also by carrie fisher
Shockaholic
Wishful Drinking
The Best Awful: A Novel
Delusions of Grandma
Surrender the Pink
Postcards from the Edge
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Version_1
for
George Lucas
Harrison Ford
Mark Hamill
Irvin Kershner
J. J. Abrams
Rian Johnson
contents
also by carrie fisher
title page
copyright
dedication
it was 1976 . . .
life before leia
upside down and unconscious with yellow eyes
the buns of navarone
carrison
notes from his periphery, or the glib martyr
forty years on
luminous beings were we
leia’s lap dance
sensation adjacent
acknowledgments
photo credits
about the author
it was 1976 . . .
Charlie’s Angels, Laverne & Shirley, and Family Feud premiered on TV.
Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs founded the Apple computer company in a garage.
The Food and Drug Administration banned Red Dye No. 2 after it was found to cause tumors in the bladders of dogs.
Howard Hughes died at age seventy of kidney failure in a private jet en route to a Houston hospital. He was worth more than $2 billion and weighed 90 pounds.
Anne Rice’s debut novel, Interview with the Vampire, was published.
Israel rescued 102 Air France passengers who were being held hostage at the Entebbe Airport in Uganda.
The Queen sent the first royal e-mail, London was bombed by the IRA and the Sex Pistols, and Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” went gold.
Andy Williams’s ex-wife Claudine Longet accidentally, she claimed, shot her skier lover, Spider Sabich, to death.
A Pennsylvania congressman won renomination for a 12th term despite having been dead for two weeks.
Caitlyn Jenner, still Bruce then, won the gold medal in the Olympic decathlon, and the title “World’s Greatest Athlete.”
So many things were happening.
The first Ebola outbreak occurred in Africa, there was a panic over swine flu, and in a contaminated Philadelphia hotel, Legionnaires’ disease killed twenty-nine people.
A military coup deposed Argentina’s president Isabel Perón.
Sal Mineo was stabbed to death, and Agatha Christie and André Malraux died, though not together.
Saul Bellow won the Pulitzer Prize for Humboldt’s Gift and the Nobel Prize for Literature for his body of work.
Son of Sam killed his first victim.
Riots in Soweto marked the beginning of the end of apartheid in South Africa.
The rock band that would become U2 was formed.
The United States Tennis Association barred transsexual Renée Richards from playing in the U.S. Open.
Network gave us Howard Beale’s iconic rant, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore,” and Paul Simon won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year for Still Crazy After All These Years.
Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, even after saying in a Playboy interview that he lusted after women in his heart.
Ryan Reynolds and Benedict Cumberbatch were born, as were Colin Farrell, Rashida Jones, Alicia Silverstone, Rick Ross, Anna Faris, Peyton Manning, Audrey Tautou, Ja Rule, and Reese Witherspoon.
George Harrison was found guilty of plagiarizing “He’s So Fine” for “My Sweet Lord.”
Buffalo Bills running back O. J. Simpson had the best game of his career, rushing a then record 273 yards and scoring two touchdowns against the Detroit Lions.
Mao Tse-tung died.
The Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty, ruling that this punishment was not particularly cruel or unusual.
The Band played its farewell concert in San Francisco.
Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton separated after four months of marriage, which had been preceded by sixteen months of divorce.
America celebrated its bicentennial.
I think you get the picture. It was a year that, like all years, a lot of things happened in. People were on TV or in movies, they wrote songs that were liked more than other songs, while other people excelled at sports, and, as always, a lot of accomplished and famous people died. But through it all, one big thing that was beginning to happen—and that still, lo these many decades later, hasn’t stopped happening—is Star Wars.
We were filming Star Wars in London in 1976, and none of us in the cast had any idea how significantly our lives would be altered when the movie premiered the following year.
• • •
cut to: 2013. Much the same kinds of things were happening, only faster and more intensely. And George Lucas announced that the Star Wars franchise was starting up again, and that the original cast would be in it.
I was surprised. As surprised as you can be and still be so far over forty. I mean, I thought they might make more Star Wars movies—not that I thought about it all that much—but I doubted that I would find myself in them. And now it looked like I would! Hallelujah!
Not because I liked appearing up on a screen. I didn’t like it when I was the age one could like it, but now they had 3-D and high-def and such, so that all your wrinkles and withered puffiness need their own agents, so if I didn’t like it then, I’d never like it now, and going forward to eventually. The bummer was that I wouldn’t be able to watch the new sequel. Not with me in it. But to hell with that! Someone could tell me about it!
If I was going to do the new Star Wars, they’d have to pay me something, even though the cloud of doubt could easily and gradually be cast over that potential fact based on some of the history of the Star Wars company. (No merchandising! But maybe I’d get some this time!)
And they’d have us all over the barrel of our wanting to be in it. And they could just as easily write any of us out. Well, maybe not easily, but they could write us out if we wrangled too long over what we wanted to be paid. And by “we,” in this case, I mean “I.”
And as much as I may have joked about Star Wars over the years, I liked that I was in those films. Particularly as the only girl in an all-boy fantasy. They were fun to make. It was an anecdote of unimaginable standing.
I liked being Princess Leia. Or Princess Leia’s being me. Over time I thought that we’d melded into one. I don’t think you could think of Leia without my lurking in that thought some
where. And I’m not talking about masturbation. So Princess Leia are us.
Bottom line, I was going to be able to pay some if not all of my overhead! Maybe not now, but soon. Sure, if it wasn’t very soon I’d be paying bills from an apartment, but at least I’d be able to buy stuff I didn’t need again. Stuff I didn’t need and in such unnecessary quantities! I’d maybe even have a charge at Barneys again soon! Life was good! Public life, that is . . . swimming pools, movie stars . . .
And this, ladies and gentlemoons, is how my whole new Star Wars adventure began! Like an acid flashback, only intergalactic, in the moment, and essentially real!
• • •
who do I think I would’ve been if I hadn’t been Princess Leia? Am I Princess Leia, or is she me? Split the difference and you’d be closer to the truth. Star Wars was and is my job. It can’t fire me and I’ll never be able to quit, and why would I want to? (That’s both a rhetorical and a real question.)
Today, while going through some boxes containing some old writing of mine, I found the diaries I kept while filming the first Star Wars movie forty years ago. Stay tuned.
life before leia
Two years before Star Wars I’d been in a film called Shampoo, starring and produced by Warren Beatty and directed by Hal Ashby. I played the part of Lee Grant’s angry promiscuous daughter, who ends up having sex with her mother’s lover/hairdresser—the starring role played, of course, by Warren. It was he, along with the screenwriter Robert Towne, who hired me for the pissed-off-daughter role.
At the time, the last thing I thought I wanted to do was go into show business, a fickle occupation that doled out a sense of uneasiness and humiliation like tepid snacks at movie screenings. This uneasiness was nurtured by the almost invisible diminishment over time of one’s popularity. First you’re in movies—a few small parts in popular films. Then, if it happens, the thing all actors are waiting for—stardom. You’re a years-in-the-making overnight success.
I had missed the early giddy portion of my parents’ rise to success. I arrived on the scene when my mother, Debbie Reynolds, was still making good, big-budget films at MGM. But as I grew up and my consciousness all too slowly snapped into focus, I noticed that the films were not what they had originally been. Her contract expired when she was in her late thirties. I recall her last MGM Studios film at forty was of the horror variety, entitled What’s the Matter with Helen? This was no Singin’ in the Rain, and her costar Shelley Winters somewhat thoughtlessly killed her at the film’s close.
Soon after this, my mother began doing nightclub work in Las Vegas at the now-defunct Desert Inn. Coincidentally, I also began doing nightclub work, singing “I Got Love” and “Bridge over Troubled Water” in her show. It was a huge step up for me from high school. My younger brother, Todd, accompanied me on guitar, and my mother’s backup singers danced and sang behind me (something that, at occasional odd moments throughout my life, I’ve wished that they continued to do).
My mother then took a modified version of this show to theaters and fairs across America. After that she did a Broadway musical. I was then one of the backup singers behind her, where backup singers tend to lurk. She then continued to do her nightclub act for the next forty years—with forays into television shows and films (most notably in Albert Brooks’s Mother).
My father, Eddie Fisher, played in nightclubs until he was no longer asked to, and when he wasn’t asked to it was in part because as a crooner he was no longer relevant, and in part because he was more interested in sex and drugs than anything else. Shooting speed for thirteen years can really put a crimp in whatever career you might otherwise be attempting to sustain—ask around.
Periodically, he would manage to secure a book deal or—well, actually, that’s it. No one could take the risk of hiring him to sing; he could easily be a no-show, and his vocal range was severely limited by his debauched lifestyle. Also, people found it difficult to forgive him for leaving my mother for Elizabeth Taylor all those years ago, causing him to be viewed for his remaining years as “America’s Cad.”
One day when I was about twelve I was sitting on my grandmother’s lap—not a good idea at any age, given that Maxine Reynolds was, to say the least, not a cuddly woman—when she suddenly asked my mother, “Hey, did you ever get those tickets to Annie that I asked you for?”
She regarded my mother with suspicious eyes. (My grandmother had three looks: glaring suspiciously, glaring hostilely, and glaring with disappointment—active disappointment, lively disappointment, condescending disappointment.)
“I’m sorry, Mama,” my mother responded. “Is there another show you want to see? Annie seems to be sold out for the whole month. I’ve tried everywhere.”
My grandmother pursed her lips, giving the appearance of someone who smelled something bad. Then she pushed air out of her nose and pronounced a very disappointed “Hmmmmmm.”
“It used to mean something in this town to be Debbie Reynolds,” she said. “Now she can’t even get a few measly show tickets.” I involuntarily squeezed my grandmother, as if to do so would push all future demeaning remarks out of her stocky little body. It was episodes like this that made me decide: I never wanted to be in show business.
• • •
so why did I agree to visit the set of Shampoo knowing that there might be a role in the film that I was right for? Go figure. Maybe I wanted to see what it felt like to be wanted by Warren Beatty in any capacity at all. At any rate, at seventeen I didn’t see it as a career choice. Or perhaps I was kidding myself—Lord knows it wouldn’t be the last time in my life I would do that. Kidding yourself doesn’t require that you have a sense of humor. But a sense of humor comes in handy for almost everything else. Especially the darker things, which this did not fall anywhere under the heading of.
I got the role of Lorna in Shampoo. Lorna, the daughter of Jack Warden and Lee Grant. I basically had one scene and that scene was with Warren, who played my mother’s, and everyone else in the film’s, hairdresser and lover. My character doesn’t like her mother and has never had her hair done (i.e., slept with her hairdresser).
Was Lorna’s not getting her hair done a way of rebelling against her mother? Possibly. Was propositioning her mother’s hairdresser a way of screwing with her hated mother? Absolutely. Would Lorna have been sorry if her father found out? Probably. Or not. You pick.
In the film, I am discovered on the tennis court wearing a tennis outfit, holding a racquet, and standing next to a tennis pro who is hitting balls as I watch Warren arrive. I inform him that my mother is not at home and take him to the kitchen, where I ask him if he’s making it with my mother and if he wants anything to eat. I tell him I’ve never been to a hairdresser, that I’m nothing like my mother, and ask him if he wants to fuck. The scene ends with my proposition and we then find me in the bedroom, postcoitally reapplying my headscarf.
Why did I wear a headscarf, you most likely failed to wonder? Because I, Carrie, had short hair—the kind you get from going to a hairdresser—so I had to wear a wig to show that a visit to a hairdresser was not something that would ever be found on my schedule. I wore the scarf because the wig looked less like a wig that way. The other big question you’re probably not asking yourself is, did I wear a bra under my tennis outfit (and if I didn’t, why didn’t I)?
Simple. Warren, the star, cowriter, and producer of Shampoo, was asked by the costume department if he wanted me to wear a bra under my tennis clothes or not. Warren squinted in the general direction of my breasts.
“Is she wearing one now?”
I stood there as if my breasts and I were somewhere else.
“Yes,” responded Aggie, the costume designer.
Warren pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Let’s see it without.”
I followed Aggie to my hamster-cage trailer and removed my bra. Whereupon I was returned to Warren’s scrutiny forthwith. Once again he squinted at my che
st impassively.
“And this is without?” he asked.
“Yes,” Aggie groaned.
“Let’s go without,” he pronounced, directed, charged, commanded.
My breasts and I followed Aggie back to my dressing zone and the subject was closed. My braless Shampoo breasts can be ogled on YouTube (or LubeTube), as can my no-underwear-in-space look in the first Star Wars and the metal bikini (or Jabba Killer) in the third (now confusingly known as Episodes IV and VI).
My two scenes in Shampoo took only a few days to shoot, and when they were done I went back to living at home with my mother and younger brother, Todd, hoping that I wouldn’t be living there for too much longer, as any amount of time was way too long for the now-too-hip-for-words me.
• • •
i had never had an audition like the one I had with Terrence Malick, the director of Days of Heaven. I recall sitting with him for over an hour and talking. Not just me talking, thank God—though I do think the emphasis was on getting to know me and what I was like. After all, I hadn’t called him into a room to meet about a movie I was making.
I remember telling him far too much about myself, a habit that would only increase as I aged. But as a teenager I didn’t yet have that big a repertoire of anecdotes. One of my best up to that time had to do with the comic Rip Taylor—he and my mom did a show together in Vegas—and his gay secretary, Lynn.
I had a crush on Lynn. He was good-looking, wore an ascot, and was really dainty, like if you breathed on him he would fall over like a feather in the wind. Lynn used to call me his love apple, and we would make out on the crew’s bus.
If I’d been in high school instead of doing shows with my mother, I’d have had appropriate venues for my adolescent feelings to emerge. I would have lived a life as a teenager, but since I wasn’t living that life, I kept having crushes on gay men.
Besides Lynn, there was also Albert, who was a dancer in the Broadway show Irene with Debbie. He was attractive and gay (although in my uninformed opinion you wouldn’t pick him out as gay), and we used to make out in the dressing rooms. My mom knew about this, so what the fuck was that about? I was only fifteen, and I was jailbait, and my mom said, “If you want to have sex with Albert, I’ll watch if you like so I can give instructions.”
The Princess Diarist Page 1