Meeting Debbie Reynolds

Last Thursday I spent ninety minutes with Debbie Reynolds, who, at 5’1″ seems smaller than she appeared on the big screen in Singing in the Rain and who, at age 79, is still larger than life. Ms. Reynolds is among the last of a dying breed, a true, old Hollywood star. She came up when the studio system ruled and elevated small-town girls like herself to international acclaim, and she carries herself with the same combination of insouciance and Hollywood royalty that made her famous so many years ago.

I first met her because I needed to interview her for a book project I’m working on, the memoirs of an even older Hollywood star: watch this space for information about that book a few months from now. Ms. Reynolds is and has been among the closest friends of that Hollywood icon for more than sixty years.

She lives in a family compound in the canyons north of Beverly Hills, in a smallish house surrounded by memorabilia and memories, Harold Lloyd’s player piano, autographed portraits of all the stars she knew and loved, gowns from Hollywood films of the 1930s, and sharp memories of an era that exists no longer. She even had her Girl Scout merit badge sash, which had more merit badges than anything I’d ever seen.

“Whenever I do anything,” she explained, “I do it to the absolute best of my ability. Also, back then, if you sold Girl Scout cookies, you kept two cents for every box, and if you sold enough boxes, you went to summer camp. That’s how I got to go to camp.”

“I’m a retired star,” she said, evoking in my mind thoughts of a kinder, gentler Norma Desmond.

“There’s no such thing as a retired star,” I said.

She turned quickly.

“You’re right,” she said. “The industry retired.”

Ms. Reynolds has little use for today’s films, or for that matter, today’s culture of promiscuity, young women with tattoos, and expletives taking the place of well-written film dialogue. She’s a small-town Texas girl at heart, raised in the Church of the Nazarene, a branch of Christianity that forbade its members even to see movies. Her own father never saw Singing in the Rain, because their church didn’t allow it.

How did she become a movie star? Debbie entered the Miss Burbank of 1948 contest and won it, wearing a skimpy bathing suit, which she showed me, and lip-synching and acting in a silly way to a popular song of the day. An MGM talent scout, yes, the studios had real, live talent scouts back then, witnessed her victorious performance and invited her to Hollywood.

Debbie Reynolds was 17 when she made Singing in the Rain. She slept in her studio dressing room, which she described as only slightly larger than the couch she was sitting on as we spoke, because her family was too poor for her to afford a car, and she would have had to leave Burbank at 3:00 in the morning to take a series of busses to get her to Warner’s lot in time for the morning call.

“I felt safe,” she said. “The guards knew I was sleeping up there, on the floor of my little dressing room. I had nowhere else to go.”

In many ways, she says, she was surprised as much as anyone by her own stardom. She was smaller and lacking in sex appeal compared with the Lana Turners and the Lauren Bacalls, the icons of the era who became her close friends. She had never danced before Singing in the Rain, and she had never kissed, either.

“I was taking ballet and acting,” she recalled. “I had no interest in boys, and I certainly didn’t want to be taking a class in kissing.”

Her dates, such as they were, ended with her father standing in silhouette behind the door of the small house in Burbank to which they’d moved when she was seven, patiently or not so patiently waiting for her date to say goodnight. Her father, all of 5’7″, stood there behind the door with a baseball bat, an unspoken invitation for the boy to get the heck off their porch, which he invariably would, and quickly. In fact, when it came time for the last scene of Singing in the Rain, where Gene Kelly kisses her in front of the billboard announcing their successful movie, she had never kissed anyone, family members notwithstanding.

She had to be shown how to kiss and be kissed, she recalls, and I won’t tell that entire story, because I don’t want to steal the thunder of the Hollywood legend whose memoir I am currently writing. Instead, that legend gave her a lesson, she said it took just a few minutes, and he claims that it went on for hours in how to kiss. Thus she was ready, or so she thought, for the moment when Gene Kelly would embrace her. To her shock and horror, Kelly not only kissed her once the cameras rolled, but jammed his tongue down her throat, which she had never expected or heard of. Disgusted, and outraged, she backed off, gagged, shrieked, and ran crying all the way to her dressing room.

Production halted until someone could coax her back to the set. She says that if you take a look at the last scene of the film, you’ll see a mightily annoyed Gene Kelly giving her the tiniest of unromantic, closed-mouth smooches at what should have been the happy triumph of a couple over all manner of Hollywood adversity.

Debbie Reynolds is 79, the survivor of three marriages, and four business managers who stole from her, by her account, $100 million. She recently sold a large amount of memorabilia for $12 million and is preparing a second sale, which saddens her, because she doesn’t like to surrender her memories, and certainly not for cash. Ms. Reynolds and the family grew up poor, and while other actresses were wearing beautiful dresses, she shopped at the Salvation Army and wore a sweatshirt that had her real name, Frannie, stenciled across the front. Maybe that’s why she still gives the sense of not taking herself, nor the whole enterprise that has been her career, overly seriously. Make that seriously, but not too seriously.

She could not have been a more gracious host, even singing a few bars from “Good Morning” when I told her how much my 11-year-old daughter loved the film. “Children love the songs from Singing in the Rain because they’re so easy to sing,” she explained, as she briefly launched into the song. The voice is still there, the eyes are still there, the memories are still there. And for ninety minutes, I had the incredible privilege of being there as well.

The following Sunday, she appeared at the Cerritos Center For The Arts, where she applauded her audience, which included my mother, my wife, my 11-year-old daughter, and myself, for “coming to see Debbie while she’s still alive.”  I urge you to do likewise!