"I wanted to be a gymnast. I wanted to work on the bars and trapeze work – I loved all that stuff."

I highly recommend this podcast interview with Debbie Reynolds, who died yesterday. I know some of you may feel resistant to the interviewer, who is Alec Baldwin, but he's actually a wonderful interviewer. There's a transcript at the link in case you need the distance of the written word. Excerpt:

Alec Baldwin: And all you broads,* shall we say, came – these four broads came from an era when everything was just – was at its height. It was heightened, doing your hair and your makeup and your costumes and everything. It's not as...

Debbie Reynolds: Everything is super important and everything is done for you. When we were under contract most of us, Shirley MacLaine and Elizabeth Taylor, were at MGM and everything was done for us, the makeup, the hair. They'd send cars for us. We were very spoiled. We didn't know what to do when they dropped everybody when television came in '48.

Alec Baldwin: Sure. Can you remember what year, around? Was the end of the '40s?

Debbie Reynolds: '48, '49.

Alec Baldwin: The studio system died as you get into the '50s?

Debbie Reynolds: It slowly died a death. It was like interesting to watch. It was – I didn't realize it was the end. I didn't know that it was that.

Alec Baldwin: You didn't know what the change meant.

Debbie Reynolds: Well, I was a young girl, so I didn't and I wasn't an intellectual. I wasn't educated. I wasn't -

Alec Baldwin: You're from Burbank.

Debbie Reynolds: I'm from Burbank.

Alec Baldwin: You're a gal from Burbank.

Debbie Reynolds: Originally from Texas.

Alec Baldwin: And you wanted to be a gym teacher.

Debbie Reynolds: That's me. I always aim high.

Alec Baldwin: Me too.

Debbie Reynolds: I love gym. I love sports.

Alec Baldwin: I wanted to be a lifeguard. Sun, girls, swim.

Debbie Reynolds: Well, yeah. Yes. Well, I was never that ambitious that I wanted to be a lifeguard, but I wanted to be a gymnast. I wanted to work on the bars and trapeze work – I loved all that stuff.

Alec Baldwin: And what's the link for you as a young girl, because you started very young, as a young girl in Burbank and you're athletic no doubt, what's the first thing that happened that said "show business" to you?

Debbie Reynolds: Well, I never thought about me being in show business. I was a fan and I would go to the movies because my mother let me, but no one else in our church was allowed to go to films because movie stars were all evil creatures, just dreadful. My mother let me go to films.

Alec Baldwin: Your mother was very religious?

Debbie Reynolds: Very. My family, except my dad. My father used to say, 'No, no, no. I'm not going to go to church with you. I've told you that I'm not gonna go because all those good people will be killed if I walked in, the roof would fall in.'

Alec Baldwin: Have heart attacks.

______________________________

* He's saying "broads" because they were just talking about a TV movie Debbie made with Shirley MacLaine, Joan Collins, and Elizabeth Taylor called "These Old Broads." The movie, which came out in 2001, was written by Carrie Fisher.

Debbie Reynolds has died.

"She wanted to be with Carrie."

IN THE COMMENTS: William said:

This had a multiplier effect. Debbie was sucked into the vacuum. I liked them both, and I'm genuinely sorrowful to hear of their deaths. Carrie was very open about her family life and her relations with her mother.. If HBO brings back Wishful Drinking, take a look. It's a performance piece, but you really get the sense that you know them in a way you don't with other celebrities. The piece supposed to be a comedy about life in Hollywood, but I bet it would play like Sophocles upon re-viewing.......Well, they were both performers and I can't imagine a more dramatic exit.

We were watching "Wishful Drinking" last night when I got a text from my son Chris: "debbie reynolds died!"

There's a new HBO documentary, made to air in 2017, with Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher. Here's a little clip, showing that the 2 women lived in houses next door to each other:



"I usually come to her. I always come to her."

This last time, she came to you.

Goodbye to Carrie Fisher.

"Carrie Fisher, the actress, author and screenwriter who brought a rare combination of nerve, grit and hopefulness to her most indelible role, as Princess Leia in the 'Star Wars' movie franchise phenomenon, died on Tuesday morning. She was 60."

Here she is, alongside her mother Debbie Reynolds, talking about the breakup of her parents (with Debbie getting the very long last laugh):



I hope that isn't too much laughing. I was looking for the interview she did with her father, back when she had a talk show in 2004, which I blogged here:

It was ragged, frighteningly raw, really, but very funny. He is an eely sweetheart of a man, and he sat there and let his daughter bounce zingers off him for an hour. She's bitter and good natured, and she let him have it about his life of heavy drug use and womanizing.

And I'm a big fan of the movie based on her book "Postcards from the Edge":



Here she is in her first role — she's a teenager — with Warren Beatty in "Shampoo":

Please stop debating about whetherOR not👁aged well.unfortunately it hurts all3 of my feelings.My BODY hasnt aged as well as I have.Blow us👌🏼

— Carrie Fisher (@carrieffisher) December 29, 2015

IsYRbody DKaying➕deth marchi🆖ever closer?®the sands 🅾️F time💲🅾️cruel✝️♓️📧Yshud🅱️arrested➕💲📧♑️✝️2️⃣a 🚗dℹ🅰©beach?Get©gℹ,perspective ➕d📧🅰🕒w/ℹ✝️ pic.twitter.com/euI92t3PeU

— Carrie Fisher (@carrieffisher) December 21, 2016

Dubbing in movie musicals fell into disrepute.

Present-day preference is for "real" screen actors, with an acceptance of their vocal imperfections. But in the old days:

Classically trained singers like Betty Noyes, Betty Wand, and Marni Nixon made careers out of singing for some of Hollywood’s most famous actresses, including Audrey Hepburn and Leslie Caron. One of the greatest movie musicals, West Side Story, dubbed three of its leads—Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, and Rita Moreno—because their voices weren’t trained for the operatic score. The film was better for it. (Russ Tamblyn and George Chakiris, whose singing was not dubbed, had less challenging vocal parts.) Similarly, the men behind Singin’ in the Rain, a movie partly about dubbing in the movies, had no problem dubbing Debbie Reynolds for a couple of songs. The King and I, Gigi, and My Fair Lady are other prominent musicals that used dubbing without shame.

Everything in those old movies was more "false," but within n comprehensive environment of falseness, it made sense. It's false that people are singing at all. There's falseness to any stage show. But in a stage show, the actors are really singing, not lip-synching. I'd rather not watch lip-synching, whether it's the actor's own voice or not.

"Despite the passage of time since second-wave feminism erupted in the late 1960s, we’ve somehow been thrown back to the demure girly-girl days of the white-bread 1950s."

"It feels positively nightmarish to survivors like me of that rigidly conformist and man-pleasing era, when girls had to be simple, peppy, cheerful and modest. Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds and Sandra Dee formed the national template -- that trinity of blond oppressors!"

Camille Paglia is displeased with Taylor Swift and Katy Perry.

Tony Curtis, RIP.

He was 85.

As a performer, Mr. Curtis drew first and foremost on his startlingly good looks. With his dark, curly hair, worn in a sculptural style later imitated by Elvis Presley, and plucked eyebrows framing pale blue eyes and wide, full lips, Mr. Curtis embodied a new kind of feminized male beauty that came into vogue in the early 1950s. A vigorous heterosexual in his widely publicized (not least by himself) private life, he was often cast in roles that drew on a perceived ambiguity: his full-drag impersonation of a female jazz musician in “Some Like It Hot,” a slave who attracts the interest of a Roman senator (Laurence Olivier) in Stanley Kubrick’s “Spartacus” (1960), a man attracted to a mysterious blond (Debbie Reynolds) who turns out to be the reincarnation of his male best friend in Vincente Minnelli’s “Goodbye Charlie” (1964).

Tony Curtis was great. I recently watched the second-rate movie "Sex and the Single Girl" and noticed how funny Curtis made lines that were really not very good. But "Some Like It Hot" is as good as a movie can be and Tony Curtis is part of what makes it fabulous. Here's one of my favorites scenes, where Tony sets up an encounter with Marilyn in which he's not dressed in women's clothes, he's pretending to be a millionaire: