There were some hiccups along the way, but we were very pleased as the building was constructed. The developers put up a $12 million loan to cover all the costs. The Greg Orman loan could be reduced and the balance renegotiated at a more favorable interest rate. The Tennessee developers projected that the numbers supported the expense, as the potential income for the first year forecasted a profit in the millions.
Once the shell of the building was completed, I flew to Tennessee for what they called a “topping-off” ceremony. There was a party on May 27, 2008. We all watched as a giant crane placed the final steel beam on top of the six-story, forty-thousand-plus-square-foot building. Todd and I had signed the beam, along with Darrell Waltrip’s partner, NASCAR star Jeff Hammond. The whole town turned out. I had my picture taken with a local man dressed like an otter, from the Otter Cove attraction.
This was my dream. Movie fans would have a place to visit the costumes worn by the most famous stars in film history. After more than forty years, it was finally happening.
My next attempt at a museum, a beautiful complex in Tennessee. Yet another disappointment, with much time and money lost. This drawing of the proposed site was part of a promotional brochure.
But God had other plans. The Bush economy of 2007 and 2008 collapsed, taking a lot of people with it. Countrywide Financial had underwritten our museum. Down went Countrywide, and Debbie right along with them. Regions Bank took over the Countrywide loans and planned to foreclose on the Belle Island Village project. The funding for the developers’ loan was canceled, in spite of its merit. The banks didn’t want to lend money to anyone.
The City of Pigeon Forge had guaranteed the project with municipal bonds. Just as we’d completed the building’s shell, they pulled out. A city planner sent us word that the city had decided to go with another project. I never understood the reasoning. Aside from shattering my dream of building a museum for what would be the last time, this decision also deprived the Pigeon Forge area of some wonderful attractions that would have continued to employ many people in the area. Our museum would have been only a few miles from Dollywood, and right next door to the NASCAR building. That alone would have made us a success. Todd and I both called the office of the governor of Tennessee, but we never got a response.
Once again, my troubles were just beginning. When Pigeon Forge backed out, I buried myself in work to keep all of us going. Meanwhile, the $1.5 million loan Todd had arranged with Greg Orman was in default. The loan had gone on for more than five years, and when we didn’t repay the loan or the interest, the interest rate kept rising. Todd knew about this, but had kept the details from me. So I was unprepared for the lawsuit that Orman filed against us.
Still, the worst was yet to come.
CHAPTER 25
ANOTHER DAY IN COURT
TODD AND I DECIDED TO make one more effort to save the collection. In June 2008, I filed for Chapter 7 bankruptcy protection for the Hollywood Motion Picture Museum, to buy us some time to find other backers.
Carrie called Paul Allen, a friend of hers who was one of the founders of Microsoft and is known for his philanthropy. His Paul G. Allen Family Foundation gives millions to charity and education every year. Paul had created the EMP Museum in Seattle, which celebrates the history of popular music and includes the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame. Because of this, we all thought that Paul might be interested in helping establish a motion picture museum.
Todd met with Paul and his sister, Jo Lynn Allen, and presented them with the possibilities, suggesting that they merge my collection with their music and science fiction museums. The Allens do so much for many causes, but they passed on our proposal.
In April 2006, I’d performed with the Omaha Symphony in Nebraska. Warren Buffett came backstage to meet me with a group of his friends. He loved my show and told me that my Barbra Streisand impression was a scream. He invited me to his home for a dinner party with him and his then-girlfriend and two other couples. Warren asked me to sign a picture for him, which I did gladly. Then I asked him to sign one of him for me. He sent me a picture of himself on a camel and another of him kissing me.
Warren is just a stunning man. He’s funny. He played the ukulele for me and sang. On the off chance that the Oracle of Omaha might be interested, Todd and I flew to Nebraska, and Warren took time out of his busy schedule to hear our proposal for a museum.
After listening to stories of what I wanted to do, he said to me, “Debbie, don’t sell the farm.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, confused.
“You mustn’t indebt yourself, and you mustn’t sell the farm.”
I took Warren to mean that my dream was clouding my judgment and could cost me everything. By raising money for a museum to house the collection, I was risking the security I had after a lifetime of work. The collection was my only real savings to carry me through to the end of my life. I might wind up spending all of my money for a building that would house it, but never earn back what I’d spent.
But I didn’t want to give up until I had exhausted every possibility.
There were four meetings with the Motion Picture Academy. They weren’t interested in helping me save any of the costumes, but they were willing to let me donate my posters to the Academy. Todd made several attempts to negotiate a repayment with Greg Orman. We were far apart on what we thought would be fair. Orman was asking for $9 million as a payoff on his loan of $1.5 million. I thought that was excessive. We offered $3 million, which would have doubled his investment. He refused.
A court date was set for September 8, 2010.
During the run-up to the trial, I continued to work on the road, taking every job I could find. In the spring of 2010, I was booked for a tour of the United Kingdom that would take me all over England and Wales, ending with a two-week engagement at the Apollo Theatre in London’s West End. The tour was called “Debbie Reynolds: Alive and Fabulous!” We arrived a few days before a volcano erupted in Iceland, stopping air travel to and from Europe for almost three weeks.
On April 1, I spent my seventy-eighth birthday at a press conference in the lobby of the Sofitel Hotel in London. As I posed for the cameras and answered questions, I prepared to spend the next three weeks traveling the country on a double-decker tour bus. This wasn’t as much fun as you might think. We left London for our first date in Norwich, followed by stops in Liverpool, Manchester, Bristol, Cardiff, Malvern, and several other cities. I performed at a beautifully restored opera house in Leeds. What a lovely setting. I didn’t know how my material would play in England, but the audiences were wonderfully receptive. They laughed in all the right places when I did my impressions of Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis. I’ve always loved doing impressions. My most difficult one is Barbra Streisand. It took me a long time to learn, as her singing voice is placed so differently from her speaking voice. Audiences burst into applause when I appeared in my Streisand wig, fake nose, and Yentl overcoat. I sang “The Way He Makes Me Feel,” then joked about how I wrote, directed, produced, and starred in the movie. “When the movie was over, I threw a wrap party,” I said in Barbra’s speaking voice. “I ordered one pizza.” Then, in my own voice, “I’m sure the only reason I’m alive after doing this impression is because Barbra hasn’t seen it.” That got big laughs. The British especially loved my impression of Irish character actor Barry Fitzgerald, who played my uncle in The Catered Affair in 1956. After two hours of singing my favorite songs, joking with the audience, and dancing along to clips from my movies, it was time to close with “Tammy.”
As much as I love performing, playing fifteen cities in three weeks was exhausting. We would do a show every evening and immediately strike the set, pack everything up, and get back on the bus. We were usually on the road to the next destination by midnight or 1:00 A.M., with bus rides sometimes lasting four hours or more. We’d roll into a new city around 3:00 or 4:00 A.M., check into our hotel, unpack, and try to sleep. Then up again a few hours later for breakfast, followe
d by an afternoon sound check, a break before the show to vocalize and go over my lines, and then another performance. And then we’d start over. I was, as the Brits say, knackered. That means tired, for those of us in America who don’t speak English. I never saw the beautiful countryside because we traveled at night. I missed so much that I wanted to see.
By the time we got to London for the last two weeks of shows, it seemed like a vacation to stay in the same place every night. I love England; everything there is at least five hundred years older than I am. It was amazing that I got through it.
When it was time to go home, the Iceland volcano had settled down, so I just had to face the latest volcanic activity in the Orman case.
I had a tough decision to make. We’d exhausted every possible avenue we could think of to find backers for the museum. After the loss of my hotel, I couldn’t ask my friends for financial help again. Todd and Carrie encouraged me to sell the collection.
In any case, the fate of the collection was out of my hands, resting with a judge in Santa Barbara.
The night before the trial, my friend and assistant Donald Light drove me from Los Angeles to Santa Barbara. We stayed at a small hotel called the Canary, which was within walking distance of the courthouse. We got up early the next morning and made our way over.
Todd was in front of the building, conferring with his lawyer. As the trial proceeded, Orman’s side called many witnesses. Julien, who had handled my small auction in 2003, testified that I was undervaluing the worth of the collection, even though we said it was worth between $20 million and $30 million.
Todd and I had been considering asking him to handle the auction if the trial didn’t go our way. Now he’d made that decision for us.
Todd and I hoped for a settlement. We hoped that the judge would find our offer of $3 million to be fair. She went right down the middle, denying Orman’s request for $9 million but awarding him $5.3 million, to be paid within the next few months.
Tears came to my eyes as the devastating news sank in. This was it. The end of this vision I had worked for since the early 1960s. There I was, seventy-eight years old and facing yet another disappointment. I truly believed that the value of my collection remained to be seen. I had spent many years going to auctions where beautiful items sold for pennies on the dollar.
I will always regret not being able to build a museum, but I know that I did everything I could to make it happen. No one shared my belief that our Hollywood history should be preserved in one place for movie fans everywhere, even though individual items like Judy Garland’s ruby slippers regularly made news when some collector bought them. I guess this could be expected from an industry that trashes everything after it’s served its purpose—from actors to movie sets. The studios reused what they could, even if that meant burning down sets from King Kong for the destruction of Atlanta scene in Gone with the Wind. Letting go of my collection was one of the hardest things I ever had to do.
On top of that, another constant in my life was disappearing. Right around the time I had to appear in court to fight Greg Orman’s lawsuit, I’d received a letter from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center saying that the Thalians’ help was no longer wanted.
I’d been involved with the Thalians since 1955, when many of my friends in the entertainment business and I had founded the charity to give back to our community by supporting children’s mental health. Over the years our coverage expanded to people of all ages with autism, Alzheimer’s, depression, addiction, and other mental conditions. When Mount Sinai and Cedars of Lebanon merged to form Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in the late ’50s, the Thalians gave the hospital $1 million to build the Thalians Mental Health Center. All told we’d raised more than $30 million for them. Without consulting us, Cedars had been slowly taking over the space in the Thalians’ building to treat other ailments besides mental disorders, and then the new management asked us to relocate. They changed the building’s name to the Thalians Health Center. There was endless back-and-forth and unpleasantness.
It was too much for me to bear when I was losing my collection. How many times could my heart be broken? I just couldn’t face it. I put it aside and let my dear friend Ruta Lee and other Thalians deal with it. Although the hurt was still there along with the feeling of rejection, it was time to prepare for yet another auction.
There was so much work to do. Todd and I were in contact with Christie’s in New York. They are truly the gold standard for this kind of sale. One of their requirements was that we hold the auction in New York, which I didn’t think would be possible in such a short amount of time. We settled on a relatively new auction company, Profiles in History, whose CEO, Joe Maddalena, had been trying to interest me in working with him for many years. He once bid $5,000 to have lunch with me so he could pitch his company. In December 2010, we signed agreements with Profiles to hold the auction on June 18, 2011.
The next six months were a whirlwind of activity, travel, publicity, and heartache—for me and for everyone near me. My assistants, Jenny and Donald, went up to Todd’s ranch to help prepare for the auction. Everything had to be taken out of storage. Two volunteers from Profiles, Lisa Urban and Dan Stebin, put the costumes on mannequins to be photographed for the catalog and the website. The art director for the catalog, Lou Bustamante, took the pictures. Todd built a soundstage with a turnstile, so the costumes could be shot at 360-degree angles. Profiles set up an area nearby with computers to run the films and verify every costume and prop. (Some of them had been used in more than one film.) Then Lisa, Dan, Donald, and Jenny took the costumes to another area and packed them carefully in boxes with acid-free tissue paper for their journey to Los Angeles. For weeks Jenny ran into town every morning before 7:00 A.M. to get coffee and snacks for the crew; then everyone worked until eleven or twelve at night. I helped identify things, but I don’t think I was any good to anyone because I was an emotional wreck.
Profiles in History had a wonderful press agent working for them, a woman named Nancy Seltzer. She arranged for me to do interviews and appearances all over the country. My first big appearance was on Oprah Winfrey’s show, in February 2011. Carrie was also booked, and she did a segment with Oprah before I came out. We all sat and talked for a few more minutes before we debuted some of the costumes to be auctioned. The most famous piece was the “subway dress” that Marilyn Monroe wears in The Seven Year Itch as she stands over the sidewalk grating and her skirt billows around her. I told Oprah that I remembered how upset Marilyn’s husband at the time, Joe DiMaggio, was about that scene in the film. He didn’t want everyone seeing her panties as the skirt rose up in the gust of air created as the train sped by beneath her. Carrie and I even sang together for the first time on television. Oprah stood in the wings watching our moment. She seemed to enjoy our number. It was very touching.
I took to the talk show circuit to tell people about the auction and raise awareness of the collection. When I appeared on The View, I took Harpo Marx’s hat with his curly wig peeking out from beneath the brim. My rounds included the Today show, Extra, and interviews with every major news outlet. The Wall Street Journal did a cover feature on the collection a few weeks prior to the sale. When I came back from the press tour, we were ready to install the collection for its Los Angeles debut.
The Paley Center for Media in Beverly Hills agreed to let us use their space for the auction and an exhibit that would run for two weeks prior to the sale, beginning on Saturday, June 4. It’s a beautiful building, three stories of elegant glass and white stone with a huge rooftop garden. How kind and generous they were to let me use their facility. I felt so fortunate to have such a special place to present my collection.
As soon as the doors opened, masses of people crowded in to see the costumes that had been worn by their favorite stars. Attendance was overwhelming: thousands of people thronged to the Paley Center. I went many times during those fourteen days preceding the auction, to talk to reporters and chat with fans, somehow managing to put on a pleasan
t face. The question on everyone’s lips was “Why didn’t you get someone in Hollywood to help with the museum?” No one realized the journey I had taken to find a home for the collection I’d saved since the early ’70s. Little did they know that I was praying that a big investor would buy everything so my treasures wouldn’t be scattered all over the world.
By the day of the auction, I was in a daze.
CHAPTER 26
JUNE 18, 2011
I WENT TO BED EARLY on Friday night, but didn’t get much sleep. Carrie called at 1:00 A.M. to say that she and Billie were stranded at the Los Angeles airport. They were going to London for a holiday, but United Airlines was having trouble with their computer system. The planes were grounded, and there was no way to rebook the trip until Sunday. So Carrie and Billie would be coming to the auction instead. I was sorry their trip was delayed, but happy that they would be there with Todd and me.
The dreaded day finally arrived. I couldn’t believe I was about to auction off my precious collection. The past year had been a whirl of insanity surrounding the lawsuit that triggered this sale as well as my efforts to promote it. I’d been on the road since February, done dozens of TV appearances, print interviews, and radio shows. Everyone expected the sale of Marilyn Monroe’s subway dress from The Seven Year Itch to set a record. I’d be thrilled if it made enough money to settle Greg Orman’s judgment.
My favorite suit hung ready for me in my closet. My assistant Jenny was scheduled to pick me up at 11:00 A.M. to get us to the Paley Center in time for the noon start of the auction; the doors opened at 10:00, and it would take at least an hour for everyone to be seated and settled. I put on my white suit and a dark green jewel-tone silk blouse with a bow sash at the neck. My hair and makeup didn’t take much time at all. I wrapped the pain pill I knew I would need for my back in a tissue and secured it in my bra, a trick I learned from my mother. Some fresh lipstick and a spray of L’Air du Temps and I was ready to go.
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