Unsinkable

by Debbie Reynolds

  And it was.

  The unsecured creditors weren’t content with recouping their investments. They thought they could do better with an auction. Led by one of my former employees, they took me to court to block the Siegel offer.

  The hearing was held in June 1998. By then, the hotel was down to twenty employees.

  Unfortunately, the judge sided with the creditors. He rejected David Siegel’s guarantee, saying, “I’m a poker player.”

  “A poker player with our money,” Todd leaned over and muttered to our attorney.

  Now everyone’s fate rested on the auction.

  CHAPTER 15

  BLACK WEDNESDAY

  AUGUST 5, 1998, ARRIVED. Black Wednesday.

  I felt like I was in a barrel at the top of Niagara Falls: I knew I was going over. I just didn’t know how the journey would end. I couldn’t believe I was attending another hotel auction in the same building. Only now it was my hotel on the block.

  I was anxious as I got ready to leave, but in these situations it’s better to appear happy than to look somber. I dressed in a bright apricot-colored jacket with brass buttons and put on a cheerful face. I didn’t know yet which earrings I wanted to wear, so I took along several pairs in my jacket pocket. In another pocket I had the statement I’d prepared to read.

  Everything hinged on this auction. When we’d heard that David Siegel might be attending, Todd quickly arranged with financier Greg Orman to give Siegel the $1 million guarantee he would need if he wanted to bid. It was almost as simple as me giving my paddle to Ralph Engelstad at the Paddlewheel auction.

  I arrived at the casino to find the room crowded with bidders, onlookers, and press. Todd told me that David Siegel was in the room. He was our last chance to save the hotel and make good on all the outstanding debts. I went over and hugged him, saying, “Thank you for coming today. I’m so glad to see you.”

  As I went to the side of the stage to wait for the cue to make my announcement, I heard whispers that my ex-husband was in the room. Thank God I couldn’t see him. I thought it was incredibly bad taste that he would show up on this day. After all, it was his treachery that had caused me to default in the first place. If he had just paid the divorce judgment, I wouldn’t have needed to sell the hotel.

  I breathed deeply, to calm myself, and thought of the Wicked Witch of the East, telling myself, “He has no power here. Maybe I’ll get lucky and one of the ‘debt collectors’ from the casinos will drop a house on him.” A reporter from the Las Vegas Sun came over to me while I was digging in my pocket to find my earrings. “I didn’t know which pair to wear, so I brought them all,” I explained.

  It was time. I walked to the front of the room and took the stage, smiling at the crowd. You could have heard a pin drop.

  “Thank you all for coming today,” I began. “Life has always been an adventure, and I have never been afraid of walking down a new path. When I bought this property in 1992, there was no thought in my mind of any difficulties such as the ones existing today. This property is wonderful to me, and I would love to have been able to remain here for the rest of my performing years—which should be about noon today.”

  ­People laughed uneasily. Trying not to be distracted, I went back to my notes.

  “I truly have called this my home and have worked here for six years, often with no salary. I continued to perform in the showroom without pay to keep the doors open. I believed we could make it. We could not. Not without a proper financial picture.”

  Gazing around the room, I saw David Siegel and tried to smile at him.

  “We had a buyer from Florida who would have enabled us all to remain here and work happily in Las Vegas, where I have been a resident for over twenty years, but because of others’ greed, we lost that buyer and are now forced to auction to the highest bidder.”

  Black Wednesday, August 5, 1998. This tops the list as one of the saddest days of my life. Photo by Jeff Scheid. Courtesy AP Photos

  I looked around. Some people were crying, people I didn’t even know. Crying for me. Tears welled in my own eyes; I could hear my voice cracking as I continued to speak.

  “I will miss the beautiful Star Theater and the fabulous Motion Picture Museum that since 1972 has searched for a permanent home. Todd Fisher, my son, designed and built the showroom and the museum, and I want to thank him for standing by me and the hotel through all of these difficult times. I want to thank him for giving up his career to help me. He’s the only man who has never left me. I will move on, but I will miss my second home—this property.

  “Thank you all for coming today. Tomorrow is a new day. I will be touring and entertaining forever.”

  Everyone applauded as I left the stage, and Todd helped me to a seat where we could observe the proceedings. Everything depended on David Siegel now; if he bid, we could be saved.

  But David Siegel wasn’t one of the bidders. I guess he’d been through enough with all the legal wrangling of the last few months. The auction started, and the bidding didn’t last long. The World Wrestling Federation bought my hotel for $11 million. Now only the people with secured loans would benefit. The greedy creditors who thought they could do better in a general auction and blocked David Siegel’s offer wouldn’t be paid at all. It was small comfort to me, if any.

  A few days later, David Siegel called me. He said that he’d gone home to Florida and watched my movie Tammy and the Bachelor. Overcome with regret, he made a multimillion-dollar offer that would settle all the debts and keep the hotel in operation.

  But it was too late. The bankruptcy court upheld the sale to the World Wrestling Federation.

  This was one time when I didn’t feel unsinkable.

  CHAPTER 16

  BOTTOMING OUT IN BEVERLY HILLS

  THERE’S A SCENE IN CARRIE’S first Star Wars movie where she is trapped in a container filled with space debris, and “something alive” in the water, with huge tentacles and one big slimy eye, comes after her looking for dinner. Suddenly the walls of the trash compactor begin to close in. That would have been a step up for me.

  Sometimes you have to run for your life, and sometimes you have to fight for it. I didn’t feel like I was able to do either now that I had hit bottom again. I took some time for reflection.

  Carrie had moved to a large house in Beverly Hills with a lot of property, including a tennis court. It was usually pretty quiet there in the daytime. I would drive there and sit on a bench and stare into space, going over everything that had taken place in the past few years and wondering how in hell I’d let this happen to me again. I passed the time crying and thinking about so many things.

  First 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. Oh well, that had happened to me once before. Then I thought about how my husband had mangled our finances so badly that I was forced into bankruptcy, losing everything but my memorabilia collection. That had happened to me before too. What do you do when your heart says one thing and your head—and your lawyer—says another? I was a romantic. I put my whole heart on the line when I loved someone.

  It never ceases to amaze me that people feel free to help themselves to my money and property. There is a mentality at work that says, “It’s okay to rob Debbie blind, I work for her.” Or, “She’s my wife, everything she has is mine.” I don’t think like a thief, so I never see this quality in others until it’s too late.

  I thought about how so many people in the arts have been destroyed by people around them who either mismanage them or steal everything they own. Doris Day’s husband and her lawyer took all her money and hid it somewhere. Her husband died before anyone knew it was missing or could do anything about it. My depression kept taking me back to all the people I’d known who had gone through tragic events and didn’t make it.

  Perhaps the most tragic story of all was Pier Angeli’s. Pier was my dear friend, and her last name suited her perfectly. Sh
e was an angel, a beautiful, innocent-looking girl who was loved by almost everyone who knew her. She was also sexy. What a hot combination. Pier had a relationship with James Dean. She was engaged to Kirk Douglas briefly, but they broke up.

  The first time Eddie Fisher asked me out was as his guest for his opening night at the Cocoanut Grove in Hollywood. Pier was seated at the table next to mine. She left right after the show, when she saw all the photographers taking pictures of Eddie and me together. I didn’t learn until much later that he’d also invited her. I’ll bet he went to her house right after he dropped me off in Burbank.

  Although many handsome men courted Pier, she decided to marry Vic Damone, another singer, which shocked all of her friends. The rumor was that her mother had insisted on it. Vic had a bad reputation around town. I remember telling Pier that she could call off the wedding and I would drive her to Palm Springs to hide. But Pier refused. “The invitations have already gone out,” she said. “My mother wouldn’t allow it.” She was afraid of her mother, with good cause.

  On Pier’s wedding day at St. Timothy’s Catholic Church, we all watched this beautiful young girl walk down the aisle. When she passed my row, I saw tears in her eyes. My heart sank. I wasn’t the only one who was upset that day. Outside, James Dean sat on his motorcycle across the street from the church. He rode off when the wedding party emerged after the ceremony. I never saw him again. He died ten months later.

  Pier’s tears didn’t stop after the wedding. Shortly after she and Vic were married, she became pregnant with their son, Perry (named after Perry Como, one of Vic’s friends). Pier was thrilled about becoming a mother. During this time, I went to her house for a visit. When I knocked, Pier wouldn’t let me in. I told her through the door that I wasn’t going to leave until she opened it. Pier knew how stubborn I am, and slowly opened the door, hiding behind it.

  When I saw her face, I knew why. It was swollen, and she had a black eye.

  I was outraged. I tried to convince Pier to leave Vic. She wouldn’t do it. She was too embarrassed, and afraid of him.

  Predictably, Pier’s marriage to Vic ended badly, and they fought bitterly over the custody of their little boy. Pier moved back to Italy to live with her family. Her twin sister, Marisa, was wonderful to Pier, but their domineering mother was difficult as ever. She had Pier committed to a mental facility near Rome, where Pier suffered hell on earth, including sexual abuse by the caretakers, both male and female. Her sister eventually got her released, and Pier returned to Los Angeles to resume her acting career.

  But things had changed in the few years she’d been gone, and Pier had trouble finding roles. She studied with an MGM coach, then made the mistake of contacting Vic for aid. He promised to help her get a role in a film if she visited him in Vegas.

  She returned from that trip crushed and despondent. She told me that Vic’s promise of help had been empty. She was ashamed and shattered. I invited her to move in with Harry Karl and me, and she slept on our couch until she found herself a little apartment in Beverly Hills.

  After she moved, she asked her doctor for a strong shot of something to relieve some kind of pain she was suffering. She didn’t say that she’d already taken a lot of pills. The shot he gave her combined with her other medications to kill her. She just couldn’t face the world anymore. I didn’t know how she could do this to her child, but I understood the feeling of desperation that led to her ending it all.

  Pier couldn’t overcome her tragedy, but I couldn’t see myself taking her way out, no matter how wretched I felt now. It would destroy my family, the most important people in my life.

  Thinking about Pier and my own situation, I realized how different people’s lives would be if we made different choices. Staring into space outside my daughter’s house, I wondered: What is my third act going to be? How am I going to overcome this grief?

  When Eddie and I were divorcing, I was in my late twenties. I had to be strong for my children, who were both under three years old. I remember packing up the kids to go for a ride in the car. But the front yard was filled with reporters waiting to get a statement or a picture. I understood why my friend Frank Sinatra would explode whenever a photographer or reporter invaded his privacy. Finally I put down the diaper bag and car keys, went outside, and asked everyone to please leave me and my family alone. They took some pictures, wrote a few lines, and eventually left. I could handle the stress when I was young and protecting Carrie and Todd.

  Fifteen years later, when I left Harry Karl, I was at rock bottom in a different way. As Mrs. Karl, I drove a Rolls-Royce convertible. Right after the divorce, I was sleeping in my old Cadillac because I didn’t have anyplace to live. By then I was in my forties. Hard as it was, recovery was still easier than it would be now. Or so I feared.

  Car keys in one hand and diaper bag in the other, I’m ready to take the kids out. But the reporters are crowding my front lawn. The beginning of experiencing real-life heartbreak. Photofest

  Sitting in Carrie’s yard, thinking back over the years, I remembered how hard Daddy had worked to make a home for us in California, saving all his money for a year until he could buy a lot and build our family a house while Mother worked just as hard in Texas until we could join him. “Work never killed anybody,” she used to say. “Would you rather be digging ditches?” My parents believed that can’t is never an option. We all have to make sacrifices for the people we love. The people I loved needed me now, and I could not give up.

  At some point, as I reviewed everything in solitude in Carrie’s quiet yard, my depression turned to resolve. I thought about all the hard fights I’d had in my life and career and remembered that I love to work. I love to perform and make audiences happy. They make me happy, and it’s all joy. As my character Molly Brown says, “Nobody wants me down as much as I want me up! I ain’t down yet.”

  Thank God.

  CHAPTER 17

  ON THE ROAD AGAIN

  IF THERE’S ONE THING I know, it’s the road.

  My second picture for MGM, in 1950, was Two Weeks With Love. The movie was not that successful, but a song from it was. “Aba Daba Honeymoon,” a novelty tune about a monkey and a chimp in love, became a very big monkey of a hit. So the studio sent the two kids who sang it in the film—Carleton Carpenter and me—out on the road to capitalize on its popularity. Roger Edens, MGM’s brilliant songwriter and lyricist, was assigned to write special material for our little act, which would be part of a larger revue.

  That was my first experience as a live performer. I was only seventeen years old at the time, which meant that an adult had to come along as my guardian. Needless to say, it was my mother. In those days MGM owned the Loews theater chain. The studio booked our revue in Loews in cities all over the country. We began the tour in Washington, DC.

  Carleton and I were specialty performers in a lineup that included the Weire Brothers—the funniest men I’ve ever known in my life—and three or four other acts, including someone performing with a bird of some kind. Altogether there were five or six acts that made up this revue. A twenty-four-piece orchestra accompanied our five shows a day, which we did between screenings of the film. In addition to caring for me, my mother was in charge of the wardrobe for the show. We stayed in hotels where everybody shared a bathroom. The Weire Brothers didn’t have very good aim when it came to the facilities, which perturbed Mother and me a little.

  Our revue was part of the last wave of vaudeville, the wonderful circuit that launched the careers of such legendary performers as W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, and Bob Hope. It was thrilling playing to packed houses with teenagers screaming for Carleton and me as we did our two numbers from the movie, “Aba Daba Honeymoon” and “Row, Row, Row (Way Up the River).”

  Carleton had so much more experience than I did. He’d been a professional magician and acted on Broadway before coming to Hollywood to be in movies. He thought I didn’t know what I was doing and he was right. I may have been a novice, but I was a quick study
and a natural performer. Carleton got upset when I ad-libbed onstage, perhaps because the audience laughed at everything I did. He used to call me his “little creature,” which I took as a term of endearment. Once he misjudged the distance to the orchestra and tumbled into it doing a choreographed high kick. I found this very funny, but Carleton was not amused. Carleton sang the melody to our songs while I did the harmony. One day he was down with the flu and I had to go on alone. Unafraid, I sang the entire song in the harmony. The reviewers called me “a little girl on a big stage,” not only because of my size—I’m five-foot-one—but because Carleton towered over me, he was so tall. Doing that tour hooked me on performing live; until then I wasn’t sure I wanted to stay in show business. I was lucky to see so many great performers doing their nightclub acts—Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, and of course, Judy Garland, whom I’d become friends with at MGM. Judy sang tunes from her movies for me when I visited her at home after work at the studio. What a beautiful friend she was.

  That was the last year for vaudeville; soon after our tour ended, shows like ours quit running in those big theaters. The same thing happened when I was at MGM. I caught the last gasp of the studio system. TV came into vogue in the 1950s, and by the end of the 1960s the era of big movie musicals was just about over. The writing was on the wall for all of us who had worked in films for years.

  In 1963 I made the transition to nightclubs when I put together my first act for Vegas, shortly before I got the part in The Unsinkable Molly Brown. As it became more difficult to get good film roles, I was happy to appear live for audiences around the world, and fortunate to have Roger Edens to help stage my act. Roger was the genius who wrote “Dear Mr. Gable” and “Born in a Trunk” for Judy Garland and “Moses Supposes” for Singin’ in the Rain. He’d also worked on Judy’s live shows.