Actress Debbie Reynolds has been collecting costumes from notable films and stars for more than 30 years. Now her collection will be on permanent display at the Hollywood & Highland shopping and entertainment complex.
Everyone thought Debbie Reynolds was either crazy or just plain foolish. In 1970, she spent three weeks bidding for old movie costumes that MGM was getting ready to toss out the door.
Reynolds, who was an MGM studio star for 18 years, dipped into $200,000 of her savings and borrowed another $165,000 for an extended shopping spree that netted 2,000 garments once worn by Marilyn Monroe, Greta Garbo, Cary Grant and Leslie Howard, among many others.
“People laughed and said I was the biggest buyer of junk,” the 69-year-old movie star recalled recently. “They thought I was out of my mind. I didn’t care.”
That was more than 30 years and 3,200 costumes ago, and Reynolds is having the last laugh. Her collection, which includes Monroe’s billowy white subway dress from “The Seven Year Itch” and Judy Garland’s ruby red slippers from “The Wizard of Oz,” has been appraised by Sotheby’s for $30 million. They are about to take center stage at the Hollywood & Highland entertainment and retail complex, which TrizecHahn Corp. opened last week next to Grauman’s Chinese Theatre.
Reynolds plans to display much of her collection at a new museum that will open next spring at the complex.
The collection has grown so large that it is stored in two warehouses: one a 10,000-square-foot building on land Reynolds owns in central California, the other a 22,000-square-foot warehouse in North Hollywood. From 1994 to 1998, many of the costumes were showcased at Reynolds’ Las Vegas casino and movie museum, which were both sold in bankruptcy court.
“I wanted to be in Hollywood and this is the new hot spot,” said the actress who played opposite Gene Kelly in “Singin’ in the Rain,” and starred in “The Unsinkable Molly Brown.”
Hollywood showcase
The Hollywood Motion Picture Collection will be housed in a 20,000-square-foot space on the fifth floor of the retail complex that is expected to revitalize a deteriorating Hollywood.
Reynolds was approached several years ago by Jack Illes, then vice president of strategic design on the TrizecHahn project. Illes became intrigued with the Reynolds collection because of how it was organized. The costumes are shown next to film clips featuring the costumes.
“It is not until you see the items in their incarnation that you begin to see the value of the entire collection,” said Illes, who now works for Urban Labs, a design, planning and development company in San Diego. “It struck me that Hollywood & Highland was the perfect location for this collection, especially with the Academy Awards being presented there at the Kodak Theatre.”
Reynolds concurred. Her son, Todd Fisher, who is in charge of organizing the museum, also liked the Hollywood & Highland location. Fisher, the son of singer Eddie Fisher, is a 43-year-old director, actor and designer who set up Debbie Reynolds’ Hollywood museum in Las Vegas. He is chief executive of the non-profit Hollywood Motion Picture Museum, which is raising $17 million to construct, open and run the new museum.
Ever since the Las Vegas casino was sold, Reynolds and her family, which includes actress/screenwriter Carrie Fisher, have been searching for a new home to house the valuable costumes.
“We struggled for a long time to find an appropriate location,” said Todd. They considered moving to the old Max Factor Beauty Museum on Highland Avenue, which now is being turned into the Hollywood History Museum, but it was too small.
While the Las Vegas museum housed in Reynolds’ casino had up to 400,000 visitors a year, Todd Fisher anticipates the Hollywood costume museum will attract as many as 1 million visitors paying $10 to see the vast collection.
Use of film clips
The Hollywood Motion Picture Collection will be divided into 12 pavilions whose themes include silent films, classics, science fiction, drama, comedy and musicals. In each pavilion, clips will be shown in conjunction with the costumes used in that movie.
“We cover almost every Academy Award winning film that has ever been made from the silent film-era up to the end of the 1970s,” Todd Fisher said.
The museum has Orson Welles’ fur coat and tuxedo outfit he wore in “Citizen Kane.” It has the gold dress and headdress worn by Elizabeth Taylor in “Cleopatra.”
Taylor, who stole Eddie Fisher away from Debbie Reynolds and later married him, has donated the armor that her fifth husband Richard Burton wore when he played Mark Antony in “Cleopatra.” Putting aside past differences, Taylor sits on the museum’s board.
There are 25 outfits worn by Katherine Hepburn from such movies as “The Philadelphia Story,” “Little Women,” and “Adam’s Rib.”
There is the ermine coronation robe that Marlon Brando wore when he played Napoleon in the movie “Desiree.” There are seven outfits worn by Gregory Peck in “How the West was Won,” “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” and “The Yearling.”
The collection is so large that only a small portion of it can be displayed at one time.
Reynolds envisions some of her old Hollywood friends, like Esther Williams and June Allyson, will make appearances at the museum to talk about the glamour days of Hollywood.
“I know this is the right thing to do, said Reynolds, whose passion for collecting costumes has never ceased. “It may be one of the last things I do.”
