‘Bewitched’ Star Elizabeth Montgomery Spent a Lifetime Searching for Love: Meet Her 4 Husbands

As Elizabeth herself admitted to the Elmira Advertiser in 1955, “My father hasn’t always encouraged my acting. For years I announced to him that I was going to be an actress and that I would eventually do pictures. I’m not sure he was in favor of a screen career for me, but then I don’t believe I can develop in just one medium. He always just told me to go ahead if acting was what I wanted.”

Herbie J Pilato, author of Twice Upon a Star: The Bewitched Life and Career of Elizabeth Montgomery and Bewitched Forever, opines, “Ultimately, I think her father was jealous that Elizabeth became a bigger star on TV or otherwise than he ever was. Elizabeth was one of the biggest TV stars of the sixties. That’s all there is to it. Bewitched put ABC on the map. So it started out being this resentful father-daughter relationship because he didn’t want her to be an actress. Then a further wedge grew between them when he divorced her mother, who she loved dearly.”

Another part of it, he muses, could have come from the fact that a previous daughter had died as an infant. “It was my sense,” he says, “that Robert Montgomery never got over the death of his first daughter and somehow seemed to resent Elizabeth from the beginning, almost for being born. It was a very strange relationship, but she still loved him and she still respected his work, but their relationship was complicated.”

As, it would seem, were the ones she experienced with other men. Her first husband was New York socialite Frederick Gallatin Cammann, the 1954 marriage to whom seemed to have come out of nowhere. Still, notes Herbie, “Robert was thrilled, because Frederick was the same age as Elizabeth, but, as it turned out, Fred wanted a wife and Elizabeth wanted to be a star. They divorced a year later.”

Which was a little surprising. In October 1954 the Star-Gazette of Elmira, New York reported, “Love robbed Bob Montgomery’s daughter Betty of a top movie role in Daddy Long Legs. Betty, who has scored a hit in TV in her father’s show, was here in Hollywood to make the test. When producer Sam Engel came on the test stage, no Betty. He was handed a note instead saying she was so lonely for her bridegroom that she had taken the plane the evening before in a burst of nostalgia.” Everybody say, “Awwwww.”

But the first sign of trouble could have come a month later when Frederick found his social standing changed when the new edition of the “social register” was published. “Some of society’s ranking favorites were voted out,” reported the Oakland Tribune, “and a number of newcomers were added. John Jacob Astor’s name is missing for the first time since his childhood, apparently because of his marital troubles … Elizabeth Montgomery did the same thing to Frederick Gallatin Cammann as her father did in connection with Mrs. Grant Harkness, former wife of William Hale Harkness. Mrs. Harkness was taken out of the register in 1952 after marrying Montgomery. Cammann finds himself on the outside looking in after his March 27 marriage to the actor’s daughter.”

On August 11, 1955 the New York Daily News reported, “Actress Elizabeth Montgomery was back at work today after winning a Nevada divorce from New York TV producer Frederic Gallatin Cammann. Miss Montgomery charged cruelty in her divorce action yesterday at Las Vegas. The couple were married in March 1954 when Cammann was working on the Robert Montgomery Presents TV show.”

Said Frederick, “She thought her career demanded that she head back to Hollywood and I didn’t see how I could fit in out there.”

It wasn’t long before she was walking down the aisle again, this time with actor Gig Young, who would go on to win the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 1969’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?.  As happy as Robert Montgomery had been with Frederick, that’s how annoyed he was about this pairing. “She cared about her father,” Herbie says, “but she definitely zinged him a couple of times. If she knew something bothered him, she would do it. The thing is, Gig Young was an older actor, pretty much Robert’s age. Robert Montgomery wigs out and she loved it. She also became friends with Bette Davis, who Robert did not get along with, and she loved his reaction. Aside from this, she was such a beautiful person who did so much for the disabled, was so down to earth and unaffected by her position. She brought all that to Bewitched, and that’s why everybody just fell in love with her.”

Elizabeth married Gig in 1956 and divorced him in 1963. By all reports, it was not an easy marriage, with Gig battling ever-growing alcoholism as well as mental issues. “Gig was extraordinarily handsome, yet extraordinarily immature for someone his age,” suggests Geoffrey Mark. “I’m not sure if he was diagnosed as being bipolar, but what I’ve heard about his behavior sure sounds like it. Which meant that Elizabeth was riding an emotional roller coaster being married to him. Up and down, up and down. She didn’t want that. She lived that as a child. And sometimes, even though we don’t want to, we repeat previous family relationships. Many of us end up with people who remind us of our own parents.”

Tragically, in 1978 Gig married his fourth wife, Kim Schmidt, and three weeks after their wedding, on October 19, he shot her and then himself to death. No motive was ever discovered.

When Elizabeth filmed 1963’s Johnny Cool, she was working with director William Asher (12 years her senior), who was also a TV producer and director, and a connection was made. “Bill Asher had a very complicated personal life at the time he met Liz,” says Geoffrey. “He was separated from his first wife, who was the mother of his children from that marriage. He was directing Liz in Johnny Cool and was having an affair with three women at the same time.”

“So Bill,” he continues, “to take the pressure off a little bit, went East after Johnny Cool. He’d already begun to have feelings for Liz, and she for him, during the filming of the movie. He went East to help create and direct The Patty Duke Show. There he had a two-bedroom suite in a hotel. Literally, there were days when he had one woman in one bedroom and somebody else in the other bedroom, and neither lady knew the other one was there. It was almost like a French farce. In walks Liz to all of this and she tells Bill that she’s pregnant. Then, on top of all of that, the assassination of President Kennedy takes place. Bill was extraordinarily close to the president. Peter Lawford was his best friend and Bill had a meltdown. So much so that he was asked to leave The Patty Duke Show.”

Bill’s name was removed from The Patty Duke Show, even though he was co-creator, and he and Elizabeth went back to Los Angeles. “To his credit,” Geoffrey suggests, “Bill gave up the other ladies. And I assure you that all of this is true, because I talked to the ladies and they all confirmed, ‘Yeah, this is what was going on.’ And while he was getting his wind back, he jumped into work again with the Beach Blanket movies with Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello, which he directed, co-produced and in some cases co-wrote. And then they got the script for Bewitched.”

“Tammy Grimes had been the original person they wanted for the part,” he adds. “A lot of the original concept as created by Sol Saks was very different from what we know as Bewitched, and Bill is the one who came up with the change of point of view, naming the characters differently and sharpening their relationships. They made a pilot, Liz had her baby and the series was given the green light. And the marriage was very successful for a while. Bill, who had always been a wanderer, felt, despite what anyone will tell you otherwise, Liz was the love of his life and he gave up being a wild man. They worked very hard together, they had a beautiful home, they had a beautiful beach house at Malibu. And Liz got pregnant again and again. According to Bill, they had a great sex life.”

When Bewitched concluded its run in 1972 — largely because Elizabeth was ready to move on — the marriage between her and William Asher was falling apart. There are conflicting views of exactly why that was happening. Geoffrey explains, “With the success of Bewitched and the films he was directing and producing, Bill became enormously busy and sometimes one cannot see what’s right in front of one’s eyes. Liz was becoming unhappy. As much as she appreciated the great success of Bewitched, she saw herself as a multi-talented actor who could do all kinds of things. She felt stifled by the program, so she was creatively unhappy.”

He elaborates, “Bill didn’t notice and because he was so busy, their marriage was beginning to suffer. The other thing is, both Liz and Bill enjoyed having a drink, but Bill was becoming an alcoholic. That was causing more stress in the marriage, as well as the fact that because he didn’t need to direct every single episode, he would take time off and do other things. She could not. So by the time Dick York was taken off the show and Dick Sargent took his place, things were not as good as they had been on the set or between them. Bewitched could have gone on longer, but Liz did not want to and she had begun having an affair with one of her directors.”

According to Herbie — who, like Geoffrey, got his information directly from William Asher — Elizabeth wasn’t the first to stray. “Bill told me it was his fault; he had had an affair,” he says, noting that her going with that director, Richard Michaels, was nonetheless extremely painful to him. “Bill Asher was pissed when that happened. His protégé has an affair with his wife? That was tough. So she ends the show and then fills out her contract with ABC with the Mrs. Sundance and Legend of Lizzie Borden TV movies.”

Geoffrey details Bill’s expression of regret that he should have sensed his wife’s unhappiness, which was truly driven home when he came home one day to find that Elizabeth’s clothing and jewelry were gone. “Bill and the children didn’t really see Liz for a year,” he says. “Now I’m not saying she didn’t speak to her children in that year or there weren’t visits, but she was not a full-time mother. She was not in the house and other than her accountant, nobody really knew where she was. After that year she wanted to come back to the marriage, but Bill’s heart was broken and he felt he couldn’t trust her anymore. The damage was done.

“Bill felt, ‘All these years you’ve been complaining about your father, and then this is how you behave as a mother?’ Bear in mind, this is his point of view, not the kids’ necessarily. He felt he just couldn’t trust her enough to take her back, and in later years regretted that decision.”

Their marriage came to an end in October of 1974, though it’s not a subject that Elizabeth chose to speak to the media about. As she told the New York Daily News, “I don’t think people should air their dirty linen in public. Certain things are private.”

In response to everything she’d been through, Elizabeth had more or less sworn off marriage, but not the idea of love in her life. A year earlier she had starred in the TV film, as previously noted, Mrs. Sundance, which is where she met actor Robert Foxworth. “She walked into the rehearsal hall and it was just immediate,” Robert tells Closer.

Laughs Herbie, “She was intrigued by his name, because it matches her father’s name, Robert. This is the first guy who’s younger than her and she loves that he’s never seen an episode of Bewitched. She falls in love with Robert Foxworth, but she doesn’t marry him. He’s always asking her, ‘Will you marry me? Will you marry me?’ Twenty years later, she says, ‘OK, let’s get married.’ And he’s, like, ‘What?'” They were married in 1993.

In those years with Robert, Elizabeth seemed to have found the inner tranquility that tended to elude her for most of her life. Describes Robert, “She was a real homebody. She was a wonderful cook. She liked to work in the garden and the kids were a huge part of her life.”

As Geoffrey explains it, the maintaining of a tight family unit was aided by Bill Asher’s third wife, actress Joyce Bulifant, to whom he was married from 1976 until 1993. “What Joyce did to include Liz in their lives is that on every Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthday and anniversary she would have Bill’s first wife and whoever she was seeing, and Liz and Robert and all the children over at once so that none of the children would feel that their parents were choosing partners over them; that the brothers and sisters could all be together and that the children’s happiness came first. That their parents could all be friends and behave well as a lesson for them in their lives. So Bill and Liz were not enemies and saw one another socially and were a part of each other’s lives with their children.”

For Elizabeth, she had found love and true happiness with Robert, and her career flourished with a wide range of television movies over the decades that allowed her to play a diverse number of characters, tapping into an acting talent that wasn’t always given the chance to shine on Bewitched. Sadly, though, it all came to an end on May 18, 1995, at the age of 62 when she died of colon cancer. Says Robert, “It was quick; about seven weeks from diagnosis to her death. She didn’t want people crying over her.”

When it comes to Elizabeth, one particular thought comes to Robert’s mind: “She would be so happy with her children today. To see them and her grandchildren would have made her proud.” Those children are William, 56; Robert, 54 and Rebecca, 51.

In the aftermath of her passing, the family issued the following statement: “The image of Elizabeth Montgomery is the image of the medium of television itself. She was a friend who has been in our living rooms thousands of times and has impacted our lives in many ways. As an actress, she brought us joy with Bewitched and ground-breaking legislation with her performance in A Case of Rape. As an activist, she has been a longtime supporter of gay and lesbian civil rights, HIV-AIDS causes and animal-rights organizations. She was, most of all, a person who loved life and her work, and shared both with us generously.”

Additional reporting by Amanda Champagne Meadows