Still sailing through the years
To be a fly on the wall the night Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor tucked into a pumpkin pie and deep-dished their mutual ex-husband, Eddie Fisher, as they watched The Last Samurai!
Unsinkable
A Memoir
By Debbie Reynolds
and Dorian Hannaway
William Morrow. 306 pp. $28.99
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Reviewed by Carrie Rickey
To be a fly on the wall the night Debbie Reynolds and Elizabeth Taylor tucked into a pumpkin pie and deep-dished their mutual ex-husband, Eddie Fisher, as they watched The Last Samurai!
Unsinkable, Reynolds' second memoir in 25 years, includes such vignettes. She recalls from a polite distance prompting her daughter, actress and writer Carrie Fisher, to describe it on the dust-jacket as a "tell-some." Though Reynolds, a clown in the body of an octogenarian Girl Scout, is not the tell-all type, her tales of an unraveling career and marriage keep the reader in stitches.
It's hard to make the case that Reynolds' new book is essential, but its indefatigable author, 81, certainly is. And not just because in the 1950s, that decade of double whiskeys and double standards, she stood out as the lemonade-sipping, single-standard gal. Whether on screen or off, a teen sensation or Hollywood's dowager princess, Reynolds projects pluck and resilience. Given her choice in husbands, that resiliency - and rueful humor - proves a personal and professional salvation.
Her first memoir shared the saga of Fisher's transit from Reynolds to Taylor, a scandal comparable to Brad Pitt's from Jennifer Aniston to Angelina Jolie. Likewise in that volume, Reynolds retailed her second marriage to shoe retailer Harry Karl, a gentleman whose gambling and self-dealing dissipated her earnings and left the five-foot firecracker an Everest of debt.
This second volume details the comparable financial shenanigans of Richard Hamlett, husband number three, a real estate developer and gambler with a fondness for the game of "deed roulette." According to Reynolds, he backdated the deeds on properties she bought to make it look like he purchased them before their marriage.
The book's first half reads like depositions from a divorce, with Reynolds recounting the various ways Hamlett defrauded her during negotiations to buy and rehab a Las Vegas hotel (sans gaming license) to house her collection of movie memorabilia. He cheated. He lied. When she confronted him, Hamlett beckoned her to the patio of their 16th-floor Vegas apartment to talk things out. She feared he would push her over the railing and make her death look like an accident.
Reynolds punctuates her tales of woe with vaudevillian bada-bing. "I thought I was in love and in a happy marriage. I was partly right. I was in love in a happy marriage while my husband was in love outside our happy marriage."
A funny thing happened while the indefatigable Reynolds tried - and failed - to create a museum for the costumes and props she had bought at backlot auctions in the 1970s. She gave damn good performances in really good movies.
Her daughter's pal Albert Brooks cast her in Mother (1996), an oedipal comedy that mines the roiling geothermal activity beneath the actress' effervescent cool. She was Kevin Kline's mom in Frank Oz's In & Out (1997). Unaware that her son is gay, she plans his nuptials to Joan Cusack: "I need that wedding. I need some beauty and some music and some place cards before I die. It's like heroin." Recently, Reynolds completed the role of Liberace's mother in Steven Soderbergh's Behind the Candelabra, on HBO next month.
In Unsinkable's second, better, half, Reynolds reconsiders her 65-year movie career, film by film, all the better to see her screen evolution from perky teenager to playboy-taming virgin to unflappable wife to passive-aggressive mother. (And all the better to share choice stories about colleagues such as Spencer Tracy, Bette Davis, Gene Kelly, and Glenn Ford).
Preceding this section is "The Life of a Movie Starlet," a high school essay she wrote at the beginning of her career, realistically chronicling the frenetic pace and bottomless patience required of movie work. The essay concludes: "Is it worth it? Yes! It's fun."
That's also a fair assessment of Unsinkable, which takes its name from her 1964 musical about a Titanic survivor, The Unsinkable Molly Brown. A more descriptive title might paraphrase that of her daughter's novel. Call Reynolds' memoir Postcards From the Off-Center.