You`d walk in at 6 in the morning, looking as if you`d just rolled out of bed, and there they were: Elizabeth Taylor, June Allyson, Jane Powell, Janet Leigh, Hedy Lamarr, Grace Kelly, Pier Angeli, Leslie Caron, Ann Miller, Cyd Charisse, Kathryn Grayson, Lana Turner, Ava Gardner, Greer Garson. It was an amazing sight, and very interesting to see that at that hour, after a night of sleep, they all looked like me. . . . It was an intense 2 1/2 hours (in makeup). We came en masse like so many working girls of all ages, often bedraggled, no eyebrows, the hair awful, no face, and we were sent out as THEY, the miraculous-looking MGM stars.
From ”Debbie-My Life,” by Debbie Reynolds.
As one of the last actresses to be trained in the old Hollywood star system, Debbie Reynolds always has walked a fragile line between appearance and reality. Beloved during the mid-`50s as America`s cute-as-a-button sweetheart, Reynolds managed to give the public what it wanted, even while enduring one personal nightmare after another. Now life is going smoothly for Reynolds, and it has her worried.
In town to promote her autobiography and upcoming appearance at Aurora`s Paramount Arts Center on Friday, a perfectly-coiffed, barefoot Reynolds leads a visitor past a table strewn with cosmetics and sits down on the hotel couch. Dressed in a sensibly elegant pants suit and pumpkin colored scarf, Reynolds props a pillow beneath one of her elbows, and explains, with just a trace of Mid-Atlantic accent:
”I think of my life as always sort of drama-but there is a calm now, and that terrifies me. I`m really happy, my marriage (to Virginia businessman Richard Hamlett) is good. It`s like just before the earthquake hits.”
Reynolds has a right to anxiety. Her storybook romance to singer Eddie Fisher fell apart in 1956. While the country gasped in dismay, Fisher left Reynolds and their two children to move in with their friend Elizabeth Taylor. After divorcing Fisher, Reynolds says she looked for a father-figure to marry, and thought she found him in multimillionaire shoe mogul Harry Karl.
”I was very young,” Reynolds recalls, ”and I wanted, like a lot of women, a very secure marriage, where the husband is going to take care of you.”
Instead, Karl gambled away not only his own fortune, but $10 million or so of Reynolds` earnings. While Reynolds was out making money in musicals and comedies such as ”The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” ”How the West Was Won,”
”The Tender Trap” and ”The Singing Nun,” Karl was losing it at poker tables. By the time Reynolds discovered what was happening, Karl was $12 million in the hole. When they divorced, Reynolds resolved to pay off her half of the community property debt. ”In my day, if you declared bankruptcy, you were a coward: it was like a sin,” Reynolds says simply.
To pay back the bank, Reynolds took on a grueling schedule of live dates, starring in ”Good Night, Irene” on Broadway and throughout the country. Even then, her luck turned foul when the checks she sent each week to her supposedly blue-chip accounting firm kept vanishing. There were even nights when the girl next door had to sleep in her car.
Today, Reynolds, who finally paid off the debt five years ago, can joke about it all.
”The great white knight never came, so I`m not the eternal optimist anymore. I`m not naive. If I were, I`d have to be a moron!”
One part of her past Reynolds still has fond memories of is her early tenure at MGM studios.
”I think the star system should come back. I think it was really good at creating a lot of talent.”
When she was 16, Reynolds was put under contract to MGM after being spotted at a Miss Burbank beauty contest.
”I had no money, and they paid you to train you,” Reynolds says. The studio changed her name from Mary Francis to Debbie, and forced a reluctant Gene Kelly to use her as his costar in ”Singin` in the Rain.”
Kelly drove the ingenue to the brink of collapse in preparing her for the dance sequences, and the two have rarely spoken since, but on screen, the chemistry was magic. The film, one of the last great Hollywood musicals, also typecast Reynolds for the rest of her career as a singing, dancing, comedic actress.
Reynolds recalls, ”When they threw Louis B. Mayer out and MGM started doing message pictures, it was the end of musical comedy. I was never able to make that transition into dramatic films.
”When your name is Debbie, and you`ve done a record called `Tammy,` they won`t let you grow up.
”People think of my life as a play thing, almost like I was `Tweety Bird,` ” she adds with a laugh. ”I wrote this book because I wanted to be regarded as an adult who really did survive a lot.”
Reynolds pours a cup of tea for herself and, as comfortable as a cat, slides down to the floor before continuing:
”A lot of actors today feel the public does not own them. They don`t dress up in public, as we were raised to do. Like Carrie (Reynolds` daughter, actress/author Carrie Fisher) is Miss Casual. She`ll come in looking a certain way, and I`ll say, `I know you have a cuter outfit than that.`
”She`ll say `Mother, who cares!` And she hates if I get dressed up. She says, `Mother, why can`t you wear something simple?` I say, `Because I should look, for my public, like they want me to look, the way they would like to look, like a star.”
Reynolds admits one area where maintaining the star image can be a pain: ”The hardest thing I have ever had to do is learn to eat in public. Everyone`s staring at you, a hot dog is dripping down your chin, and that`s when the paparazzi guy is going to shoot your picture. Or you want to pick your nose-you can`t. You just have to let it itch. It`s not wonderful, that side of it.”
Though she hasn`t made a movie for several years, Reynolds has kept busy with her exercise videos, which she says she made because ”I couldn`t do the others, they were so difficult. Now, Jane Fonda has about 12-`Now we walk, now we crawl, now we talk, now we burp.` I mean, there`s a whole library. But mine is really for out-of-shape people.”
Reynolds has some serious working out to do after the holidays, to prepare for what she says will be her last public performance: a yearlong revival of ”The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”
”I`m 56,” Reynolds says, with no apparent sentimentality. ”One more year, and that`s it.”
Once her performing days are over, Reynolds hopes to get her long-awaited Hollywood Museum off the ground. She has been buying costumes, props and furniture from old movies since 1970, when the major studios began auctioning their properties, and now has one of the world`s largest collections of Hollywood memorabilia.
Unlike the Moving Images Museum in New York, which is a for-profit business, Reynolds would like to see her museum function as ”a university to train new designers and artists. It should also be wonderful fun. Not stuffed people and boring and wax-it can`t be that. That`s my last dream, then I`m out of dreams.”
One final question: Does she forgive Eddie?
”Yes,” Reynolds replies without hesitation. ”It`s like the old line,
`Frankly, my dear, I don`t give a damn.` It`s in the past, it`s over, I wish him well. The children look after him, but there`s no reason I have to.”
