Unsinkable: A Memoir by Debbie Reynolds

This review was previously posted on my classic film blog.

Unsinkable: A Memoir by Debbie Reynolds
Hardcover
9780062213655
April 2013
William Morrow
320 pages

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In 1988, Debbie Reynold's autobiography Debbie: My Life was released. It depicted the often times tumultuous life of the perky and vivacious movie star who became famous with her roles in films such as Singin' in the Rain (1952) and The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964). At the time of that book's publication, Reynolds was newly married to Richard Hamlett. Little did she know that more trials and tribulations were waiting around the corner.

Unsinkable: A Memoir picks up in the timeline of Debbie Reynolds life when she married Hamlett in 1984. Reynolds describes her tumultuous marriage to Hamlett, the messy divorce that followed, the rise and fall of her Las Vegas hotel, her daughter Carrie Fisher's emotional and physical problems, her relationship with her son Todd and the repeated disappointments and financial hardships she endured in trying to create a museum for her vast collection of movie memorabilia.

The book is divided into two parts. Part One follows Reynolds life from 1984 to 2011. Part Two kicks off at 2012 and dips back into time following her movie career from 1948 until 2013. It's mostly a continuation of her first autobiography but she does include plenty of information about her early movie career and her troubled marriages to Eddie Fisher and Harry Karl.

Reading Unsinkable was quite an interesting experience for me. Debbie Reynolds is very candid. Some readers might be a little uncomfortable with some of the things she reveals. I don't think I'll ever look at Tony Randall the same way after reading this book. But that very open and sharing nature is just Debbie Reynolds' style. Her personality definitely comes through, whether the writing is mostly hers or that of her co-wrieter Dorian Hannaway. Reynolds also makes some big revelations including the fact that she thinks her third husband Richard Hamlett tried to kill her.

Debbie Reynolds spends a lot of time in this book discussing her passion for movie memorabilia and how she treasured the costumes and props she purchased or collected over the years. In 2011, Reynolds was facing financial difficulties and after years of trying to create a museum for her memorabilia she made the controversial decision to sell the pieces at auction instead. The most famous piece was the white dress that Marilyn Monroe wore in the subway grate scene in The Seven Year Itch (1955). Reynolds spends a lot of time talking about the memorabilia, her attempts at creating the museum, her regrets and how it pained her to auction off all those pieces. She seems genuine enough but sometimes I wondered if she was trying to seek validation from her readers and her skeptics.

By Part Two, I wasn't sure if I would find much value in this book. Her stories were interesting and I was especially intrigued to read about her very complicated relationship with Elizabeth Taylor. However, one chapter into Part Two and I discovered the real value of the book. Starting on page 183, Reynolds goes back to 1948 to her very first movie and reminisces about (almost) each and every movie she made up until her most recent one Behind the Candlelabra (2013) in which she plays Liberace's mother (with whom she was good friends in real life). This part was the most interesting to me. She shares her personal experiences and memories from each of those films. This is what separates a biography from an autobiography in my opinion.

This book has its bias. Reynolds is not afraid to pass judgment on certain people in her life and with some of her over sharing I wonder what she is hiding as well. I tried to take most things in the book with a grain of salt. With that said, Debbie Reynolds is quite charming so it's very likely she'll win you over with her candid style.

So what do I really think of the book? If it wasn't for that movie-by-movie rundown in Part Two, I wouldn't have liked the book at all. That really saved it for me. I would recommend reading Unsinkable if you are very interested in Debbie Reynolds as an actress and a woman and definitely if you had read her first book. It's also for those of you who are curious about Debbie Reynolds' decision to sell her memorabilia and want to know her side of the story.

Thank you so much to William Morrow for sending me a copy of Unsinkable for review!

The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century by Margaret Talbot

The Entertainer: Movies, Magic and My Father's Twentieth Century 
by Margaret Talbot
November 2012
Riverhead (Penguin)

This review originally appeared on my movie blog Out of the Past.

Please make sure you also check out my interview with the author which can be found on my movie blog too. 



In her captivating, impeccably researched narrative - a charmed combination of Hollywood history, social history, and family memoir - Margaret Talbot conjures warmth and nostalgia for those earlier eras of '10s and '20s small-town American, '30s and '40s Hollywood. She transports us to an alluring time, simpler but also exciting, and illustrated the changing face of her father's America, all while telling the story of mass entertainment across the first half of the twentieth century. - Riverhead Books

Margaret Talbot's The Entertainer is not simply a biography about her father the actor Lyle Talbot. Rather the book consists of two parallel stories; one of Talbot's life as a man and career as an actor and the other about the evolution of Hollywood and the entertainment industry in the twentieth century.

This book is a portrait of an entertainer placed firmly on the canvass of twentieth century history. The Entertainer is a charming book with a lot of insight and thoughtfulness and a rich abundance of information. The book chronicles Lyle Talbot's life and career almost chronologically. There are several jumps back and forth through time but the course keeps steady and it reads as though you are moving forward continuously rather than simply jumping around.

Margaret Talbot doesn't try to romanticize her father. She is frank about his drinking problem and how he never became a major movie star. But this book is also an ode to the father who she knew and loved dearly. Their age gap reminds me very much of the one I have with my own father (52 years in my case and almost 60 in hers). Her father was secretive about his romantic past, much like my own is now. A lot of what Margaret Talbot found out about her father Lyle's girlfriends and wives was from her research.

Speaking of research, the author relies a lot on the memories of her father as well as the stories that her father told her and the ones shared by family and friends. She also relies on scrapbooks, photographs, clippings, receipts, menus, telegrams, postcards and other papers saved over the years. She revisited taped interviews and transcripts and dug up articles and interviews from various publications and read many biographies, novels and books on history and criticism. She recounts a lovely story about a man finding a photo scrapbook of her father at a yard sale, realizing it's importance and contacting her about transferring the book back to the family. I'm sure a lot of people would have kept those photographs or sold them so it's nice to hear that someone was generous enough to give them to the family for safe keeping.

The book clocks in at over 400 pages and includes 45 black and white photos which appear throughout the text. This type of design is my ideal as the photos appear with the relevant text to go along with it. It keeps me from flipping back and forth from a photo insert to where I had left off reading (which I have done many times in the past with other books).

For those of you who are looking for a book about an actor's life, without all the salaciousness of other biographies and with plenty of context, then look no further than this book. I wish there were more books like this one; kind yet frank portrayals with lots of added information. I would go so far to call this book an enhanced biography. I found The Entertainer to be absolutely charming, well-written and insightful.

Disclosure: Thank you to Riverhead Books (a division of Penguin) for providing me with an advance readers copy of the book to review.