DEBBIE DOES VEGAS

By RICHARD CORLISS

TO LOVE LAS VEGAS IS TO BE A SIZE FREAK. EVERY NEW HOTEL IS THE biggest, every new show the most expensive, every glitzy costume the most faaaabulous! And then there's Debbie. To the owner and star of the Debbie Reynolds Hotel/Casino/Hollywood Movie Museum, smaller is better. It's also all she could afford. Reynolds bought and spruced up the 200-room Paddlewheel Hotel for just $10 million, which is valet-tip money to Steve Wynn. Debbie makes do with her own perky energy. And makes more of less. "Welcome to my new little theater!" she tells visitors to her nightly show. "Doncha think it's cute?"

At 63, Debbie's still cute. Her audiences, with hair the color of a cloudless Vegas sky, may come to the show thinking, as she jokes, "We're gonna go see Debbie before she dies." But the star of Singin' in the Rain, Tammy and the Bachelor, The Unsinkable Molly Brown and some messy '50s headlines ain't down yet. And she ain't just cute. There's a platinum will under her blond perm (as her daughter Carrie Fisher suggested in the fond, acerbic novel and film Postcards from the Edge). And there's a vision in Debbie's show-biz heart--a vision that looks back to the movies' glory days, from the '20s through the '60s. Who else has built and stocked her own Hollywood museum?

In 1970 when MGM auctioned off a good part of its priceless heritage, Reynolds was there to buy costumes worn in some of the studio's famous films, including Leslie Caron's plaid suit from Gigi and Clark Gable's uniform from the 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty. "I just started buying on an emotional level," she says. "But after I had bought all this stuff, it struck me: Wouldn't everybody love to see this?" For years, without avail, she tried to interest moguls in financing a movie museum in Hollywood. Then she rolled sevens in Vegas.

The museum space--a movie theater, showing clips and costumes, and one small room with, among other treasures, Marilyn Monroe's Seven Year Itch dress and one of the Citizen Kane "Rosebud" sleds--is in immediate need of expansion; it displays only a tenth of the boots and booty Reynolds has collected from other auctions and such friends as Ginger Rogers and Cyd Charisse, Ann Miller and Ann-Margret. Debbie even pays tribute to an ex-friend: in the theater is a Cleopatra headdress worn by Elizabeth Taylor, who seduced and married Debbie's first husband, Eddie Fisher. It's all grist for Debbie's sweet obsession; she now has some 3,000 pieces. "Passionate collectors," she notes, "don't become unpassionate." When she divorced shoe magnate Harry Karl in 1973, she says, "he wanted me to sell my movie stuff and give him half the money. I told him, 'You can have the house, you can have the furniture, but you can't have my costumes.' So I kept my children and the costumes."

She should be glad she kept both, for this mom-and-pop operation is really a mom-and-son. Carrie's younger brother Todd Fisher, 37, is the museum's multimedia mastermind and Reynolds' main support in her adventure. "Debbie's dream was contagious, and I caught the disease," says Fisher. "At one point she asked me, 'How can you take two years out of your life?' And I said, 'How could you take 18 years out of yours?' I figure it's a fair trade."

And with a pretty fair return. In the hotel's vest-pocket casino, you'll find a slot game called Debbie's Hollywood Reels. If three smiling Debbies turn up, you get $200 for your quarter. You're bucking long odds on the machine, but so did Reynolds in her quest to create a museum. Now, in Vegas, she's come up one smiling Debbie.

--By Richard Corliss. Reported by William Tynan

With reporting by William Tynan