“I’ll just stay in show business till they stuff me like Trigger, when I drop dead.“
Is Debbie Reynolds a Gay Icon? Abba-Dabba-Solutley!
Reynolds was a lifelong advocate for LGBTQ Rights. She headlined an AIDS benefit concert at the Hollywood Bowl in 1983, when the plague was still highly stigmatized. Remember, President Ronald Reagan didn’t address the disease publicly until 1985. In 2014, she admitted that she would fake relationships with closeted gay actors during her Hollywood heyday to protect them from a scrutinizing press. That’s right, Reynolds was a beard! Reynolds:
”Over the years many of the boys that have worked for me as dancers have been gay. The creative people were all gay people, from producers to writers. To me, they were just family.”
Mary Frances Reynolds‘ career was an accident. She had planned to become a gym teacher. She was a tomboy from a Burbank family with no ties to the showbiz industry. At 16 years old, she made an arbitrary choice to enter a local beauty contest. Afterwards, she was shocked to find herself crowned Miss Burbank. She was then offered a contract with Warner Bros., and they changed her name to the youthful, young sounding Debbie. As Debbie Reynolds, she had a 66-year career in films, stage, television, and nightclubs.
With zero experience when she joined the studio, and still just a teenager, Reynolds worked 12-hour days taking classes and learning to sing, dance and act. I suppose Warner Bros. didn’t see Reynolds’ potential because she was traded to MGM with the good fortune of soon finding herself playing opposite the great Fred Astaire in the musical Three Little Words (1950).
I continue to just love Debbie Reynolds to pieces, but she is especially important to me because she played aspiring actor Kathy Selden opposite Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor in Singin’ In The Rain (1952), one of the best films about movie making ever, and the perfect film musical. Singin’ In The Rain is in my Top 10 Favorites Films. Amazingly, Reynolds claimed that she could just barely dance when she met Kelly on set for the first time.
She made a bunch of films during this era: Tammy And The Bachelor (1957), How The West Was Won (1962), plus an Academy Award nomination for The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964), a film I can only just tolerate, made watchable only because of Reynolds’ moxie and audience pleasing performance. She also had a number one hit record with The Theme From Tammy, along with three more Top 10 hits in the late 1950s.
Reynolds also received all sorts of attention from the press about her personal life. She was character number three in one of the most noted of Hollywood scandals. After seeing Reynolds picture on the cover of LIFE magazine with the headline: ”Eddie’s Scorned Woman”, my mother had to sit me down at the kitchen table when I was five years old to explain the whole equation of Debbie Reynolds – Eddie Fisher + Elizabeth Taylor = Big Trouble thing. Reynolds was the wholesome America’s Sweetheart, Fisher was a cad and a Jew, and Taylor was the sex bomb of all-time. I had a lot of questions for my mother that day. Now, a showbiz infatuated kid could just check the Internet for this sort of fodder, but we had to wait for each thread of gossip.
Reynolds:
”I stood no chance against her. What chance did I have against Elizabeth, a woman of great womanly experience, when I had no experience at all?”
Reynolds was a noted film historian. She was forced to auction her world-class collection of movie memorabilia when she was made to go into bankruptcy by the financial shenanigans of her unscrupulous husbands and managers. She was devastated to lose her important collection, and I was personally sad when I lost my own bid on Charlton Heston‘s loincloth from Planet Of The Apes (1968). I just knew that Reynolds wanted me to have it.
Reynolds received nominations for an Academy Award, an Emmy Award, a Tony Award and a couple of Golden Globes without ever winning. She received a Lifetime Achievement statue at the 2015 Screen Actors Guild Awards where she gave a funny, nutty, rambling speech. Reynolds was introduced by her daughter Carrie Fisher, who said:
”She has been more than a mother to me… not much, but definitely more. She’s been an unsolicited stylist, interior decorator and marriage counselor. Admittedly, I found it difficult to share my mother with her adoring fans, who treated her like she was part of their family. She has led two lives, public and private, sometimes concurrently, sometimes not. This is an extraordinarily kind, generous, gifted, funny woman who would give you the shirt off her back… if Vivian Leigh hadn’t once worn it in Gone With the Wind.”
While accepting the honor, Reynolds noted how long she had been in showbiz and she was very excited to be at the SAG awards. She also embarrassed Fisher with a story, recalling that her bun in the famous musical led her to warn her daughter ahead of playing Princess Leia in Star Wars:
”I said, ‘Well, Carrie, be careful of any weird hairdos’. So, luckily George Lucas gave her two buns.”
Reynolds went on and on about the making The Unsinkable Molly Brown:
”In that movie I got to sing a wonderful song I Ain’t Down Yet… Well, I ain’t.”
Reynolds made over 50 films, appeared in Vegas and on Broadway, and had her own series or two on television. I especially admire her work in A Catered Affair (1956), and as Kevin Kline‘s steely, but loving mother in In & Out (1997), and as another mother, the nearly unrecognizable Frances Liberace in Behind The Candelabra (2013), plus as Grace’s showbiz mother on several seasons of Will & Grace.
I had the pleasure of seeing Reynolds live twice in my lifetime, in her nightclub act in 1975 and on Broadway in a revival of the musical Irene in 1974. She was fabulous, plucky and hard working on stage. The audience could tell she loved performing and she gave off lots of love back to her fans.
