Movie Quote of the Day (‘The Affairs of Dobie Gillis,’ on a Subject on the Minds of Many College Males Shortly)

Advisor [played by Donald Elson]: “What subjects would you like to study?”

Dobie Gillis [played by Bobby Van]: “Well, I don't rightly know.”

Advisor: “What are you interested in?”

Dobie: “Women.” — The Affairs of Dobie Gillis (1953), screenplay by Max Shulman, directed by Don Weis

This post is for a friend of mine (AND HE KNOWS WHO HE IS!!!) whose favorite subject was women when he entered college five decades ago—and it remains so to this day.

The Affairs of Dobie Gillis turned out to be a diverting surprise when I came across it a couple of weekends ago on TCM. I had heard of (but was way too young to watch when it originally aired) the TV sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. The show, which ran from 1959-1963, starred Dwayne Hickman as the title character and a pre-Gilligan’s Island Bob Denver as his beatnik friend, Maynard G. Krebs.

In the movie musical, Dobie was played by Bobby Van, who enjoyed a busy career on the big screen, television, and the stage without ever achieving the level of stardom that his dancing talent deserved, while his fresh-faced, funny girlfriend was played, in her ingenue stage, by Debbie Reynolds—who certainly did achieve celebrity.

I didn’t expect The Affairs of Dobie Gillis to be Singin’ in the Rain or The Band Wagon, let alone the stage and screen musical classics later brought to life by Van’s onscreen friend Bob Fosse, Cabaret and Chicago. But it transported me to a time and place in which the biggest crisis was Reynolds’ klutzy experiment in a chemistry class.

And that, during these last fevered weeks in American history, couldn’t have been more welcome.

Movie Quote of the Day (‘Postcards From the Edge,’ on Carrie and Debbie)

Doris Mann [pictured right, played by Shirley MacLaine]: “So you said you have a ranch?”

Jack Faulkner [played by Dennis Quaid]: “Yeah, out in Malibu.”

Doris: “If all ranchers looked like you, there wouldn't be many crops.”

Jack: “Depends on what you're raising.”

Doris: “Certainly not doubts!”

[Both laugh. Doris’ daughter, Suzanne Vale—pictured left, played by Meryl Streep—enters.]

Doris: “Oh, I was just coming to get you—your little friend is here.”

Suzanne: “Can I speak to you for a moment in private?”

Doris: “Excuse me, my daughter wants to speak to me.”

[Both step into the alcove.]

Suzanne: “I would really just like a few people of my own without them having to like you so much!”

Doris: “I was just being friendly. And I don't care if he likes me or not, your friend in there with the bedroom eyes.”

Suzanne: “Right. And the living room nose, the kitchen forehead and den ears.”—Postcards From the Edge (1990), screenplay by Carrie Fisher based on her novel, directed by Mike Nichols

The deaths of Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds within 24 hours of each other are, as virtually everyone on social media would tell you, poignant, stunning, and dramatic. But I bet that in Heaven right now, Fisher is eyeing her mom drolly before saying, “Never wanted to be upstaged, did you?”

At least some of that exasperated hypercompetitive feeling, along with generous amounts of sass, surfaces in the above scene from Postcards From the Edge, which is, by common agreement, semi-autobiographical. 

For Fisher, comparisons with a show-business legend such as Reynolds—not to mention claiming her attention and love in childhood—had to have been, at best, like living in a gilded cage. And, when the times weren’t so good, it could not have come as a surprise that, like other Hollywood offspring, she would be left dizzy and disoriented in adolescence and young adulthood.

If you want a sense of what it must have been like to live like Tinseltown royalty, only to be rudely expelled from the kingdom, I urge you to read Darcy O’Brien’s 1977 coming-of-age novel, A Way of Life, Like Any Other. From the 1930s well into the Forties, George O'Brien, a star of Westerns and a member of John Ford’s stock company, and his wife, the former actress Marguerite Churchill, led a posh life, and their son Darcy was cosseted: “I had an electric car, a starched white nanny, a pony, a bed modeled after that of Napoleon’s son, and I was baptized by the archbishop of the diocese. I wore hats and sucked on a little pipe.”

Suddenly it was all over: “Life turned round on Mother and Dad…. Everything had changed.” Hollywood (save for the loyal Ford) forgot they ever existed; the jobs dried up after WWII; George and Marguerite divorced; and Darcy, a young pasha no more, was left to his own devices as his mother indulged in love affairs with bad men and the bottle.

For a sense, then, of what life was like for Carrie Fisher and brother Todd, take the O’Brien family, multiply by the megawattage of the Debbie Reynolds-Eddie Fisher union, and imagine the collateral damage to the offspring. First Carrie had to share her mother with fans. Then, maybe just as bad, the cheering drifted off for Reynolds. By that time, the relationship became even more complicated: Now Fisher was the one finding fame in her late teens, first in Shampoo, then, far more widely, in Star Wars.

“What the scary thing about it, though, is watching celebrities fade," Fisher said in a 2011 appearance on Oprah. "Celebrity is just obscurity, biding its time. Eventually all things will disappear."

But as frustrating as competing with her mother for public attention was, being the daughter of Debbie Reynolds also gave Fisher the quality she would need after years of bad choices in men and mind-altering substances, not to mention mental illness and neglect by Hollywood: the will to survive. Striving so long for a measure of distinction and personal autonomy, she became the quintessential survivor, and, in that respect, her mother’s daughter in the end.

Reynolds, “America’s Sweetheart” in the 1950s, was far tougher than her ingénue image led the public to believe. At age 19, she not only had to endure one grueling take after another ordered by Gene Kelly while filming Singin’ in the Rain, but also fend off the advances of this director-choreographer-star at the height of his power and influence. Later in the decade, she recovered from the betrayal of husband Eddie Fisher with best friend Elizabeth Taylor.

As the golden age of the Hollywood movie musical came crashing down in the late Sixties, Reynolds was forced to reinvent herself for television and the stage. It didn’t help that her taste in men was as abysmal as her talent was transcendent: her second husband, Harry Karl, not only had prostitutes in their home while she was away but ended up swindling her. By her own admission, she “married idiots”—yet she remained, like the title of the film she made about Titanic survivor Molly Brown, “unsinkable.”

Six years ago, I wrote a post about Fisher’s one-woman show, Wishful Drinking. At that time, it was possible to discuss the star of one generation apart from the other. Now, their deaths have underscored the symmetry of their lives: 19-year-olds cast in industry-defining movies, then forced to shift for themselves through the years, irritated by their closest relative’s eccentricities and weaknesses before finally relying on and admiring each other’s fate-defying moxie.

Theater Review: “Wishful Drinking,” Created and Performed by Carrie Fisher

“Celebrity is just obscurity biding its time,” Carrie Fisher observes—but with Wishful Drinking, she staves off obscurity for quite a bit longer than what one might expect from someone whose exploits would, under normal circumstances, make her one of those has-beens on “Celebrity Rehab.”

I never got around to reviewing this one-person show before it closed on Sunday at Studio 54. Not that it mattered: it would have done fine with or without my two cents. I’m sure the Roundabout Theatre’s creative honchos would have been delighted if Ms. Fisher had elected to stay longer, what with the way Bye, Bye, Birdie unexpectedly tanked this season. But I guess she had other cities to conquer.

Fisher’s show is, essentially, an audio-visual counterpart to her book of the same name. Before purchasing my ticket, I had bought her memoir for a friend, who later warned me that the best lines would be spoiled for me if I heavily perused this too-much-too-soon autobiography. Because I hadn’t done so, the lines came to me with the joy that surprise and freshness can bring.

“One-woman show” might be one way to describe Fisher’s performance; another might be “comic self-therapy.” If you want a sense of her tone, imagine Dorothy Parker, in all her biting glory, but not sinking under the weight of pills, alcohol and tristesse love affairs/marriages gone awry, but somehow rising to her feet, with even more material because of a wildly dysfunctional family.

How dysfunctional? So dysfunctional it requires the aid of a blackboard (in the image accompanying this post)—a hilarious prop you won’t find in Fisher’s book—to explicate all the marriages and liaisons ensuing from the infamous triangle involving her mother, Debbie Reynolds; her father, singer Eddie Fisher; and Elizabeth Taylor—that generation’s equivalent of the Jennifer Aniston-Brad Pitt-Angelina Jolie triangle, she helpfully translates for the audience.

Amazingly, Reynolds’ two-timing, drug-using ex (“Puff Granddaddy,” the wheelchair-bound octogenarian is now nicknamed) was not the worst of her mates. In fact, since two of them ended up swindling her of all her savings, the former ingénue of Singing in the Rain was being entirely accurate when she predicted to her daughter that Fisher “might turn out to be the good one.”

(Oh, did I mention that one of Carrie’s stepfathers had a hairdresser who moonlighted as a pimp? Or that Reynolds, responding to her daughter’s rejection of the notion that she might want to sleep with her stepfather, answered, in one of the great non sequiturs in history: “Just read The Enquirer, dear—it’s a weird world out there!”)

At the matinee I attended in October, Fisher invited to the stage her teenage daughter Billie, up in the Northeast for a visit, to try on a version of the mouse-like coiffeur Fisher had sported, to immortal effect, as Princess Leia in Star Wars. The occasion provided an opportunity to demonstrate how Hollywood filmmakers can be just as weird as the process of filmmaking. (Director George Lucas advised her that she couldn’t wear a bra under her white dress because “there’s no underwear in space.”)

The New York Times reported early in the show’s run that, at the request of Warren Beatty, Ms. Fisher deleted some risqué material on her former Shampoo co-star. Despite their short-lived marriage, Paul Simon also emerges relatively unscathed here. (She slips in that one of his lines from the song “Hearts and Bones” concerns their relationship, the story of “One and one-half wandering Jews” who “speculate who had been damaged the most.”)

Yet it wasn’t this constant family lunacy, or the insane demands of Tinseltown, or her own well-publicized struggles with drug abuse and bipolar disorder that provoked the most fascination at the performance I saw—it was Fisher’s 2004 discovery, in her bed, of a good friend, a gay GOP campaign consultant, dead of a drug overdose. Audience members asked her just about everything you could imagine, including, “Did you sleep with him?” and “Did he leave you any money?” (No and no were the answers.)

(The incident also led to the monologuist regaling her Blue State audience with an anecdote they ate up. Her friend the GOP operative, she related, had, in his younger years, known George W. Bush, who, as a wild and crazy fellow, could cut farts that would leave a big stink—sort of like the way he departed the Presidency, she said.)

If Reynolds was The Unsinkable Molly Brown, then her daughter, with her horrors recounted, faced and dispatched with one-liners, is in another realm of the eternal survivor entirely. “If you claim something, you own it,” she says—and she did so here to hilarious and triumphant effect.