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apart.”
    That’s putting it lightly. According to Pylant, Henry, Sr. was depressed, suffered a nervous breakdown, and subsequently committed suicide:
    Not only did Robert Montgomery have to cope with the tragedy of his father’s death, he had to face a financial crisis as well as the social stigma of having a suicide in the family. Henry Montgomery’s nervous breakdown was also a public reminder of the scandal that unfolded in newspapers a generation earlier when Archibald Montgomery, Robert’s grandfather, was accused of being an insane alcoholic. The charges against Robert’s grandfather were dismissed, yet the damage had been done to the family name. Whispers of a nervous breakdown, insanity, alcoholism and suicide were devastating to a prominent family’s social standing. Wire reports of Henry Montgomery’s suicide caused the story to be spread in newspapers across the country.
    On October 25 and 28, 1884, respectively, The Brooklyn Eagle published the articles, “Is He Insane? The Predicament of a Well-Known South Brooklyn Man” and “The Montgomery Suit: Withdrawal of the Suit at the Insistence of the Family,” both about Archibald.
    On June 25, 1922, The Philadelpia Inquirer published the item below titled “Man Jumps To Death From Brooklyn Bridge: Hundreds See Suicide From Trolley To Rail”:
    A man believed to be Henry Montgomery, of Brooklyn, leaped to his death from the Brooklyn Bridge this evening, in the view of hundreds of pedestrians and surface car and elevated train passengers. He leaped from a passing car to the bridge roadway, stepped to the rail without looking back and jumped.
    On June 26, 1922, The Denver Post published the following item under the heading “Wealthy N.Y. Rubber Firm Head Drowns Himself In River”:
    Henry Montgomery, 45 years old, of Brooklyn, wealthy retired president of the New York Rubber company, committed suicide late Sunday afternoon by jumping into the East River. Montgomery, who had been suffering from a nervous breakdown which forced his retirement ten months before, had apparently planned to take his own life, and left instructions for notifying his relatives.
    Either way, Henry (Sr.) left his family penniless, and his son Robert (Henry, Jr.) was forced to pick up the slack—as a railroad mechanic and oil tanker deckhand—and he was none too pleased about it. Fortunately, by the late 1920s, and following ineffectual attempts to become a writer, he became an established Broadway actor, joining his stage peers in the mass migration into film as talkies came into play.
    But his subsequent tumultuous relationship with Lizzie may have been ignited by the resentment and the frustration he experienced in his pre-acting days. No doubt those years helped to foster a strong work ethic that he would later instill in Lizzie. But initially, it was no pleasant experience. What’s more, a future family tragedy would further loosen and then only entangle the father-daughter link between Elizabeth and Robert Montgomery.

    Elizabeth and her father did not always see eye to eye, and they were definitely on opposite ends of the political spectrum, but their lives were in many ways similar. He was educated at exclusive private schools, as she would be later (at his instruction). She made her theatrical stage debut at six years old in Red Riding Hood’s World (a French language stage production at the aristocratic Westlake School for Girls in Los Angeles); his theatrical film premiere occurred much later in life (with the comedy, Three Live Ghosts , in 1929); but they both loved acting (after his initial objection to her vocational choice).
    Contracted with MGM, Robert would later be pigeonholed as that carefree leading man; just as Lizzie would later be typecast as a lighthearted leading witch. And just as she would later distance herself from Samantha (with a list of edgy TV and motion picture roles), Robert tried to