Make 'Em Laugh Page 2

  Everyone laughed.

  “My favorite movie was The Unsinkable Molly Brown. I had a lot of fun doing that. In it I got to sing a song, ‘I Ain’t Down Yet.’

  “And I ain’t!

  “Thank you all for this award.”

  As the audience cheered me again, Carrie, Todd, and Billie led me off the stage.

  Carrie and I went backstage to speak with the press. I barely found a seat; I was so faint. They took my award and put it on a stand so we could be photographed together.

  We left right after the press line. I was so happy that things had gone well and everyone seemed pleased. But it was all a blur.

  The ride home was bumpy. All I could see on the long journey were clouds and my bed. Everyone had been so wonderful to me, but I was exhausted from all the attention.

  The documentary crew was there again when we pulled into the driveway at home.

  I went to my door. It was locked. Pinky must have locked it when she left. Nobody had a key. We had to stand outside until the second car arrived so Donald could let us in. Meanwhile, the party planner I had hired couldn’t get into the gate and was circling around town.

  When we finally got inside, I was out of my gown in record time, into a T-shirt and sweatpants.

  Everyone gathered in my living room, drinking and singing. After a few minutes, the documentary crew charged in to film my thoughts about the evening. I managed to say something about how much it meant to me to be honored by SAG. (It was easier to do that than make a fuss, but I hated the intrusion.) Carrie sat next to me on the couch and spoke about how wonderful the evening was.

  After twenty minutes of visiting, I went to bed. I could hear everyone outside my bedroom door, laughing. Joey played the piano while people took turns singing and telling jokes.

  When I went to sleep, I knew I wouldn’t dream of anything as lovely as getting this award.

  What a great honor. I really wish I could have been there.

  With Carrie and Todd backstage after my part of the SAG-AFTRA Awards show. Everyone worked so hard to get me through this appearance.

  PH: Charley Gallay / Wireimage.com for Turner Entertainment Networks.

  With my daughter, Carrie, beside me, I accepted a great honor from SAG-AFTRA—their Lifetime Achievement Award.

  PH: Rich Polk / Wireimage.com for Turner Entertainment Networks.

  2

  The Cinderella Story of the Texas Tomboy

  Receiving a lifetime achievement award put me in a reflective mood. The last time I was given a look back at my life and career was in March 1961, when Ralph Edwards surprised me on This Is Your Life. I was only twenty-eight at the time.

  I’d been asked to tape the presentation of a check for a million dollars from my favorite charity, the Thalians, to Steve Broidy, the head of Cedars of Lebanon and Mount Sinai Hospitals, which had just merged to become Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. The money was for the building of a clinic for the mentally ill at their facility.

  My friends told me that the presentation would be broadcast on the news that evening, from the NBC studio in Burbank. We were standing at a podium on the sound stage, chatting in front of a camera while waiting for Mr. Broidy to arrive—me; Hugh O’Brian, the Thalians’ first president; Margaret Whiting, the second; the composer Elmer Bernstein, the current vice president; and, behind me, Jack Haley Jr., the executive vice president. Instead of Mr. Broidy, Mr. Edwards appeared. Ralph always surprised his subjects, and I was no exception. When he told me that I was the one to be the guest that night, I did a pratfall backward into Jack’s arms.

  We moved across the hall to the This Is Your Life set, which included a long couch in the back against a wall of hanging lilac vines and a love seat up front. Ralph escorted me past an urn containing a gorgeous, tall floral arrangement, and had me sit on the love seat as he told the viewers about my life and career. I was a bit overwhelmed when the first person’s voice I heard over the sound system was that of my gifted costar from Susan Slept Here in 1953, Dick Powell.

  Dick entered from backstage. I stood to greet him and we hugged. Dick had always been wonderful to me. He called me a baggy-pants comedian. When we were making our movie together, he taught me a lot about comedic timing and stage kissing. He had such gorgeous blue eyes.

  After Dick and I chatted, he went to sit on the long couch behind us. Next Ralph brought out my brother, Bill, and my three uncles, Hugh, Owen, and Wally Harmon. They told everyone what a tomboy I was. They left out the story about how they had dug a hole and buried me alive when I was only a little sprout.

  My mother and Daddy came out next with my Grandma Harmon. Mother talked about my earning forty-six merit badges as a Girl Scout.

  “Forty-seven, Mother,” I corrected her. She must have forgotten the one I got for bird watching.

  Daddy told everyone how I’d earned a white Bible for doing work at our church and getting kids to Sunday school in El Paso, Texas. Then he and Grandma talked about our early years there, before we moved to California.

  Every few minutes, I wiped away tears as the memories flooded over me.

  Next my dear friend Jeanette Johnson came out. Jeanette and I had gone to high school together. We both planned to be gym teachers until my life took a different turn. I would do anything to get attention in those days. I was always in the principal’s office for silly stunts like climbing the flagpole. Jeanette told Ralph how I’d sung the loudest and had the biggest mouth of anyone at Girl Scout camp. She was so nervous that she called Ralph “Ruth.”

  After a break Solly Baiano took the stage. Solly was the talent scout who discovered me at the 1948 Miss Burbank contest. He talked about my early days at Warner Brothers, then MGM. Other friends came on to remind me of my days performing for the troops in Korea.

  In the last segment of the show, Ralph asked what November 25, 1960, meant to me. I just stared into space; I had no idea what he was talking about. Ralph reminded me that it was the day I married Harry Karl. Thank goodness he didn’t rub it in that it had been only five months ago!

  My second husband entered from the wings with Carrie and Todd. Carrie was very shy as she sat next to me. She was only a little over four years old then, with a cute Buster Brown haircut. Todd had just turned three, and was having fun looking at the TV monitors and saying, “There’s Mommy.”

  Then my friends who’d helped set up this surprise show came onstage: Hugh O’Brian, Margaret Whiting, Elmer Bernstein, and Jack Haley Jr. Hugh explained how the charity had been founded in 1955 to work for the cause of emotionally disturbed children, how Jack had brought me on board, and that I’d been a “real spark plug ever since.” Jack mentioned that I’d just been elected president for the third successive year.

  As the show closed, I was finally able to present the million-dollar check to Mr. Broidy on behalf of the Thalians. He admitted that he’d been in on the surprise. The show also gave Cedars-Sinai a check for a thousand dollars and a reel-to-reel tape recorder. Ralph gave me a 16mm movie camera and a film of the program as a remembrance. He also gave me a gold bracelet with charms representing special events in my life to that point. Many years later I sold this and some other jewelry to pay for Todd’s wedding to his first wife.

  At twenty-eight, I still had many adventures ahead of me. There were also quite a few that didn’t get mentioned in Ralph’s retrospective.

  So, with the help of my scrapbooks, old diaries, and my friends and accomplices—here are some of the many things that made me laugh (and sometimes cry) over the years.

  On the set of the popular 1960s TV show This Is Your Life. The host, Ralph Edwards, had just surprised me.

  Left to right: Ralph Edwards; Grandma Harmon; my mother, Maxene; and me with my daddy, Ray Reynolds.

  3

  Early Days

  Some of my scrapbooks . . .

  I save almost everything!

  In the 1950s hardly a week went by when my picture wasn’t in some newspaper or magazine, or both. The same was
true for Eddie Fisher, even more so when we got engaged and the press named us America’s Sweethearts. Once when I was still living in Burbank with my parents and Eddie was out of town performing, he sent me a telegram. (That was how you sent special messages in the days before the digital age—or even fax machines!) Eddie’s message was signed “Puzzled” and only half serious (I hope), but it shows what we were accustomed to:

  JUST PICKED UP A MAGAZINE AND DIDN’T SEE YOUR

  PICTURE OR MINE EITHER WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?

  In case you’re wondering, telegrams seldom used punctuation.

  But before I was a star and my picture was everywhere, there was my first magazine cover.

  LASSIE WITH A LASSIE

  When I was crowned Miss Burbank in April 1948, there was a flurry of activity surrounding the event. Not only were there talent scouts, one of whom eventually signed me to a studio, there was a lot of local excitement about the contest. I was in parades and other Burbank functions. My picture was in the newspapers in Los Angeles and Burbank.

  One day my mother got a phone call from a man who said he was a photographer. He told her that he would like to do a photo shoot with me for a magazine cover. He explained how he would pick me up, drive me to the location, then return me home. She agreed to let him do it.

  On a Saturday afternoon, the man pulled up to our house on Evergreen Avenue in Burbank in a station wagon. He had with him a beautiful collie dog. We drove to a remote farm deep in the valley.

  It was a pretty uneventful afternoon. The photographer had an outfit for me to wear: a pair of light blue dungarees, a matching blue plaid shirt, a bright red neckerchief, and a white cowgirl hat. I had washed and set my own hair. I wasn’t wearing any makeup. (My mother and father didn’t approve of makeup for young girls. The only makeup Mother ever wore was a light lipstick called Tangee. There wasn’t much color in it; it was orange in the tube but went on almost clear.)

  This was the first time I’d ever posed for a picture. All the photos taken of me after I won the beauty contest had been candid shots.

  The final picture is of me leaning against a wooden fence next to the collie. It was eventually sold to Collier’s, a famous weekly magazine that no longer exists, and appeared on the cover of their November 13, 1948, issue with a box announcing the start of “The Amazing Story of Jimmy Doolittle” (see color photo insert). By then, I was signed to Warner Brothers. An inside page identified the picture:

  Lassie with a Lassie. Carlyle Blackwell, Jr., son of the famous actor, photographed Debbie Reynolds of Burbank, Cal., after she had won a talent contest.

  I think they probably meant to suggest that the collie in the picture was the same dog that had starred in several hit movies in the 1940s, including two with Elizabeth Taylor, and went on to have a hit television series. But the real Lassie never went anywhere without her trainers.

  Looking back, I’m amazed that my mother allowed her sixteen-year-old daughter to go off in a car alone with someone she didn’t know. She could have asked my brother to go along, but she didn’t. She trusted me to be able to take care of myself, and apparently Mr. Blackwell was a very well-known photographer.

  I was raised on baseball. My father’s whole life was about the game. We were not allowed to speak when the radio was on—you did not talk, you did not sing, you did not do anything. You listened to the game. My brother trained to play professionally, but was sidetracked by a shoulder injury. So it was a real event when I was introduced to one of the greatest baseball players of all time.

  A HANDSOME, QUIET ADONIS

  In the summer of 1952 I was filming I Love Melvin in New York City, and one of my publicity trips was to Yankee Stadium to see a game Joe DiMaggio was playing. What a thrill it was to meet him in the Yankee dugout. I believe this picture has never been seen before.

  A few years later I was fortunate to meet him socially, when my friend Jeanette Johnson and I were in Paris. Jeanette was a physical education teacher. Sports were her passion. On this special evening in Paris, we went out to dinner at Maxim’s with the designer Joseph Picone, head of the Evan Picone fashion house, and his wife. They said that a good friend of theirs would be joining us. What a surprise when that friend turned out to be Joe DiMaggio.

  With the great baseball star Joe DiMaggio. I visited him in the Yankees dugout while I was on location in New York making I Love Melvin with Donald O’Connor.

  I didn’t drink at that time, and I’d never known Jeanette to, so when the waiter came over to ask us if we’d like a cocktail, I turned to tell him that she didn’t drink. Before I could get the words out of my mouth, Jeanette said, “I’ll have a Scotch on the rocks.” It was like a vaudeville bit. I was taken aback. Then I realized that she was just getting into the swing of things.

  Joe DiMaggio was a quiet, shy man, and so handsome. Jeanette knew his record and all the stats for the Yankees, and that night Joltin’ Joe only had eyes for her. Every other beautiful woman at the restaurant must have wondered what her secret was. They talked about baseball the entire night.

  So if you want to dazzle a great athlete, learn your stats!

  When I was under contract to MGM, I was paid every week no matter what I was doing. If I wasn’t working on a film, I might be studying dance, singing, or drama. Sometimes the studios sent stars on publicity tours. Once we went to Washington, DC, where we met President Truman; another time Pier Angeli and I toured South America. This is about another trip south of the border.

  SWIMMING WITH SHARKS

  In December 1952 MGM organized a lavish junket to Mexico City for a visit to their new production studio there, and to attend the inauguration of Mexico’s new president, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines. The group included me, Celeste Holm, and Rhonda Fleming and her new husband, Dr. Lewis Morrill. The studio also let me invite my father and my high school friend Jeanette. Celeste and I became good friends on that trip. She was a great gal who liked to have fun. We worked together later in The Tender Trap with Frank Sinatra. Celeste was one of our great actresses. She was talented and beautiful, similar in type to Loretta Young. They both had great careers and were nominated for many awards for their work. Celeste won the Oscar, Golden Globe, and New York Film Critics Circle Award in 1947 for her role in Gentleman’s Agreement, and received two more Oscar nominations after that.

  Our first stop was Mexico City. I shivered in the night air. My only coat was at the dry cleaners in LA; I didn’t think I’d need it in Mexico. Instead of the usual limo, a bus was sent to pick us up at the airport and take us to the hotel. Some of the actors refused to get on it. I took charge.

  “Get on the bus,” I ordered them. “You’re the luckiest group of people in the world. My father was a brakeman on the railroad. He still works on the road. I worked at the counter at JCPenney. The most fortunate hour of my life was when I got a job in pictures. On the tenth of this month, I’m going to entertain the troops in Korea. This is the first vacation I’ve had in two years and nobody is going to ruin it.”

  Everyone applauded—and got on that bus.

  Hedda Hopper, then one of the most powerful gossip columnists in the world, wrote about it. She was famous for her sharp tongue and fabulous hats. She often went along on studio trips. Everyone, including the studios, was afraid of her, although they pretended otherwise. Hedda liked it that way. The studio would never have refused her access, and she in turn provided them with publicity.

  (I should say, everyone but me was afraid of her. I always told Hedda when I disagreed with or didn’t like something she had written, and she always took it from me.)

  The inauguration took place on December 1 at the Palace of Fine Arts, a vast building in the northern part of the city. Masses of people crammed into the huge courtyard to view the proceedings. As we crowded into the room where the ceremony was held, my petticoat started to slip. The elastic in the waistband must have been loose. I tried pulling it up but finally I had to just step out of it. (Only Hedda Hopper seemed to notice. She wrote
about it in her column.) Lex Barker (who played Tarzan) lifted me up on his shoulder so I could see what was going on.

  We had a few days before the opening of the new studio, so we decided to visit Acapulco. One afternoon Celeste and I went out with surfboards. I wouldn’t exactly call it “surfing”; we paddled beyond the breaking waves and just floated. At one point I yelled to Celeste across the water.

  “Look how big the waves are getting.”

  “I see them,” she yelled back. “And they all have fins.”

  Shark alert! A whole school of them, as it turned out.

  Celeste and I were both very light and very fair. Those sharks must have seen us and thought, “Hey guys, look—lunch.”

  That’s when Celeste and I learned to be speedboats, using our arms to paddle like hell toward the shore. The lifeguards were already on their way to save us. We didn’t realize how far out we’d gone. Talk about your dumb tourists.

  Celeste and I escaped being lunch in Acapulco, and ever since then I’ve avoided swimming in the ocean.

  There were all kinds of fun things to do on this Mexico trip. I danced with Gary Cooper at a party. Gary was already in town to shoot Blowing Wild with Barbara Stanwyck. He was one of the handsomest men I’d ever met, and I’ve met quite a few lookers.

  Miguel Alemán Valdés Jr., the son of the outgoing president of Mexico, took us all to a villa outside the city so Daddy and Jeanette could attend the bullfights. I wasn’t interested in watching bulls die, so Miguel’s associate Enrique Parra Hernández offered to show me around. Enrique had been President Valdés’s right-hand man on economic matters. He was just ending his job as the director of Mexico’s National Bank of Foreign Commerce.

  “Let me show you the apartment I keep for my mistress,” he offered.

  It sounded interesting.

  Once we were there, he said, “Let me show you the bedroom.”