Marianne Gray talks to Debbie Reynolds, one of the last of Hollywood’s Golden Era
Debbie Reynolds is the first to admit she’s no longer Tammy. At 78, she’s more like the Unsinkable Molly Brown as she tours Britain this month in her one-woman show, Alive and Fabulous.
‘You people in England probably think I died years ago but I’m still kicking,’ she says, laughing. ‘I know that a lot of young people don’t know who I am unless they’ve noticed me as Grace’s mother, Bobbi Adler, in the sitcom Will & Grace, but I’ve never stopped working. I’m an Aries and it’s in my nature to be a performer.
‘I’ve worked for 62 years and the only change is that nowadays I only do one show a day, not two or three like I did in the old days,’ she tells me. ‘I’d wither away and die if I wasn’t working. When I kick the bucket they’re going to stuff me like Trigger [Roy Rogers’s horse] and put me in a museum. If you put a quarter in my mouth I’ll sing you “Tammy”. I just love performing!’
Her second husband said of her: ‘Debbie is always on. Every time the fridge door opens and the light goes on, she takes a bow and does 20 minutes.’ I run the story past her and she shrieks with delight.
‘Oh, that’s an old joke. All my friends say, “She’ll perform anywhere,” and it’s true. People like me and Judy Garland and Ethel Merman, all those who have worked in nightclubs, we’re used to performing. Give us a party or a piano and we’re off.’
In her show, which she describes as a full-on energy show, she sings to clips of films like Singin’ in the Rain and Tammy and the Bachelor, dances to a medley of 1940s songs, reminisces in front of MGM movie-excerpts and does impressions of friends like Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn, Barbra Streisand, Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart and all the Gabors, especially Zsa Zsa, who is aunt to heiress-socialite Paris Hilton, and gives her troubled niece advice on how to talk to policemen and stay out of jail.
‘My life has been so exciting and in the show I tell true stories, even bad ones! It’s 35 years since I last performed in London. In 1974 I played at the London Palladium. I’d come hot from Vegas. Carrie [daughter actress/writer Carrie Fisher] was 16 and singing in the show. My mother and father and my son [Todd Fisher] were also here and we were all staying at the Savoy. We loved it. One reviewer said, “She is the gold of Vaudeville and she brought us the platinum”.’
Reynolds is one of the last of the Golden Era of Hollywood professionals. Energetic, exuberant, tiny (5ft ½in), trim (115lbs) and still cute-looking, she has a lot of history behind her; three husbands: Eddie Fisher, who left her for her friend Elizabeth Taylor (‘Elizabeth could have any man she wanted — and she wanted mine’), millionaire businessman Harry Karl, who gambled away his and her money and left her with the debts (‘he was 27 years older than me’), and property man Richard Hamlett (‘he was younger than me’), with whom she bought a small hotel and casino in Las Vegas, which failed and forced her into bankruptcy.
‘I was a fool for love and I married idiots. I thought when a man said he loved me, he meant it. I don’t have good taste in men and they got all my money. Anyway, now Eddie is senile, the second one is deceased and the third is just another ordinary, mean man. And I’m still here and I still have my fabulous life.
‘I live down the garden from Carrie and next door to my brother, who I adore. My son is working with me on a project. I see my daughter and my granddaughter [Carrie’s daughter, Billie, 17] every day when I am home and not on tour or in Vegas. What else do I need? A husband?’
Home is a Spanish mission-style house in Beverly Hills. There’s no gym as she says she doesn’t need to keep fit as she has an indoor pool. Set around a courtyard, her house contains some marvellous antiques, including a Rodin statue and a Toulouse-Lautrec poster. Relaxing in her favourite room with its soft pale-green walls lined with books, her feet on a Persian rug given her by the last Shah of Persia when she sang at his wedding, and at her side her ‘fancy’ white dog, Dwight, whose breed she can’t remember (‘Jane Fonda has two of them’), she is not planning to retire, ever.
‘I don’t see why I should. I always had great legs and great tits and they haven’t fallen — yet — so why stop? As long as they sell the dye, I will be blonde for ever. I only look in the mirror when I am getting ready to go out and I try to look as pretty as I can possibly look and take advantage of what’s left.
‘So many of my friends have passed away — Marilyn, Judy, Howard Keel, Eva Gabor, Esther Williams, Gregory Peck, Jack Lemmon, Kathryn Grayson, Groucho Marx. They all came to my house and my kids grew up with them around. They were the good old days and we had a fantastic time.
‘At Carrie’s house I sometimes meet the younger-generation Hollywood actors, like Johnny Depp, who is adorable. But mainly, when I’m home, I get together with friends like Shirley [MacLaine] and Elizabeth [Taylor] — we made up many years ago — and schoolfriends, normal folk that I know from my childhood in Texas.’
Reynolds was born in El Paso, into a strict Nazarene family, the daughter of a carpenter for the Southern Pacific Railroad. The family moved to Burbank, California, and while she was still only 16 and at high school she won the Miss Burbank Beauty Contest, a contract with MGM and changed her name from Mary Frances to Debbie. As a perky, wholesome girl-next-door type of actress, she starred mostly in musicals and got to dance with both Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly. Best Actress Oscar-nominated for Molly Brown in 1964, she is still clearly starstruck with Hollywood.
‘I’m a movie-oholic. I have been collecting Hollywood memorabilia for decades and have thousands of costumes, many from the silent-screen period. I’ve got Carmen Miranda’s turbans, John Wayne’s guns, Marilyn Monroe’s dress from The Seven Year Itch and Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz. The collection has moved around a lot and now Todd and I are trying to create a museum for it by Dolly Parton’s Dollywood Museum near Nashville. A final resting place.’
Since she was 17 she has been involved in the Thalians Club, which is made up mainly of film industry people and of which she is president. ‘At the beginning we performers used to charge people to come to our parties and then it grew and grew. We have since raised $90 million, enough to build a clinic for people with mental problems in the grounds of the Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles.’
When I ask her what life has taught her, she replies, smart as a button: ‘To be patient and get through the tough times — there is always light at the end of the tunnel. You just gotta tough it out.’
Debbie Reynolds’s Alive and Fabulous is visiting 14 venues in April and is at the Apollo Theatre, London, from 28 April to 9 May. More details at www.debbiereynolds.co.uk
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