Twitch Upon a Star by Herbie J. Pilato

small house in Los Angeles until 1932, when they moved to Beverly Hills. Approximately one year later, little Lizzie arrived at 4:30 AM on April 15, 1933 (and not 1936 or 1938). However, after her brother Skip was born on February 15, 1936, the family moved to Holmby Hills, an affluent neighborhood in West Los Angeles just north of Sunset and east of Beverly Glen, in a custom-built sixteen-room mansion with an Olympic-sized swimming pool. They lived there until they all moved to New York.
    Franchot Tone, a substantial star in Robert Montgomery’s league at the time, then purchased the Beverly Hills home. Elizabeth later attempted to buy it back when she married Bill Asher, but Tone wouldn’t budge. Subsequently, the Ashers purchased their Beverly Hills estate on Laurel Canyon Drive from Howard Hawks (the legendary director of westerns, along the lines of John Ford), where Lizzie remained after her divorce from Bill, through her marriage to Bob Foxworth, and until her demise.
    Elizabeth told Ronald Haver in 1991 that her childhood was “all very kind of abnormally normal.” As Foxworth explained on A&E’s Biography in 1999, the upscale world that she grew up in did not contribute to a regular childhood. She was expected to dress properly and to have good manners and behave in a certain way. She took that as an act, Foxworth believed, because it failed to mirror her own true feelings. So, in a sense, he said, “she was always an actress.”
    In March of 1939, Robert Montgomery told Collier’s Magazine that his farm in the Towners section of Patterson, New York, near Brewster was his refuge from acting. He lived there three months a year and any visitor to the farm who mentioned the entertainment industry in any way was reportedly “apt to be slugged.”
    Robert Montgomery’s love-hate partnership with Hollywood would mirror his personal relationship with Lizzie. She didn’t get along with her father because, as Foxworth also surmised on A&E’s Biography , to some extent her father was envious of Elizabeth’s popularity.
    Billy Asher, Jr., the first of Lizzie’s three children with William Asher, blamed the ongoing rift between his mother and grandfather on their opposing political views. He, too, appeared on Biography , and said, “They just didn’t see eye to eye.”
    In later years, she and her dad seldom spoke. But if she phoned him, at least he’d answer, as he did when Hollywood called him abroad in May of 1939.
    It was then he traveled to England to make The Earl of Chicago , which would become Lizzie’s favorite of his films:
    A Chicago gangster (Montgomery) learns he has inherited an earldom in England, and he travels to London in order to claim it; he does so, even though he remains involved with mobsters back in the States. Ultimately, he transforms from a two-bit gangster and ends up living in an English castle with this wonderful old valet (Edmund Gwenn) who proceeds to tutor him in the ways of being an earl. Unfortunately, his previous life continues to haunt him; he commits murder, is tried by a jury of his peers in Parliament, and ends up in prison. In the end, his valet brings his best clothes, knickers, silk stockings, and patent leather shoes, coat with lace collar, ultimately dressing him for his execution.
    In 1991, Elizabeth expressed to Ronald Haver just how impressed she was with this movie:
    It’s just a gem, and it’s not because he’s in it. I could see anybody in it, as long as they were as good as he was in it. It is imaginative, it’s beautifully directed, it’s cleverly acted. Edmund Gwenn is so fabulous. It builds to such a point where they had the courage to do what they did at the end, instead of somebody saying, You’re kidding, you can’t do that. How can you possibly end it this way? I was just flabbergasted the first time I saw this. (You think) Superman will swoop down and take this man