Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email


2021 May 07 • Friday

The October 1964 issue of Mobile Home Journal is the only one we have—so far.

Of course we were intrigued by Debbie Reynolds's $50,000 mobile home. That's about $427,000 once you adjust for inflation.

At 34' by 10', it's bigger than Elizabeth Taylor's 9' by 22' mobile home, which had been covered in the September 1962 MHJ.

The Reynolds unit has Regency double doors, French Provincial decor, two 1750 French costume prints that were once the property of Rudolph Valentino, a gilded antique Dresden wash basin set off by a crystal chandelier and gold fixtures and ceiling-height cut glass mirrors in the dressing area.

Her "powder palace on wheels" was given to her by her husband, the second out of three, Harry Karl, described in MHJ as a shoe manufacturer and on Wikipedia as a "millionaire businessman". He was probably both.

Since Reynolds divorced her first husband, Eddie Fisher, after learning that he was having an affair with Elizabeth Taylor, the comparisons of the Taylor and Reynolds mobile homes might have carried a bit of extra charge for readers at the time.

At the end of the article they ask you to choose which one is better, though it seems clear which vote the article's author, Jeanne Harrison, will cast.

She says that Taylor's unit "was considered only so-so by American mobile home standards" while the Reynolds's is "more mobilificent than any home we've ever seen".