Valley alum recalls Hollywood moment
It was such a big day that she knew it was time to break out her fancy fiesta dress, bought at Jeannette’s, a trendy clothier in Albuquerque back in 1958.
Such a big day that Judi Sinks would not fully comprehend the significance for days and years later.
Sinks, along with classmates Johnny Saiz and James Taylor from the Valley High School student newspaper, were going Hollywood.
Or rather, Hollywood was coming to them. For reasons she is not altogether clear on, the three had been chosen to interview Mike Todd, then perhaps the most famous theater and film producer and showman in the world and a man
Sinks remembers as grandiose, gregarious and graced with a giant ego.
You may remember him as Mr. Elizabeth Taylor, the glamorous movie star he married in 1957.
But with last week’s passing of Hollywood legends Debbie Reynolds and daughter Carrie Fisher, you may remember Todd now as the guy whose death nearly 59 years ago led to the scandalous breakup of Reynolds’ marriage to Eddie Fisher (Carrie’s dad), who comforted the grieving Taylor with sex and a subsequent marriage proposal.
Reynolds’ death reminded Sinks of all that and of her longago interview with Todd, which took place in Albuquerque on March 19, 1958, just three days before Todd’s own death when his private plane — named “the Liz” after his famous wife — crashed in an icy pasture near Grants.
“I think we were so mesmerized by the fact that here we were these punky kids with this producer of this fabulous movie, and we became among the last to interview him before he died,” said Sinks, 76, whose comfortable home in the Northeast Heights is cluttered with old news clippings, photos and mementos. “It was an event we won’t soon forget.”
She was Judi Smith then, a high school senior and a reporter with The Legend, Valley’s school newspaper.
The interview, held at what was then the Hilton Hotel and is now the Hotel Andaluz, was part of a promotional tour of Todd’s
latest and perhaps greatest film, “Around the World in 80 Days.”
The star-studded production had premiered 1½ years beforehand and had already amassed millions at the box office and garnered five Academy Awards, including for best picture, but it had only then made its way to cow towns like Albuquerque.
Todd, though, called Albuquerque “a city of great virility,” Sinks wrote.
That day, Todd had attended a Kiwanis luncheon before heading to the Hilton.
“I got dressed up for that in my fiesta dress, lavender with a pink border,” Sinks said. “That was highfalutin.”
Although she and her high school journalist colleagues had been invited, she said, it was still a surprise that they were allowed in the same room with such a Hollywood elite — and an even greater surprise at how cordial Todd was to them.
“He was this wonderful, egotistical man, larger than life but compact in stature, and then you meet him and he is lovely and sincere and evidently treated everybody with such tenderness and love,” she said.
For their Legend article, she and her colleagues wrote: “Todd’s personality seemed to engulf all those who came in contact with him. It was a general consensus of opinion by all of the reporters present that Todd couldn’t do enough for them.”
The interview, she recalls, was interrupted by a phone call from Taylor, who had not made the journey to Albuquerque because she was home sick with a cold.
Todd called his wife — who at age 25 was a little more than half his age — his “old lady,” an irreverent description that still amuses Sinks.
“He told us that he had to leave to fly home to have dinner with Liz, and he admitted he was henpecked,” she said. “But he said, ‘Who would mind being henpecked by Elizabeth Taylor?’ ”
Off he flew after that, presumably for that dinner.
Three days later, he was flying again, this time with three others aboard from Burbank, Calif., to New York City, where he was to be feted at a Friars Club dinner. Somewhere over the Zuni Mountains, “the Liz” faltered, nose-diving into the frozen ground about 80 miles west of where Sinks had met Todd just days before.
The Civil Aeronautics Board blamed the crash, which killed all four aboard, on the plane’s being overloaded, engine failure and icing on the wings.
“It was such shocking, tragic news,” Sinks recalls. “It was all over the front pages of every newspaper.”
The famous and the not-sofamous have come and gone. Sinks lost her husband to cancer nearly 17 years ago. Saiz, one of her high school journalist colleagues, is gone, too.
Eddie Fisher died in 2010. Elizabeth Taylor died in 2011. Debbie Reynolds outlasted them all, dying Dec. 28, a day after daughter Carrie Fisher, 60, passed away.
“She came out pretty good,” Sinks said of Reynolds. “She was 84, which to me I used to think was ancient. Now I’m 76, and it doesn’t seem that old.”
Neither are her memories, which live on in clippings and in photos, in mind and in heart, never gone.