Stage and Screen Legend Returns to Valley Stage

Debbie Reynolds isn’t one to hold back in her performances. Variety Magazine has said that she continues to display bundles of showmanship in a time when it’s often the missing ingredient.

She laughed at this in a recent telephone interview. “The exciting thing about being on the stage is just that – being on the stage,” she said. “When I walk out, I feel loved…We’re a bunch of friends together.”

Reynolds will be opening her one-woman show of music and comedy on July 9 at North Hollywood’s El Portal Theatre, not far from where she grew up in Burbank.

“The El Portal is very sentimental for me. I worked there last year for fun,” she said. “This time I’m going to do my acts, which I do 42 weeks a year. I travel on the road and go everywhere.

“I’m sort of like the female George Burns,” she added. “But I don’t expect to sell out. That’s not why I’m going into there. I just think it will be fun. Those that can will come and see me and those that want to will bring their children. I have a very clean show…a bit bawdy, a bit long, but a lot of good jokes and film clips and songs. I’m a vaudevillian.”

Reynolds’ performance career began even before two Warner Bros. talent scouts discovered her at age 16 in the 1948 Miss Burbank beauty contest and signed her onto an immediate contract.

“I used to do little skits for the Girl Scouts, Boy Scouts, Elks Clubs and Junior Chambers of Commerce all over Burbank,” she said. “I just did it because I’m a big ham… and I still am.”

When not charging a penny per person to perform at her house on Evergreen Street, she was cycling to the El Portal Movie Palace on Lankershim Boulevard for the cartoons, double-features and musicals featuring Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers that played in the 40s. “They didn’t make you leave,” she said of the theatre in those days. “If you paid a dime, you could stay all day. So I would.”

Originally built in 1926 as a vaudeville and silent movie theatre, the El Portal was renovated in the late 1990s and reopened in 2000.



Donald O’Connor, Debbie Reynolds and Gene Kelly in Singin’ In the Rain.
Courtesy Debbie Reynolds
Reynolds is among the few working actors today that hail from MGM’s so-called golden age of film. Asked whether she agrees that showmanship has eluded modern performances, she said the training opportunities that existed in her day are gone.

“When I was first at MGM Studios, they sent me out to play the Lowes Theatres in Chicago and New York. I was 17 and I did five shows a day,” she said. “I was awful, I’m sure, but I got a lot of experience. Then I was sent to do summer stock.”

Young people today miss that kind of experience, she said, and must take the initiative to work in community theaters for similar training.

“The most creative era was the beginning of it all, wasn’t it?” she mused. “Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin and the guys who really started it.”

Now, she said, it’s one individual such as Tom Cruise buying a project to do for him or herself – not like the studio era, when films were made for everybody. “That ended in 1948 with the advent of television, because television took over that role of C movies and B movies and sitcoms and family films.”

Reynolds was one of the top ten box-office stars of 1959 when her first husband, Eddie Fisher, left her for the newly widowed Elizabeth Taylor. It was the scandal of the day, similar to recent headlines made in the Aniston-Pitt-Jolie triangle.

“Yes,” Reynolds said with gracious resignation, as if she has been asked the question many times, “Elizabeth and I are friends.”

But she has nothing to do with Fisher, who now lives in San Francisco. “He was a very poor father and I don’t have any respect for that,” she said.

Their children, Carrie and Todd, have Hollywood careers of their own. Today, Reynolds lives on a Beverly Hills property with Carrie Fisher and granddaughter Billie Catherine. She said she won’t be making any more “mistakes” with husbands, after two more marriages ended disastrously.

“The unhappiness that comes from it is…not worth it,” she said. “You want to be happy in life, you have this one life that we know of, and so you don’t want to go jumping off the bridge every day.”

Though she lives on the Westside now, she has enduring roots in the Valley. “I’m so familiar with both sides of the fence,” she said, “I could be a cab driver.”

After a difficult time in the 1970s, when her second husband, Harry Karl, lost all of their money and homes, she was “frantic” to find a place to live and “wanted to be in the Valley.” She still owns the “darling” old home she purchased at that time on La Maida near Colfax Avenue. Her brother, a longtime bachelor, lives there now.

Reynolds’ mother passed away a few years ago, and she regrets selling her Valley home, which could have been used as a guest house. “I’ve made a lot of wrong decisions,” she said, “but usually about husbands, not about property.”

Luckily, she made many memorable decisions when it came to her films, some of her favorites being The Unsinkable Molly Brown and How the West Was Won. Though she enjoyed making Mother with Albert Brooks in 1996, she said she is nothing like the character she played. “I’m not domesticated. I’m very show-business.”



Courtesy Debbie Reynolds
Crowned Miss Burbank at age 16 in 1948.

Her civic involvement includes ardent support of the Girl Scouts of America. “Girl Scouts afforded young girls from poor families – which I was – a chance to go camping, see the out-of-doors, go to some area that didn’t require money,” she said.

She used some of the money she made at age 19 on Singin’ in the Rain to build a swimming pool at her own local Camp Lakota. She has also been generously active with the Thalians Club, a children’s mental health charity organization at Cedars Sinai in Los Angeles, for over 30 years.

But her greatest passion has been to found a Hollywood Motion Picture Museum, which is now being built in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee.

A self-described preservationist and historian, Reynolds’ collection of 4,000 movie costumes, cars, and pieces of furniture includes the dress that Greta Garbo wore in Camille, a pair of Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from Wizard of Oz, and Marilyn Monroe’s famously windswept white dress from The Seven Year Itch.

“It goes all the way back to the original beginning, to the silent screen,” she said. When silent screen legend Mary Pickford died, Reynolds “bought practically her whole collection.”

Her vision for the museum, which is being constructed ten minutes from Dolly Parton’s house, has always been very clear. “The idea is to create the famous moment from an Oscar-winning film,” she said. “It’s a big huge movie screen and then the stage revolves and you then see the real costumes and the real props.” She emphasized that seeing the film is the most important thing: “The preservation of the film.”

She had hoped the museum would be located on Cahuenga near Hollywood Boulevard, but numerous obstacles turned her sights elsewhere. “I’m not George Lucas, I’m not Spielberg,” she said. “I don’t have millions and I couldn’t do it. It had to be Tennessee.”

She said if she can get it done in her lifetime, “I’ll be very happy.”

Tom Waldman Spotlights Humor in Politics with New Book on Liberalism in America

Author spotlights humor in politics with new book
By Catherine Billey

Liberals have been the rootless drifters of American politics since McGovern fell to Nixon in the 1972 presidential race, says author Tom Waldman in the book he had long dreamed of writing, Not Much Left: The Fate of Liberalism in America.

He didn’t want to explore the subject through charts and graphs. Instead, interlaced with his own analysis, Waldman has created a trenchant collection of political stories through interviews with Southern California politicos – such as Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky – who were shaped by the transformative 60s, the disheartening 70s and the stifling conservatism of recent decades.

“I really wanted to tell what it was like to be a liberal during the time when conservatism was getting so powerful,” said Waldman, who is Chief of Staff for LAUSD Board Member Tamar Galatzan, in a recent interview at Art’s Deli in Studio City. “I also wanted to capture some of the humor of politics, because politics can be very funny and we can forget about that.” For instance, he believes that right-wing commentators who act aghast when Sen. Barack Obama doesn’t wear an American flag pin on his lapel are putting on a show. “And the only way to deal with the show is to laugh at it.”

In Waldman’s view, the absence of debate in America is a media problem. “I think television has played such an important role in every aspect of political lives now. Any debate becomes fodder for television. So you have more and more people on both sides hired for their ability to…make politics entertainment – over-the-top entertainment,” he said. “But there’s not a lot of substance behind it.”

Humor is a good strategy here too, he added. “With someone like Ann Coulter, liberals try to either act like ‘this is so horrible that someone like that is so popular’ or they try to argue with her,” he said. “I think the third option is to just see how ludicrous she is and treat her that way.”

But liberals have lacked the strength and resolve to resist the pummeling of political bullies, Waldman says. “Blustering, anti-intellectual, right-wing media stars have dominated the debate today because liberals are confused, embarrassed and ashamed.” Some have even gone into hiding, he said, and others have called themselves progressives to avoid the dreaded “L-word.”

His book, released last month, provides some context for how this came to pass – and it’s not all the fault of right-wing pundits.

Waldman is uniquely qualified to write such a book. He has been an historian, journalist and political aide – all of which inform his favored current role as author. Though he says it’s not a crippling regret, he wishes he had started writing books earlier in life.

Now 51, Waldman was 41 when his first book came out. Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock ‘N’ Roll from Southern California (co-written with David Reyes) was followed by The Best Guide to American Politics: Easily Accessible Information for a Richer, Fuller Life, and then, We All Want to Change the World: Rock and Politics from Elvis to Eminem.

Waldman grew up in the 1960s at a dinner table where educated conversation about contemporary politics regularly took place. His face lights up whenever he recalls his parents, Nancy and the late Theodore Waldman, who fostered political awareness and dialogue as far back as he can remember and remain his greatest influence.

Politics – for someone who grew up in the 60s – was not filtered through television as it mostly is today, but experienced firsthand. Waldman said he felt more anxious than scared on the day in 1962 when a notice for parents was passed around his elementary school about what to do in case of nuclear war. Later he connected it with the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In 1969, when his father, a professor of philosophy, was teaching at an experimental college in Berkeley, Waldman remembers pepper gas drifting into his classroom (ordered by then-governor Ronald Reagan), a police car burning during the People Park riots, and the bystander who was shot down from a Telegraph Avenue rooftop.

He received his Masters in Journalism at the University of Southern California and worked as a full-time reporter for the San Gabriel Tribune and the Jewish Journal in the 80s and also freelanced for publications such as the Los Angeles Times Magazine and the LA Weekly.

One day in 1992, a former editor called to ask whether he’d like to work for Howard Berman, who needed a more vocal media presence and wanted to hire a press secretary. “I thought, yeah, wow, that’s like the other side,” Waldman said with a smile. “What working in politics has done is you get a sense of the daily tensions – anxieties and rewards – of being an elected official, and it helps you get perspective on why they do what they do.”

Politics is not Waldman’s exclusive passion, however. With an unapologetically playful smile, he said that although he can’t exactly date his interest in theatre to the time he was 15 in London, “it was certainly a good start” when he saw Diana Rigg in a brief full-nudity scene in Tom Stoppard’s Jumpers.

He treasures a collection of New York Times theatre reviews from 1920 to 1970, found at a used bookstore in San Francisco, which reveals how some of the great plays of the 20th century like Waiting for Godot and Streetcar Named Desire were reviewed the very next morning in the so-called “paper of record.”

He somewhat reluctantly admits that of the journalists on the scene today he most admires, Christopher Hitchens is the one he reads most. “I think a genuine wit among journalists is rare, and I appreciate it whenever I see it,” he said. “There’s no holding back.”

But his greatest admiration is reserved for the late Dwight Macdonald, journalist, social critic and political radical who wrote for Politics in the 1940s. Waldman prizes a collection of Macdonald’s columns that he found in a used bookstore in Riverside.

John Lennon is Waldman’s foremost celebrity hero because of his music, his sarcasm, and his tendency to say whatever he thought. “I think a hero is a person who is someone who is brutally honest with themselves and willing to be brutally honest in how he or she leads his or her life,” he said.

By that standard, Waldman has taken a heroically candid and unflinching look at the state of liberalism today in Not Much Left, which, as the risk of sounding “practiced,” he deservedly calls his greatest achievement.

Tom Waldman lives in the West Valley with his wife and two sons.

MTA Expansion Plans Spark Debate at Public Hearing

As part of the 45-day public review period that began on March 12, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) of Los Angeles held the final of seven outreach meetings on April 23 at the Marvin Braude Constituent Center in Van Nuys seeking community input on the details of its Draft 2008 Long Range Transportation Plan.

“Planning for the future is more critical than ever,” said MTA Executive Officer Brad McAllester – who was also present at the hearing – in a video presentation outlining the MTA’s vision for mobility over the next 25 years. Projects take time, the population is growing, and aggressive goals are needed for improving air quality, he said. L.A. also has the busiest container port in the country and truck miles covered on congested freeways are projected to grow by 33 percent by 2030.

The MTA is responsible not just for bus and rail, but road improvements, freeway service patrols, call boxes and other services.

McAllester mapped the MTA’s accomplishments since 1980, when there was just one carpool lane on the I-10 as opposed to today’s 465 miles of carpool lanes. Other achievements include 18 new Metro Rapid lines, the Orange Line, and the Exposition Light Rail line currently in progress.

“We will spend more than $152 billion over the next 25 years to keep L.A. County moving,” he said, but that won’t be enough to meet all mobility goals. Sacramento must return the gasoline sales tax transit system funding twice ratified by voters (in 2002 and 2006), and other sources of funding will also be needed, he said.

Twenty residents took their two-minute opportunity at the microphone after the video.

Two from the business community – Aaron Green, legislative affairs manager for the Valley Industry & Commerce Association (VICA), and Mark Levinson, president of the Encino Chamber of Commerce – were entirely supportive of expansion.

“Anyone who thinks there won’t be growth in L.A. is kidding themselves,” Levinson said. Green said VICA is a full supporter of the plans. It has been a “long and tough road to bring improvements” to such areas as the 101/134 Freeways, the 405 corridor through freeway widening or light rail, and extension of Orange and Red Lines above or below ground. He acknowledged that raising the sales tax for funding would be difficult.

Most of the speakers opposed expansion efforts that involve widening freeways to add carpool lanes.

Gerald Silver, president of Homeowners of Encino, said the MTA should expect to receive opposition from residents similar to what CalTrans experienced in their efforts to widen the 405. The MTA has not considered the finite carrying capacity of the region, he said.

Joan Luchs, president of the Federation of Hillside and Canyon Associations, said, “This isn’t a plan; it’s trying to put out a fire.”

People stay in their cars because they give up trying to find parking at Metro stations after 45 minutes, she said. “Stop any further growth or you’re not going to solve the problem,” Luchs asserted.

Wayne Williams of the Sherman Oaks Homeowners Association (SOHA) echoed Luchs’ comments. “Educate people on what growth will mean,” he encouraged. “Not just gas, but the cost of water.” Food and education resources will also diminish as the population increases, he said.

Growth is not inevitable, said Williams. “For me, put more bikeways in.”

Local resident Gregory Wright said he gave up his car several years ago, but the MTA must incorporate practical things like patches on poles that would provide shade areas for people waiting for the bus. Wright also suggested that businesses “rethink the work week” by offering flex-time, thereby staggering commute traffic times.

“You can make the freeways 20 lanes wide,” said one resident, who recently visited Phoenix, Arizona, with its congested six-lane freeways. “It won’t help.” Overbuilding is the problem, the resident said.

Bill Manning of the Sunland Tujunga Neighborhood Council agreed. People bring three or four cars per family, not just one. “Stop encouraging people to come here,” he said. “We have no place to put them.”

Public comments were recorded and will be brought to the attention of the MTA board, which will vote on the plan in June.

- by Catherine Billey
for Sun Community Newspapers, May 2-8

Iraq War Fifth Year Anniversary, Studio City Protest

Nearly 200 people gathered at dusk at Ventura and Laurel in Studio City on the fifth anniversary of the Iraq War to honor nearly 4000 fallen American troops in a call for peace. A procession of five caskets donated by Arlington West was made for each corner of the intersection at sunset. This was just one of many vigils organized by moveon.org that brought hundreds more people to street corners throughout the San Fernando Valley.