Photoplay (Jul-Dec 1962)

DEBBIE LOSES Happiest sound in Hollywood — until today, as this is written — was Debbie Revnolds’ lilting voice singing folk songs. A new album is in process for Dot Records, and late summer afternoons when Carrie and Todd were up from their naps, they’d all get together at the piano. Rudy Render, Debbie’s secretary-accompanist, would play and Debbie would try out first one song then another, easily, without strain, singing softly, having fun. Sometimes the children sang, too. Often when Harry came home from the office they’d still be singing. Happiest girl in America was Debbie — you could hear it, see it, her radiance was contagious! There are some girls who glow in pregnancy, there are some who don't. I remember Rosemary Clooney, before her first baby, hated her bulkiness, she felt herself the ugliest woman in America and hated Joe’s seeing her like that. I remember Jean Simmons when she was pregnant, lazy and luxuriant . . . Janet Leigh, nervous and high strung . . . Sandra Dee, hysterically funny . . . but I’ve never known a pregnant woman more serene than Debbie Reynolds. She’s always wanted a houseful of kids. She certainly wanted Harry’s child. She had everyone in stitches planning how next year they’d have another baby . . . and maybe the year after . . . until Harry cracked, “I’ll be the first father in history to pace the waiting room in a wheel chair.” But he and Debbie often clown. This girl simply delights this man, he finds her sense of humor irresistible. And nothing has delighted him more than watching her swell and grow with his child. Her great expectations! Nothing daunted her. She had to announce her expectations at two months because there were still scenes to be shot for “How the West Was Won” at M-G-M and then “My Six Loves” to shoot in its entirety at Paramount. Toward the end of that one Debbie had to be laced up pretty tight to look like a romantic heroine. On one final scene they had to do twelve retakes and she prayed, “Please hurry. Please, please, please, hurry!” But nothing daunted her. Soon it would be over and she'd be off to Palm Springs with Harry and the children to rest. She wasn’t even daunted when Carrie and Todd came down with chicken pox they’d caught from Marge and Gower Champion’s small son. Nurse Dottie was off on vacation, Debbie nursed the youngsters herself and enjoyed it. There were lazy story hours and dolls to cut out with Carrie and blocks to build with Todd and long leisurely evenings in the air-cooled house with Harry after the children went to sleep and long sweet nights of sleep for herself. They came back from Palm Springs the first of July, Debbie looking brown and fit and, as her mother says, “healthy as a horse.” But she felt tired somehow, she couldn’t summon up her usual pep and she went in for a check-up with Dr. Charles Levy, the Reynolds family doctor who has looked after Debbie since she was eight, delivered both her babies and knows her, physically, better than anyone in the world. He examined her carefully, found her sound as a dollar and reminded her that as the fetus comes into its seventh month the rate of growth accelerates, the weight increases and a prospective mother could feel a lack of pep. In the next couple of weeks, Debbie began to feel wonderful. She decided it had probably been the heat at the Springs that fatigued her. She started singing her folk songs . . . ate picnic lunches with the children in the garden . . . talked with carpenters about the new nursery they would add to the house . . . talked with Carrie and Todd about the new baby and how they would help her bathe it and put it to sleep and give it its bottle . . . they toyed with names. A time of love and life This was probably the happiest time of Debbie’s life, these weeks, totally surrounded by love, Harry, the children, her mother and father dropping by. And moving inside her, kicking out first here, then there, an active unseen force insistent about its life. For Debbie Reynolds, children are a must. “Children I’ve wanted as far back as I can remember,” she has said. “They’re a great gift and I’ve found I am just as fulfilled playing with Carrie and Todd as I am in acting. Children don't ask to be born and they deserve all the love and the understanding and time my parents gave to Bill and me-and that Harry and I give to Carrie and Todd. My parents were always with Bill and me, they gave us a faith and a sense of security that is the backbone of my life and has seen me through a Jot.” She has never really believed in working mothers — remembering one of her friends in high school whose mother was an actress and who never had time to come to any of the school activities— not even graduation. That was never going to happen to children of hers! As a matter of fact, if it had been necessary last fall, Debbie would have flown back from New York just to take Carrie to kindergarten the first day. Nor was she ever going to let work interfere with her pregnancy. She was carrying Carrie when she made “Bundle of Joy” and she was frantic because the shooting schedule barely gave her time to be free for her delivery date. She was carrying Todd when she made “Tammy,” but that time she managed to stop a little earlier. And this time, much as she would have liked to keep her pregnancy a private matter for a few months, she had to tell in order to get her two films finished and give herself a breather. Well, she breathed and she enjoyed it with a full heart. You love a baby long before its birth — every woman who has ever borne a child knows this. You love it from the first message — at first just a flutter, a brush, a wink like the opening and closing of an eyelid or the motion of a wasp’s wing, hardly a motion at all. so quick you hold your breath to be sure. But there it is, the stretching of arms and legs; and from that moment on there’s a communication, the child saying, “I’m here, I’m here,” the mother listening. The only alarm is during those moments when for some reason (the baby probably sleeping), the mother fails to sense this hidden motion. And she thinks about it, maybe worries. “Kick out, little baby!” But from the sixth month on, the movements of the child become real thumps, it kicks out clamoring for recognition and Debbie, like every other mother would think, “Kick out, little baby, grow strong, kick out.” Often, as they sat on the grass, she’d let Carrie and Todd put their little hands on her tummy, feel the baby kick. “Did I do that too. Mommy?” “Did I kick my feet?” Harry was very proud of her. For people in love, the whole of childbearing is a love song, every motion of t the child, and the slowly swelling body of the mother are tied up with what two ( Continued on page 21) 11