Stage and screen legend returns to valley stage
BY CATHERINE BILLEY
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Debbie Reynolds isn’t one to hold back in her performances. Variety Magazine has said that she continues to display bundles of showmanship in a time when it’s often the missing ingredient.She laughed at this in a recent telephone interview. “The exciting thing about being on the stage is just that – being on the stage,” she said. "When I walk out, I feel loved…We’re a bunch of friends together."
Reynolds will be opening her one-woman show of music and comedy on July 9 at North Hollywood’s El Portal Theatre, not far from where she grew up in Burbank.
"The El Portal is very sentimental for me. I worked there last year for fun," she said. "This time I’m going to do my acts, which I do 42 weeks a year. I travel on the road and go everywhere. I’m sort of like the female George Burns," she added. "But I don’t expect to sell out. That’s not why I’m going into there. I just think it will be fun. Those that can will come and see me and those that want to will bring their children. I have a very clean show…a bit bawdy, a bit long, but a lot of good jokes and film clips and songs. I’m a vaudevillian."
Reynolds’ performance career began even before two Warner Bros. talent scouts discovered her at age 16 in the 1948 Miss Burbank beauty contest and signed her onto an immediate contract.
"I used to do little skits for the Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Elks Clubs and Junior Chambers of Commerce all over Burbank," she said. "I just did it because I’m a big ham… and I still am."
When not charging a penny per person to perform at her house on Evergreen Street, she was cycling to the El Portal Movie Palace on Lankershim Boulevard for the cartoons, double-features and musicals featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers that played in the 40s. "They didn’t make you leave," she said of the theatre in those days. "If you paid a dime, you could stay all day. So I would."
Originally built in 1926 as a vaudeville and silent movie theatre, the El Portal was renovated in the late 1990s and reopened in 2000.
Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds and Gene Kelly in Singin’ In the Rain.
Reynolds is among the few working actors today that hail from MGM’s so-called golden age of film. Asked whether she agrees that showmanship has eluded modern performances, she said the training opportunities that existed in her day are gone.
“When I was first at MGM Studios, they sent me out to play the Lowes Theatres in Chicago and New York. I was 17 and I did five shows a day,” she said. "I was awful, I’m sure, but I got a lot of experience. Then I was sent to do summer stock."
Young people today miss that kind of experience, she said, and must take the initiative to work in community theaters for similar training.
"The most creative era was the beginning of it all, wasn’t it?" she mused. "Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and the guys who really started it."
Now, she said, it’s one individual such as Tom Cruise buying a project to do for him or herself – not like the studio era, when films were made for everybody. "That ended in 1948 with the advent of television, because television took over that role of C movies and B movies and sitcoms and family films."
Reynolds was one of the top ten box-office stars of 1959 when her first husband, Eddie Fisher, left her for the newly widowed Elizabeth Taylor. It was the scandal of the day, similar to recent headlines made in the Aniston-Pitt-Jolie triangle.
"Yes," Reynolds said with gracious resignation, as if she has been asked the question many times, "Elizabeth and I are friends."
But she has nothing to do with Fisher, who now lives in San Francisco. "He was a very poor father and I don’t have any respect for that," she said.
Debbie with children, Carrie and Todd Fisher.
Their children, Carrie and Todd, have Hollywood careers of their own. Today, Reynolds lives on a Beverly Hills property with Carrie Fisher and granddaughter Billie Catherine. She said she won’t be making any more “mistakes” with husbands, after two more marriages ended disastrously."The unhappiness that comes from it is…not worth it," she said. "You want to be happy in life, you have this one life that we know of, and so you don’t want to go jumping off the bridge every day."
Though she lives on the Westside now, she has enduring roots in the Valley. "I’m so familiar with both sides of the fence," she said, "I could be a cab driver."
After a difficult time in the 1970s, when her second husband, Harry Karl, lost all of their money and homes, she was "frantic" to find a place to live and "wanted to be in the Valley." She still owns the "darling" old home she purchased at that time on La Maida near Colfax Avenue. Her brother, a longtime bachelor, lives there now.
Reynolds’ mother passed away a few years ago, and she regrets selling her Valley home, which could have been used as a guest house. "I’ve made a lot of wrong decisions,” she said, “but usually about husbands, not about property."
Luckily, she made many memorable decisions when it came to her films, some of her favorites being The Unsinkable Molly Brown and How the West Was Won. Though she enjoyed making Mother with Albert Brooks in 1996, she said she is nothing like the character she played. "I’m not domesticated. I’m very show-business."
Crowned Miss Burbank at age 16 in 1948.
Her civic involvement includes ardent support of the Girl Scouts of America. “Girl Scouts afforded young girls from poor families – which I was – a chance to go camping, see the out-of-doors, go to some area that didn’t require money,” she said.
She used some of the money she made at age 19 on Singin’ in the Rain to build a swimming pool at her own local Camp Lakota. She has also been generously active with the Thalians Club, a children’s mental health charity organization at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles, for over 30 years.
But her greatest passion has been to found a Hollywood Motion Picture Museum, which is now being built in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.
A self-described preservationist and historian, Reynolds’ collection of 4,000 movie costumes, cars, and pieces of furniture includes the dress that Greta Garbo wore in Camille, a pair of Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from Wizard of Oz, and Marilyn Monroe’s famously windswept white dress from The Seven Year Itch.
"It goes all the way back to the original beginning, to the silent screen," she said. When silent screen legend Mary Pickford died, Reynolds “bought practically her whole collection.”
Her vision for the museum, which is being constructed ten minutes from Dolly Parton’s house, has always been very clear. "The idea is to create the famous moment from an Oscar-winning film," she said. "It’s a big huge movie screen and then the stage revolves and you then see the real costumes and the real props." She emphasized that seeing the film is the most important thing: "The preservation of the film."
She had hoped the museum would be located on Cahuenga near Hollywood Boulevard, but numerous obstacles turned her sights elsewhere. "I’m not George Lucas, I’m not Spielberg," she said. "I don’t have millions and I couldn’t do it. It had to be Tennessee."
She said if she can get it done in her lifetime, "I’ll be very happy."
Debbie Reynolds will appear at the El Portal Theatre July 9-20, 2008. For tickets and info: (818) 508-4200 www.elportaltheatre.com
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Also check out Debbie's website!
And we all remember 'Tammy'!
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Singing in the Rain 'Good Morning!'
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Debbie on 'What's My Line' - this was before she married Eddie Fisher
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July 5, 2008 UPDATE
Received this email from Jeanne Barron Aikman today - we both went to Miller and my mom was our Brownie leader - ahhh memory lane - THANKS JEANNE!
Greetings Cathy,
Just want to let you know I love the latest postings on your blog. The film clip from Tammy was incredible. I too remember the visit Debbie Reynolds made to Mc Cambridge Park to see all of us Brownies and Girl Scouts. I even remember sitting on her lap and giving her a kiss on her cheek. She was always an inspiration to me. I'll never forget the day I came home from school and my dad had a huge grin on his face. He had brought home something special for me. I couldn't figure it out. But, later when I went to practice the piano, a brand new copy of the sheet music for Tammy was waiting for me. I was sooo excited and jumped for joy. He loved those kind of surprises. He also new how much I loved singing along to music I played. Thanks for rekindling the memories. We all are so fortunate to have lived through those special years.
I might be making a road trip north to Oregon this August and would love to stop by for a visit. Let's stay in touch.
Love,
jeanne
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7/11/2008 UPDATE
THEATER REVIEW
Debbie Reynolds sings, jokes, does impressions -- and shows a little leg
By Daryl H. Miller, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
July 12, 2008
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Mary Frances Reynolds is back in the old neighborhood.
You know her as Debbie Reynolds. That's the name given to her when, as a 16-year-old, she was first under studio contract. Talent scouts had spotted her in the Miss Burbank beauty contest, which she'd entered despite being a tomboy whose most distinguishing talent was an ability to lip-sync to Betty Hutton records.
For two weeks, Reynolds is performing at El Portal Theatre in North Hollywood, just blocks from her old family home in Burbank. As a kid, she rode her bike to the theater to see movies. Now she's on its stage with a show road-tested through years of nightclub dates and tours. What she presents is, essentially, a variety act: a few songs, a handful of impersonations and rather too many salty-tongued wisecracks.
She gives the audience all she's got, and if, at 76, neither her voice nor her body is as supple as they once were, she allows no one a chance to disparage her before doing it herself. Referring to the leg on display through a floor-to-thigh slit in her gold sequined gown, she cracked at Wednesday's opening that she reveals "just the one leg, because everything else is shot." Shortly thereafter, she exhorted musical director/keyboardist Joey Singer and percussionist Gerry Genuario to launch into the second song "before I get tired."
She gibes her ex-husbands and, in what seems a ploy to counter whatever notions you might have gleaned from "Postcards From the Edge," she displays happy home movies of children Carrie and Todd Fisher. Reminiscences from the making of such movies as "Singin' in the Rain," "Tammy and the Bachelor" or "The Unsinkable Molly Brown" are in short supply, however.
The closest she comes is to show a series of film clips, singing along with her younger self up on the screen and dryly observing, "Can't do that today," while watching Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor and herself dance up and down stairs and tumble over couches in "Singin' in the Rain's" "Good Morning" number.
Her song selections are mostly in the vein of such standards as "From This Moment On" and "That's Life," but Reynolds pulls a surprise when she turns to the country tune "Grandpa," recorded by the Judds, which sits nicely in lower part of her amber-honey singing voice. Only amid the too-infrequent songs does she let real feeling slip past her life-hardened, showbiz-honed exterior. The years melt away and, wow, there it is: that sweet, unguarded smile we fell in love with on the big screen.
daryl.miller@latimes.com
July 24, 2008 UPDATE
Just found this cool youtube video photo tribute to Debbie - listen to her sing 'You're the Cream in my Coffee'
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Ms. Reynolds went to Burbank High School, not Burroughs.
ReplyDeleteActually I recently discovered she went to both schools and graduated from Burroughs in 1950, the first class of the then new high school. She & her brother were friends of my cousins 😃
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