Stage legend Mitzi Gaynor dishes on her Hollywood life

• Show grew out of a charity drive
• Series of stories grounded in marriage to Jack Bean
• %22Everything I say is true ... on the stage.%22

WILMINGTON, Del. -- There's tea at the Green Room in the Hotel du Pont. And then there's tea at the Green Room in the Hotel du Pont with Mitzi Gaynor imitating the way the Duchess of Windsor talked.

In her rendition, it's remarkably similar to a nasally wide-mouthed frog and is, in a word, hilarious.

At the same time, there's not a mean thing about it. The star of There's No Business Like Show Business and South Pacific is merely trying to capture the moment she's describing with Broadway belter Ethel Merman goading Mitzi to dance with the "little duke" – Merman's exact words – at El Moroco, and the duchess encouraging her husband, "David, do dance with Mitzi."

Later, a friend calls to tell Gaynor that the Duke and the Duchess will be in town and would like to have dinner at Gaynor's house. There's little time to plan dinner, Gaynor tells her friend. Oh, they'll eat anything, the friend tells Gaynor.

She makes them meatloaf. And "big marts" – martinis, which go fast.

That's just the tiniest taste of the buffet that Gaynor serves in her one-woman show, Mitzi ... Razzle Dazzle! My Life Behind the Sequins.

And while the show is loaded with name-dropping – Howard Hughes, Gene Kelly, Marilyn Monroe – it's grounded in her 52-year marriage to Hollywood producer Jack Bean, and the loss she still feels at his death from heart troubles in 2006. (She continues to wear her wedding ring, and his is attached to a bracelet tucked under her jacket sleeve.)

"I didn't know if I could be Mitzi Gaynor any more because we were like one person," she says.

Even so, she sings, dances and changes her Bob Mackie costumes six times in the show, which also includes video footage from her television, concert and film work.

The tour first ran from 2009 to 2010. Then she took a break to take a cruise around the world, and while she was planning that, every time she turned on the television, some movie version of The Titanic was showing, she says. The tour resumed again in 2011, and among stops this year are Florida, Ohio, South Carolina, San Diego and Las Vegas. It's drawn rave reviews and it's easy to see why.

The idea for her show started after she decided it was time to get rid of some of the hundreds of costumes she'd been keeping in storage. Why not sell them and give the proceeds to a charity she supports, such as the Professional Dancers Society, of which she is president. She called around for help with the sale, which led to a special evening honoring her and her career, a display of her costumes by Mackie and a documentary being made about her life, which sparked the tour.

"And I'm back in the saddle again," says Gaynor, 81. "It's not that I don't miss (Jack). I still keep some of his clothes."

Her show has a rough outline – because the band has to know which songs to play – but the stories might change night to night, depending on the audience.

"Everything I say is true," she insists, adding after a beat, "on the stage."

This, by the way, is the third or fourth time Gaynor has stayed at the Hotel du Pont, the first three times with her husband. The desk in her room has real stationery in it, she points out. Real. Stationery. And she looks around the Green Room and talks about what an elegant place it is, the perfect place to "darling" someone.

She listens raptly as pastry chef Michelle Mitchell describes the candies she's brought out to the star, and instantly pops a heart-shaped chocolate cup filled with chocolate ganache into her mouth.

"I never eat chocolate," Gaynor insists. "I have to worry about those Bob Mackie costumes fitting."

In the show, she will talk about meeting her husband. She was 18 years old. She'd just broken up with Howard Hughes, and her agent wanted her to go out to hear Harry Belafonte. She assumed he was some Italian singer. Her agent was going to send a guy to escort her.

She was all dressed up in her black velvet outfit, sexily cut down the front. She opened the door to the penthouse at Chateau Marmont that she was sharing with her mother to find this tall handsome fellow ready to take her out drinking and dancing.

He asked for Mitzi Gaynor.

"I'm Mitzi Gaynor," she told him. "Don't you recognize me? I'm in all the movies."

"I'm so sorry," he told her. "I only go to foreign films."

She went outside to find he'd brought his old two-door Plymouth, which needed to be washed, and whose backseat was loaded with his dirty clothes. They arrived. She stepped out. Flashbulbs started going off.

"I'm 18, I'm hot, I just broke up with Howard Hughes," she remembers. "I'm like Paris Hilton or something."

And then his laundry fell out of the backseat onto the ground around her feet. Gossip columnists Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons were standing together watching – one of the few times they got along, Gaynor says – and Hopper turned to Parsons and said, "Who's that with Mitzi?"

"I don't know," Parsons said. "But Mitzi must really like him."

And she did.

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For more information, visit http://missmitzigaynor.com.