Interviewing Debbie Reynolds, one of Hollywood’s pluckiest stars

Less than two years ago, I sang a duet with Debbie Reynolds.

Then 82, Reynolds was about to receive the Screen Actors Guild’s Lifetime Achievement Award but she was only doing minimal press; I joined her in the cozy home on daughter Carrie Fisher’s property where Reynolds lived for years. She was noticeably frail that cold, rainy afternoon; she had been ill during the past few months and she confided in her typical candid fashion that only one of her kidneys was working.

Still, Hollywood’s famous girl-next-door was as upbeat and indefatigable as ever, sipping a cup of tea on a sofa, her devoted Coton de Tulear dog Dwight next to her. While discussing “Singin’ in the Rain,” she started to croon “Moses Supposes.” It’s a funny song, one I knew well, and I could not resist joining in.

So there I was were in Carrie Fisher’s guest house, singing a duet with Debbie Reynolds. Heaven.

Her blue eyes sparkled when we finished, just as mine filled with tears Wednesday when, having just written a piece in the wake of Fisher’s death, I learned of Debbie’s.

Almost unimaginably, she had collapsed while planning her daughter’s funeral.

Mother and daughter, Old Hollywood and new, both teenage stars of iconic films, their lives perpetually, inextricably entwined on stage, film, memoir, were now linked too in death.

The stuff of legend indeed.

Two decades ago, when Reynolds accepted another Lifetime Achievement Award (this time from ABC’s “American Comedy Awards”) she brought the house down by referring to her ill-fated marriage to crooner Eddie Fisher as “Oh, my faux pas” — a spoof on Fisher’s hit tune, “Oh My Papa.”

Reynolds didn’t write that speech, Fisher did; Eddie, of course, was her father.

Along with younger brother Todd, Carrie Fisher was the child of Hollywood royalty, photographed and cooed over by Hollywood and Reynolds’ adoring fans, especially after Eddie famously left Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor after her husband Mike Todd died. The two couples had been friends and when Todd was killed, Eddie rushed to her side, Fisher explained in her one-woman show, “Wishful Drinking,” adding dryly: “Gradually moving it to her front.”

As immortalized in the film version of Fisher’s novel “Postcards From the Edge,” Carrie and Debbie were proof of the strange yet devoted attraction of opposites. Even after all those years, Reynolds had stars in her eyes about Hollywood, while Fisher, true intergalactic princess, shook off the stardust and told the truth, writing about her battle with substance abuse and mental illness with perception, dry wit and brazen honesty.

“I come from a long line of short, potent broads who render their mates sort of obsolete,” Fisher told me in a 1995 interview. “My parents’ whole relationship was basically a press release.”

Still, Fisher became an actress because it was in the family business.

“My mother put me in a nightclub act, in effect, to be with her,” Fisher noted. “She was not having a good time at the time. It was a way of keeping the family together. I was 13 and did her nightclub act in Vegas and Reno. Then I acted in the chorus [on Broadway] when I was 15. How do you walk away from something that you can do OK, that is sort of fiscally attractive? There’s a lot of drama about it and your mother can give you advice forever.”

Especially when she lives in your guest house.

Just like her daughter, Reynolds had more than her share of struggles including two marriages that left her in horrible financial shape. But she too was a fighter.

I first interviewed Reynolds in 2011 at the Paley Center where she was auctioning off part of her famous collection of Hollywood memorabilia. Nearly 600 items of the 5,000-plus vintage costumes, props, cameras, letters and even cars she had acquired over four decades in hopes of opening a permanent museum, were being sold to meet her debts.

Though it must have been devastating, Reynolds was strong as an ox. She walked through rooms filled with such items as Marilyn Monroe’s white “subway dress” from “The Seven Year Itch,” a lock of Mary Pickford’s hair and gowns from “The Unsinkable Molly Brown” as if she couldn’t wait to get rid of the stuff.

And although she did not show it as often, Reynolds shared her daughter’s wicked sense of humor — she gave Fred Astaire a jeweled jockstrap after starring with him in 1961’s “The Pleasure of His Company.”

“He only had a little dance at the wedding,” she recalled on that rainy day, offering me a plate of chocolate chip cookies. “He said to me, ‘You don’t worry about dancing. Just relax and let me lead you. Let me guide you.’ I just floated around the table. We didn’t make one mistake, at least not that I remember.”

So she gave him the jockstrap as a “thank you” present.

“It is very precocious and sounds fresh and smart aleck, but I meant it as a lovely, funny gesture,” she said. “He laughed for an hour.”

Reynolds hadn’t been the first choice for what became her iconic role in “Unsinkable Molly Brown.” Director Charles Walters wanted Shirley MacLaine, but contractual issues prevented MacLaine from taking the part.

“Walters said, ‘You are totally wrong for the part.’ I said, ‘No, I’m not. I am exactly right for the part.”’

Which even Walters finally admitted was true. (Ironically, MacLaine would play the Reynolds part in “Postcards From the Edge.”)

“You have to believe in yourself,” Reynolds said. “I remember Gene Kelly yelling at me ‘Smile!’ while I’m dancing. ‘Smile one more time. You become a workhorse.’”

A workhorse who had just recently finished another film, a documentary called “Bright Lights,” about her life with Fisher.

Mother and daughter together in their shared final work.

“If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true,” Fisher said in “Wishful Drinking,” and even in the shock of such an unprecedented double death, it’s easy to hear them laughing somewhere, two short, potent broads who, together, rendered so many things obsolete.

Shortly after Reynolds’ death was announced Wednesday I got a text from the publicist who was at the interview that day.

“Thinking of you as I learned of Debbie Reynolds’ passing and the sweet moment when you sang together in her living room.”

I’ll never forget that day. And we’ll never forget Reynolds.