For me, she was the Grandma on Halloweentown: vivacious, beautiful and a key part of my childhood experience. But she was so much more. Debbie Reynolds was unsinkable.

I stumbled upon a TikTok mentioning the “scandal of the time” involving Miss Debbie, and I was shocked, of course, I started looking up more about Debbie Reynolds and the incredible life she led. Turns out that Debbie was an incredibly successful singer, dancer, actress, and businesswoman. She also was an incredible mother. The one part of her life that wasn’t so successful was her love life.

Married three times, Debbie claimed that she “had terrible taste in men”. In an Inside Edition interview, one of the last interviews before she died, she stated “I still believe in love, but it just doesn’t happen to me. It isn’t that I don’t believe in it. It’s wonderful if you can really find someone that adores you but that hasn’t happened for me. And so I think three strikes and that’s enough of that.” (Inside Edition) This quote really captures just how incredible Debbie was. Not only three failed marriages, but marriages that left her in emotional, financial, and physical ruin, and she still didn’t desert the idea of love. Three ex-husbands, truly terrible in their own way, and one incredible woman in the middle of it all. Where shall we start?

Synopsis of Her Career

Throughout Debbie Reynolds life, she achieved many things and built quite a life for herself, despite men’s many attempts to destroy her. She started out with simple beginnings living in a shack in El Paso with her family. But, even though they were poor, she said they were never went hungry. Her mother and father provided for her well. Then after moving to Burbank, California in 1939, Debbie entered the Miss Burbank beauty contest at 16 and won.

Debbie’s humble beginnings didn’t keep her down. In fact, they inspired her and pushed her to the point that she became the incredible icon she is today. One of her high school friends said of her humble start “Debbie can serve as an inspiration to all young American womanhood. She came up the hard way, and she has a realistic sense of values based on faith, love, work, and money. Life has been kind to her because she has been kind to life. She’s a young woman with a conscience, which is something rare in Hollywood actresses. She also has a refreshing sense of honesty.” (Wikipedia)

As she grew into the incredible Debbie Reynolds, she won the following awards for her time in the entertainment industry with an additional 10 nominations.

• Best Supporting Actress in 1956
• Lifetime Achievement Award in Comedy in 1997
• Best Supporting Actress – Motion Picture in 1987
• Life Achievement Award in 2014
• Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award in 2015

Debbie also received the Lifetime Achievement in the Arts Award from Chapman University on November 4, 2006, and the University of Nevada, Reno awarded her an honorary degree of Doctor of Humane Letters because of the many years that she dedicated to the film studies program.

In addition to the many accolades of her entertainment role and the incredible businesswoman she was, she was a mother. This seemed to be one of her very favorite roles. But before the baby in the baby carriage, came marriage.

Eddie Fisher

During this time, Debbie was close with Elizabeth Taylor and they spent lots of time together. That was until Elizabeth’s husband died and it was revealed that Elizabeth and Eddie were having an affair and had been for some time. This was an astonishing scandal at the time and led to Eddie Fisher’s show being canceled (goodbye cheater!). They got divorced in 1959.

Debbie, the class act that she is, ended up forgiving Elizabeth Taylor after they reconciled some 10 to 15 years later. And in respect to Eddie she stated, “Now in retrospect, though it was not in my will, I think it probably was the best thing that ever happened to me. He did give me two great children and for that I will ever be grateful. Our door is always open to him. I believe in peaceful coexistence and being friends with the father of your children.” (Wikipedia)

Harry Karl

One short year later in 1960, healing and ready to move on, Debbie married Harry Carl. He was distant from the entertainment world which was exactly what the doctor called for. He had a successful empire as a millionaire businessman. What a power couple right? A business mogul and a Hollywood star. A tale as old as time. In this marriage, Debbie gained her third child, her stepdaughter Tina Karl, but unfortunately didn’t gain much else. In fact, she lost everything.

It turned out, Harry Karl had a terrible addiction to gambling. He took his millions and her millions too and gambled it away or invested in bad investments. They were married from 1960 to 1973. During that time, it is reported that Karl foolishly spent $7 million of Reynolds’s hard-earned money. Eventually, Harry Karl added cheating to his list of horrendous acts and Debbie took her children and her dignity and left.

Richard Hamlett

Have you had enough of despicable men in this story? Too bad. Richard Hamlett was the worst of all. Richard Hamlett was a real estate developer and in her words, “I married the devil.” (Unsinkable) Mind you, this is the same woman who made peace with her best friend and her husband who slept together. She’s not a woman who holds a grudge. But Hamlett was a different breed.

Basically Hamlett was a greedy man with no thought of anyone else. He used Debbie and her incredible talents as some kind of twisted cash cow system to fund his debauchery. One specific night captures his evil ways well.

So Hamlett convinced Reynolds to invest her money in a hotel in Las Vegas so that they could open it together. She agrees and they call it the Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Casino. He then convinces her that they best way to get a crowd to their hotel would be for her to perform opening night. Of course, the talented and loyal woman she is, decided to perform. In this middle of her performance, Hamlett disappeared for the next 36 hours. Many sources claimed that he allegedly ran off to meet his mistress. He left her to open the hotel completely by herself. In Unsinkable Debbie wrote, “Getting the theatre ready for the gala opening was a nightmare. Everything that could go wrong did so. My dreams were collapsing around me. Then my son discovered (Hamlett) had placed a $10,000 bet that we wouldn’t open on time.” (Unsinkable)

Debbie also goes on to describe how Hamlett’s name suddenly and “mysteriously appeared on the deed to a property that [she] owned” which she “certainly never agreed to”. (Unsinkable) In her book she then describes how she had to ride out the chaos of opening while waiting impatiently for her husband to come back home. Thirty-six hours later, he shows up at Debbie’s 12th floor condo in Las Vegas. And this was the night that things hit a breaking point for Debbie.

She explains the feeling of pure fear feeling that he surely was going to kill her because of the look in his eyes. Even though she was scared, she still presented him the deeds and demanded answers. Immediately Hamlett reached for Debbie’s hand saying, “Why don’t we go out on the balcony and talk?” As Debbie remembered this event while writing her book, she expresses how she was so confused as to why we wanted to go out on the balcony. Her balcony was only “3 feet wide – not enough room to have a friendly conversation” (Unsinkable). She said she continued to feel fear as he persistently requested they go to the balcony to talk. “Was he thinking about my million dollar life insurance policy with him as a beneficiary? I could practically see the dollar signs floating about his head. I was sure he was going to toss me off the balcony. One shove and all his troubles would be over. I pictured myself plummeting twelve floors to the pavement… Thankfully that didn’t happen.” (Unsinkable)

She expresses how she managed to tear her hand away from his grip as she expressed to him that she needed to go to the bathroom. She ran back to her bedroom and hid in a small space at the top of her closet where no one could see her. “After a couple of minutes, my husband began slamming doors. I didn’t move a muscle for 20 minutes. He had to believe I had run out of the apartment.” Eventually, she heard him leave the condo and she was left in the silence.

Between the terrible nightmarish divorce that followed and The Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Casino failing, Debbie ended up completely bankrupt. In one final thought about the man that Hamlett was, Debbie confessed in her book, “I’m waiting to read that somebody runs him off a cliff somewhere.”

Once again, Debbie Reynolds had nothing but her children, her dignity and the future in front of her. What was she left to do?

We’ve had Eddie Fisher who cheated on her with her best friend, Harry Karl who wasted her money and cheated on her and as Debbie put it the “devil” who bled her dry, cheated on her and possibly tried to kill her. She explained, “My three husbands all left me for another woman and obviously I wasn’t a very sexual lady. My husbands all repeatedly said the same thing – that I was not a very passionate woman. It seemed that I was more interested in raising my children, not pursuing my husbands.” (Heavy)

But Debbie was still Debbie. As her high school friend stated, she had her values. “Life is both faith and love. Without faith, love is only one dimensional and incomplete. Faith helps you to overlook other people’s shortcomings, and love them as they are. If you ask too much of any relationship, you can’t help but be disappointed. But if you ask nothing, you can’t be hurt or disappointed.” (Wikipedia)

Above all, Debbie believed in love and I think she was more prone to forgiving her ex-husbands’s shortcomings than all three of the men combined could reciprocate . She loved them like they never could love her. She believed in love and faith and forgiveness, yet they all treated her like dirt.

While it makes me sad that Debbie never received the love that she gave from a man, she did fortunately receive that love in her lifetime. The love of children for their mother. And in the end that’s what really matters. Even three aggressive sharks in the water surrounding an unsinkable ship cannot sink the ship. At least not a ship like Debbie.

Her Children

Debbie Reynolds loved being a mother. Her children were her pride and joy. Her true love. Her lifeline. Although Debbie and her daughter Carrie Fisher went through a patch of estrangement due to Carrie Fisher wanting to create her own identity out of her mother’s shadow, they become close again. Debbie and her daughter Carrie Fisher were extremely close towards the end of their lives and actually neighbored each other for 15 years as adults. They even left this world just a day apart.

On December 23, 2016, Carrie Fisher was on a flight from London to Los Angeles when she suffered a medical emergency. A couple of days later, she died at the young age of 60. The following day, on December 28th, 2016 Debbie Reynolds was driven to the hospital after suffering a “severe stroke” according to her son, Todd Fisher. Just that afternoon, Debbie passed away at the age of 84. While her official cause of death was an “intracerebral hemorrhage and hypertension”, Todd claimed that grief was one of the causing factors for his mother’s stroke. Allegedly, she said “I want to be with Carrie” soon before she died. Todd elaborated that his mother didn’t die of a broken heart, but rather “left to be with Carrie”. He stated that his mother “didn’t want to leave Carrie and did not want her to be alone”.

The Death of an Icon

Debbie Reynolds was a strong woman of conviction and morals. She adhered to those morals and lived them out loud. She had her family, he children, and even some great-grandchildren that still carry on her legacy today. In the end, slimy men were drawn to this magical and creative life she led, and she gave them the time of day because she believed in love so completely that she wanted it to be real. Debbie Reynolds was truly unsinkable, even when her ex-husbands tried so hard to prove otherwise.

Sources

There’s no one better source than first-hand. Debbie Reynolds blessed the world with “Unsinkable: A Memoir”, her story in her own words. I strongly recommend reading this book if you’re interested. This article just a snapshot of the incredible life she lived.

Reynolds, Debbie, and Dorian Hannaway. Unsinkable: A Memoir. William Morrow, 2013.

The following sources were also crucial in writing this piece.