human shortcomings and sins.

   If you haven't guessed by now, perhaps one revealing anecdote will tell you.

   A stranger, meeting Liz recently in her professional identity and feeling he was in her debt for precious time she had given, said good-bye this way:

   "Thank you, Mrs. Asher."

   Her face changed immediately and subtly. In less than a moment, she was no longer an actress but a woman.=== "Well!" she beamed. "Thank you! That's the nicest thing anyone's said to me all day."

   Mrs. Asher. When she hears those two enchanted words, and feels in her heart what happiness they mean. Liz doesn't envy anyone in the world. Not even Samantha.