Welcome Home, Kids!—Debbie Reynolds & Eddie Fisher

“We’re going to have a son as soon as we can,” Eddie Fisher told me with great solemnity the first time I saw him after his marriage to Debbie Reynolds.

Barely able to restrain a smile, I asked, “What if it’s a daughter?”

“It won’t be,’ Eddie assured me, with all the conviction of a young man who is very used to having everything go his way.

And, by golly, I suppose it will be a boy, just like Eddie says—which will be perfectly all right with Mrs. Eddie, you can bet.

Mike Todd threw them a party 48 hours after they got in.

The kids were frankly dead tired. Or rather, travel tired and almost groggy from catching plane after plane. Outside of the two days they had taken off from Eddie’s traveling salesman’s chores plugging Coca-Cola, which he advertises on TV, to get married, the bride and groom had been on continual go, go, go for two weeks.

The plane they had boarded in Kansas City at 4 a.m. had not set down at Los Angeles’ International Airport until after 7 in the morning of a day that was to be the start of a hectic week end at home.

As hostess I had first look at Deb’s ring—the one she got after the wedding.

There were only forty-eight hours for seeing relatives and family, some members for the ) first time since their marriage. Eddie had to check in with his doctor about stomach pains, nagging and persistent (which turned out to be just nervousness). There were business conferences with the agents of both the bride and groom and all this to be topped by a “Welcome Home To Debbie And Eddie” cocktail party which producer Mike Todd was hosting in their honor. Five hundred friends of the couple invited! Just an intimate little affair!

Debbie kept her furry red coat on all evening, it was so cold.

The weather which had been mild and warm turned unexpectedly cold, which would not have mattered except that to accommodate all those who had accepted, the party had to be moved outside the house and into a huge tent, which was hurriedly put up in just three hours time.

It was a beautiful job, very gay and colorful with all the posts covered with gay streamers and balloons, a five-piece band made with the music, and waiters were everywhere with hot hors d’oeuvres and champagne. But it was chilly.

Eddie took me aside to whisper that the first thing they want is a son!

Because I know Debbie and Eddie so well, Mike had asked me to come early and be his hostess, and right behind me Eddie and Debbie arrived very thrilled about the affair, looking happy and holding hands, but a bit on the beat side.

Uncle Miltie Berle was one of the 500 guests congratulating the kids.

Friends

Debbie looked like a doll in a pale gray cocktail suit with a jaunty little pink cocktail hat atop her brownish upswept hair do, but she was so chilly she kept on her coat (a rabbit-fur dyed very, very red) for the entire party. They both kept up a gay barrage of “Hi’s” and “Hello, theres” to everyone. Among the first to arrive—and the last to leave—were Roscoe Ates, Casey Adams, the Bernie Riches, Mrs. Gertrude Fogee (Debbie’s diction teacher) Lori Nelson, Joey Foreman and Leon Tyler—all close friends of the bride and groom.

Lucille, Desi and Debbie had champagne—Eddie drank Coke!

Eddie suddenly took my arm, swinging us away from the semi-official receiving line to a spot where we could chat quietly for the first time since he and Debbie said “I do.”

“I hope Debbie doesn’t get chilled,” he said, real concern for his little bride in his voice. “Believe me, we’re tired. Really exhausted, but—” and that wonderful happy smile of Eddie’s broke through, “—awfully happy.”

Gary Cooper beamed down at the kids. Now there’s a man who could tell them about Hollywood marriages—the good and the difficulties.

It was then, out of the blue, he spoke to me of his fond hope that he and Debbie would be the parents of a boy, “as soon as we can.”

With such guests arriving as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, the Gary Coopers, Spike Jones, William Goetzes, Peggy King, Anna Maria Alberghetti and scores of others, it was hardly time for more confidences. So we swung back over near the door to continue the “hellos.”

Lori Nelson, who was there when Deb got her engagement ring, hugged her . . .

A chance to talk

For the next forty-eight hours Debbie and Eddie literally skidded through important appointments and we didn’t have a chance to talk again until they came by my house to visit with me and pick up their plane tickets (I had taken care of getting them aboard TWA’s Ambassador flight east).

It was our first chance to talk for months, back to that time when Debbie and Eddie were rumored splitting up and all marriage plans called off.

Then she and Leon Tyler, another old friend of the honeymooners, gave the ring—and the bridegroom—their official approval.

“Mother was looking through the scrapbook she started when Eddie and I first fell in love,” Debbie smiled at me, “and you are the only writer who didn’t take a crack at us—or say something mean about either Eddie or me.”

“That’s because I’m very fond of you both and wish you only the best of everything,” I smiled. “I believed all along that you two were in love and would get married, even sometimes, I suspect, when you hardly believed it yourselves.”

Danny Thomas got a kiss from Debbie, who looked about 14 to me

They laughed—looking like prototypes of all the happy brides and grooms in the world—except that Debbie looked about fourteen in her salt-and-pepper checked jumper with its short sleeved white sweater.

“Tell me the truth, you two,” I went on, “did you have any previous plans that your wedding would take place as suddenly as it did and in that particular place?”

“No, absolutely not,” they said in unison. “We made up our minds to get married walking back to Debbie’s hotel after we’d had dinner,” Eddie explained.

And Anna Maria Alberghetti had congratulations for a fellow singer.

“I can prove to you how sudden it was,” Debbie broke in excitedly. “When I went east to join Eddie I thought it was for just a day or two, just long enough to go to the Marciano fight and to see the start of the World Series. I took just one small suitcase.”

Now, anyone who knows anything about brides realizes that a girl who had any inkling of an impending wedding, secret he or public, just couldn’t have made such a momentous journey with one little suitcase.

Close pal Peggy gave best wishes—but her own marriage is over.

“Little did I know when I was packing that what I was taking would turn out to be my trousseau.”

“Some trousseau,” her bridegroom kidded.

“To delight the eye of my ‘beholding bridegroom’,” laughed Debbie, “I had two dresses, two tailored nylon nightgowns, both previously laundered; two slips, one bra with straps, one without; and two pair of pink panties.

Jeanette Johnson (Deb’s maid of honor) and Bernie Rich attended.

“I called mother at eleven o’clock at night Los Angeles time and told her to head east with a wedding dress! Just like that! Man, was she surprised!”

I didn’t have to ask them why they had chosen Grossinger’s for the nuptials. My young friend Eddie has a wonderful characteristic—his loyalty and faithfulness to old friends. He never has forgotten Jennie Grossinger’s kindness to him when he was struggling to find his place in the sun. And it was there that Eddie Cantor heard him sing one New Year’s Eve and signed him then and there.

Rings and things

So it was back to Grossinger’s, in its beautiful setting in the Catskills, that Eddie took his Debbie and summoned his parents and hers for their marriage. So quiet was the wedding and so hush-hush that it was Milton Blackstone, Eddie’s manager and close friend, who was dispatched to Tiffany’s to get the wedding ring. He took for measurement a ring Eddie wore on his little finger which just fitted Debbie’s third finger, left hand.

“I bought the ring under the name of Henry Smith,” Milton had told me at the cocktail party. “There was no time for Debbie to buy Eddie a ring, so he was Married with one borrowed from a guest! But they have their wedding bands now. The one Debbie now wears is a diamond baguette band given by George Unger, a jeweler friend of Eddie’s.”

Very pretty, particularly with that big sparkler of an engagement ring she wears. Eddie showed me his wedding band—it is of dull gold and wider than is usually worn by a man, but very effective and looks very “married!”

This is one time when I don’t in the least mind bragging “I told you so,” because I did. So firmly did I stick to the story that no matter what was printed elsewhere (and plenty was) I convinced that Debbie and Eddie really loved one another and would be married.

I was so strong on this that one of the scandal magazines came out with a story that the whole romance was a “publicity stunt” dreamed up by me and that they weren’t and never had been in love.

In a duck’s eye they weren’t! I was with the kids when they were first falling in love on a jaunt we were on to Las Vegas—a story I wrote in detail for MODERN SCREEN, and every word of it true.

A bag snag

I’m not saying that Debbie and Eddie did not hit a bad romantic snag about last June, just about the time their big church wedding was supposed to come off.

In fact, I know something important came up—something which made Debbie coupe to entertain the GIs to help her forget. But don’t think for a minute that his wasn’t an unhappy time for Eddie, too.

Neither one said anything. They aren’t he types to wear their hearts on their reeves. But to a close confident, the young finger did say, “They aren’t going to run my life. I’m not going to be pushed round.”

Just who “they” were was never exactly made clear. It could have been any one many outside influences or all of the ressures put together.

There was talk that his advisers told Eddie he would lose his teenage followers she took a wife.

I even heard that Eddie resented all publicity about a big wedding, feeling at the whole MGM publicity department has moving in on the biggest and most portant step of his life.

One important thing stood out to me—Eddie still loved Debbie and wanted to marry her—but he is not a young man to be pushed.

Isn’t it significant to you that when the kids did make up their minds to take the fateful step that it came at a time when all the “heat” was off—when even the press was no longer carefully watching them?

The decision to marry came when they were alone, away from all outside influences—sure of their real feelings. A quiet, calm time in their love story.

I’m sure they made up their minds to be married some day after all the ruckus when Eddie flew out to the Coast to see Debbie and they met very quietly in Palm Springs to talk things over.

Although they refused to admit that anything was changed between them, there was a shining, quiet glow about them when they appeared together, holding hands, exuding a new kind of happiness. Debbie started calling Eddie “my boy” again—something she hadn’t done in weeks.

No matter what the world thought and gossiped,—it was obvious that Debbie and Eddie knew their future.

On the go

Since their marriage, they’ve been leading the life of traveling salesmen, they both told me.

“My soft-drink sponsors keep me on the hop,” Eddie said, helping himself to a bottle of Coke from the icebox in my playroom. “The nice thing about it is that Debbie has no new picture scheduled until after the first of the year, when she’s due to report for The Reluctant Debutante at MGM.

So, she can travel with, me, said Eddie, beaming at his bride.

“But where do you plan to really make your home?” I asked the happy Mr. and Mrs.

“Here in California, with an apartment in New York probably,” Eddie answered. You don’t talk with them long before you realize that Eddie is the head of the house on decisions, which is the way it should be.

“Right now we’re hoping to find a house in the Valley with a place for some horses,” Debbie put in.

“Now I was surprised. “Horses?” I echoed. “What’s with horses?”

The kids laughed at my bewilderment. “Well, when we were in Kansas City we got in the habit of doing some early morning cantering with some friends of ours,” Eddie explained. “We liked it. We might just as well look around for a small place in the Valley while we’re at it,” he said.

Later, when I had occasion to talk with Mrs. Reynolds, Debbie’s mother, on the telephone, I brought up this surprising idea of theirs.

“Oh, we aren’t taking it too seriously,” Mrs. Reynolds laughed. “Right now they think they want to be gentleman farmers and go in for the simple life. I doubt if they’ve checked too thoroughly into the upkeep of animals and how much it costs to maintain a couple of horses. But you never know. These youngsters have proved that they make up their own minds about what they want.”

“That’s for sure,” I laughed.

It’s my private opinion that whether that settle in the Valley or in a town-house in Bel Air or in a penthouse atop a New York scryscraper, Debbie and Eddie will be happy and keep happy.

And “As soon as possible,” as Eddie put it, there will be a baby boy to keep them company. Or that’s what the groom hopes.

THE END

—BY LOUELLA PARSONS

 

It is a quote. MODERN SCREEN MAGAZINE JANUARY 1956