Reynolds Returns to the Hollywood Nest

NEW YORK —  It’s early on a December morning in New York, and Debbie Reynolds’ first comment is about the ungodly hours she’s having to keep in her revived career as a movie actress. She has the day off from Frank Oz’s “In and Out,” which is shooting in New York, but she’s been up since 5 a.m., getting ready to go on “Good Morning, America” to discuss her title role in Albert Brooks’ “Mother.”

“I’m not a morning person, I never was,” Reynolds says, pouring herself a cup of tea in her suite in the Mark Hotel. “People say, ‘Don’t you want to wake up and see the birds?’ I say, ‘No, I’d rather see them when I go to sleep.’ ”

It’s been a long time since Reynolds had to worry about early wake-up calls. In her own words, her film career “came to a screeching halt” a quarter-century ago, when the musicals and light comedies for which she was known became passe, and she’s spent most of the interim doing a nightclub act.

“We’d never get to bed before 4 or 5 o’clock in the morning,” she says. “That’s when the film company gets me up now. Sheesh! I can’t get used to it at all.”

She may, however, get used to the praise that has been pouring in for her performance in “Mother.” The movie, about a middle-aged novelist who decides to move back in with the mother he blames for both his writer’s block and his failures with women, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival in September, and Reynolds has been on everybody’s short list for a best actress Oscar nomination ever since.

In the movie, Reynolds plays a widow sublimely adjusted to retired life in San Francisco. She’s proud of her two sons, the writer (Brooks) and the sports agent (Rob Morrow), even though both are wildly maladjusted. She has a boyfriend, who’s as frisky as a colt, and a garden she loves to tend. The last thing she needs is for one of those boys to move back into his childhood bedroom, reinstate his lava lamp, pennants and rock posters and try to relive his youth.

His actual effect on her is that of a 180-pound gnat, constantly in her face, and she reacts to him with a running patter of hilariously innocent insults. Reynolds’ role is the fullest Brooks has written for another character, and she plays it to deadpan perfection.

But as critics hail her as 1996’s comeback story, the question arises, why did Brooks even think of her?

“I wanted someone in the role who wouldn’t be in three other movies the same year,” Brooks says. “I needed someone to break out, I wanted it to be as special as it could be. Debbie fit the bill. Here she was in ‘Singin’ in the Rain,’ for God’s sake, then just gone, disappeared.”

Reynolds, 64, hadn’t disappeared, exactly. She was on stage somewhere almost every night, singing and dancing and telling jokes.

“When my film career stopped, I was raising five kids and I needed to work,” Reynolds says. “I was lucky. I could sing and dance and I was capable of producing my own acts and going on the road. The other girls were so used to everything being done for them that they just stayed home.”

Brooks had developed a casual relationship with Reynolds through his friendship with her daughter, Carrie Fisher. Reynolds remembers Brooks as an old boyfriend of Carrie’s, “this cute, funny guy.” Brooks says he and Carrie were merely friends. In any event, Brooks and Reynolds saw each other socially every few years, and after considering such missing-in-action names as Esther Williams and Doris Day for “Mother,” he thought of Reynolds.

“I called Carrie and woke her up one night to ask her, ‘Do you think your mother could play my mother?’ ” Brooks recalls. “She said, ‘She’d be perfect.’ ”

Says Reynolds: “Carrie called me and said, ‘Mother, you’ve got to fly in and read for Albert. He’s got a great part for an older lady.’ I said, ‘Honey, I can’t fly in, I have too much to do here.’ She said, ‘Well, you just have to, you’re never going to have another role like this.’ She’d suddenly become my agent, she really pushed me.”

Reynolds wasn’t immediately interested because she had put film work completely out of her mind, and because she had no idea Brooks was someone who could actually hire her.

“I hadn’t seen Albert’s films, I didn’t know he was a big star and that he had all this power,” she says. “I had never auditioned before, and I didn’t even know how to go about that. So, I did a scene with Albert and he said, ‘Fine, you’ve got the part.’ I said, ‘Well, Albert, don’t you have to call the producer or the head of Paramount or somebody?’ He said, ‘No, I do everything.’ I thought, ‘Wow.’ ”

“She was really funny,” Brooks recalls of that meeting. “Here’s a woman from Louis B. Mayer’s world. I don’t even know if directors made decisions in that world.”

Brooks says he was always convinced he could get the performance he wanted from Reynolds, but he wasn’t ready for the time warp she brought to the set with her.

“On one of the first days of shooting, Debbie takes me aside, like this is something nobody would know,” Brooks says. “She tells me, ‘Honey, there are not enough lights here.’ We’ve got this great cinematographer [Lajos] Koltai working on the film. I said, ‘OK, let me go tell him. I’m sure he’ll go, “Oh, my God, you’re right!” ’ “

“Being on a movie set again was familiar, yet unfamiliar to me,” Reynolds admits. “It’s kind of scary, because of the new techniques. Hand-held cameras. The lighting’s different. There are so many things I’m not accustomed to.”

Looking back, Reynolds views her life as a string of events almost beyond her control. “My life has just spun along, sort of like a wheel on a car that somebody else is driving,” she says. “I’ve just gone with it.”

That car got up to speed after her father moved the family from Texas to Los Angeles, where she got absorbed in movies, developed a taste for performing, and, at age 16, won the Miss Burbank contest. An MGM scout in the audience invited her in for a screen test, and she spent the next 17 years on contract at the studio that was home to Oz.

Reynolds made a minor splash in the 1950 “Three Little Words,” playing boop-boop-a-doop singer Helen Kane, and two years later, sang and danced her way into film history as Kathy Seldon in “Singin’ in the Rain.”

Shortly after that, she married pop singer Eddie Fisher in one of those storybook romances Hollywood was so good at promoting. The couple quickly had two children, Carrie and Todd, the latter named after Fisher’s best friend, producer Mike Todd. When Mike Todd died in an airplane crash in 1958, Fisher was so successful at consoling his widow, Elizabeth Taylor, that he literally became her consolation prize. In one of the great scandals of the time, Fisher left America’s sweetheart for the violet-eyed femme fatale and became a national joke.

“Eddie Fisher trying to satisfy Liz Taylor is like a man trying to flag down the Super Chief with a match,” said one comedian.

“I always say, ‘Eddie went down the Nile,’ ” Reynolds says, referring to the making of “Cleopatra,” when Taylor dumped Fisher for co-star Richard Burton.

Reynolds would remarry twice, to shoe magnate Harry Karl and real estate developer Richard Hamlett, but they would only serve as two more speed bumps in that out-of-control ride.

“My personal life has been crazy because of my own inability to pick men,” Reynolds said. “That’s my problem. Just poor taste. I have no taste in men. . . . I’m a very good parent, and I adore my children. But I don’t adore my ex-husbands.”

Reynolds says she was emotionally devastated for two years by the Fisher-Taylor affair, but Karl, who has since died, left her broke and millions of dollars in debt, with her two children and his three to raise.

“He lost all the money and drove me into a situation where it took me 10 years to pay off debts. I’ve never forgiven him for that.”

Reynolds divorced Hamlett early in 1996 and says she’s now resigned to living without a male companion, or at least another husband. She jokes that she may take a cue from her character in “Mother,” who tries to put her son’s mind to rest about her relationship with her boyfriend. “Dear, we’re not intimate, we just have sex occasionally.”

Though the MGM musical era ended shortly after “Singin’ in the Rain,” Reynolds continued to work in such light comedies as “The Tender Trap” and “Tammy and the Bachelor,” and in occasional musicals, including “The Unsinkable Molly Brown,” for which she won her lone Oscar nomination. But the film industry and American tastes were changing, and as message movies began to muscle out light entertainment, Reynolds became disposable.

“I wanted to be an actress who could play anything, take a role anywhere I wanted to,” she says. “Before, all I was required to do was show up. I was adorable, I was young, I could sing and dance. It took about five years of studying acting seriously before I was confident. Then, I was fired.”

Actually, Reynolds had one major opportunity to segue into the new era of film candor, when she was offered the role of Bobbie, Jack Nicholson’s despairing mistress in Mike Nichols’ 1971 “Carnal Knowledge.” She says she turned it down because it required nudity. A less modest Ann-Margret took the part and won an Oscar nomination for it.

“My girlfriend, Carol Baker, and I had a long talk about the role,” Reynolds says. “She said, ‘It’s just part of acting, it has nothing to do with you personally.’ I said, ‘I can’t differentiate.’ I’m very Victorian, and it doesn’t matter how much I know about acting, I’m not going to take my blouse and my bra off.”

Nor, if she can help it, will anyone in her family. “My daughter was offered a part in ‘Hair,’ where she’d be naked. I said, ‘Carrie, do you really want your children to grow up seeing you running down the street with your breasts and your pubic hair exposed? Is there anything you’ve seen your mother do on screen that you’re embarrassed about? Because you are going to have children and they are going to see you in that film.’ So, she turned the part down. I was thrilled.”

The video revolution, of course, has made nude celebrity sightseeing its own form of home entertainment. There’s actually a reference book out called “Bare Facts” that indexes the nude scenes of most film actors, locates the exact moment in the movies where their body parts are visible, and rates them by the quality of the image. (For the record, the Ann-Margret “Carnal Knowledge” entry reads: “0:48--Topless and buns making love in bed with Jack Nicholson, then getting out of bed and into shower with Jack.”)

“And that would have been me,” Reynolds says, shaking her head. “Why? Just for a good part in a picture? No thanks.”

Instead, Reynolds made a successful segue into live performance, first by appearing in the Broadway revival of “Irene,” then by creating a nightclub act that she still does, in sold-out theaters from Atlantic City to her own Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas.

Her show is a cavalcade of movie nostalgia, featuring film clips and her performances of songs made famous in her movies.