I had the pleasure of accompanying my great aunt and one of her contemporaries to the opening of this movie in Denver in 1964. Because they had known the old girl herself (the real Mrs. Margaret Brown, that is) back in the early years of the century, both in Leadville and Denver, they were keen on seeing what Hollywood and Debbie had done with the story.
I remember vividly watching their reactions turn from initial pleasure with the opening number to puzzlement when Debbie started to chew the scenery and behave like, well, Debbie Reynolds. This was followed by Ed Begley and the boys in the saloon hooting it up, and the two old ladies next to me started to frown a bit and whisper something to the effect that "it was not like that at all." They were becoming quite restless until the Denver bits began, but they seemed to accept the remainder of the story with a good deal of resignation that it was all just good fun and nonsense, and wasn't that what going to the movies was all about?
Afterward, as we strolled over to the Brown Palace for dinner, they regaled me with a complete history of the real Mrs. Brown and the many mutual friends they had enjoyed meeting at that same venue from roughly 1895 to 1915 when they were themselves just being presented into Denver society. I learned, among other things, that Mrs. Brown was considered an eccentric but generally well-liked and articulate woman who, despite never really being accepted at the toniest levels, became a legend in her own time after the Titanic episode. That part of the story was not only true, but actually a larger-than-life experience, the details of which they agreed should have been featured more profoundly in the film version.
The next time I drove down Wadsworth Blvd. and saw Mrs. Brown's "Summer House," a rather grand Victorian edifice like the better known one in the center of Denver, I tried to picture Debbie Reynolds in that setting and could not quite fit the two together. That in spite of the fact that Debbie herself grew up in El Paso at the southern end of the same Rocky Mountains that rise northward through Colorado.
I remember vividly watching their reactions turn from initial pleasure with the opening number to puzzlement when Debbie started to chew the scenery and behave like, well, Debbie Reynolds. This was followed by Ed Begley and the boys in the saloon hooting it up, and the two old ladies next to me started to frown a bit and whisper something to the effect that "it was not like that at all." They were becoming quite restless until the Denver bits began, but they seemed to accept the remainder of the story with a good deal of resignation that it was all just good fun and nonsense, and wasn't that what going to the movies was all about?
Afterward, as we strolled over to the Brown Palace for dinner, they regaled me with a complete history of the real Mrs. Brown and the many mutual friends they had enjoyed meeting at that same venue from roughly 1895 to 1915 when they were themselves just being presented into Denver society. I learned, among other things, that Mrs. Brown was considered an eccentric but generally well-liked and articulate woman who, despite never really being accepted at the toniest levels, became a legend in her own time after the Titanic episode. That part of the story was not only true, but actually a larger-than-life experience, the details of which they agreed should have been featured more profoundly in the film version.
The next time I drove down Wadsworth Blvd. and saw Mrs. Brown's "Summer House," a rather grand Victorian edifice like the better known one in the center of Denver, I tried to picture Debbie Reynolds in that setting and could not quite fit the two together. That in spite of the fact that Debbie herself grew up in El Paso at the southern end of the same Rocky Mountains that rise northward through Colorado.