The Princess Diarist

by Carrie Fisher

  Of course, I didn’t feel truly comfortable telling the story before now—and still don’t, and probably still won’t at whatever point in the future that you’re actually reading this—not only because I’m not necessarily a comfortable person in general, but because Harrison was married at the time, and also because really, why would you tell other people about something like that unless you were one of those people who tell everybody everything, not caring about how a particular revelation might affect anyone else who appears in the story?

  Not that I’ve ever done a single thing that might encourage people to consider me anything remotely like the soul of discretion. It’s true that I do tell a lot. Indeed, I have the well-deserved reputation of divulging conspicuously more information that would ordinarily fall on the intimate side. But, though I do admittedly lay bare far more than the average bear, before disclosing anything that is possibly someone else’s secret to tell, I make it a practice to first let that person know about my intention. (Aren’t I ethical? I thought you’d think so.)

  They’re free to persuade me to alter what I’ve written to reflect their (obviously gutless) recollection of the experience, or be even more wimpy and ask me to remove them from the story altogether, in light of their concerns that their reputations and/or lives might be forever destroyed. I don’t want to make anyone else look stupid. That’s a privilege I reserve for myself.

  Because, with the exception of fucking with the truth about whether or not I was loaded at any given moment or if I stole painkillers from your medicine cabinet, I’m no liar. I need you to trust that or stop reading. Recollections might differ with regard to the smaller details, but I don’t think my perceptions are distorted. No one has ever said to me, “That never happened,” or “I don’t remember the evening that way at all. There were no pygmies in our group that night.” I mean, if I have even a teensy doubt about something’s having happened, then I don’t tell the story. Not worth it.

  Bottom line, not only am I not a liar, I’m not even an exaggerator. If anything, I like to dial things down a bit so everything doesn’t come off as a drag queen line dance at Mardi Gras.

  Do I at times wish I’d had a calmer, wiser, and more manageable sort of existence? One that even at times included pauses and yawning? Absolutely. But then who would I be? More than likely not someone who, at nineteen, found herself having an affair with her fourteen-years-older married costar without first ever having had with him a linear, meaningful conversation while clothed.

  Also, if I didn’t write about it someone else would. Someone without direct knowledge of the “situation.” Someone who would wait—cowardly—until after my passing to speculate on what happened and make me look bad. No.

  Though no one seems to have any idea that our affair occurred, or even may have occurred, forty years later, here’s the truth, the banal, romantic, sweet, awkward truth. The truth that is Carrison.

  • • •

  i began filming Star Wars hoping to have an affair. Hoping to strike people as somewhere between sophisticated and louche—someone you’d think had gone to boarding school in Switzerland with Anjelica Huston and had learned to speak four languages, including Portuguese. An affair for a person like that would be a completely predictable and totally adult experience.

  This would be my first affair—not surprising, when you think about it, for a nineteen-year-old female in the seventies—and I didn’t really know what someone actually needed to do in order to make a thing like that happen. Back then I was always looking ahead to who I wanted to be versus who I didn’t realize I already was, and the wished-for me was most likely based on who other people seemed to be and the desire to have the same effect on others that they had had on me.

  I knew I was going to be awful with men, partly because of the way my mom had been, with her two divorces and one separation in the pipeline. I possessed that certainty by fifteen or sixteen, and so I needed to prove it to you. Sure, the insight wasn’t a comfortable one, but it was mine, and I was still young enough to be considered precocious. Wow! I was clairvoyant! Maybe I couldn’t fix it, or alter it even a little, but what the hell! I knew what was coming and didn’t bother with feeling sorry for my not-too-distant-future self—it might not be great, but I predicted it, named it, claimed it, and tried to project the illusion that I was up to my elbows in control.

  Despite the fact that almost everything was new to me then, it was crucial that I appeared to be a kind of nonchalant citizen of the weary part of the world—been there, done not only that but also this, and even that other one a few times later on. I could hardly be expected to do too much more.

  Which is undoubtedly why a man might easily have assumed that I’d been around the block, without having any idea how I’d arrived at that block in the first place, or what sort of block it was that I’d been around, and was it lined with homes or trees? Was it an auction block? A city block? Or a chopping one?

  I did my best to come off as this kind of ironic, amused, disenchanted creature. An often chatty, even giddy gal with little to no sense of fashion.

  Simon Templeman, a British boy I had gone to drama school with, had been my only boyfriend till then, and he and I were together for close to a year before we actually slept together, i.e., had sex. But whatever I’d done or not done with Simon, that—along with some fooling around with three straight guys and kissing three gay guys—was basically the sum total of my earthling version of sexual experience (and an exciting preview of things to come).

  Sure, I’d devoted a lot of time to exploring the world of foreplay. Mostly in the shallow end, though—the far reaches caused me, in theory, a certain amount of concern. What if I went there and never made it back? I don’t know even still what it was about sex that concerned me. Was it that once you gave up your virginity, that was it—you could never be a virgin again? Ever? Was it that my mother had been known as Tammy? Tammy the Girl Scout, the last one standing at the virgin sit-in, who raised me to be a very good girl, save my milk and not be a cheap cow no one wanted to buy? Or was it my father, the Olympian sex enthusiast?

  Maybe it was the specter of the back of my first stepfather Harry Karl’s gray, withered hanging ball sack as he rose from the bed without pajama bottoms to yet again visit the bathroom. A ball sack available for my nightly viewing throughout my childhood and on into my adolescence. If that was what my future held—a facsimile of what I would someday have to hold tenderly—I would cling to my blessedly penis- and ball-sack-free present for as long as possible. And that possibility finally ended when Simon and I began.

  • • •

  i am someone who wants very much to be popular. I don’t just want you to like me, I want to be one of the most joy-inducing human beings that you’ve ever encountered. I want to explode on your night sky like fireworks at midnight on New Year’s Eve in Hong Kong.

  Having famous parents doesn’t endear you to your high school classmates. I found this out one day in ninth grade when I overheard two girls walking behind me in the school hallway. One of them said to the other in an audible whisper, “See that girl just ahead of us? With that headband?”

  “Yeah?”

  “She’s Debbie Reynolds’s daughter.” There was a slight pause before she added, “She thinks she’s so great.”

  Wow, right? Uncanny how she so perfectly nailed me straight out of the box. I just thought I was incredible.

  Of course, most people want to be liked, I think, especially when you consider the lonely alternatives. Even the fringier members of society—gangsters, drug cartel types, garden-variety serial killers—even they want to be liked in their own endearing ways. They might want to be admired for their own particular brand of impressive awfulness, such as managing to elude the law for longer than anyone in their questionable line of work, or for the unique and even striking manner in which they slaughtered their victims. Clearly there are numerous methods that can
be employed in one’s ravenous quest to be loved.

  Given this desire for popularity, playing the role of “the other woman”—a home wrecker (or even an apartment or lean-to wrecker)—was not on my radar of things to accomplish in a lifetime. I can’t think of a single personality trait I have that lends itself to seeking out participation in a sordid situation of that kind.

  It’s difficult to imagine a childhood less likely to make one pro-adultery than mine. When I was born, my parents, the handsome singer Eddie Fisher and the beautiful actress Debbie Reynolds, were known as “America’s Sweethearts.” The gorgeous couple with their two adorable little babies (my brother, Todd, came along sixteen months after I did) were the American Dream realized, until Eddie left Debbie for the recently widowed gorgeous actress Elizabeth Taylor, who, just to pile it on a little more, was a friend of my mother’s from their early days at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studio. For those too old to remember or too young to care, it was one of the great midcentury tabloid feeding frenzies, and I watched it at very close range.

  At the ripe old age of eighteen months I lost my father to an adulteress. I knew in my heart that the only rationale he could have had for leaving was because of how big a disappointment I must have been, and I wasn’t going to do that to some other kid. So it stood to reason that if I could disappoint my own father—if I couldn’t get my own father to love me enough to stick around or, God forbid, visit more often than one day a year—how was I ever going to get a man who didn’t have to love me like daddies were supposed to? (Hey, Envious Classmate, see how fucking great I thought I was?)

  My first larger-than-life lesson was what it felt like to be on the clueless end of infidelity. So there was absolutely no way—zero!—that I’d carry on that evil tradition of hurting some lovely, unsuspecting lady.

  So when I was contemplating having an affair on this movie, I wasn’t going to include married guys. (Not that I even thought about not including them.) One of the things I knew when Harrison and I met was that nothing of a romantic nature would happen. It wasn’t even an issue. There were plenty of guys out there who were single whom I could date without needing to dip into the married guy pool. He was also far too old for me—almost fifteen years older! I would be twenty in a matter of months, but Harrison was in his midthirties—old! Well into adulthood, anyway.

  Also, he was a man. I was a girl—a male human like him would have to be with a woman. If Harrison and I went to the prom together, no one would believe it. “What’s he doing with her? Captain of the football team and president of the cool literary club? What’s he doing with Cutie-Pie Sweetcheeks, with the troll doll collection and Cary Grant obsession? Must be a glitch in the machine . . .”

  On top of that, there was something intimidating about Harrison. His face in repose looked to me like it was closer to a scowl than to any other expression. It was immediately clear that he was no people pleaser; this was more of a people unsettler. He looked like he didn’t care whether or not you looked at him, so you watched him not caring, hungrily. Anyone with him was irrelevant, and I was definitely an “anyone.”

  When I’d first seen him sitting on the cantina set, I remember thinking, This guy’s going to be a star. Not just a celebrity, a movie star. He looked like one of those iconic Movie Star types, like Humphrey Bogart or Spencer Tracy. Some sort of epic energy hung around him like an invisible throng.

  I mean, let’s say that you’re walking along in the twilight, minding your own business (your own show business), and there’s fog all around you—a mysterious sort of cinematic fog. And as you continue walking, you find that you’re moving slower and slower, because you can barely see a few feet in front of you. And then all of a sudden the smoke clears. It clears enough for you to imagine that you’re beginning to ever so slowly make out the outline of the face. And not just a face. This is the face of someone that painters would want to paint or poets would wax poetic about. An Irish balladeer would feel compelled to write a song to be sung drunkenly in pubs all over the United Kingdom. A sculptor would sob openly while carving the scar on his chin.

  A face for the ages. And seeing him sitting there in the set that would introduce him to the world as Han Solo, the most famous of all the famous characters that he would come to play—well, he was just so far out of my league. Compared to him I didn’t even have an actual verifiable league. We were destined for different places.

  Having grown up around show business, I knew that there were stars and there were stars. There were celebrities, talk show hosts, product spokespeople, and then there were movie stars—people with agents and managers and publicists and assistants and bodyguards, who got tons of fan mail and could get a movie financed, and who consistently graced the covers of magazines. Their grinning familiar faces stared proudly out at you, encouraging you to catch up on their personal lives, their projects, and how close they were to being the most down-to-earth of those famous-to-earthlings.

  Harrison was one of that epic superstar variety, and I wasn’t. Was I bitter about this? Well . . . not so you’d notice.

  • • •

  i was in the last year of my teens, only weeks free from my drama college romance and in my first starring movie role. I was extremely insecure. I felt as though I didn’t know what I was doing, and for good reason. In most areas, I didn’t.

  Oh, I could be witty as the deuce, but I had no idea how I should best apply that cleverness, for I was clever, not intellectual. I had very little learned knowledge, having dropped out of high school to be a chorus girl in my mother’s Broadway show, and I was very insecure about my lack of education. I was a voracious reader, but part of what that taught me was that I was nowhere near as scholarly as I wanted to be. I was precocious, but how many years beyond your teens can you be called that with sincerity?

  I was good with words and had an ability to analyze people and things, but only enough for a party trick—at least that’s what I told myself at the time. I would tell you I wasn’t as smart as you thought I was, but obviously not without first establishing that you thought I was bright. Still, knowing that I was insecure, I couldn’t imagine being with someone who seemed to be overconfident. But then, was Harrison overconfident if it transpired that his high opinion of himself was based on a clear-eyed assessment?

  It was all so confusing. But one thing I knew was that Harrison made me feel very nervous. I got tongue-tied in his company, and clumsy. It was uncomfortable in the extreme, and not in any way I could overcome with a few well-chosen witticisms. We met, hit a wall, and stayed there. It didn’t seem like a challenge, it seemed like something to avoid whenever possible. I was with him when we worked in scenes together and I tried to avoid him otherwise so as not to annoy him—not to, as it felt like to me, waste his better-spent time. It was more comfortable to hang out with the cast and crew who were more fun and less immune to my charms.

  But when I look back with squinting eyes, I figure Harrison was scoping out the set in those early days. Not to have an affair necessarily, but then again, not not to either. We were on location, after all, and to have a little quiet jaunt on the side wasn’t the worst thing he could do. It was almost expected. On location—far from home . . .

  So while I combed the environs for my potential location adventure, Harrison may have been combing, too.

  • • •

  on one of the first Friday nights after filming began, a party was organized to celebrate George Lucas’s thirty-second birthday. It was billed as a surprise party, though I’d be surprised if he was actually surprised by it. And even if he was, you never knew with George. He really wasn’t into facial expressions, much like Darth Vader and various and sundry robots, stormtroopers, and Ewoks.

  One thing George never did like other directors—I was to later learn, with dismay—was encourage us to “just have fun with it.” So many directors have urged me in that amused direction, and I always want to say, “Is tha
t what I’m here for? Fun? I am here for my salary, and to periodically use an ill-advised British accent, and to get people that I don’t know to like me.” Fun was for later, and generally misguided, which brings me back to George’s surprise party.

  The festivities took place in a medium-sized, uncluttered room adjacent to the cafeteria at Elstree Studios. The walls were dirty-yellow, though a more generous and myopic guest might call it mustard. Most of the assembled crowd was made up of the crew—the grips, the electricians (“sparks” in the UK), the drivers, and all the others who toiled daily on the new, fairly obscure film that was being shot there. If they can get on the screen half of what George put on the page, I thought, people will come to see it. No matter what, it’s going to be this cool, weird little movie. I’d go see it. Well, I’d have to anyway, but they wouldn’t have to drag me.

  So, this cafeteria was a biggish blank sort of place—inscrutable, impassive, without affect, the better that you might concentrate on what you were ingesting, which would have been chips, dips, carrots, celery, and pretzels. And next to the table boasting this decidedly less-than-exciting spread was everybody’s destination, another table with more sought-after treasures: the bar.

  Not having located George yet, I tried to look as unconcerned and blasé as possible as I slowly sauntered barward, adding a smile to the mix in order to make it easier for the people there to like me and not wonder why I, of all people, had been cast in the role of the rather daunting princess.

  “Hi! How you doing?” What was his name? “Great to see you.” Oh, no—what was his name? What were any of their names, I wondered as I weaved through this ever-growing crowd of faces I saw every day. Of course, they all knew my name because there it was on the call sheet.

  “Could I have a Coke with ice, please? In as big a glass as you’ve got? Oh, that’s right, we’re in England, there is no ice. Okay, then, warm Coke it is.”