The Persona. The Person: Debbie Reynolds in Las Vegas Exhibition.
Actress, comedienne, singer, dancer, and businesswoman Debbie Reynolds was born Mary Frances Reynolds in 1932 to a working-class family in El Paso, Texas. Her family relocated to California in 1939, where she would later be discovered competing in a beauty contest at just sixteen years old. Debbie was offered a studio contract and went on to make history both on-screen and onstage, kick starting her lifelong film career in the 1952 film Singin’ in the Rain.
In The Person, The Persona: Debbie Reynolds in Las Vegas, we join Debbie in 1962, still caught in the media spotlight following her divorce from husband Eddie Fisher and his highly-publicized love affair with actress Elizabeth Taylor in 1959. Now, married again, and wishing to spend more time with her two children, Carrie and Todd Fisher, she moves to Las Vegas to begin her million-dollar residency at the Riviera Hotel and Casino. She looks to Las Vegas to provide stability in her life, both personally and professionally, as she establishes herself not only as one of Las Vegas’ most enduring personalities, but also as a multi-talented entertainer. This leads Hollywood to consider her for different roles, casting her as ‘Molly’ in The Unsinkable Molly Brown, based on a real-life tale of resilience that Debbie felt paralleled her own rags-to-riches life. Her performance in the film earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.
This exhibition weaves together two stories: one of Debbie’s professional career, highlighting her performances, collaborations, and unique rapport with her audiences, and one of Debbie’s personal life, featuring the love she had for her family, her enduring friendships, and her “unsinkable” resilience, culminating in a legacy that is forever entwined in the history of Las Vegas.
This Free Exhibition at Grand Gallery at Las Vegas City Hall ran from September 5 to October 26, 2023.
Academy Museum Gives Debbie Reynolds Her Due as a Costume Conservator
When the “Singin’ in the Rain” actress was alive, the film academy turned up its nose at her fabled costume collection. Now it has gone to her son with hat in hand.
“My mother was one of the most forgiving people ever,” said Todd Fisher, Debbie Reynolds’s son, who inherited the remaining part of her collection. “She would never want me to hold a grudge.” Credit...Roger Kisby for The New York Times
LOS ANGELES — For decades, Debbie Reynolds begged Hollywood to help her preserve and exhibit her vast collection of golden age costumes. “These pieces are cultural touchstones that still carry the energy of the stars who performed in them,” she once said, referring to legends like Elizabeth Taylor and Judy Garland. “There is magic in every thread, button and bow.”
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences turned her down — five times. Reynolds quoted an uninterested David Geffen in her 2013 memoir as once saying, “Why don’t you just sell that stuff?”
In debt, she finally had no other choice, auctioning Marilyn Monroe’s ivory-pleated halter dress that blew upward in “The Seven Year Itch” for $4.6 million and Audrey Hepburn’s lace Royal Ascot number from “My Fair Lady” for $3.7 million — prices that shocked moviedom’s aristocracy and proved Reynolds had been right. Also sold, in some cases to anonymous overseas collectors, were Charlton Heston’s “Ben-Hur” tunic and cape, the acoustic guitar Julie Andrews strummed in “The Sound of Music” and every hat that Vivien Leigh flaunted in “Gone With the Wind.”
Hollywood didn’t give a damn.
Now, four years after she died at 84, there has been a plot twist in the Debbie Reynolds costume collection saga, one that she would undoubtedly find both maddening and satisfying: The Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, set to open on April 30 and costing $482 million, finds itself caring about her collection — at least the part that is left, which includes iconic costumes she wore in movies like “Singin’ in the Rain.” Also remaining are screen garments created for Mary Pickford, Deborah Kerr and Cyd Charisse, as well as rare memorabilia from classics like “The Wizard of Oz” and “The Maltese Falcon.”
“There are still amazing pieces,” Bill Kramer, the museum’s director, said by phone. Reynolds passed the items to her son, Todd Fisher, a major collector in his own right, who has long focused on film cameras and lenses, or “cinema glass.” Fisher also inherited “Star Wars” memorabilia owned by his sister, Carrie Fisher, who died a day before their mother in 2016.
“I approached Todd about a year ago with the idea of naming our museum’s conservation studio after his mother, who was so key to our history, not only as an artist — acting, dancing, singing, her comedy — but also as a collector and preservationist,” Kramer said. “It turned into a conversation about how we might be able to work with Todd and the collection to bring Debbie’s legacy — and Todd’s and Carrie’s — into the museum in a tangible way.”
So far, Fisher has agreed to lend the Academy Museum one item from his own collection: a set of seven Bausch and Lomb Baltar lenses used by Gregg Toland, the fabled “Citizen Kane” cinematographer. But Fisher, 62, said more items would come, as long as the Debbie Reynolds Conservation Studio exists on the museum’s lower level next to the Shirley Temple Education Studio.
“My mother was one of the most forgiving people ever,” Fisher said. “She would never want me to hold a grudge just because I have knowledge of all the missed opportunities — how the people running the academy in the past were never willing to step up and support her. She would have wanted me to share these important artifacts with future generations. So, as long as they are properly recognizing my mother for her contribution to this discipline, I agreed to provide access to whatever I have access to.”
Fisher continued: “I’m still here, and I know where a lot of it is — where key pieces ended up. I’m still here, and I still have some of it.”
Article by Brooks Barnes at The New York Times
