First husband Eddie Fisher famously left her for Elizabeth Taylor. (REUTERS)
Second husband, shoe chain owner Harry Karl, allegedly burned through $100 million of her money. (Getty Images)
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Unsinkable:
A Memoir
by Debbie Reynolds
William Morrow
Debbie Reynolds was so certain that her third marriage would end her streak of bad luck — her first husband betrayed her publicly with the most famous woman in the world and her second husband left her financially destitute — that she put it in writing.
Real-estate developer Richard Hamlett was sexually intoxicating (unlike her other husbands) and a rare combination of “brave, loyal and loving,” she wrote in her 1988 memoir, “Debbie: My Life.”
Now, in her follow-up memoir “Unsinkable” — which reads more like a true-crime story than a fairytale love affair — she amends her impression with four words: “How wrong I was!”
Reynolds has a career that spans 60 years, with classic roles in “Singin’ in the Rain” and “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.” Yet she’s most widely recognized for her rocky love life — an image this book will only cement.
Sure, Eddie Fisher humiliated her, his worst infraction being “ignoring our children.” And millionaire Harry Karl “wiped us out financially” and was an “unfortunate man.”
But Hamlett? “I’d married the devil.”
Reynolds met the dashing, blue-eyed Hamlett in 1983 at a party while taping a television special in Reno, Nevada.
Less than a year later, he proposed to her. She was 52 and didn’t want to spend the rest of her life “alone, afraid of loving again.” It had been 26 years since Eddie Fisher left her for Elizabeth Taylor and 10 years since she divorced her second husband, a shoe-store chain owner who squandered an estimated $100 million of Reynold’s own savings.
“Marrying him felt right. We seemed to be kindred spirits,” she writes, even though her daughter, actress and writer Carrie Fisher, had yet to meet him, and her close friends were wary of this new suitor.
She felt prepared for this new love in ways that she felt she was lacking in her other relationships.
“Gone were the days of just hugging and kissing,” she writes. “Prior to this, I’d felt that loving someone was enough. I learned that pleasuring a man is all part of being a good hostess.”
During her second marriage, she had hired a sex expert to school her in the art of lovemaking (with the help of electronic toys, to boot). But she hadn’t used her new knowledge on her second husband, because at the time the feds were already raiding her home.
Early on, she functioned as Hamlett’s own personal bank, providing him with seemingly limitless financial support for his real estate investments. Then, in 1989, she named Hamlett a co-producer on her traveling theatrical production of “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.” As a thank you, he raised his salary to $20,000 per week.
In 1992, he then proposed the idea for cash-strapped Reynolds to purchase a defunct Las Vegas-based hotel and casino called the Paddlewheel that had hit the auction block. She dipped into her savings to pay the $200,000 to do it, and after they won the bid, spent the next year borrowing against mortgages on her other properties, begging for loans from famous friends and even selling her antiques and jewelry in an effort to pay off the hotel’s $2 million price tag.
They spent the next year retrofitting the hotel in an Old Hollywood theme. While Reynolds writes about busting her bum to make get the hotel done in time, she talks about how Hamlett would sometimes vanish for hours, even days, at a time.
Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Casino opened in June 1993. To celebrate, Reynolds performed a song and dance number, riffing on her notoriously difficult love life with jokes like: “We worked so hard to get ready for the show. I haven’t had this much stress since Eddie followed Elizabeth down the Nile.”
But when she looked out in the crowd from the stage, she was stunned to see Hamlett walk out mid-show.
Hamlett disappeared for the next day and a half — in the arms, she would learn, of his mistress, who had followed him from his hometown of Roanoke, Va. She had also learned that he changed the deed of her Bel Aire mansion to include both of their names. No more red flags. The evidence was in.
When Hamlett sauntered in at 4 a.m. reeking of sex, Reynolds confronted him about his philandering and the deed. Suddenly she got caught off guard by a “look in his eyes [that] scared me.”
He began to bizarrely insist that the two continue their conversation out on the apartment’s 12th-floor balcony.
“Why did he seem so intent on getting me out to the balcony, which is only about 3 feet wide — not enough room to have a friendly conversation? Was he thinking about my million-dollar life insurance policy with him as a beneficiary? I could practically see the dollar signs floating above his head,” she writes.
“I was sure he was going to toss me off the balcony. One shove and all his troubles would be over. I pictured myself plummeting twelve floors to the pavement.”
She dodged him by wedging herself besides several pieces of luggage on the top shelf of her closet, hiding from sight for hours until he left the property.
While detailing Hamlett’s behavior, Reynolds flashbacks to her famous former marriages.
Reynolds writes about how unhappy she was with Fisher. How after the birth of their first child, Carrie, they stopped having sex. But the pragmatic Reynolds wanted another.
“I ordered Eddie a beer, and he drank it, even though he preferred his highs provided by his friendly physician, whom I called Dr. Needles. Then I asked for another beer for my sperm bank — uh, husband,” she writes.
She got what she wanted: A little boy, whom she named Todd after their very close mutual friend Mike Todd, who was at the time married to Elizabeth Taylor.
A month after little Todd’s birth, Mike Todd died in a plane crash, leaving the grieving widow wide open. “The rest, as they say, is history,” she writes.
Though she ends her story of Fisher here, she continues to speak highly of Taylor, who would later become a close friend of hers and her daughter’s.
Carrie Fisher even casted Taylor, her one-time stepmother, alongside Reynolds in her movie “These Old Broads.” Art imitating life, Taylor played an adulterer who steals Reynold’s husband while she is in an alcoholic blackout.
Reynolds also had auditioned for the movie version of her daughter’s book “Postcards from the Edge,” which was based on Carrie Fisher’s dysfunctional relationship with her mother. Hilariously, Reynolds was turned down flat for the mom role by director Mike Nichols, who said, “You’re not right for the part.”
Shortly after the balcony incident, Reynolds finally figured that Hamlett wasn’t right for the part of her third husband.
She invited Hamlett to meet her at a public café to discuss their divorce settlement. There he admitted once and for all that he did not love her.
“I’m in it for the money,” he said. “I’m not leaving. You’ll never get rid of me.”
He continued, almost like a cartoon villain. “You can’t get rid of me. I control everything. It’s all in my name. You’re just a figurehead. You’re nothing. And I don’t love you.”
As she began to extricate herself from the marriage, she learned that he had retooled their finances in nefarious ways. He had backdated deeds to their shared properties transferring the estate to his girlfriend and his brother so that they wouldn’t be included in his holdings when it came to determining divorce settlements. According to Hamlett’s friends, he had done the same scheme — which had coined “real estate roulette”— to his first wife, too.
He fought at every turn. Eventually, she paid him $270,000 to buy out his interest in the hotel and casino, which he pocketed to fund a move back to Virginia with his girlfriend.
What follows is an exhausting list of her financial blows. Lawsuits, liens and unpaid loans clutter the narrative. She loses her casino and even sells off her beloved collection of Hollywood memorabilia — the largest in the world at the time, which included Dorothy’s red slippers and Marilyn Monroe’s subway dress — netting her tens of millions of dollars.
“The collection had saved me,” she writes.
But it’s perhaps her relationship with her long-suffering daughter, Carrie that saved her in the end. Maybe it’s Carrie — imperfect Princess Leia — who is actually Reynolds’ true love.
Although only one chapter and a small percentage of the book are devoted to Carrie and her struggles with bipolar disorder and substance abuse, they are perhaps the most unaffectedly loving passages.
“Carrie is my child, and I love her with every ounce of strength I possess. If love alone could cure our children, they would always be well. Since I can’t, I will do whatever I can to make her life less difficult,” Reynolds writes. “I’m so grateful to Carrie for working so hard to stay well when sometimes it might be easier to give up.”
Her daughter, who wrote the preface to her mother’s memoir, writes in an equally effusive manner: “Always, she is who she is: a good person, a kind person — which would be a fine thing if these were qualities consistently rewarded. But as most of us know, they are not.”
Carrie, who lives next door to her mom in Los Angeles with her own daughter Billie, endorses the book as “extraordinary anecdotes from an extraordinary woman.”
Maybe at this point in Reynold’s life, having a devoted but damaged daughter is enough.