If you tuned in to Bewitched on September 18, 1969, you saw Samantha chase Tabitha into a storybook in “Samantha and the Beanstalk,” and you saw a different man come home as Darrin. Nobody on screen said a word about it. Dick York, who had played Darrin Stephens since the show began in 1964, was gone, and Dick Sargent had moved into the house on Morning Glory Circle.
The short answer is that York’s body gave out. A back injury from a 1959 movie had tormented him for a decade, and in January 1969 he collapsed on the set and never returned. The longer answer involves a handcar, a hospital bed, a fever of 105 and a question his director asked him there.
How Did A 1959 Movie Break Dick York’s Back?
Ten years before Darrin, York was cast opposite Gary Cooper and Rita Hayworth in the Western They Came to Cordura. In one scene, he and the other actors were pumping a railroad handcar when an extra grabbed the rail at the wrong moment, and York found himself lifting the man’s full weight. “The muscles along the right side of my back tore. They just snapped and let loose,” he recalled in a 1992 interview with FilmFax magazine, as Biography.com reported. He kept working, and he called that day “the start of it all.”
By the time Bewitched made him a star, the pain was constant. “I had a board in my trailer where I would flatten out,” York told People in 1989, adding that “on the set the crew would help me.” Crew members sometimes stood on the far side of a heavy door so he didn’t have to pull it open himself. Doctors prescribed codeine, muscle relaxants and sleeping pills, and by 1968, according to Biography.com and TVLine, he had a full-blown addiction. As his condition worsened from the third season on, some scripts kept Darrin in bed, and other episodes sent him off on business trips.
He held on through five seasons. Then came a day in January 1969 when he couldn’t.
What Happened On The Set In January 1969?
York was filming the fifth-season episode “Daddy Does His Thing,” the one where Samantha’s father, Maurice, turns Darrin into a donkey. He had been running a high fever for days. “I was too sick to go on. I had a temperature of 105, full of strong antibiotics, for almost 10 days,” he told FilmFax. He went to work anyway, and he was up on a scaffold with Maurice Evans for a special-effects shot when he felt faint and asked to be let down. The next thing he knew, he was waking up on the floor. Later reports in People said he had suffered a seizure while unconscious.
Producer and director William Asher, who was married to Elizabeth Montgomery, visited him in the hospital and asked whether he wanted to leave the show. York’s answer, as he remembered it, was brief: “If it’s all right with you, Billy.” He was 40 years old. By the end of that month, the Los Angeles Times was reporting that Sargent would replace him, and York kept things gracious in public. “Five years as Liz’s husband on Bewitched; there are no hard feelings,” he told The Sacramento Bee that March.
The episode he collapsed on still aired that April 3. What surprised people more was who stepped in, and how long that actor had been waiting in the wings.
Was Dick Sargent The First Choice All Along?
This is the part of the story that has never been settled, because the two sides tell it differently. Sargent maintained that he had been the original pick for Darrin in 1964. According to TV Guide, he was considered for the role from the start but was already committed to another ABC sitcom, the short-lived Navy comedy Broadside. Asher remembered it the other way. He said in 1999 that York had always been his first choice, a claim repeated in later accounts of the casting. Both men may have been right, since a studio can talk to one actor and still prefer another, but no contemporary casting record has surfaced that settles it.
What did happen between the two Dicks was kinder than any rivalry. Herbie J. Pilato, who has written several books about the show and about Montgomery, told Fox News Digital that Sargent went to York before taking the part. “Is it OK if I play this part? I don’t want there to be any hurt feelings,” Sargent asked, according to Pilato. York’s reply, in Pilato’s telling, was “Please, you have a job to do. If you have the opportunity, take it. You have my blessing.”
With that settled, the producers made a choice that still has viewers talking: they decided to say nothing at all.
Why Did Darrin Change On Bewitched Without An Explanation?
A show about witchcraft could easily have written a spell to explain a new face. Bewitched never did. Sargent’s Darrin walked in at the start of the sixth season with the same name and the same job at McMann and Tate, and the series carried on as if he had always been there. That season also brought a new baby, Adam, so the household audiences returned to in the fall of 1969 had changed in more ways than one.
Sargent played the part for three seasons, until ABC ended the show in 1972. Some viewers never warmed to the switch, and others barely noticed it, which may be the strongest argument that the producers chose wisely. Erin Murphy, who played Tabitha, was four years old when York left, and she grew up on set with both men as her TV father. You can see what became of the little girl who played Tabitha, and she has talked about both of her Darrins over the years.
For Sargent, the role became the one he was known for. For York, the years after Bewitched were far harder than anyone watching at home knew.
What Became Of Dick York After He Left?
He spent roughly a year and a half in bed, and in 1971 he quit his pain medications cold turkey. His career did not come back. For about a decade, according to Biography.com, his family lived on welfare, unemployment checks and odd jobs, and Pilato told Fox News Digital that the former star of a top-rated sitcom ended up cleaning toilets. Asher wanted to help him with money, Pilato said, but “Dick refused. He refused that help.” York’s only later screen work came in small roles on Simon & Simon and Fantasy Island in the early 1980s.
He and his wife, Joan, whom he married in 1951, settled near Rockford, Michigan. Years of smoking three packs a day had left him with emphysema, and by 1989 he was housebound and breathing from an oxygen tank. Even so, he started a charity called Acting for Life from his bed, working the telephone to get government-stockpiled food, clothing and bedding to homeless people, according to his UPI obituary. Dick York died on February 20, 1992, at Blodgett Hospital in Grand Rapids. He was 63, and he left behind Joan, five children and 13 grandchildren.
Sargent died of prostate cancer on July 8, 1994, at 64. “He was a great friend, and I will miss his love, his sense of humor and his remarkable courage,” Montgomery said, as reported by The Seattle Times. York, for his part, never sounded bitter about the role that slipped away from him. Asked in 1989 about the charity he was running from a sickbed, he told the Los Angeles Times, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful if one old has-been actor with a hose up his nose could help millions of people?”
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