Unsinkable Read online

  That was the first unsuccessful attempt to get a Hollywood museum built.

  Years passed with no activity. Then, in 1970, I read in the Hollywood Reporter that MGM was planning to auction off their land, their wardrobe, their scenery, and all their props. I was still under contract there, so I went to the office of the president, Jim Aubrey, to find out what was going on.

  “We’re in the real estate business now,” he told me.

  MGM was selling Lot 2, where Singin’ in the Rain had been filmed. So many other famous films had been shot there, and now MGM was looking to liquidate their holdings to raise money. The old studio system had indeed come to an end. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

  That was the year I began to collect in earnest.

  My idea was to turn Lot 2 into another Disneyland. I remember the day Walt Disney opened his theme park. “I sure hope this works,” he told me. “I’ve put all I own into it.” Disney had mortgaged everything, including his home, to fund this park for children and the young at heart. He and I went on the “It’s a Small World” ride together, both of us crying because it was so wonderful. There we were, a studio head and twenty-three-year-old Debbie Reynolds, weeping in our boats as we rode through the magical realization of his dreams. I’m glad it was dark in there. Walt Disney certainly had the courage to back his dream, and I hoped to follow his example.

  Harry Karl and I went to see his good friend Al Hart, who was then president of Citibank in Beverly Hills. Citibank gave me $5 million to buy Lot 2. But my offer wasn’t accepted, and someone else bought the property for the same price. Undaunted, I asked Jim Aubrey if he would sell me some of the costumes and props prior to the auction. He told me to “find a seat and bid like everybody else.”

  The mood at MGM was horrible in those days. It was incredible to me that the studio was scrapping its history. All the music files were sold to a company that used them for landfill under the new 405 freeway being built. Films from the studio libraries were burned in big metal rubbish barrels. These included scenes that had been cut from great MGM movies. Clothes were tossed into boxes and sold to thrift stores. Costumes that cost $20,000 to construct would be bundled together and the lots sold for $200 to costume houses all over the country, and not only in big cities. It broke my heart that so many of these unique creations would probably become Halloween costumes in a very short time, as no one knew their true value.

  I bought everything I could afford. The MGM auction lasted for three weeks. I was there almost every day. Soundstages full of items were sold. I got a tiny fraction of what was offered. The rest was scattered to the four corners of the world, never to be seen again. Someone in Texas bought the paddlewheel boat used in Show Boat. I wonder how they got it home! Another Texan outbid me for the brass bed from The Unsinkable Molly Brown. He told me that his wife had a stronger connection to it than I did. I still don’t understand that. When my costumes from the movie went up for sale, the audience yelled, “Give them to her.” The auctioneer finally conceded and let me have them for a few hundred dollars.

  The following year 20th Century Fox did the same thing. Jerry Wunderlich put me in touch with the president of Fox, who allowed me to pick out anything I wanted prior to the public sale. That’s when I bought all of Marilyn Monroe’s costumes, which became the most famous objects in my collection.

  All these things had to be warehoused safely. I met with Irwin Karz, a friend from MGM who owned the Garden Court Apartments on Hollywood Boulevard, near Grauman’s Chinese Theatre. Irwin shared my love of Hollywood memorabilia and offered to let me store everything at his building. Anne Baxter, George Peppard, and North American Van Lines helped me move all the furniture, props, costumes, and set pieces I had purchased to Irwin’s five-story building. He and I hoped to transform some part of it into a permanent home for the collection.

  Unfortunately, the security there wasn’t good. Many of the things I had bought at auction disappeared, including a lot of the furniture.

  When Harry Karl and I divorced, the bank gave me a choice between keeping our house or keeping my collection. Everything was out of the house in four days—including me and the children.

  Moving day for my collection. George Peppard and Anne Baxter even came down to help us.

  I kept trying to find a location for the museum. I entered into an agreement with the City of Los Angeles to renovate the Pan Pacific Building, a landmark structure in the Fairfax District, in the center of Hollywood near the Farmers Market and CBS Television City. This would have been a perfect location. But the city decided not to go forward with the project. It was a bitter disappointment.

  Now finally, all these many years later, I had my museum.

  Opening night was set for April 1, 1995, my sixty-third birthday. Things went pretty smoothly in terms of making the deadline. Still, I did not actually see the presentation Todd had prepared until that night.

  It was a gala affair. Paula Kent Meehan flew up in her jet, filled with guests for the party. So did Bob Petersen, owner of the Petersen Auto Museum in LA. Roddy McDowall, Esther Williams, Ruta Lee, and so many of my Hollywood friends came to Vegas to wish me a happy birthday and see the new museum. When we sat together in the theater, we all saw the presentation for the first time. It was thrilling as the carousel revolved around us in our seats, with costumes and film clips appearing and then passing out of view. Of course I started crying. Seeing everything so beautifully showcased made my heart sing. It was a triumph—a wish come true and the perfect birthday gift.

  But we were still in the middle of a cyclone of trouble at the hotel. Todd was busy fending off more lawsuits. I had paid cash for all the furniture and fixtures, and now I was getting bills from leasing companies I knew nothing about. Richard had taken out loans on the hotel’s physical assets, so that I was now leasing what I had already paid for and, according to these companies, the payments had come due. Richard was gone, and with him all that money. I wondered where it had gone. For more $10,000 bets that he lost?

  Just to make things concise, let me give you a rundown of some of the litigation I faced in 1995. In preparing to write this book, I went through forty-five boxes of files and reams of legal documents to piece together this time in my life. I was sued by most of the time-share holders—more than three hundred lawsuits—in addition to employees, vendors, managers, creditors, and (to add insult to injury) lawyers. It would be much too boring, not to mention confusing, to slog through the endless details. Instead, I’ll give you, for lack of a better term, the “highlights.”

  The first two important lawsuits came from two of our original associates.

  On April 14, Ed Coleman sued us for breach of contract. He got nothing.

  On April 28, Ron Nitzberg sued for breach of contract, claiming we owed him $245,000. We countersued him for breach of fiduciary duties and contract. I won that one.

  In May, Todd became the CEO of the Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Casino, and we terminated our contract with the Canadian company, which had furnished the ser­vices of our original time-share guru. Todd discovered some large cash transfers that had been made from the hotel account to an account in Canada. There were personal charges for a Hawaiian vacation on a company credit card. The guru left but the problems at the top had trickled down. There was one croupier who was giving herself two chips for every single chip she collected in the casino. The employees’ dining room was losing $75,000 a month. Todd fired one hundred of the company’s three hundred employees. The new president was a very nice man and not corrupt, but Todd cut his salary in half to reduce expenses.

  No lawsuits in June—hard to believe. Then in July we were sued twice.

  August was the hardest month for me personally. In 1993 one of my best friends had invested in the hotel. When we got into trouble and I couldn’t pay him back right away, I offered him stock as collateral. On the advice of his management company, he refused. Instead, he took me to court to recover his investment. It was heartbreaking for me a
s well as a bad choice on his part. All my other friends took the stock, and I personally paid everyone back as soon as I could. This friend and I finally settled, but we didn’t speak for a few years. I was devastated, and so was he. For some reason he believed that I actually had money when he sued me.

  In fact, that same month I personally guaranteed a third loan from Bennett Management, for $2,865,000, without knowing how I would repay it. The proceeds were principally used to pay off existing debt, including the $525,000 they’d lent us in February and the $340,000 from May, and for general corporate purposes. The new loan was due August 1999. (As it turned out, Bennett was running a Ponzi scheme. In 2000 they were prosecuted and convicted, so we never had to pay them back.)

  September brought us a suit from YESCO, the company that put up all the signs outside the hotel. One of their employees told Todd that YESCO had written a check to Richard as part of the deal. Why on earth would they pay Richard for something he hired them to do? It became a big legal mess, with me in the middle. Todd had to beg YESCO to leave the signs up while we straightened everything out. I wrote them a check for the $75,000 they said they had given Richard, and we worked out the rest. Then YESCO got in line with everyone else as we moved forward. Their suit for more than $700,000 was finally

  settled.

  In addition to all that, we had to deal with our own inexperience. In December we issued options for 750,000 shares of stock to a man named Peter Bistrian and an associate, unaware that Bistrian was a convicted felon who’d served time for bank fraud. He and his associate never paid for the shares, and the following April Bistrian was in prison again, after pleading guilty to selling phony shares of another casino company in 1993. “He had a pretty good reputation,” Todd says, but he wishes we’d done more checking.

  As Todd told the Las Vegas Sun in April 1998, the principal blunder was probably the choice to focus on time-share units rather than gaming, because people go to Vegas to gamble. Everything else is incidental. But we’d never been able to get our own license.

  Looking back, I believe I was acting with my heart instead of my brain during the time when all this was happening. I believed that if I fought hard and kept working, eventually the hotel would be a success and everyone would benefit. I never imagined that the hotel could fail.

  Dreams are funny when you’re chasing them. My dream of a loving husband and a stable life with a permanent place to work had eluded me again.

  The museum at my Las Vegas hotel for my collection—

  a dream come true.

  CHAPTER 11

  MOTHER PLAYS MOTHER

  NINETEEN NINETY-FIVE CONTINUED TO BE the year under the elephant’s tail. There was no avoiding the ongoing deluge of problems—the hotel troubles, the divorce battles. Through it all, I kept working as best I could. When I hit the stage each night, I could forget my difficulties for a few hours while I entertained my audience.

  Sometime in the fall Carrie called to tell me that her friend Albert Brooks was casting a new movie, to be entitled Mother.

  “You’re perfect for it, Mama,” Carrie encouraged. “Albert said he’d meet you.”

  I understood Carrie’s reasoning. For as long as I can remember, all the young people around me have called me Mother. The chorus kids in Irene, the actors in my movies—all have connected to my motherly side. This makes me very proud, as I believe it’s one of my best qualities.

  “I don’t know your friend, dear,” I admitted. “I’ve been so busy, I haven’t kept up.”

  Carrie went on to tell me more about Albert, emphasizing that he was brilliant and how right I was for the part. I vaguely remembered meeting Albert at some point with Carrie, but she has so many talented friends, he was only a name now. It was difficult for me to think about doing a movie at that time; when I wasn’t performing nightly at the hotel, I was giving concerts in other cities.

  Carrie sent me a copy of the script to read. Several days later she called to find out if I’d looked at it. When I told her the script was still downstairs at the reception desk, she strongly urged me to read it.

  Finally, the next day, I retrieved the script. It was about a neurotic science-fiction writer who moves back in with his mom to solve his personal problems after two failed marriages. I was a bit troubled by how different the character of the mother was from me, but I knew I could study the part and play her well. Albert’s script was so good that I agreed with Carrie that I should read for him.

  It had been a long time since I auditioned for a part. The studio system had kept me working without screen tests or auditions once I proved myself. I’d read for some sitcom in the 1980s, for a group of twenty-somethings who asked what acting experience I had, which didn’t exactly endear them to me. If the casting landscape hadn’t changed since then, I wasn’t optimistic about my prospects with Albert.

  I was the only person there to meet him when I arrived at his office at Paramount. I read two scenes, and he told me I had the part.

  “You can’t just say that,” I protested. “Who’s the director?”

  “I am.”

  “Well then, who’s your boss?”

  “Me again, and I’m telling you the part is yours.”

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. One of Carrie’s friends was telling me I had the lead in the movie without consulting anyone else. Could he do that?

  “I can read another scene,” I offered. I was prepared to read several. “How about the one in the restaurant?”

  He said that wouldn’t be necessary.

  Much later Albert told me that my behavior during that meeting assured him he’d made the right choice: I was already bossing him around.

  I returned to Las Vegas with mixed emotions. Who would take over for me at the hotel while I was on location? I hadn’t had a lead movie role in years. There was so much at stake; I wasn’t sure that I could handle it. I thanked God that Lillian Burns Sidney, my coach from MGM, was available to work with me.

  Todd arranged to book a revue into the Star Theater while I was away doing Mother. Production was set to begin at the end of the year. Until then, I continued to work every job in sight to save the hotel from bankruptcy.

  On days off from my showroom I would work one-nighters elsewhere to make money for the hotel. One Saturday in November I was onstage performing in Riverside, California, doing a show for a group of doctors, when suddenly I felt horrible pain in my stomach. I hadn’t experienced anything like it since I gave birth to Todd, who’d weighed over nine pounds. Somehow I got through the show and had my picture taken afterward with many of the doctors there. Even though I was in a room full of physicians, I would never presume to ask them for medical advice. I decided to wait until I got home, hoping that some rest would make me feel better. It was a two-hour drive from Riverside to my house in North Hollywood. I slept in the back of the limo all the way.

  The pain woke me up at nine the next morning. I called my doctor, who was also sick and couldn’t come over. I decided to check into the emergency room. Annie Russell, a friend and fellow actor from the Molly Brown road company who’d flown in from her home in New York to help with my lines for Mother, went with me to St. Joseph’s Hospital in Burbank. Sick as I was, I insisted on doing the driving.

  The next thing I recall is looking up and seeing a curly hairpiece that was tilted to one side of a head. The curls seemed to be moving of their own accord. I was obviously delirious. I closed my eyes and groaned, thankful that I hadn’t passed out at the wheel.

  “What kind of drugs do you do?” a voice asked me, presumably the doctor’s. “Do you smoke crack? The X-rays show that your stomach has completely burned through. It looks like you swallowed Drano. This kind of burning in the esophagus only happens when people smoke crack or do a lot of drugs.”

  And for this I got out of my own bed.

  “I don’t do drugs and I don’t smoke crack,” I informed Dr. Curly groggily. “I’ve been under some stress lately.”

  That w
as putting it mildly. About three years of unrelenting stress.

  “I’m putting you on an IV,” Dr. Curly advised me. “You won’t be able to eat any solid food for a few weeks at least.”

  “How long will I have to be in the hospital?” I asked, thinking, How long will I be looking at your toupee?

  “About two weeks. Ten days, if you’re lucky.”

  Lucky? I was lucky that I’d be acting in a film in three weeks. I didn’t need to be knocked down before I even got started. The next day I called Albert Brooks to say that I was in the hospital but should be out in a few days. Even though he told me not to worry, just to get well, I could sense that he was concerned.

  Lillian Sidney agreed to come to the hospital to coach me. Anne Russell read the script with me every day too. I had to memorize the material before filming started, and I needed to develop the character. As we said in El Paso, Oy!

  For the next week Lillian and Anne stayed by my bedside at St. Joseph’s, reading and rereading the script with me. My IV was the only way to get nourishment; once I was done with the IV, I would be switched to liquids. Lillian and I discussed the motivation for each scene, and she recorded my line readings on a portable cassette player, for reference.

  The hospital let me out early, and a week later I was at home, with the IV in place. The day after that I met with Albert at Paramount to work on the script. I wore a long-sleeved jacket, to cover the IV tube and my arms—still bruised from all the blood tests. Albert told me he wanted my character to be tougher and crisper, and underplayed. He read the lines with me. I was nervous because there was so much dialogue and Albert’s writing is very quick and precise.

  Carrie was right: Albert is brilliant. He’d written a story that was funny and touching, a remarkable examination of the relationship between a difficult mother and her troubled yet talented son. Albert himself plays my son. I wish I had been stronger during filming, but with Anne’s help I pushed through. She went with me to the studio and was there every day of shooting, keeping me on track. Annie and I would visit the set on my weekends off, to rehearse the following week’s scenes and work out shtick for my character. I wanted my scenes to feel natural. A number of them took place in the kitchen. I spent one Sunday memorizing the set, so I would feel as comfortable as if I were in my own kitchen when we shot the scene. Such touches add so much to a performance, and I wanted to be as good as I could be.