She’s Lived on the Edge and Survived

Actress Debbie Reynolds is very much in the public eye these days. “Postcards From the Edge”--a film made from the partly autobiographical novel by her daughter, Carrie Fisher--is playing at a number of Orange County theaters, and Reynolds plans to visit here early in November as the centerpiece of a fund-raiser for the candidacy of Marian Bergeson (R-Newport Beach) for the office of lieutenant governor of California.

There’s been a lot of acrobatic backing-and-filling by both Fisher and her mother to make it clear that the boozy, sometimes self-righteous character played by Shirley MacLaine in “Postcards From the Edge” is not drawn from Debbie Reynolds. All of this has brought back in rather vivid Technicolor a surrealistic evening I spent with Reynolds more than a decade ago, when I was covering Hollywood for several national magazines.

I did half a dozen “scrapbooks” of entertainment luminaries (Bob Hope, John Wayne, Lucille Ball, among others) in which I collected a pile of personal photographs from a mixture of sources, then flashed the pictures on the people I was writing about. They invariably responded with a warmth and depth that probably couldn’t have been tapped in any other way.

I did one of these scrapbook articles on Debbie Reynolds. In the process, I hung out with her while she was putting together a nightclub act in a Los Angeles rehearsal hall and also at the house she shared with Harry Karl.

But the evening with her that came vividly to mind when I saw “Postcards From the Edge” took place in Reno. I had already been through the photographs with her, and I had gone to Reno to watch the nightclub act I had seen evolve in rehearsal.

I watched her work the audience at a dinner show and marveled at the waves of love that came back to her. She kissed bald men and called them Charley and their wives Mary, and she walked across table-tops talking to children and picking up names to use later in her act. And then she went back to the stage to work--singing, clowning, dancing, mimicking. God, how she worked.

Afterward, I picked my way through a cluttered backstage, past a hard-eyed man I later discovered was her bodyguard, into a neoplastic dressing room where she had changed to a robe and was sipping consomme. I remember her as tiny and still Dresden-pretty but also surprisingly tough, with authority in her voice and hard lines around her eyes when she thought on certain things.

After two hours of talk, she got back into her sequined dress--”boobs up, stomach in” she told herself--for the midnight show and invited me to wait in her dressing room for more talk.

She was back at 1:15, and three hours later, Debbie Reynolds--unwinding over a now-dead bottle of wine and chain-smoking furiously--was still going strong. The theater had long since emptied out and the bodyguard was dozing on a chair outside her dressing room. And although I was totally wiped out, I had seen some layers peeled back on the last of the Girl Scouts in the high-octane world of cabaret entertainment.

I still have my notes of that conversation, although I ran out of tape about 2 o’clock, and after that the notes are sketchy because we were two people talking over a bottle of wine. And her vulnerability, so carefully protected most of the time, had been allowed to emerge cautiously and finally to sit in almost casually on our conversation.

She told me about the poverty of her childhood and adolescence, about selling awesome amounts of Girl Scout cookies by walking five miles to the neighborhood in which Bing Crosby and Bob Hope lived, about slugging her only date in high school when he tried to kiss her, about her shock at winning a Miss Burbank contest (she just wanted to be a gym teacher), which got her a movie contract when she was 16.

She insisted that no studio mogul ever made sexual demands on her (“maybe I wasn’t sexy enough”) and still feels the pain of the 18-hour rehearsal days when she had to hold her own with Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor in “Singin’ in the Rain.”

When the studio gave her “vitamins” to keep up her strength, her parents stopped it. “They were vitamins all right,” she told me, “with speed in them. They already had Judy Garland hooked, and they would have had me if my parents hadn’t stepped in.”

Early in the evening, she talked almost dispassionately about her marriage to Eddie Fisher and the pain of her humiliation when he left her with two small children for Elizabeth Taylor. She married a shoe tycoon named Harry Karl on the rebound because he was “wise and strong and kind,” and she ended up raising his children and then losing her savings and working a Herculean schedule to pay off his gambling debts after she divorced him.

She tried TV first, but quit a series rather than work for a cigarette sponsor (partly because she was addicted to smoking, herself). Then she resurrected an old chestnut of a show called Irene and made it work, before turning to nightclubs, which was where I found her in Reno.

Even early that evening, her talk was straight, but only after the theater emptied and the wine took hold did she allow some of the bitterness and anger she felt into the conversation.

“My kids have gone through it all with me,” she said “I’ve never shielded them. They were on the road with me all during Irene and saw their mother go to 96 pounds. They didn’t think I’d make it, but I told them I would--and I did. They were my support. Without the children, I don’t think I’d have wanted to make it. But if I’d given up, where would they have been? Their father certainly wouldn’t have taken them. What kind of example has he been?”

She admitted some head-to-head confrontations with Carrie when Reynolds offered advice that often wasn’t sought. She recalled telling Carrie when she took off with Gucci luggage on her first acting assignment: “It’s everything you told me you didn’t want. You said you were leaving here because all your friends were Beverly Hills Gucci Pucci. So remember that line--and take my speckled black luggage and be understated for a change.”

She told me about other, similar, incidents that seem to provide an undertone for “Postcards From the Edge.”

This is caught most powerfully in the movie when the daughter (played by Meryl Streep) is asked to sing at a party, and when she finishes, she throws the spotlight to her mother, an aging actress. The crowd cheers as MacLaine sits on the piano, hikes up her skirt to show off some fine legs, and sings Stephen Sondheim’s “I’m Still Here” from Follies :

Good times and bum time, I’ve seen ‘em all, and my dear,

I’m still here.

Plush velvet sometimes, sometimes just pretzels and beer,

But I’m still here.

I’ve stuffed the dailies in my shoes, strummed ukuleles,

Sung the blues,

Seen all my dreams disappear, but I’m here.

Black sable one day, next day it goes into hock,

But I’m still here.

Top billing Monday, Tuesday you’re touring in stock,

But I’m here.

First you’re another sloe-eyed vamp, then someone’s mother,

Then you’re camp,

Still someone said, “She’s sincere,” so I’m here.

That had to be written for Debbie Reynolds.

As dawn began to break over the Nevada hills behind Reno that morning 13 years ago, I wrote down Debbie Reynolds’ parting words: “Success can either destroy you or make you a better person. But you have to be very strong. If you don’t have your own inner strength, you can’t make it. You just can’t. You go insane or become a drunk or get on pills and drugs. I watched them all. I was there. But I was never chewed up by it.

“I’m still doing what I’ve always done, only more so. I think it’s just self-will, self-determination. My parents were like that. So is Carrie. I never want to be poor again. So now I’m 45 and I don’t have $20,000. You think I haven’t learned the hard way? I’ve lived it. But I want to survive. I’m going to survive.”

Prophetic words from a tough Girl Scout. I haven’t talked to her since that night in Reno, but I think I saw a lot of Debbie Reynolds in “Postcards From the Edge.”

I’d like to add a small clarification to my column of Sept. 28 about the plight of the Grove Shakespeare Festival. I quoted some remarks of director David Herman that I said were made before the Garden Grove City Council when they were actually delivered at a meeting of festival supporters that followed the council session.

There were also some semantic complaints from Councilman Raymond T. Littrell (who was not identified in my column). He said that funds were denied, not withdrawn, that the denial of funds didn’t directly force the company to close down, and that his comment about Garden Grove being a hard-hat community was made earlier and not at the meeting in question.