The man she had married was asking her to step out onto the balcony, and the look in his eyes frightened her. It was the opening night of the Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Casino, the single most important night of her professional life, the culmination of thirty years of work toward a dream that had consumed her since 1970. She was sixty years old, standing in a hotel room in a building with her own name on the front of it, and she was afraid of what her husband might do if she went out onto that narrow ledge with him, perhaps three feet wide, no room for two people to stand and talk. She did not go out onto the balcony.

Nothing happened. But the moment stayed with her, and she wrote about it later with the dry, unsparing honesty that had become her trademark. The man was Richard Hamlet, her third husband, a real estate developer from Virginia. And the marriage would end the way the other two had ended, with Debbie Reynolds losing money on a scale that, accumulated across four decades, would eventually put one of the most famous women in America into a bankruptcy court.

She was born Mary Francis Reynolds on April 1, 1932, in El Paso, Texas, into a family with almost nothing. Her father worked for the Southern Pacific Railroad. When she was around eight, the family moved to Burbank, California, where they lived frugally and carefully in a household where money was counted and recounted and nothing was wasted. That detail is worth holding on to, because it explains a great deal about the woman she became and about how she reacted to everything that happened later.

She grew up genuinely poor, and she never entirely stopped behaving like someone who might be poor again. She was a Girl Scout. She played French horn in the school band. By every account, including her own, she was an ordinary, energetic, extremely determined Burbank teenager with no particular plans for a career in film.

In 1948, at sixteen, she entered the Miss Burbank beauty contest largely because contestants were given a blouse and a scarf, and she wanted the clothes. She won. Talent scouts from both Warner Brothers and MGM happened to be in the audience that night. Within a short time she had a studio contract and a new first name, chosen for her by a Warner Brothers executive who decided that Mary Francis was not going to work on a marquee.

She reportedly disliked the name Debbie for years. What followed was one of the more improbable rises in Hollywood history. She moved to MGM, and in 1952, at nineteen years old, with no serious dance training whatsoever, she was cast opposite Gene Kelly and Donald O’Connor in *Singin’ in the Rain*. The rehearsal process was, by every account including her own, brutal.

She described dancing until her feet bled, being reduced to tears by Kelly’s exacting standards, and being found sobbing underneath a piano on the sound stage by Fred Astaire, who happened to be working on the lot and who told her, in effect, that this was simply what the work cost and that everyone went through it. She later said that making that film and giving birth were the two hardest things she ever did. The film became one of the most beloved musicals ever made, and Debbie Reynolds became, at twenty, exactly the thing the studio system was built to produce: wholesome, perky, enormously likable, America’s girl next door on a contract. On September 26, 1955, she married Eddie Fisher at Grossinger’s, a famous Catskills resort in upstate New York.

She was twenty-three. He was one of the biggest recording stars in the country, a crooner with a long string of hits and his own television show. The marriage was covered as though it were a national event, because in a certain sense it was. The studios and the press had essentially manufactured the pairing.

The two of them were sold to the public as America’s sweethearts, the perfect all-American couple, photographed constantly, written about constantly, their courtship followed by millions of people who came to feel a genuine sense of ownership over it. Fan magazines built entire issues around them. Reynolds later acknowledged fairly openly that a good deal of the romance had been arranged for publicity purposes before either of them had a great deal to say about it, which was standard practice at the time and which nobody involved found remotely strange. The reality inside the marriage was, by her own later account, considerably less charming.

Writing about it decades afterward, she described a husband who did not find her funny, who was critical of her in ways both petty and personal, and who had made it reasonably clear that what he had actually wanted was the image rather than the woman herself. She described being told, in effect, that the one thing he genuinely valued about her was that she looked like a nice girl, and that he hoped the children would inherit her nose. She wrote about all of it with the dry, unsparing humor that became her trademark. But the picture underneath the jokes was of a young woman discovering that the great national romance was, at least on one side, a piece of casting.

Two children arrived quickly. Carrie Fisher was born on October 21, 1956. Todd Fisher followed on February 24, 1958. And it was that second child’s name that pointed directly at what was about to happen, because the boy was named after the couple’s closest friend, a producer named Mike Todd, who was married to the woman Debbie Reynolds considered her best friend in the world.

Elizabeth Taylor and Mike Todd had married in 1957, and Reynolds and Fisher had stood up at the wedding as matron of honor and best man. The two couples were close to inseparable. They holidayed together, socialized constantly, and by every account the friendship between the two women was genuine and deep, dating back to their teenage years as young contract players at MGM together. On March 22, 1958, Mike Todd’s private plane, which he had named after his wife, crashed in the mountains of New Mexico.

Everyone aboard was killed. Elizabeth Taylor was twenty-six years old and had been married to him for barely a year. She had been intending to travel with him and had stayed behind because she was unwell. What happened next has been retold so many times that it has become almost a shorthand for a particular kind of betrayal.

And the sharpest version of it came years later from Reynolds’s own daughter. Carrie Fisher wrote that her father rushed to Taylor’s side and then gradually moved around to her front. Eddie Fisher, dispatched to comfort a grieving widow, began an affair with her. It became public in the summer of 1958, and it landed in the American press like an explosion.

The machinery that had spent three years building Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher into America’s sweethearts turned around and processed the collapse of it with exactly the same enthusiasm. The scandal was enormous in a very specific way, because everyone involved was immediately assigned a role. Elizabeth Taylor was cast as the seductress, the glamorous widow who had taken her best friend’s husband, and she absorbed a genuinely vicious wave of public hostility for it. Eddie Fisher was cast as the fool who had thrown away a perfect life.

And Debbie Reynolds was cast as the wronged wife, the wholesome, betrayed all-American girl standing on her doorstep with two babies. There is a famous photograph from this period of Reynolds facing the assembled press outside her home with her hair in pin curls and a diaper pin attached to her blouse, looking like the absolute picture of domestic innocence. She later said with characteristic bluntness that the image was not entirely accidental and that she was perfectly aware of how she looked and of exactly what it was doing for her. She was a studio-trained professional in the middle of the biggest story in America, and she understood the assignment.

The divorce was finalized in 1959. The affair carried Fisher into a marriage with Taylor that would itself collapse a few years later when Taylor met Richard Burton on the set of *Cleopatra*, an outcome that a number of people at the time regarded as a species of poetic justice. Publicly, Reynolds emerged from the whole thing enormously sympathetic, and her career did not suffer in the slightest. If anything, the wave of public affection carried her forward.

The following years brought some of her strongest work, including her Academy Award–nominated performance in *The Unsinkable Molly Brown* in 1964, a role that required exactly the kind of scrappy, indestructible energy she actually had, playing a woman who comes from nothing, refuses to be embarrassed by it, and survives a disaster that kills people around her. She was thirty-one. Privately, the situation was rather different. Eddie Fisher, by the accounts of both his children and Reynolds’s friends, more or less disappeared as a father.

He did not send money. Her friend Ruta Lee described the situation as genuinely frightening at the time: a young woman suddenly responsible for two small children with no support arriving from the other side. Reynolds later summarized the entire financial history of her three marriages in a single line that has been quoted ever since. Every husband she ever had, she said, robbed her blind, with one exception.

Eddie Fisher did not take her money. He simply did not pay for the children. So there she was in 1959, twenty-seven years old, two small children, an enormous career, and an entire household to fund on her own. What she wanted next was security.

What she got was a man who would spend the following thirteen years quietly setting fire to everything she earned. There is a stretch here, roughly 1959 into 1960, that gets skipped in most tellings, and it is worth pausing on because it explains the decision that follows. Reynolds was at that moment one of the most sympathetic figures in the United States. The public was entirely on her side.

Her films were doing well. *Tammy and the Bachelor* had produced a number one record for her a couple of years earlier. She was also, in every practical sense, on her own with two children under four. She had been working continuously since she was sixteen and had never in her adult life had the experience of somebody else handling anything.

The studio had managed her career, and her husband had been the other half of a public partnership that had just detonated. Now there was nobody, and there were two small children, a household, staff, and a career that required her to be on soundstages and on the road. Her friends have described a woman who was frightened, and specifically frightened about money, which for someone raised the way she had been raised in Burbank was the oldest fear she had. So when a wealthy, established, apparently reliable businessman appeared, offering to take all of that off her hands, the appeal is not remotely difficult to understand.

She was not being naive or greedy. She was a young single mother in 1960 doing what a great many young single mothers in 1960 did, which was to look for someone solid. The tragedy is not that she made that decision. It is that she made it reasonably, and it was the single most expensive decision of her life.

On November 25, 1960, Debbie Reynolds married Harry Karl, a shoe magnate whose family business, Karl’s Shoes, operated hundreds of stores and had made him extremely wealthy. He was roughly twelve years her senior, previously married, and by every appearance a solid, established, thoroughly grown-up businessman of the kind that Hollywood was full of but that Hollywood actresses did not always end up with. That was precisely the appeal. Her friend Ruta Lee later explained the thinking plainly.

Reynolds wanted a good father for her children, because Eddie Fisher had not been one and had shown no signs of becoming one. Harry Karl looked like a man who would take care of things, who would handle the accounts, and who would mean she never had to think about money again after two years of thinking about very little else. Carrie Fisher years later identified the flaw in that arrangement with the precision that made her such a good writer. Karl, she said, presented initially as someone who would take care of her mother so that her mother would never have to learn about money.

And that, Carrie said, was her mother’s Achilles heel: letting men have the final say. Harry Karl was a compulsive gambler. That is the whole story in a sense, but the scale of it is what makes it genuinely remarkable rather than merely sad. Over the course of the marriage, Karl gambled away an amount that has been reported at somewhere in the region of $100 million, combining his own fortune and hers.

He had access to her accounts. He was functionally managing the finances of one of the highest-paid women in Hollywood while feeding a compulsion that no amount of income on earth could have satisfied. It is worth being clear about what that actually means in practice, because a number that large stops feeling real. It means that every film she made, every television special, every week of nightclub work, every dollar of a career that had been running since she was sixteen years old, was being converted into losses at card tables and racetracks by the man she had married specifically so that she would never have to worry about money.

And she was working constantly through those years, one project after another, and the money was going out the back door very nearly as fast as it came in the front. That was not the only thing happening in that house. Todd Fisher has spoken publicly and in some detail about what that household was actually like, and his account is considerably darker than the gambling losses on their own. He has described Karl having women come to the house, presented to the household as manicurists, and has said plainly that he and the rest of the family came to understand the nature of those visits to be something other than nail care.

He has said he witnessed it firsthand as a boy in his own home, including while his mother was away working. He has also drawn a distinction between the two men that is worth repeating because it comes from someone who was actually there. Eddie Fisher, he said, was a young love, and what happened with him was essentially a bomb dropped on his mother from outside. Harry Karl was something else entirely, a deliberate, sustained addiction, and what Todd described simply as dark stuff.

Reynolds discovered the true state of the finances toward the end of the marriage, and by then the damage was done and largely irreversible. The couple divorced in 1973 after thirteen years, and she did not walk away clean. She was left responsible for roughly $3 million owed to his creditors on top of having lost her own accumulated fortune. Carrie Fisher later joked that her mother took a Broadway role specifically in order to get out of the marriage, which in Hollywood, she noted, counted as a legal method of escape.

So at forty-one, Debbie Reynolds was divorced twice, financially devastated, carrying somebody else’s debts, responsible for her own two children and involved in the lives of Karl’s as well, and back to work. What she did over the following decade is genuinely impressive, and it is what makes the third act considerably harder to watch. The 1970s and early 1980s were, in career terms, an extended act of rebuilding, and Reynolds did it the hard way, without a safety net and without complaint. She toured relentlessly: nightclubs, casinos, theaters, cruise ships, anywhere that would book a Vegas-style review with a genuine movie star at the center of it.

She was a superb live performer, funny and warm and technically excellent, singing and dancing and doing impressions and handling a room the way only somebody trained in the studio system and then hardened by twenty years of live work could handle a room. Audiences who came expecting a faded one-note got a professional at the absolute top of her craft. She worked essentially without pause because she needed the money, because she had two children, and because there were creditors involved who were not going to be talked out of anything. She took the Broadway revival of *Irene* in 1973, which earned her a Tony nomination, and which Carrie Fisher later characterized as her mother’s legal escape route from the marriage.

She did television specials. She did guest spots. She said yes to a great deal that a woman of her standing might once have declined. There is a particular kind of grinding, unglamorous professionalism in that decade that does not fit the image of the perky MGM one-note at all, and it is probably the truest thing about her.

She also during these years was quietly doing something else, something that would eventually become both her real legacy and her real financial undoing. In 1970, MGM auctioned off its costume and prop collection. The studio system that had made her was being dismantled and sold for parts, and almost nobody in Hollywood cared. Sets were bulldozed.

Costumes went for a few dollars. There was at that moment essentially no institutional interest anywhere in preserving the physical history of the American film industry. Reynolds cared enormously. She began buying, and she kept buying for decades, at that auction and at every other opportunity that presented itself over the following thirty years.

Costumes, props, cameras, screen tests, set pieces, anything she could get her hands on. She acquired items that are now regarded as among the most significant artifacts in the history of American cinema, including the white dress Marilyn Monroe wore over the subway grate in *The Seven Year Itch*, the bowler hat and cane Charlie Chaplin wore as the Tramp, and pieces worn by Judy Garland and Audrey Hepburn. Her ambition was to build a museum, a permanent public home for all of it, preserving the material history of the studio era for people who would never otherwise see any of it. She spent decades on that goal, and outside her children, it was the thing she cared most about in the world.

She could not find institutional support. She approached studios, cities, and anyone else who might house a collection that had by then grown into tens of thousands of items and required multiple warehouses just to store it. That is how she ended up in Las Vegas, and how the third marriage managed to do what the first two had not quite finished. In 1984, Debbie Reynolds married Richard Hamlet, a real estate developer from Virginia.

She was fifty-two years old. She had been single for eleven years, working more or less continuously, and by the accounts of the friends around her, she genuinely believed this was her last real chance at a partnership. Her friend Ruta Lee later said that Reynolds saw it as her final opportunity to find happiness with a man. Hamlet came into her life with a business background, an air of competence, and eventually a plan.

And the plan involved Las Vegas. In 1992, against the advice of essentially everyone around her, Reynolds paid around $10 million for a faded hotel just off the strip and converted it into the Debbie Reynolds Hotel and Casino. It is important to be clear that this was not a vanity project or a rich woman’s whim. It was a solution to the museum problem, and on paper it almost made sense.

The hotel would house the collection, giving it the permanent home nobody else would provide. The casino and the showroom would generate the revenue to fund it, and she would perform there herself several nights a week to draw the crowds in. She put everything she had into it financially and physically. She headlined her own showroom in her sixties, working a full performance schedule to keep the room full, effectively becoming the attraction that paid for the museum that was sitting upstairs.

There is something both admirable and slightly heartbreaking in that arrangement: a woman in her seventh decade singing two shows a night to subsidize the preservation of an art form that had largely forgotten her generation existed. And it did not work. The location was wrong, a few blocks off the strip in a city where a few blocks is the difference between everything and nothing. The economics of a small independent hotel and casino in 1990s Las Vegas were merciless, and this was precisely the period when the city was being transformed by enormous corporate mega-resorts with budgets she could not begin to compete with.

A hotel with a few hundred rooms and a movie memorabilia museum attached was in that market not a business. It was a hobby with a mortgage. The money went out considerably faster than it came in, and she covered the gap the only way she knew how, which was by working. Then there was the matter of what her husband was doing with it.

According to Reynolds herself, her family, and friends who spoke about it publicly afterward, Richard Hamlet was moving money out of the business and out of her accounts for his own purposes, and lying to her about it while he did it. Her friend Ruta Lee described the situation deteriorating to the point that one of Reynolds’s own long-serving employees handed in her resignation rather than continue watching it happen, telling Lee that she could not stand the lying that was going on and that Reynolds’s husband was taking money for personal use and not accounting for it. That is a striking detail on its own. Somebody who worked for her found the situation so intolerable that leaving a good job was preferable to staying and knowing about it.

Lee’s own summary of Hamlet afterward was blunt to the point of being unprintable in places. He really did her wrong. There was also another woman. Reynolds later wrote about the opening night of the hotel.

This was the single most important night of the entire venture, the culmination of everything she had worked toward for thirty years, the night the museum finally had a home. She performed. Her husband walked out of her show partway through and disappeared for several hours. She understood him to have been with his mistress, and she described what happened when he came back to their room afterward in a passage that is genuinely uncomfortable to read.

She wrote about a look in his eyes that frightened her. She wrote about him seeming strangely, insistently intent on getting her out onto the balcony, a narrow ledge perhaps three feet wide, with no real room for two people to stand and have any kind of conversation. And she wrote plainly that she was afraid of what he might do out there. Nothing happened.

She did not go out onto the balcony. But a sixty-year-old woman stood in a hotel room on the biggest professional night of her life, in a building with her own name on the front of it, genuinely frightened of the man she had married. The marriage ended in 1996, and the financial wreckage from it was the worst of the three by a considerable distance. As part of the divorce settlement, Reynolds had to pay Hamlet $270,000 to buy out his stake in the hotel and casino.

She was paying a man to remove himself from a business that, by her account, he had been draining. In 1997, at sixty-five years old, after nearly fifty years as one of the most famous entertainers in America, Debbie Reynolds filed for bankruptcy. Read that again, because the sentence does not sound real. This was a woman who had starred in one of the most celebrated films ever made, who had been nominated for an Academy Award, who had worked continuously for five decades and had been at various points among the highest-paid women in her industry.

And at sixty-five she was in a bankruptcy court. The hotel was sold at auction the following year, and the museum collection, the things she had spent nearly thirty years assembling, the artifacts she had personally rescued when nobody else in Hollywood could be bothered, had to be broken up and sold off in pieces over the years that followed. The major auctions took place in 2011 and afterward, and they were, for anyone who understood what was being dispersed, genuinely difficult to watch. The Marilyn Monroe subway dress, the single most valuable item in the collection, sold for a figure in the millions to a private buyer.

The Chaplin bowler went. The Judy Garland pieces went. She never got her museum. The collection she had built specifically so that it would stay together in public permanently, for anyone who wanted to see it, was broken apart and sold into private hands around the world.

Her own assessment of the whole situation, delivered in 1999 with the timing of a woman who had been doing stand-up in casino showrooms for forty years, was that all of her husbands had robbed her blind, with the single exception of Eddie Fisher, who had not taken her money and had simply declined to pay for his children. She was sixty-seven years old, and she went back to work. Before the last chapter, there is one thread in this story that deserves its own place, because it is the part that says the most about who Debbie Reynolds actually was underneath the scandal she is best remembered for. She forgave Elizabeth Taylor.

Not immediately, and not easily. The two women did not speak for years after 1958, and the whole apparatus of the American press had spent that period defining them against one another, the wronged wife and the woman who took her husband, a framing that suited everybody involved except the two of them. The reconciliation, by the most commonly repeated account, happened more or less by accident. The two of them found themselves aboard the same transatlantic liner years later, unable to avoid one another for the duration of the crossing, and eventually simply sat down together and started talking.

They had a great deal in common, including a shared and reportedly fairly unsentimental assessment of Eddie Fisher, who by then had also left Taylor and had been through the same cycle twice. It is worth remembering that both of them had been assigned characters in 1958 by an industry and a press corps that had no interest whatsoever in what either woman actually thought. Taylor had been made into a villain at twenty-six while she was grieving a husband who had died in a plane crash. Reynolds had been made into a martyr while she was trying to work out how to pay for two children.

Neither role had much to do with the people involved. The friendship resumed, and it lasted. They appeared together on screen decades later in a television film, playing with some evident enjoyment two women in a complicated rivalry. Reynolds spoke about her repeatedly and warmly in the years that followed, and after Taylor’s death in 2011, she was entirely unambiguous about it.

She had never really stopped loving her. That is a genuinely unusual thing. The most publicly humiliating episode of her life, the one that defined her in the popular imagination for six decades, was also the one she personally put down and walked away from. She was considerably harder on the husbands who took her money than on the friend who took her husband.

What she did with the remaining twenty years is honestly the part of this story most worth sitting with. She kept performing. She kept touring well into her seventies, playing theaters and casinos and doing the same show she had been refining since the 1960s. She took character roles in film and television, including a recurring run on a hit sitcom as Grace Adler’s overbearing theatrical mother, winning herself an entirely new audience of people who had never seen *Singin’ in the Rain* and who knew her only as a very funny older woman on Thursday nights.

She did voice work. She appeared in her granddaughter’s generation’s media. She simply did not stop. She also rebuilt her relationship with her daughter, which had been genuinely difficult for long stretches.

Carrie Fisher had written about her mother with enormous affection and enormous exasperation in more or less equal measure, in her novels and then in her memoirs and her one-woman show. Growing up as the daughter of a famous mother in the wreckage of a famous scandal had not been simple, and Carrie had her own decades of addiction and mental illness to contend with, which she wrote and spoke about with more candor than almost anyone in Hollywood ever had. There had been long periods where the two of them barely spoke. The reconciliation took years and a good deal of work from both sides.

By the 2000s, the two of them were living next door to one another in adjoining houses on the same Beverly Hills property, in and out of each other’s homes constantly, with Carrie’s daughter, Billie, in the middle of it. They appeared together publicly and enjoyed it. They filmed a documentary about their relationship, which was completed shortly before both of them died and which stands as an unusually honest record of a complicated mother and daughter who had eventually worked it out. Eddie Fisher died in 2010.

Harry Karl had died in 1982. And when Todd Fisher broke that news to his mother, he later said she showed almost no emotion about it at all, having apparently arrived at some private accommodation with everything that man had done to her and to her children. On December 27, 2016, Carrie Fisher died at the age of sixty, four days after suffering a medical emergency on a flight from London to Los Angeles. The following day, December 28, Debbie Reynolds suffered a stroke while at her son’s home in the middle of discussing her daughter’s funeral arrangements.

She died that afternoon. She was eighty-four years old. Todd Fisher has said that his mother told him that day that she wanted to be with Carrie. Looking at the whole run of it, what stands out about Debbie Reynolds’s three marriages is not really the romance, and it is certainly not the scandal, which is the part everyone remembers and the only part most people could name.

It is the money. She married at twenty-three for love and got a public humiliation on a national scale and a man who would not support his own children. She married at twenty-eight for security, specifically, openly, and by her own admission primarily for security, and got a compulsive gambler who went through a combined fortune estimated in the region of $100 million and left her holding $3 million in his debts. She married at fifty-two for companionship, believing genuinely that it was her last chance at it, and got a business partner who, by her own account and her family’s, was taking money out of the back of the enterprise while she stood on a stage every night trying to keep the front of it afloat.

Three marriages, three men who ended up costing her money. One of them left her bankrupt at sixty-five. There is a pattern in there that Carrie Fisher named better than anyone, and she named it with real sympathy rather than contempt. Her mother’s weakness was letting men have the final say.

A woman who had grown up poor in Burbank, who had been a working professional since sixteen, who was tough enough to survive Gene Kelly and tough enough to face down the American press with her hair in pin curls, handed the accounts to somebody else three separate times, because she wanted, very reasonably, to not have to think about it. And the thing that makes it land is what she was actually trying to build with that money. She was not accumulating for its own sake, and she was not living extravagantly. She wanted a museum.

She had personally saved the physical history of an entire American art form out of a liquidation sale in 1970, when the studios were treating their own past as junk to be cleared out of a warehouse, and she spent the rest of her life trying to find it a permanent home. The money kept disappearing into other people’s compulsions before it could get there. The collection was ultimately dispersed. The museum never happened.

But the individual pieces survived at all because she bought them, and a great many of them sit today in institutions and private collections around the world precisely because one former MGM contract player looked at a pile of old costumes in 1970 and understood that they mattered when nobody else did. She is remembered for a raincoat and an umbrella, for a scandal that happened to her when she was twenty-six, and for being extremely funny about all of it afterward. The fuller version is a woman who was worked over financially three separate times across four decades, who paid off other people’s debts without much public complaint, who went back on the road in her sixties after a bankruptcy, who forgave the friend who took her husband and outlived all three of the men she married, and who kept a sense of humor so intact that she could summarize the entire catalog of it in a single line and get a laugh out of a room. Every man she married cost her something, and she kept working anyway, and she was still trying to build the museum when the money ran out for the final time.

Whatever else the three marriages took from her, they never quite managed to take that.