Stars Gone Broke

Doris Day's contemporary Debbie Reynolds was equally trusting in her early years. As a young MGM starlet, Reynolds was personally cast by Louis B. Mayer opposite Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain, and began a career ascent that reached a new high when she married singing star Eddie Fisher. She hit major pay dirt when she starred in the smash Tammy and the Bachelor and sang the hit title song. Reynolds then was featured in the tabloids when Elizabeth Taylor stole Fisher away in 1958, a humiliation she bounced back from by marrying wealthy entrepreneur Harry Karl in 1960 and appearing to establish a privileged, Hollywood-style life for herself and her two kids, Carrie and Todd. With an Oscar nomination for The Unsinkable Molly Brown in 1964, Reynolds seemed to have settled into a charmed life. But husband Harry Karl was secretly gambling, and over the next several years, while Reynolds assumed he was brilliantly handling her money and making much more himself, he was actually draining their combined resources.

Reynolds's film career was already over by the time she got rid of Karl. Forced to take her Unsinkable persona to heart, she developed a stage show and sweated it out in Vegas to pay bills. She stayed afloat, whereupon she met the man who would become her third bad husband. With developer Richard Hamlett, Reynolds built her own Vegas hotel and casino in the '90s, and for a while, things were all right. In the end, as she later described it, she "went down in a blaze." The bankruptcy that followed led her to comment, "The men I marry seem to love the money I make more than me." Reynolds had been banking on her Unsinkability shtick for so long by this point, she just took it up a notch to deal with the newest calamity. These days, with the recurring role she did on "Will & Grace" as Grace's overbearing mother, her advocacy of the drug Detrol as part of a consumer education program about a problem she knows personally (overactive bladder), the cross-country tours of her live shows and her position as the mom of Princess Leia/screenwriter Carrie Fisher, Reynolds is a Hollywood figure of sufficiently camp proportions that she can get away with saying, "I think the only other person I know that is dumber than I am about love or romance is Burt Reynolds. Maybe I should marry Burt. I wouldn't have to change my last name and we could share wigs."

Debbie Reynolds does indeed have things in common with Burt Reynolds, the only star, perhaps, who outdoes her in boom-and-bust dynamics. Burt Reynolds, whose most recent financial woe took place in the late '90s after he filed Chapter 11, has had, at various times, all the luxuries that tabloid readers imagine stars to have. Even in the realm of Hollywood's hyper-brand of conspicuous consumption, Reynolds's consumption has been conspicuous. After starting out with his own TV series, "Dan August," in 1970 and making a few films of widely varying quality, Reynolds began a five-year box office reign in 1977 with Smokey and the Bandit. When he got a record $5 million for The Cannonball Run in 1981 he was well into a Rolls-Royce, mansion-strewn lifestyle, as he describes in his autobiography: "The more money I made, the more homes I acquired: two in California, three in Florida, plus a mansion in Georgia that looked exactly like Tara in Gone With the Wind." Add to that the Burt Reynolds Theatre in his hometown of Jupiter, Florida, a restaurant chain, a yacht, a jet and a helicopter. Reynolds weathered the first bust when a series of box office bombs (beginning with the memorable Stroker Ace in 1983) coincided with a pill addiction and business failures to leave him owing $15 million to creditors.

With the devotion of new companion Loni Anderson (as unlikely a follow-up to Sally Field as Field had been to Dinah Shore), he cleaned up and slogged through some mediocre flicks that paid him well. The big leap back to boom-land, though, would come via television with "Evening Shade." On the strength of that success he bought a 15,000 square-foot house on Mulholland Drive--tennis court, gazebo, "marble floors, Hearstian fireplaces" included--without even showing it to Loni. Anderson, though, did her part for Reynolds's spend ethic. He credits her with maxing out a new platinum card she'd gotten one morning with $45,000 in purchases by noon, and notes her disciplined way of never wearing a gown more than once, but buying all everyday outfits in triplicate. Baby Quinton, the adopted son of Reynolds and Anderson, became a new way to absorb cash. For Quinton's first birthday, Reynolds gave him a $10,000 carved rocking chair, and from his crib Quinton graduated into a corvette-shaped bed.

Reynolds's expensive divorce from Loni (he claimed to be paying the highest child support in California history) was followed by a botched syndication deal on "Evening Shade," all at about the same time he went on national television in a purple suit and, among other things, challenged Loni to take sodium pentathol. By '96 he was declaring Chapter 11 with debts of $10 million. But Reynolds has a habit of stardom the way some people have a gambling habit. Boogie Nights brought him back to respectability and turned the light on at the end of his financial tunnel.

Buster Keaton's colleagues Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd were no more talented than he, but they were savvier with money and died with their fortunes intact. Stars like Greta Garbo and Fred MacMurray got wealthier from non-Hollywood business than their stardom could have made them. But when you consider the probable correlation between star quality and financial savvy--let's just say it's by no means one to one--it's hardly a surprise that some actors who've managed to make fortunes from their iffy occupations have also managed to lose them. Moreover, given the number of charlatans loose in the world of Hollywood personal and financial management, you have to wonder how any star succeeds in keeping flush. And as if the game were not already slightly fixed, there is always this comment from Veronica Lake's memoir to think about: "Money was so plentiful if often seemed that much of it was spent in desperation moves to get rid of it."

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