“If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true,” Carrie Fisher writes in her delightful 2008 memoir Wishful Drinking, “and that is unacceptable.”
The multi-talented Fisher was many things: an actress appearing in classics like Star Wars, Shampoo, The Burbs, and When Harry Met Sally; a beloved guest star on shows including Sex and The City, Catastrophe, and 30 Rock; and a brilliant writer who was known as the best script doctor in Hollywood.
In Fisher’s short, snappy memoirs—Wishful Drinking, 2011’s Shockaholic, and 2016’s The Princess Diarist—the ultimate nepo baby tells the story of her operatic life like she’s talking to an old friend, with bracing honesty, and zingy one liners. “I confide in everyone,” she confesses in The Princess Diarist. “I have no restricted private self, reserved specifically for certain trusted special people. I trust and mistrust anyone.”
Told in a stream-of-consciousness style that, yes, sometimes gets a bit exhausting, Fisher recounts her lifelong battle with bipolar disorder and drug addiction (she nicknames her mania “Rollicking Roy” and her depression “Sediment Pam”) in humorous and at times heartbreaking detail. Well aware of her own eccentricity, Fisher is generous to those who inhabit the strange world of showbiz, likening herself to her friend Shirley MacLaine: both of them, she says, were “war reporters on the front line of celebrity.”
Most importantly, Fisher humanizes mental illness and drug addiction, seemingly at peace with the fact that her struggles would be of the lifelong variety. “While the place that I’ve arrived at in my life may not precisely be everyone’s idea of heavenly,” she writes in Wishful Drinking, “I could swear sometimes—if I’m quiet enough—I can hear the angels sing. Either that or I’ve screwed up my medication.”
The Surreal Life
“I was born on October 21, 1956. This makes me quite old—half a century and change,” Fisher writes in Wishful Drinking. “I was born in Burbank, California . . . to simple folk. People of the land. No, actually my father was a famous singer, and you wanna hear something really cool? My mother is a movie star. She’s an icon. A gay icon, but you take your iconic stature where you can.”
The star was Debbie Reynolds; the crooner was Eddie Fisher. This self-described clumsy and awkward child knew her life wasn’t normal from the start. “When two celebrities mate, something like me is the result,” she writes. “I grew up visiting sets, playing on backlots, and watching movies being made. As a consequence, I find that I don’t have what could be considered a conventional sense of reality.”
When Carrie was just a toddler, Eddie Fisher left Reynolds for the widow of his best friend, producer Mike Todd—a woman who just happened to be Elizabeth Taylor. “He consoled her with flowers,” Fisher quips, “and he ultimately consoled her with his penis.”
Fisher became the ultimate absentee dad. Fisher and her brother, Todd, grew up with Reynolds and her second husband, Harry Karl (a man who, according to Fisher, spent most of his time farting and watching his multiple TVs). They lived in a grand mansion Fisher dubbed “the embassy.” The siblings worshiped their eccentric movie star mother—“the funniest, the prettiest, the kindest, the most talented”—and Fisher longed to be as beautiful as she.
But when Fisher realized her looks would never be as conventionally gorgeous as Reynolds, she decided to be something else entirely. “If I wasn’t going to be pretty, maybe I could be funny or smart—someone past caring,” she writes. “So far past caring you couldn’t even see it with a telescope.”
May The Force Be With You
“Forty Three Years ago, George Lucas ruined my life,” Fisher writes in Wishful Drinking. “And I mean that in the nicest possible way.”
After singing in her mother’s chorus at fifteen and studying at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, Fisher’s big break came when she was cast as Princess Leia in George Lucas’s Star Wars at the age of nineteen. Still carrying a whiff of a fake British accent, Fisher hated Leia’s iconic hairstyle and was bemused when Lucas told her she couldn’t wear a bra because “there’s no underwear in space.”
In The Princess Diarist, Fisher also reveals that she had an on-set affair with her very married co-star Harrison Ford. But Fisher’s most fascinating Star Wars musings dissect the absurdity of the fame and fandom that the franchise wrought. She seems particularly tickled with the amount of merchandise made in her likeness, from Princess Leia Pez dispensers to the Princess Leia figurine an ex once stuck pins in as a makeshift voodoo doll.
“I saw yet another Leia figurine recently at one of those comic book conventions—which yes, I go to when I’m lonely,” she writes. “Anyway, this doll was on a turnstile. And when it got to a particular place on the turnstile, you could see up my dress, to my anatomically correct—though shaved—galaxy snatch.”
As for the $800 Princess Leia sex doll? Fisher admits to owning one. “If ever anyone tells me to go fuck myself,” she writes. “I can actually get the doll and give it a whirl.”
Bad Trips
“I used to refer to my drug use as putting the monster in the box,” Fisher writes in Wishful Drinking.“I wanted to be less so I took more—simple as that.”
With her mental illness undiagnosed for years, by her early 20s Fisher was abusing drugs of all kinds—especially hallucinogens. “My mother started to become worried about my obviously ever-increasing drug ingestion,” Fisher writes. “So she ended up doing what any concerned parent would. She called Cary Grant.”
Grant, who famously took LSD during a course of therapy sessions in the 1960s, dutifully gave Fisher a call. Fisher admits to being truly star-struck by Grant (a rarity for her), but was still clever enough to convince him she did not have an acid problem. ( “I did have an opiate problem,” she writes, “but frankly that was none of Cary Grant’s fucking business.”) Instead, they spent an hour gossiping about Chevy Chase, whom they both disliked.
Amazingly, this would not be the last time Fisher heard from Grant. In 1981, Fisher’s father, Eddie, saw Grant at the funeral of Princess Grace (whom Carrie claims her father didn’t know). Eddie asked the actor to help him with his daughter’s acid problem. Fisher writes:
So here we go again. Poor Cary Grant (I’m sure he’s very rarely been called that) gets back from the funeral and in due course calls me again to discuss my issue with slamming acid. Well, if I was embarrassed the first time he called, this time I was completely humiliated.
Unsurprisingly, Grant’s intervention was not enough to scare Fisher straight. Finding humor in even the most painful of times, Fisher’s first overdose a few years later inspired her best-selling novel Postcards From The Edge in 1987. “The doctor that pumped my stomach sent me flowers,” she writes. “With a note that read: I can tell that you are a very warm and sensitive person. All from the contents of my stomach! I was tempted to marry him so I could tell people how we met.”
Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes
“Years ago, there were tribes that roamed the earth, and every tribe had a magic person,” Fisher writes in Wishful Drinking. “Well, now, as you know, all the tribes have disappeared, but every so often you meet a magic person, and every so often, you meet someone from your tribe. Which is how I felt when I met Paul Simon. Paul and I had a secret handshake of shared sensibility. We understood each other perfectly. Obviously, we didn’t always agree, but we understood the terms of our disagreements.”
In 1978, Shelley Duvall introduced Fisher to the musical superstar, who had been Fisher’s hero since high school. The two highly-strung intellectuals began a turbulent, passionate, on-again-off-again twelve year relationship (including a brief marriage in 1983) “with lots of words, big words,” as Fisher recalls.
Some of the tenderest and most scathing sections of Fisher’s memoirs focus on her memories of Simon, and she seems to view the numerous songs he wrote about her (including several on the iconic album Graceland) with a mixture of pride and annoyance. Simon saw her maybe a bit too clearly, and a bit too cruelly.
“If you can get Paul Simon to write a song about you, do it,” she writes. “Because he is so brilliant. Anyway, one of the lyrics in that song goes like this: She is like a top/She cannot stop…And I’m afraid I’ll be taken/ Abandoned and forsaken/In her cold coffees…Yup I’m a bitch.”
The twin flames finally split in the early 1990s, both exhausted from their turbulent entanglement. “Mike Nichols used to say we were two flowers, no gardener,” Fisher writes. “No one was minding the relationship.”
Forgiveness, Hollywood Style
“I don’t hate hardly ever, and when I love, I love for miles and miles,” Fisher writes in Shockaholic. “A love so big it should either be outlawed or it should be a capital with its own currency.”
Fisher’s writing bears out this statement. She is enormously kind about her partner, the mega-agent Bryan Lourd, who left her for a man. Fisher also became close to her ex-stepmother Elizabeth Taylor, in the most screwball of ways.
In the mid-1990s, Taylor invited Fisher and her daughter, Billie (who’s now a successful actress herself), to an Easter egg hunt on the grounds of her Bel Air mansion. Once there, Fisher confronted Taylor about a piece of gossip: Fisher had heard that at a recent dinner party, Taylor had been bad-mouthing Reynolds. In true diva fashion, Taylor denied this and walked away, only to march back up Fisher. “I’m going to push you into the pool,” she told Fisher dramatically.
Never one to back down from a challenge, Fisher dared her to do it. And so, Taylor pushed a fully clothed Fisher into the pool. When a laughing Fisher emerged from the water, all her decades-long animosity had evaporated.
“When I stood up, we slung our arms around each other’s shoulders, laughing riotously—she largely dry, and me soaked to the skin,” Fisher writes. “By then people had begun to gather around us, cheering. Around us! Elizabeth Taylor and me.”
In the last years of his life, Fisher also forgave and became close to her father, whose womanizing and drug addiction had ruined his career. Although many of Fisher’s sharpest barbs are thrown in Eddie’s direction (she quips that her father’s autobiography, Been There, Done That, should have been titled Been There, Done Them), she is very clear that her “adorable,” deeply flawed father loved her. And she loved him.
After he died in 2010, Fisher inherited Eddie’s large diamond pinky ring. She and her siblings Joely and Tricia believed the jewelry was worth thousands. Then Fisher discovered the stone was, fittingly, a fake. “He genuinely meant to give bona fide diamonds of only the finest color, cut, and clarity,” Fisher writes. “Ultimately [he] was only able to offer cubic zirconium.”
The Best We Can Do
“When you are a survivor, in order to be a really good one, you have to keep getting in trouble to show off your gift,” Fisher writes in Wishful Drinking.
Fisher would valiantly struggle and thrive, with long periods of sobriety in between occasional relapses. She also worked tirelessly on her mental health, and in later years found enormous relief in electroconvulsive therapy, which she promotes extensively in Shockaholic. “ECT has forced me to rediscover what amounts to the sum total of my life,” she writes. “I find that a helluva lot of it fills me with a kind of giddy gratitude.”
A famous party thrower who filled her home with Hollywood friends and family, Fisher seems to have found many moments of joy despite the challenges she faced. And most importantly, she never lost her belief in the power of humor. When Billie told her mother that she also wanted to be a writer, Carrie had some advice:
“I say…’you have tons of material. Your mother is a manic-depressive drug addict, your father is gay, your grandmother tap dances, and your grandfather shot speed!’ And my daughter laughs and laughs and laughs, and I say, ‘Baby, the fact you know that’s funny is going to save your whole life.’’’
As always, Fisher’s mother and brother were there offering support in their own zany way. “She was upset about my drug addiction—what mother wouldn’t be,” Fisher writes. “But on some level she wasn’t as upset as she was with my failure to do a nightclub act.”
Carrie Fisher died on December 27, 2016, of cardiac arrest after a drug relapse. Debbie Reynolds died the next day. Always fascinated by death, Fisher had already pictured the media coverage surrounding her demise, with typical irony and wit. As she wrote in Shockaholic:
“What you’ll have of me after I journey to that great Death Star in the sky is an extremely accomplished daughter, a few books, and a picture of a stern-looking girl wearing some kind of metal bikini lounging on a giant drooling squid, behind a newscaster informing you of the passing of Princess Leia after a long battle with her head.”
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The post A Beautiful Mess: Carrie Fisher’s Brave Brilliance appeared first on Vanity Fair.
