The Full Biography
Robert Montgomery. Actor. Director. The Beacon, New York, leading man who left MGM for the Navy, then taught a president how to sit in front of a camera.
This is his story.
The image most people still carry is a debonair MGM smile, or a boyish killer with a hatbox in Night Must Fall, or a host in a live television studio introducing a play the country would see only once. The years are 1931, 1937, 1950. What the still cannot show is Henry Montgomery Jr. of Fishkill Landing, a rubber-company heir whose father jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge, an ambulance driver at Dunkirk, a lieutenant commander at Normandy, and the unpaid man in an Eisenhower White House office whose job was to keep a general from looking lost on television.
He was born on May 21, 1904, in Beacon, New York — then Fishkill Landing — to Henry Montgomery, president of the New York Rubber Company, and Mary Weed Barney Montgomery. The house was money, Scots and Scots-Irish, and then it was not. In 1922 his father jumped from the Brooklyn Bridge. The fortune collapsed. Henry Jr. went to New York to write and to act because the old path had ended in the river. He established himself on the stage quickly enough to turn down a film offer opposite Vilma Bánky in This Is Heaven. Sharing a stage with George Cukor opened Hollywood. MGM signed him. He debuted in So This Is College (1929). On the set he questioned the sound crew, the electricians, the cutters. He would say making a picture was a cooperative project. The studio put him in one production after another. The popularity grew. Off screen some people found him chilly. On screen he was the man Norma Shearer wanted opposite her.
The door was not a single premiere. It was Shearer choosing him for The Divorcee (1930), Strangers May Kiss (1931), and Noël Coward’s Private Lives (1931). He became a star in light clothes: Elyot Chase, a divorced husband who cannot stay away. MGM had hired a comedy leading man. He spent the next decade arguing for other weather. His first dramatic part was Kent, the weak prisoner in The Big House (1930). The studio resisted until he demonstrated how he would play it. After that he was in constant demand. He appeared with Greta Garbo in Inspiration (1931), with Tallulah Bankhead in Faithless (1932), with Ann Harding and Myrna Loy in When Ladies Meet (1933). In 1935 he became president of the Screen Actors Guild — the first of two tours in that chair, the second in 1946–47, between George Murphy and Ronald Reagan.
In 1937 he played Danny, a charming psychopath, in Night Must Fall. The smile that had sold Coward became a threat. The Academy nominated him for Best Actor. It is the performance people still use when they need to prove he was not only a tuxedo. He went back to comedy because that was the contract, then pushed again. Hitchcock’s Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) with Carole Lombard gave the public the old Montgomery. Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) gave him Joe Pendleton, a boxer and amateur pilot taken to heaven by mistake and sent back in another man’s body. A second Oscar nomination. The picture is still the template for every film about a second chance that arrives with a celestial clerk.
When war began in Europe he did not wait for Hollywood’s bond tours. In 1940 he enlisted in London with the American Field Service and drove ambulances in France until the Dunkirk evacuation. He came home, addressed a Red Cross rally on the MGM lot, and finished the pictures already promised. After Pearl Harbor he joined the United States Navy. He rose to lieutenant commander. The file is not a studio biography’s decoration. He served on the staff of Destroyer Squadrons 5 and 60; commanded PT-107; served aboard the light cruiser USS Columbia; worked as an assistant naval attaché at the embassy in London; and was executive officer of PT-5. He was present at the Normandy invasion. The decorations included a Bronze Star with Combat V. He was thirty-seven when he volunteered. He was forty-one when he came back to a lot that still wanted the tuxedo.
The 1930s MGM list is long because the studio used him the way it used a reliable tenor. Letty Lynton (1932) with Joan Crawford. Blondie of the Follies with Marion Davies. Hell Below (1933), a submarine picture that let him put on a uniform before the real Navy asked. Another Language, Night Flight with the Barrymores, Riptide with Shearer again, The Mystery of Mr. X, Hide-Out, Forsaking All Others. He was, for a stretch, the man Louis B. Mayer could drop into a comedy or a crime picture and trust the diction. That reliability is why the Danny of Night Must Fall landed as a shock: the same polish, a hatbox, a smile that was no longer safe. After the nomination he made Live, Love and Learn, The Earl of Chicago, Yellow Jack. The tuxedo kept paying. The actor kept asking for the other weather.
John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1945) put him in PT boats again, this time as an actor who knew the hardware. When Ford could not work, Montgomery directed some of the boat scenes — uncredited, which is how a Navy man prefers a first time in the chair. In 1947 he directed and starred in Lady in the Lake, from Raymond Chandler, shot almost entirely from Philip Marlowe’s point of view. The star appears on camera only in mirrors. It was his last film for MGM and one of the strangest experiments a contract leading man ever forced through a major studio. He directed and starred again in Ride the Pink Horse (1947), another noir, this one in New Mexico light, a veteran in a town that does not want his memory. He was a friendly witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee the same year. In 1948 he hosted the Academy Awards. He acted in June Bride with Bette Davis and in The Saxon Charm. In 1955 he won a Tony Award for directing the Broadway production of The Desperate Hours, the Joseph Hayes siege play, a stage job that used the same command he had brought to a destroyer staff.
So little of what I did in Hollywood gives me any pride of achievement. Three or four pictures out of sixty-odd. It’s not very much.Robert Montgomery
On April 14, 1928, he married actress Elizabeth Bryan Allen. They had three children. Martha Bryan died at fourteen months in 1931. Elizabeth, born April 15, 1933, would become the face of Bewitched. Robert Jr., born in 1936, acted as well. The marriage ended on December 5, 1950. Four days after the divorce he married Elizabeth “Buffy” Grant Harkness. The second marriage held. The first left the more famous child. He did not spend the rest of his life explaining either fact to fan magazines.
The turn is the decision that the camera was a tool, not a religion. He had already left the lot for an ambulance and a destroyer. After the war he left the leading-man contract for the director’s chair, then left pictures for live television, then left the studio entirely for a White House office without a salary. Many stars announce a second act. He took three, and none of them required him to keep the old smile in repair.
Six things most people never knew
- His father died off the Brooklyn Bridge. Henry Montgomery Sr., president of a rubber company, jumped in 1922. The son’s Hollywood ease was built on a vanished fortune.
- He drove ambulances at Dunkirk before he wore a Navy uniform. The American Field Service took him to France in 1940. Hollywood’s war work, for him, started as a civilian at the wheel.
- Lady in the Lake almost never shows his face. The 1947 Chandler picture is shot from Marlowe’s eyes. The star is a reflection. It was his last MGM film.
- He was Screen Actors Guild president twice. 1935–1938, then 1946–1947. The second term sat between George Murphy and Ronald Reagan.
- He coached Eisenhower on television, unpaid. From 1954 he kept a White House office as consultant on how a president should look and speak on camera.
- Elizabeth Montgomery was his daughter. The star of Bewitched was the child of his first marriage. Both of his surviving children would die of cancer, as he did.
He left the grind of being MGM’s polished man and built a weekly room the country entered on purpose.
The later years
Home, after the second marriage, was a life split between New York and the work that television made possible. Buffy Harkness was the companion of those years; the first marriage’s children were grown enough to walk onto a set. In 1950 he launched Robert Montgomery Presents, a live dramatic anthology on NBC. He hosted. He produced. He sometimes directed. The series ran until 1957 and won an Emmy. In a decade when a play vanished after the broadcast, he treated the hour as a serious room: adaptations of established plays, originals, young actors who needed a first national look. A summer-stock version of the same idea toured under his name. His daughter Elizabeth made an early television appearance on the show, years before Samantha Stephens. The host was not a faded movie name filling a chair. He was a man who had already run a union and a PT boat and now ran a live clock. Guests and regulars moved through the hour the way contract players had once moved through Culver City, except the mistakes could not be printed over on Tuesday.
In 1952 he helped Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential campaign by coaching the candidate’s public appearances. When Eisenhower won, he appointed Montgomery special consultant on television and public communications. The job was unpaid. The office was in the White House. The assignment was specific: how to sit, how to look into a lens, how not to let the new medium make a general look small. Historians of political television still mark the arrangement as one of the first serious media consultancies in an American presidency. He was a Republican and said so. He had already testified as a friendly witness in 1947. The White House work was continuous with that politics, not a surprise conversion.
His last film as director and producer was The Gallant Hours (1960), a portrait of Admiral William F. Halsey, starring his friend James Cagney. Montgomery appears in the production file, not as the tuxedo of 1931, but as the Navy man who had been at Normandy and wanted the Pacific command rendered without syrup. The picture is almost a briefing: maps, voices, a command that does not need a love story. After that he stepped away from acting, directing, and producing. He had already hosted the Oscars, run the Guild, and kept a White House office. Two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame — one for pictures at 6440 Hollywood Boulevard, one for television at 1631 Vine — marked a career that had already changed rooms. He did not keep a schedule of cameos. He had Buffy. He had Elizabeth, whose Bewitched would, after 1964, make the Montgomery name a weekly fact in American living rooms he no longer had to enter. He had Robert Jr. He had the record of the anthology and the Eisenhower coaching, which did not require another close-up. Friends still asked him to talk about television and politics. He still would. He did not pretend the tuxedo had been the whole job.
Cancer took him on September 27, 1981, at Columbia-Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. He was seventy-seven. The body was cremated; the ashes went to the family. Elizabeth died of cancer in 1995. Robert Jr. died of cancer in 2000. Buffy lived until 2003. The obituaries remembered the smile, the killer in Night Must Fall, and, if they were paying attention, the man who had told a president where to look when the red light came on.
After he was gone
Bewitched kept Elizabeth’s face in syndication, which meant a generation met the father first as a trivia answer. The better memory is the work he chose after the tuxedo: the first-person Marlowe, the live anthology, the Tony for The Desperate Hours, the unspoken boat scenes in They Were Expendable, the Eisenhower office. Film students still pull Lady in the Lake when they need to show what a studio star could do with a camera once he was allowed to point it. Political historians still pull the 1950s tapes when they need the moment a president learned he was also a performer. He did not have the longest list of beloved titles. He had one of the cleanest second lives a leading man ever built — Navy, director, host, coach — and he judged the first life more harshly than the public did. Three or four pictures out of sixty-odd, he said. The public kept more than that. He was entitled to his count. The country is entitled to Night Must Fall, Here Comes Mr. Jordan, and the hour when television became a presidential skill.
It showed me that making a motion picture is a great co-operative project.Robert Montgomery, on learning the set from the crew
The still of the MGM smile will last. It should. But the life behind it was a fallen fortune, a bridge, an ambulance, a destroyer, a live studio, and a quiet office in a White House that had just discovered the lens. If you only remember the tuxedo, you have the lobby card. If you remember Dunkirk and the coaching, you have him.
Portrait: NBC Television · Public domain (PD-US-no notice) · via Wikimedia Commons