At MGM I was one of the few actresses who lacked for romance. Hedy Lamarr was one of the busiest gals on the lot. And the Brits were a frisky bunch. All the actors and actresses who came over from England spent a lot of time with each other and the natives. Jean Simmons once had an affair with Richard Burton while her husband, Stewart Granger, slept upstairs in their bedroom. The studio legend was that Burton climbed in their basement window to meet Jean. MGM was buzzing about it.
There were so many handsome men and women thrown into one place to work, it’s no wonder there was a lot of romance in the air regardless of anyone’s marital status. I was never good at this game, so I never really tried to play it.
I was married when I made How the West Was Won. One of my costars was the most adorable, handsome, charming man you could ever hope to meet. George Peppard played my nephew. George was single and dating many women who were more beautiful and sexual than I. He did not seem to be attracted to me, so we became dear, close friends. My fantasy would be to take a step beyond that friendship. I would love to have had the courage to try just a kiss. I was afraid I’d like it too much, and get caught up with a divine-looking man in a situation that could go nowhere. I was very insecure at that time and I remain so. I’m not the kind of woman who can step forward to have a wild love affair just to see if it works. I’d love to have known where that kiss might have led. Would it have been to something more? Could it have been more? Those are the questions. Do I have answers? No, I do not.
Mother and Daddy on their wedding day. She was even more naive than I was when I got married.
If I had been more adventurous, I might have tried to have a romance with Jack Lemmon. What a darling. I would have liked to just hold his hand. But he married Felicia Farr, whom he loved and adored. Even though he dated quite a few ladies, Felicia was the one he chose for his wife.
Plenty of men had made passes at me but most were married at the time. One day I went over to Buddy and Sherry Hackett’s house to pick up Carrie and Todd after school. While our kids played in the next room, Buddy put his hand up my skirt and down my blouse at the same time. I had never had anyone be so rude or as sexually crazy as he was. He thought it was funny. I didn’t. I told him off but I should have slugged him. Maybe I didn’t because the children were so close by.
Glen Campbell once pinned me to the pool table in his rec room. I had gone to his home to rehearse a number we were doing at a Thalians gala. Next thing I knew, Glen was on top of me. Always the gymnast, I wiggled out from his grasp and was in my car before he knew it. I adore Glen, but not when he was looking for an afternoon delight. Glen is one of the best musicians ever. He did amazing work on his own as well as with other great musicians. I was so sorry to hear about his Alzheimer’s diagnosis. He has faced it so bravely.
Of the many times I’ve been romantically involved, most are not worth writing home about. But some have been with very nice men—temporarily.
ANCHORS AWEIGH
Donna Reed was one of my best friends from MGM. Most famous now for her role as Mary Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life opposite Jimmy Stewart, she won an Academy Award for her portrayal of Lorene Burke in From Here to Eternity. Donna, Janet Leigh, and I were very close to our teacher and mentor at the studio, Lillian Burns Sidney. The three of us worked hard to help Lillian put her life together after George Sidney left her.
Donna’s third husband, Grover Asmus, was a lovely man. They were married for twelve years or so before Donna died in 1986. Grover was a lifer in the military, having graduated from West Point in 1946. He was in the Korean War for several years. Afterward he was stationed all around the world. He became fluent in French while serving in France as an aide to General Charles D. Palmer near Versailles. In the early 1970s he became the senior aide to General Omar Bradley, even doing some consulting on the movie Patton.
After Donna died, Grover and I stayed friendly. When I was invited to the Palm Springs Film Festival one year, I asked him to go with me as my escort. We began dating and after a while we became romantically involved for about a year.
My high school friend Paula Kent Meehan invited us to go on a cruise of the Mediterranean with her and her then-husband, John Meehan. Paula was a brilliant businesswoman who cofounded the Redken hair-care company. Bob and Margie Petersen were also on that trip. We sailed all over the south of France along the Côte d’Azur in Paula’s yacht, The Dreamcatcher.
I preferred to have my own room on board, close to Grover but not too close. Paula insisted that Grover and I occupy the suite on top of the ship, saying she didn’t have space for us to be separated. So we were together. Grover stayed up later than I did one evening and returned to our room very drunk. He frightened me. So I ordered him out, telling him he’d have to bunk somewhere else on the ship. He was very upset about that. He went outside and down the stairs to the main deck.
There he decided to jump overboard. I heard the splash and went to wake up Paula. She woke up her husband, who woke up the captain. The captain woke up the crew, who went down to the wharf to yank Grover out of the drink. Luckily, we weren’t out on the open seas.
Once Grover was safe, they took him ashore. It was clear that he was going to have to get home on his own. After all that experience in the war and his military training, I was sure he would manage.
When I got back to LA, Grover came to my little house in the valley to pick up his luggage. He still had a bruise on his forehead where he’d bumped into the wharf. He was very apologetic.
We never dated again but we remained friends. He was the first man to literally fall overboard for me.
GOLL-EE
Jim Nabors was most famous for his role as Gomer Pyle, first on The Andy Griffith Show, the homespun series that took place in Mayberry, then on his own spinoff, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., which ran from 1964 to 1969. Jim’s catchphrase for his naive character was a surprised “Golly,” which when delivered with his southern accent became “Goll-ee.”
Once Jim was established as a television star, he also became famous for his beautiful singing voice. After Gomer Pyle he had two other weekly series. I appeared more than once with him and we did some wonderful sketches together. He’s just so adorable.
When we performed in Vegas, we would spend a lot of time together. He would be working at the Sands and I’d be at the Riviera, and afterward we would hang out—Jim and I and whoever was working with me. At his hotel, the Sands, they had little private bungalows with a pool. We would sit together soaking and drinking, and talk about our evenings. “How was the audience?” “Did anything funny happen?” It was so much fun. I loved being with Jim.
Jim is one of the dearest friends you could ever have. We did many shows together, which were always the most fun.
So one night I said to him, “Look how much fun we have together. Why don’t we get married?”
“I can’t marry you, Debbie,” he said. “I’m extremely fond of you, but I have a man in my life.”
I was stunned. It never occurred to me that Jim was gay.
“Well, I can’t marry both of you,” I said.
“No, but we’ll always be the best of friends,” he responded.
And so we remained the best of friends.
When Jim worked in Hawaii, he decided to move there. That was where he met the love of his life, Stan Cadwallader, who was a firefighter. Thankfully, the world has changed since then. Jim and Stan were married in 2013 in Seattle after Washington voted to allow same-sex marriages. They’ve been together for almost forty years.
I’m so happy for them.
Can I get a “goll-ee”?
A GUY CALLED ZIGGY
In the 1980s I went to the wedding of one of my girlfriends’ daughters—on my own, because that was how my life was at that moment. I was seated at a table with seven people I didn’t know. One of them was a man named Ziggy Steinberg.
You have to love a name like that.
Ziggy and I started talking, being friendly. He told me he’s a
comedy writer and had worked for great comedians like his buddy David Steinberg (no relation), Lily Tomlin, and George Carlin. He wrote a feature movie for Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder called Another You, as well as television scripts for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Three’s Company, and The Bob Newhart Show.
I certainly was not looking for a new boyfriend, but sometimes you meet someone who is just plain fun. Ziggy and I hit if off. He is so funny. Even though he is fifteen years younger than I am, he’s attractive and his sense of humor made him even more so. We had a short fling.
But my friends were worried.
“Debbie, he’s so young,” they said. “Aren’t you afraid that dating him could be fatal?”
“What the hell,” I said. “If he dies, he dies.”
8
You Got to Have Friends
Being a contract player at a film studio gave me the opportunity to meet so many different, wonderful people. I made it a point to make friends with as many of them as I could. And I continued to do this as my career and my life branched out into other areas. To me, my friends are my family.
TERRY AND HER RICH MEN
Terry Moore was one of my girlfriends in the early days. At the time of this story, she’d already starred in the box-office hits Mighty Joe Young, in 1949, and in 1952’s Come Back, Little Sheba, for which she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. A few years later she was in Peyton Place.
Sometime in 1953 I went with Terry to Las Vegas. We stayed at the Desert Inn. At twenty-four, Terry was recently divorced from her first husband, and one of the most sought-after young women. Terry was a strict Mormon, but somehow seemed to enjoy a freedom that I never quite understood until much later in my life. Nicky Hilton was calling. Howard Hughes was calling. And Bob Neal, the heir to the Maxwell House fortune and Nicky’s closest friend, was calling. These were all playboys, very rich men. That phone rang off the wall. I wondered how she kept them straight.
One night all three men were involved. Terry said to Nicky Hilton, “Come to the lobby and I’ll meet you there.” She also arranged to meet Bob Neal. Then Mr. Hughes called.
“I’ll have to see you later,” she told him. “There’s something I have to do. But Debbie could meet you.”
So I met Mr. Hughes, and he taught me how to play craps. He didn’t play himself, but he taught me. He just stood beside me at the Desert Inn casino while I played for a couple of hours. He was very conservative: we stuck to one-dollar chips. I didn’t win anything, but I did have a wonderful time. Nobody knew who he was because he looked so nondescript in his tan jacket and tennis shoes.
The next night I went out with Bob Neal. I felt I was becoming a Girl About Town. We were driving along the Vegas Strip when Bob warned me he was going to step on the gas because we were being followed.
“What does that mean?” I asked him.
“Howard is having us followed,” he said.
“Howard? Do you mean Howard Hughes?”
“Did you say something to him? Did you go out with him?”
“Terry sent me. She couldn’t go with him last night because she was seeing you and Nicky. So I went with Howard and we played craps.”
“Howard really wants to find out if you’re jailbait, or if you’re doing anything with me,” Bob said. “He likes to know everything.”
(Howard Hughes preferred young girls. He liked cute little things with big breasts. Terry was young and beautiful, a year older than me, and had a great bosom. I’m sure she and Mr. Hughes had an affair to remember. At the time of this story, Howard also had about six girls he kept in an apartment, and then never had anything to do with them. He just wanted them off the market, on call. They all looked alike. He had all these girls stashed away, yet they were never close to him. I believe the only women he ever really loved were Katharine Hepburn and his wife, Jean Peters.)
So Bob drove at top speed down the Las Vegas Strip. It was a wide, untraveled road then, not like it is now. All of a sudden he made a U-turn, spinning the car around, and screeched to a halt, facing the car behind us. He jumped out and went to have words with the men in the other car. Bob was right; it was Howard’s men, keeping tabs on us.
Mr. Hughes had a lot of people working for him but he was the most solitary man. Quiet. He had no friends. He lived on an entire floor at the Desert Inn. And we all know the story about how they called him and asked him to move out because they needed his suite for a high roller.
“That’s ridiculous,” he said. “I’ve lived here for three years. Why would I move?”
So he bought the hotel. He called up the owner and made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. That was the beginning of Mr. Hughes buying up Las Vegas. He bought the El Rancho that week. He bought the Silver Slipper that week. He just started buying up things. It amused him. He also didn’t like the mob. That was his way of getting rid of them: he bought up everything.
One night years later, in the early 1960s, I met Mr. Hughes in the Beverly Hills Hotel, going up in an elevator.
“Hello, Debbie,” he said.
“My goodness, Mr. Hughes,” I said. “Do you live here now instead of the Desert Inn?”
“I go back and forth,” he said. “I have a suite here and a floor in Vegas.”
He was very hard of hearing but he was a sensitive man, a Jimmy Stewart type.
After he died, Terry Moore sued Mr. Hughes’s estate, claiming that they were married on a yacht in international waters off Mexico in 1949, and never divorced. Mr. Hughes had told me that it wasn’t true. He said he’d told Terry they could be married by the captain, which was him. But it wasn’t a real marriage. He’d checked it out, and they were never legally married. He liked intrigue. She was holding up the whole estate, so they paid her off for “an undisclosed sum.” But I believe it was about $700,000. Terry wrote a book about it, The Beauty and the Billionaire. It became a bestseller in 1984.
I found Mr. Hughes to be the most polite, southern Texas kind of gentleman. He was smarter than anyone else I knew. He should have had a happier life.
THE FOURTH GABOR
Before we had the Kardashians, we had the Gabors: Zsa Zsa, Eva, Magda, and their mother, Jolie. Although the Kardashian gang are merely famous for being famous and for a notorious sex tape, some of the Gabors were actually actresses. But then, when the Gabors were young there were no lightbulbs, let alone videotapes.
Once upon a time in a faraway land called Hungary, there lived a beautiful woman named Jolie Gabor, the daughter of wealthy Jewish jewelers who owned a store called the Diamond House. Jolie had three beautiful daughters who grew up believing they were princesses, if not by birth, at least by entitlement. The girls in this family were famous for their jewels and their many marriages. They were always getting married or divorced, slapping policemen, or getting themselves in the headlines for something silly—great material for comics, who never failed to use it. But that came later.
Mother Jolie was a good businesswoman. She moved the family to the US in 1945 and soon opened a jewelry store on Madison Avenue that was very popular in the New York social scene. She used to give big parties at her apartment. Jolie would play the piano and her lover, Edmond, would play the violin. She’d brought Edmond to the US from Hungary. According to her, he was a freedom fighter. Jolie insisted that Eva and Zsa Zsa buy town houses in Manhattan. They later sold them to the government for a huge profit, to be used for housing ambassadors and such. They became very wealthy thanks to their mother’s advice.
Jolie used to call me the Fourth Gabor because I looked like I could be one of her daughters. Also, I could sound like them. At MGM, I’d been able to screen movies to study the techniques of the great actresses. I noticed how Bette Davis held her hands during a scene, how Garbo used her beautiful voice. When I began doing a nightclub act, I used my natural ability to mimic voices to do impressions of famous stars, everyone from Jimmy Stewart to Zsa Zsa Gabor. Agnes Moorehead had coached me when I was developing a character. “I
t’s where they place their voice, where they put it,” she would say. When I started doing my impression of Barbra Streisand in my act, it was difficult to learn because the placement of her singing and speaking voices is so different. When she sings she produces these magnificent, full, chest and head tones. But when she talks it’s nasal, filtered through Brooklyn. My Gabor impressions have been a staple in my act from the beginning. Eva had a slower, more melodic tone. Zsa Zsa was always high-strung, sounding hysterical. Her voice was a few tones above Eva’s. I would use Zsa Zsa’s line about being a great housekeeper. Every time she got divorced, she’d keep the house.
Whenever I was the mystery guest on the television quiz show What’s My Line? I’d disguise my voice by answering the panel’s questions with my Hungarian accent. In one of my early TV specials, I did the impression as “Ga Ga Zabor.” Carl Reiner wrote the skit. I once dressed up as Eva on a Bob Hope special, all in chiffon and feathers with lots of shimmering diamonds.
The Gabor sisters were fun to imitate. But I could never be like them in real life.
The oldest was Magda, a socialite who didn’t get involved in acting. Zsa Zsa was born two years after Magda. She almost became Miss Hungary in 1934, but was demoted to runner-up because she was a year underage. Jolie and Zsa Zsa consoled themselves with a shopping spree in Vienna, where Richard Tauber, one of the most renowned tenors in Europe, approached them in a restaurant and asked Zsa Zsa to be in a new operetta he’d composed and was starring in. After its three-month run she returned to Budapest restless. So she went to Istanbul, and asked a Turkish diplomat to marry her. (“I want to choose the man. I do not permit men to choose me,” she states in her autobiography.) That was how Burhan Belge became the first of her nine husbands.
Make 'Em Laugh Page 9