“I can’t help how he feels about me.”
I sighed—I sometimes do. “Well, you can’t hurt Debbie like this without hurting yourself more, because she loves him.”
“He’s not in love with her and never has been.”
“What do you think Mike would say to this?”
“He and Eddie loved each other,” she said.
“No, you’re wrong. Mike loved Eddie. Eddie never loved anybody but himself.”
“Well,” she said calmly, “Mike’s dead and I’m alive.”
My voice was rising with my temper. “Let me tell you, my girl, this is going to hurt you much more than it will Debbie Reynolds. People love her more than they love you or Eddie Fisher.”
“What am I supposed to do? Ask him to go back to her and try? He can’t. Now if he did, they’d destroy each other. Well, good luck to her if she can get him. I’m not taking away anything from her because she never really had it.”
We went at each other for a minute or two longer before we hung up. By then, she had said something that sent my anger soaring like a rocket. I didn’t include that quote in the story I snapped out in five minutes flat and got it out on the news wires before I could start to simmer down. I had been very fond of Mike Todd, who had been dead not quite six months. This is what Elizabeth Taylor had to say that set me alight: “What do you expect me to do? Sleep alone?”