When you enter Debbie Reynolds’ house in Coldwater Canyon, Calif., it’s a trip — back in time, to Hollywood’s Golden Age. Two dozen luscious, autographed black-and-white portraits of the greats — Crawford, Stanwyck, Dietrich, Hepburn (accompanied by a letter signed “Kate Hep,” proving Reynolds was a real friend) — fill up two walls and make you dizzy to think she knew all of them.
Step into the living room and it only gets more fabulous. The Maltese falcon, from the classic Humphrey Bogart movie, rests on its own pedestal. Commanding a sense of awe, though, is Reynolds’ prize possession, on the marble mantle: the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in “The Wizard of Oz.” In person, they’re more magenta than red, their sequined luster still intact.
“There were five pair of slippers,” Reynolds says, seated on a green floral sofa. She wears black trousers and a multi-colored blazer. Her hair–a blonde bouffant with bangs–is a wig.
“The first sold to the Smithsonian in New York which weren’t the real pair because that was a too-big pair. Judy and I were the same size. She wore a five and a half. And those were a seven. I said to the auctioneer at the original MGM auction in 1970, ‘Those aren’t Judy’s.’ They were all the same color, but different sizes because the dance stand-in had a different size.”
Reynolds, 81, has sold most of her collection of her Hollywood memorabilia, for financial reasons, but one the mementos she kept is more personal than those iconic film images. You can find it under a large display of framed family photos on the grand piano in the far corner of the living room. It’s a beige shawl given to her by Liberace. They met when they were both playing Vegas, Reynolds at the Desert Inn, Liberace across the street at the Hilton. Even though Liberace, like many of Reynolds’ showbiz friends, is long gone, a simple twist of Hollywood fate brought them together again. Reynolds is playing Liberace’s mother, Frances, in the new HBO film, “Behind the Candelabra,” an extremely campy expose of the entertainer’s twisted relationship with Scott Thorson, a cut-rate Ganymede who famously sued the entertainer for palimony and settled out of court.
Working on the Steven Soderbergh film, which stars Michael Douglas and Matt Damon, brought back a flood or memories of Reynolds’ friendship with Liberace that she shared with The Post.
“Lee and I met because Seymour Heller was his manager and he was also my manager. Mostly I went to the Hilton backstage to see Lee,” she says. “He loved to have people in his dressing room. Nobody stayed up as late as Lee and I. It was our afternoon. And I’d get hungry. And I don’t cook. So Lee cooked. We had to go to his house. And he’d get on his fancy apron. Make scrambled eggs. He’d make sausages.”
Liberace and Reynolds regularly traveled in an after-hours troupe of Vegas entertainers of the 1950s and early 1960s—Louis Prima; Sammy Davis Jr.; Danny Thomas; Danny Kaye–who would pop into each other’s dressing rooms after the shows were over and party. Sexuality was never an issue backstage.
“Everyone knew everything about everybody. But we didn’t discuss it,” she says. “We never talked about ‘Are you gay?’ or ‘Do you like girls or do you like boys?”
Little Richard would show up in a gold lame jumpsuit with his entourage and nobody blinked. “He used to come to the D.I. backstage, Little Richard with his whole gang,” she says. “All black. And all gay. And Little Richard has seven children. So that doesn’t mean a thing.
“We didn’t get off stage until two in the morning. You’d do three shows a night. We worked very hard and then you’d want to play. We got together at Louis Prima’s at the Sands. Because they had great Chinese food. We got together and asked, ‘Who’s got the best joke?’ Or: ‘I heard a new number.’ ‘Did you see so-and-so’s act? It’s terrible.’ Or: ‘So-and-so’s so heavy now? Did you notice how heavy she is?’”
Once they were friends, Liberace didn’t keep his private life a secret. Reynolds knew his “choirboys,” the angelic-looking youngsters who drove Lee on stage in a Rolls Royce. He bed them, put them on the payroll and made them part of the act.
“I knew the boy. I met Scott,” she says. “I didn’t care for him. Lee always had him walk the dogs when I was there. I’d say, ‘Lee, does he have to stay? He’s so boring.’”
Even though she wasn’t a fan of Thorson’s, Reynolds remained sympathetic to closeted entertainers. “They were looking for love, looking for their lives to be fuller, trying to find a way in,” she says. “ It was the era of loneliness, as far as being gay.”
The repressive atmosphere in Hollywood certainly didn’t help. In Reynolds’ earliest days in film—the 1950s–gay actors were enormous pressure from the studios to appear straight and they would go on “double dates” with starlets so the studios could feed stories and photos to movie magazines — and the audience’s fantasies.
‘They were looking for love, looking for their lives to be fuller, trying to find a way in. It was the era of loneliness, as far as being gay.’
“They would make us take pictures, once a week, to give to the movie magazines,” she says. “Or say, ‘Debbie, there’s a new restaurant in the valley. Italian. Maybe you’d like to give a party. And we’ll have you be with Tab Hunter. We’ll have Rock Hudson bring Doris Day.’
“They’d put together about six couples. And send a car for us. And take us to the Valley. And we’d have fun. Farley Granger was with Shelley Winters. Everybody who was under contract became double dates. And the movie magazines, they were given the story. Negatives. We knew it was for the magazines.”
The repressive publicity machine worked and people believed what they saw. Reynolds says the women in the audience at Liberace’s Vegas shows had no idea he was gay.
“They didn’t think about it,” Reynolds says. “They were his friends. They were his girl friends. And they weren’t his executioners. They weren’t looking for anything bad because he was so charming and disarming on stage. He played to them. And shared his jewelry with them. His furs with them. His stories with them. And he made them all feel like, if you’ll pardon the expression, queens.
“Women made his career, not the men,” Reynolds says.
When Reynolds reported for work on the set of “Behind the Candelabra,” it was on location at Zsa Zsa Gabor’s Beverly Hills home, which substituted for Liberace’s Vegas house. She had to do a double take when Matt Damon walked by, with his hair dyed and his face made up to look like Scott Thorson.
“I thought he was the cutest little thing I’d ever seen,” she says. “And I said, ‘He looks just like that little boy. He looks just like Scott.’ I was amused. Then Danny Aykroyd walked up and I laughed, because I thought he was perfect for Seymour [Heller] too. Danny and [my daughter] Carrie [Fisher] were engaged. He’s like a little child I raised, Danny Aykroyd. So it was fun.”
Many of the scenes in “Candelabra” shocked Reynolds, particularly the truly bizarre ones where Scott has plastic surgery, at Liberace’s request, to look more like him.
“That would have been a secret that he would have had with Scott,” she says. “That was after me, that changing of looks. I had to be on the road a lot. I had children. I didn’t continue to know Scotty well.”
The five-year affair between Liberace and Scott Thorson ended in 1982; Liberace died five years later, at age 67. The last time Reynolds saw him was in 1986, shortly before he was diagnosed with AIDS.
“It was just before he got sick,” she says. “It was in Vegas. At the Hilton. It was just before he was going to go to New York to perform at Radio City. That was his last big show. He was a little anxious about it. He wasn’t feeling well. And that was a tough show to do. Two a day, for sure. So he was a little tired. So he was concerned about his health. He had lost his mother. And [his brother] George too. So he was kind of alone.”
When he did die, Reynolds was stunned, as Liberace kept his illness, like his sexuality, a secret. “He died almost overnight. You see him at party and then the next moment you’re going to a funeral,” she says.
The funeral was held in Palm Springs, at Our Lady of Solitude Catholic church. Reynolds made her “Singing in the Rain” co-star Donald O’Connor go with her. The only other Hollywood type who was there was singer Robert Goulet. “I spoke at the funeral. Nobody went. The only other person who went was Robert Goulet. There were people there. Some wore wigs. Pink wigs. It wasn’t good at all. I got very angry. It’s a lot of years ago. but I remember that I took the wigs off the guys.”
BEHIND THE CANDELABRA
Tonight, 9 p.m., HBO