How to Be a Movie Star

by William J. Mann

  They would not. The scandal was not going to blow over any time soon despite Kurt Frings's fervent hopes.

  Elizabeth remained in hiding. Eddie moved in with her at Frings's house. "We spent most of our time in a small room up several flights of stairs," he recalled. They slept on a sofa bed, calling the place their "womb with a view." Eventually reporters figured out where Elizabeth was and lined the street outside Frings's house. On the rare occasions when they ventured out, Eddie and Elizabeth would lie on the floor of Roddy McDowall's car covered with blankets. It was the only way to sneak past the press.

  Across town, however, Debbie Reynolds was still making sure that reporters got a good look at her. According to MGM publicist Rick Ingersoll, Debbie came to feel that Metro, possibly because of growing concern over Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, was now "siding with Elizabeth." So she hired her own public relations firm. While it's clearly not true that the studio was favoring Elizabeth, there was a limit to how far they'd go in attacking the star of one of their biggest pictures of the year. But Debbie wanted a much more aggressive campaign on her behalf, and she got it. From the fall of 1958 through early 1960, it was virtually impossible to pick up a fan magazine or entertainment section of a local newspaper and not see the face of Debbie Reynolds.

  The Liz-Eddie-Debbie triangle was the first major scandal of the poststudio era. In the old days, the studios' mass production of star publicity—all those purple mimeographed press releases, glossy eight-by-tens, and scripted "interviews"—had fed the ever-hungry maw of the press, and the public's curiosity about its heroes and heroines had been sated, if often deceived. When a scandal like Rita Hayworth's "premature" baby or Robert Mitchum's marijuana bust erupted, the disclosure of the star's "transgression" was, as film scholar Adrienne McLean has described it, "oriented toward short-term profit and gain." That is, after a suitable period in which the newspapers and fan magazines were allowed to reap the financial rewards of sensational headlines, the studio pulled back, gave the word that it was over, and received the full understanding and cooperation of its collaborators in the press. In the studio era, most scandals flared up and died very quickly. Aggressive reporters who tried to keep the story going would be barred from further access. No one benefited if the scandal went on too long.

  But that was then. As studio control declined and independent press agents—like Bill Doll and the public-relations firm that Debbie hired to represent her—came to predominate, the single narrative that had determined press coverage in the past was split into two or three competing versions. It's not difficult to page through issues of Photoplay or Motion Picture and distinguish between which stories were planted by Doll and which ones by Debbie's publicists. In this poststudio arrangement, the back-and-forth story lines ensured that the press continued to make money from the scandal for many months afterward. Indeed, Time magazine reporter Ezra Goodman called the Liz-Eddie-Debbie coverage "the greatest binge of marathon mush" that he had ever seen. The triangle narrative stretched on for more than a year. And for most of that time, it was Debbie's advocates who led the spin, who won the battle for the most pages, covers, and sympathetic treatment.

  That success can be attributed as much to the lady herself as to her agents. "Debbie was going to win the war, not just the battle," said publicist Alan Cahan. In many ways, Debbie Reynolds was very much like the character played by Shirley MacLaine in the film Postcards from the Edge, based on her daughter Carrie Fisher's semiautobiographical novel: the iron-willed survivor whose red sequined gowns and perky charm belie the warrior within. Debbie was everything Elizabeth was not: a compulsive entertainer, a Hollywood booster, a spotlight chaser. She could go from girl next door to high-kicking chanteuse in an instant.

  As a girl, Carrie was riveted by that process. She called her mother's closet "the Church of Latter-Day Debbie" because it was the place she entered as an ordinary mom and "emerged as Debbie Reynolds." Carrie and her brother Todd would watch the transformation in awe. "She'd twirl her hair up into pincurls that she'd use to pull her face tighter, then she'd put on her make-up base with a sponge." Next came the false lashes, lipstick, rouge, and powder—"great puffs of glittering clouds of powder, followed by hair, which was a big deal, getting the wig on right." Finally she'd clip on earrings, slip a sequined dress over her head, and step into her tiny shoes. "When she was finished," Carrie said, "her Debbie Reynolds movie-star accent got stronger, her posture got better and she looked incredibly beautiful." Later Carrie would observe the process in reverse. The makeup came off with a facecloth, followed by a bubble bath. "Debbie Reynolds would slowly return to being our mother," Carrie wrote. "The coach was once more a pumpkin, the footmen went back to being mice."

  Debbie was the classic showbiz pro. Robert Shaw, Hedda's legman, was unabashed in his admiration of Reynolds: "She took what could have been a disaster for her and turned it into a triumph." Alan Cahan was even more succinct: "Debbie knew what sold."

  Indeed, the Liz-Eddie-Debbie scandal was ready-made for the housewives who read the fan magazines. In contrast to the glamorous Elizabeth, Debbie had always been someone with whom they could identify, the slightly less pretty, slightly less successful member of the Todd-Fisher quartet. In October 1957 Photoplay had published a photo of Debbie looking wistful as she'd "oh'd and ah'd" over the splendor of the Todds' lifestyle—exactly the way any housewife would've acted if she'd been asked along on one of Mike's private-jet trips to Las Vegas or New York. And when Mike died, those housewives recalled, it had been Debbie who'd been there for "Liz." "Dear Debbie," Photoplay had written. "She asked the same question Liz asked: 'What about the children?' And took them all into her own home." No wonder one fan wrote to Hedda tarring Elizabeth as "Judas Iscariot."

  To the public, Debbie was the Good Mother. Elizabeth was anything but. "A no-good mother," one fan declared. "Why doesn't she stay home and take care of her children?" Another was tired of the "excuses for her neglect of her children"—who, after all, were left in the care of nannies while their mother hid out at her agent's house. "Does she not even have a mother's love?" asked a Mississippi woman.

  And if this developing narrative revealed that Elizabeth didn't love her children, then she mustn't have loved her husband either. "It makes me furious all these lies about how broken up over Mike Todd's death she is," a Texas housewife griped to Hedda. The New York Daily News ran a letter from a reader saying Elizabeth should win an Academy Award "for her recent role as the grief-stricken widow."

  It was absurd, of course; everyone who knew Elizabeth attested to how much she mourned Mike. But without the studio's controlling hand, whichever side spoke the loudest won the round. And it was Debbie's voice—or the voices of her publicists—that drowned out most everything else, ensuring that what the public got was, in fact, the exact inverse of reality.

  Case in point: If conventional wisdom held that Elizabeth hadn't really loved Mike, Debbie's love for Eddie was treated as certain beyond any and all doubt. "Debbie loved Eddie with a fervor and intensity that surpassed any emotion she had ever known," one fulsome scribe wrote. "To her marriage she had given every joy and every hope she had tucked away in her heart. When Eddie Fisher left her home for the arms of Liz Taylor, he took it all with him. [Debbie] drew the curtains of silence and sadness around her life and in the sudden and terrible loneliness that overwhelmed her, she grieved."

  It didn't matter that Debbie had actually thrown the curtains open wide and practically invited the press into her living room. The paradigm was put in place. Motion Picture magazine summed it all up in a single image: When Eddie announced that he was leaving, "Debbie Reynolds—her hair in a single ponytail and her tired face completely devoid of makeup—heard her baby son cry and reached automatically for the diaper pin pinned to her blouse." That was all millions of housewives needed to hear.

  The fan magazines that had once deified Elizabeth now went on the attack. "[She] has spent most of her life in a sheltered, unreal world all her own—a soft, comf
ortable, pretty world, with her beautiful self at the center," wrote Photoplay in December 1958. Fan-magazine readers all knew girls like her—girls who had it easy, who didn't need to struggle the way they did. Now their envy and resentment were aimed at Elizabeth. Another magazine opined, "Elizabeth Taylor may discover—for the first time—that her outrageous beauty is not sufficient justification for her attitude throughout this crisis."

  Debbie, by contrast, was a paragon of virtue. "No sweeter girl has ever lived in Tinseltown," declared one report. Hedda's mail was filled with similar accolades for the folksy blond star. "Debbie is a thousand times better than Liz," a Sherman Oaks, California, resident wrote. Another correspondent thought Debbie had "an intelligence far above her years," and another, from Sydney, Australia, was moved to defend Miss Reynolds because, after all, "Tammy gave enjoyment to so many." One particularly riled fan insisted, "Debbie has more beauty in her little finger than that jezebel."

  This became the prevailing image of the scandal because, bottom line, Debbie wanted it to be. The truth, of course, was very different. Even at the time, there were those who recognized a myth in the making. Ezra Goodman had no patience at all when he heard writers describe the Fishers' marriage as "ideal": "In Hollywood, all marriages are considered 'ideal' until they are suddenly splattered all over the front pages." When "friends" were quoted wondering if "poor little Debbie" could survive this terrible blow, one writer for Motion Picture had the guts to write: "You know who those friends were? Publicists and press agents. They knew the line to feed to the fan magazines, and the editors knew what would sell to the housewives who made up their readership."

  In cold hard truth, the marriage of Eddie and Debbie had been a masquerade from the start. Even their daughter Carrie would admit, "[Their] whole relationship was basically a press release." Their courtship had been arranged by MGM, concocted by a publicity department that saw magic between the two "All-Americans." Both Eddie and Debbie knew the game they played. "That's how [stars] would meet," Debbie explained years later. "They would have premieres, and each studio would have ... their new young stars meet the other new stars, and that's how we'd go out on dates. That's how Janet Leigh met Tony Curtis. Like [how] Jeff Hunter married Barbara Rush." Such candor wasn't found in her memoir, however, where she tried to maintain, some thirty years after the whole ordeal, the spin that her relationship with Eddie had been authentic and heartfelt. But MGM had arranged matches for her in much the same way that she had described for those others, first with Robert Wagner, then Tab Hunter, and finally Eddie.

  Fisher, for his part, simply did what he was told. "I had no con trol over my own life," he said. "I went where Milton [Blackstone, his agent] told me to go, I sang the songs RCA wanted me to sing, I married Debbie Reynolds because ... To this day I still don't know why." The reason, quite simply, was because the public wanted it. The fan magazines had built them into the most-watched couple in America, with photographers chasing them everywhere shouting, "Give her a kiss, Eddie!" There was so much interest in the couple that even the queen, after a show Eddie gave in London, inquired whether they were going to marry.

  Eddie had tried to back out at the last minute. According to one friend, Eddie had grown increasingly concerned about Debbie's "strong personality and was worried about being dominated by it." But marry they did, in September 1955, with the honeymoon to New York "more or less a business trip, specifically requested by Fisher's then-TV sponsor." To the public, Debbie and Eddie seemed a real-life version of Betty White and Del Moore of Life with Elizabeth, or Joan Caulfield and Barry Nelson of My Favorite Husband, or any of the other perfect young couples then dominating television. But like those sitcom twosomes, the Fishers' lives were entirely scripted. Their first costarring film, Bundle of Joy, was timed to coincide with the birth of their daughter Carrie. Or maybe it was the other way around.

  Their domestic bliss was a well-orchestrated fiction. Tension between husband and wife increased in the summer of 1957, when Debbie's recording of "Tammy" spent five weeks at number one and then stayed an unprecedented thirty-one weeks on the charts. Eddie, despite his hot TV show, hadn't had a hit in over a year. There was jealousy. There was fighting. A number of times they separated, only to reconcile for the good of their squeaky-clean image. Privately, Eddie agreed that Debbie was indeed the girl next door—"but only if you lived next door to a self-centered, totally driven, insecure, untruthful phony."

  For a man who had been used to bedding as many girls as his schedule would permit, the marriage to Debbie was like being ex iled to a vast, arid desert. Sex between them, Eddie said, was "nonexistent" except to "make babies." Debbie admitted that she was "frigid and sexually unresponsive" until she was much older.

  Eddie even thought that his wife might be a lesbian: "The idea crossed my mind," he said. Rumors about Debbie's sexuality had been floating around Hollywood for years, and Eddie wondered if they might be true. "My father's story is basically that my parents' relationship had gone south because my mother was gay," Carrie Fisher said, though she made sure to express her opinion that Eddie's tale of leaving Debbie "in the house with her lover" was "insane" since, after all, "the press [was] living in the yard."

  Still, many wondered about this Camille Williams "on whose slender shoulder Debbie Reynolds wept through the resounding smashup" of her marriage. Those reporters out front noted that when Debbie and Camille returned home from the movies, the lights in the house went dark—"all except the light in Debbie's bedroom upstairs." Like Debbie, Camille had been Miss Burbank, and had made something of a career of beauty contests, being named Miss Magnolia Park in 1956 and coming in third in the Miss San Fernando Valley pageant. She'd also competed for the unwieldy title of Queen of the 162nd Tactical Control Group of the California Air National Guard. Debbie would describe Camille as a "voluptuous" brunette forever being chased by men. Sounds a little like Elizabeth. But at twenty-seven years old, Camille had so far managed to elude all offers of marriage and was currently dancing in Dan Dailey's Vegas act—a comeback attempt by the former movie star who'd been outed as a cross-dresser by Confidential.

  There was one other "very close friend" of Debbie's, as Eddie called her. This was Jeanette Johnson, another old pal from Burbank who had served as Debbie's maid of honor and frequent traveling companion, and "who had become the gym teacher Debbie once dreamed of being."

  Whatever the truth of Debbie's sexuality—and it's likely far more nuanced than any one label could describe—the fact of her artificial, largely sexless marriage to Eddie radically alters the nar rative that seemed so sure, so true, in the fall of 1958. One thing is certain: Elizabeth was no home wrecker. When she told Hedda Hopper, "I'm not taking anything away from Debbie Reynolds because she never really had it," it definitely upset a lot of people. But it was 100 percent true. And Elizabeth's candid violation of the set of fictions that she herself had sometimes exploited must have been very threatening to Hedda, one of the chief perpetrators of Hollywood untruths.

  "Although Liz and I have been cast in the villains' roles, with Debbie as the heroine, there are just a few things wrong with all the reports that have come out about us and the picture created in the public's mind," Eddie complained to the press. Art Buchwald was one of the few journalists who provided a platform to explain what those "few things" might be. Eddie said: "The legend that [Debbie and I] were the ideal couple was to blame more than anything else for what happened when Elizabeth and I announced that we were going to get married. I'm just a guy whose marriage was at an end. I knew it. Debbie knew it. Our friends knew it. The public didn't know it. Debbie's studio wouldn't admit it. So I was happily married, as far as the public was concerned, long after I was unhappily married."

  The problem was, no one cared to hear the truth. The fiction sold so much better.

  In the midst of all this, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof opened in New York at Radio City Music Hall. Unlike Giant, there was no gala East Coast premiere; Elizabeth remained sequestered in Bever
ly Hills. But that didn't stop the crowds from showing up. If MGM had worried that the scandal would deter people from seeing the movie, their fears were relieved by the lines that snaked around the corner from the theater all the way down Seventh Avenue. Fans started gathering at daybreak, jamming into the lobby and spilling out onto the street. The first show was scheduled for 10:30 in the morning, and all six thousand seats sold out. Ushers in their crisp white jackets and bow ties did their best to find seating for every one who showed up, but even then there was an overflow. Anxious patrons waited in the street for one of the next shows—1:22, 4:17, 7:17, and 10:11. Every seat was filled at every screening. In between shows the famous Rockettes kicked up their legs—but who cared about them when Liz Taylor was up there on the screen, her larger-than-life image filling up that enormous, darkened theater, her heaving breasts and hourglass hips barely contained in a clingy white slip for most of the film's 108 minutes?

  "Ferocious and fascinating," wrote the New York Times' Bosley Crowther after seeing the picture—and Elizabeth, who "quite obviously has the proclivities of that cat on the roof," was "terrific as a panting, impatient wife wanting the love of her husband as sincerely as she wants an inheritance." Variety praised her "well-accented, perceptive interpretation," and Time was impressed by her "surprising sureness."