Bewitched and Beyond: The Fan Who Came to Dinner Read Online Free PDF Page A

Where was the Continuity Girl on that day??

Chapter 6
    So, On to Westport
     
    For the first two seasons of Bewitched, an actress named Irene Vernon played the part of Louise Tate, but as she would soon find out, there were many changes brewing on the set of Bewitched.
    Director (later producer) William Asher and wife, Bewitched star Elizabeth Montgomery, had now taken over the reins of the show and were doing a bit of house cleaning.
    Not only was the show to debut in color for its third season, the new producers also felt that Larry Tate needed a younger, “trophy wife.” So, it was goodnight Irene, Kasey’s up to bat!
    “Bewitched was one of my favorite shows before I got to be on it,” Kasey told me. “It was a real thrill. I didn’t even have to read for the part. I just went in, met with Harry [Ackerman] and Bill [Asher], and the next week I was ‘Louise!’ At first, it was kind of a challenge to go from all the ‘internalizing’ of Peyton Place, to the wide eyed comedic innocence of Louise Tate yelling, ‘Larry!’
    I also donned a dark wig so the change in actresses wouldn’t be quite as noticeable. I wore that dark wig until Dick Sargent took over the role of Darrin. It used to itch and bother me. You can even see me scratching at it from time to time in some of the episodes.
    So one day, in make-up, I asked Bill if I had to keep wearing it and he remarked he didn’t even know why I was wearing it to begin with! So that’s how Louise became a red-head overnight!”
    Other changes on the show included a new “Gladys Kravitz.” Sandra Gould would replace Alice Pearce, who had passed away from cancer at the end of the previous season.
    The producers, as well as the network, didn’t like the idea of an older married couple getting divorced, and in a situation comedy, the sudden death of one of the main characters was out of the question, so the role of Gladys Kravitz had to be recast.
    For a few transition episodes, actress Mary Grace Canfield played Abner’s sister, Harriet, while a suitable actress was found to fill the larger than life shoes of Alice Pearce.
    Some Bewitched trivia here: Alice Ghostley, who would later play nervous nanny Esmeralda, was offered the chance to replace Alice Pearce in the role of Mrs. Kravitz, but declined because she and Alice were old friends, and she just didn’t feel right about accepting the offer. Sandra Gould once told me that when she had been a young child, George Tobias (her on screen hubby and fifteen years her senior), had been her baby sitter!
    Along with the new color episodes, came a new look. Samantha no longer wore the full-skirted, shirt-waist dresses of the “Donna Reed” era, but sported a sleeker, sixties look; not too “mod” but pleasantly “hip.”
    Also gone was the bow Elizabeth wore on the back of her head which pulled up the sides of her hair. (I always missed that… Next time you watch an episode, notice that her hair is even drawn that way in the opening cartoon credits, although the bow is undoubtedly hidden under her pointed hat!)
    “I was very glad to be on Bewitched, but it wasn’t always a happy set,” Kasey would say. “I wasn’t privy to a lot of what was going on, but when the Asher ‘take-over’ came, there was a lot of bad feelings that took time to dissipate.
    I remember one time I was to wear a fur coat in a scene. I didn’t really have a dressing room because I wore all my own clothes on the show and make-up was in a different building, so I asked a crew member for a place to hang the coat between shots. But I might as well have been talking to a brick wall. I didn’t get anywhere and guess I was looking a little frustrated when Elizabeth came over and asked if I needed anything. I told her, ‘Yes,’ I needed somewhere to hang up this expensive coat. A moment later the same crew member came over, hammered a big nail in the side of a flat and walked off. I had to hang this beautiful fur coat on a nail on a flat!