I wonder how her career might have been different if she’d gotten the role in On the Waterfront. It was apparently down to her and Eva Marie Saint, and Elia Kazan thought she was a bit too finishing school. Because she’d been to finishing school, you see. So even though Eva Marie Saint was nearly ten years older than she was, and the character’s a teenager, the role went to her. That was ten years before Bewitched, when she was still mostly just doing episodes of her dad’s TV show. Interesting to consider, anyway.

As it happens, I don’t really like Bewitched. It bothers me. I get that there’s this whole Thing about how mortals can’t know that witches exist, presumably because the witch trials were, if I’ve got the show’s mythos right, still in living memory for them. (There’s a statue of Montgomery as Samantha Stephens in Salem, Massachusetts, which is not the tackiest aspect of the city’s witch tourism but is pretty high on the list.) But that’s not why she doesn’t use her powers. She doesn’t use them, or anyway isn’t supposed to use them, because it bothers her husband. It’s an important aspect of her life, but she’s supposed to shut it away.

I can’t help wondering if she and Second Darrin Dick Sargent saw the parallels, and if it’s why she was such an outspoken activist for women’s rights and gay rights and so forth. (Their last public appearance together was in an LA gay pride parade shortly after he came out.) Because it is an interesting parallel. Oh, Samantha isn’t in her marriage for the appearance; if she married another witch, she could be herself. But society demands that she pretend to be a certain way, and it shapes everything about her life and her relationships.

And she couldn’t be her full, true self because her husband’s needs outweighed her own, let’s not forget that. She loved him, but he was allowed to tell her not to be herself. It’s pretty gross, and I have no doubt that she thought about all of this. She said she loved being on the show, that she never got bored, and I’m sure the actual acting was a lot of fun. And learning how TV worked—that can be interesting as well. It’s just that the reason I stopped watching the show was that the whole thing made me really uncomfortable, especially on episodes with Tabitha.

She did a few movies, some before and some as plays on the Samantha Stephens character. But I wonder now if later generations will remember her at all, now they’re growing up with such a different relationship to old TV shows from the one my generation had. Bewitched was always on in the middle of the morning, but if it was a vacation day, it was something I’d watch if there was nothing more interesting happening. So I remember Elizabeth Montgomery. I don’t know if my children will. You can buy seasons of the show on Amazon streaming, but that’s not the same as syndication.

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