The Princess Diarist

by Carrie Fisher

  Wrong. That evening he talked more than I’d ever seen him talk. There were stories about the day we’d had an early call—hardly unusual—and by early afternoon we still hadn’t been summoned to the set to film anything. “It doesn’t bother me that much to be kept waiting,” Mark volunteered as he sprinkled cheese over his pasta. “Obviously I don’t like it, but there are ways to keep yourself entertained.”

  “Oh, yeah,” drawled Mr. Ford, “what are those ways? Catching up on your correspondence or taking up the zither.” I listened intently—everything depended on my getting into this conversation while trying to convey that it didn’t matter to me at all.

  “I would pay many hard-earned dollars to see you play the zither,” I offered shyly, hyperaware of making a good impression.

  Harrison studied me briefly from his prime real estate across the table. He slowly rubbed his chin with his left hand while he considered my offer. He pursed his lips and began tapping them very slowly. Narrowing his hazel eyes, he said, “How much?”

  He waited for my reply calmly, knowingly—he wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t not smiling either. Under the table, I picked at the skin on my thumb, ripping off a strand, suddenly lost. What were we talking about? Why was he looking at me like that? Did I have food on my face? I looked at the other people at the table—coincidentally they were all looking at me as well! Why was everyone looking at me? I must have food on my face. I wiped the corners of my mouth with my now-slightly-bleeding hand.

  “How much for what?” I asked them sadly. “I’m a little lost, what scene is this?” Now I sounded as if I was pleading. Not for my life necessarily, but for a way to live it nobly—like a poet on a porch.

  They laughed when I asked what scene it was. Harrison didn’t laugh, but he looked as though he might have if he’d been made a different way. Then I remembered, at least part of it.

  “Play the zither! I’m going to pay you to play the zither!”

  “Now?” Harrison said.

  “Yes!”

  That was the first I had laughed. We all laughed. Maybe everything would be all right now. Sure! That was it! It was a sign! It all started and ended with the zither. And something else, too—I was going to go home with Harrison. I wasn’t sure up until that moment, and I wasn’t sure of what would happen after I went home with him. I knew it wasn’t a good idea. It would never be a good idea, but it wouldn’t be a really bad one either. I mean, weird and grumpy as he might have been, he wasn’t a bad human. He was much more on the good side of the bad/good human graph. He was bad and good, like most people. A good person who does bad things or a bad person who does good things—as long as people are involved, people will do bad or good things to them. Especially when there’s money (and small dogs) involved.

  The check was fought for valiantly by all us available good soldiers, understanding as we did on some dark and smiling level that those blessed with a bounty of backed-up semen would actually pay it. Koo and I played at being semi-cloyingly grateful for the gallant sacrifice of their hard-won shekels and we rose from our four-sided trough, thus easing our way out of our eatery and on to the finer events that no doubt awaited us all.

  I was in no shape to do anything but take cues, when and if they were distributed with intent. But perhaps I had misread the situation—was I following a lead that only existed in my unaccustomed-to-alcohol-and-as-such-altered mind? But I was slowly sobering up, and the likelihood that I was misreading signals was getting lower by the minute as we stood on the sidewalk outside the little Italian restaurant I’d so recently managed to survive. The cool air was welcome—who knew that there was so much of it outside! Especially when compared to the overall quantity of air set aside for eateries.

  We stood under the timid light of a nearby street lamp, shuffling from one foot to the other, checking watches, lighting cigarettes, or squinting into the night to ascertain whether or not there were any incoming cabs.

  “I’m in Chelsea,” Mark said.

  “So you decided to keep that place in the end?” Peter observed, nodding wisely.

  Mark shrugged. “In the end I figured, why not? It’s got great views, an awesome kitchen . . . I mean, sure there are better neighborhoods, but . . .” He paused and shrugged again. “But not with a second bedroom.”

  Harrison flicked away his barely smoked Camel and coughed. “Okay!” he said to everyone. He then looked at me. “I can drop you at your place—it’s on my way.”

  He took my arm and steered me toward Piccadilly Circus.

  “Good night!” I managed as Harrison drew me along into the street and away from them. That I didn’t stumble was a miracle, not like the virgin birth or anything, but you could’ve fooled me. We walked in silence for several moments while I riffed through an assortment of remarks I might make, enabling me to seem . . . to seem like someone . . . a woman even, who knew what she was doing—or didn’t care what she was doing—because wherever she went only the very best people would follow. Follow her every word like welcome stalkers—why wouldn’t Harrison want to be where she was? If only she felt this way about herself, if only she could think of what to say to him—other than ask him what they were doing. Where were they going and why? Would he ask her to the prom and cover her in hickeys?

  Now, of course she loved him, didn’t she? She wouldn’t have dared to before that business in the backseat, but now . . .

  “What’s your address?” he asked, startling me, standing there beside this king, Han Solo and all the other characters he would eventually play seeded in him now. And then there was me, pregnant with all those people I would play: a vengeful hairdresser, a hostile mother-in-law, a flute-playing adulteress, a psychologist, a drug-addicted writer, a boyfriend-poaching actress, a boy-hungry casting director, myself, an unfaithful wife, an angry boss, myself, myself, myself, myself, and a couple of nuns. He took me by the elbow and eased all of us into the backseat of a taxi.

  “What’s your address?”

  I looked at him, blinking. “My address?”

  “Where we going, ladies and gents?” The driver put the taxi in gear and it growled back to life. “Or I could drive you kids around all night, it’s your money.”

  Harrison nodded in agreement, twirling his index finger rapidly—the international indicator to hurry things along.

  “Fine, Esmond Court, off Kensington High Street.”

  “Okay, lady. Have you there in a jiff,” he all but cheered in his cockney Dick Van Dyke East London accent. The one I wish I had. “That’s behind Barkers, is it?”

  I was about to tell him when Harrison pulled me back into the seat, moving us closer and closer together, face-to-face, until we were two faces, four eyes, one kiss, going to the place where we could rehearse that kissing we would be doing a year and a half later in The Empire Strikes Back—and apparently we wanted to get a jump on it, as it were. People think you just kiss in a love scene. They don’t realize the years some actors put into those scenes. Real actors. All that practice really shows. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Check out those kisses in Empire. See? Those were years in preparation and I promise you, they did not have to use special effects there. These were the early days and nights of the Force.

  “Here we are, folks! Esmond Court!” This was punctuated by the sharp sound of the pulled brake. “That’ll be five pound ten please.”

  Harrison reached around to retrieve his brown beat-up wallet from his back pocket. I pulled my bag from the floor and into my lap, saying, “I could—”

  He looked at me indicating that what remained of the sentence I had started would be less than welcome. I may have become a blush factory, sending southerly blood to my northerly face for a visit. It now occurred to me—belatedly, I admit—that Harrison wasn’t just dropping me off, but that we were very likely going to be having what my friends and I referred to as a sleepover. What if he—if we—and then�
�oh God—then he would leave me with my new slutty sense of myself established in one fell swoop—a fallen woman flat on her face, swooping for all she was worth . . . Leia would never get in a situation like this . . .

  Actually she probably would, but not until the sequels. This was sequel behavior. Oh, but what if she did get into the backseat of a taxi with a smuggling married actor? If she did happen to do that, she wouldn’t just go along with things like a leaf on a rushing stream. C’mon! She’d be able to come up with something more unusual . . . maybe not poetic but . . . Why was I so obedient? What would Leia do? Obviously it would be different than following Jesus’s example. Jesus would hardly—well, it’s no use pursuing Jesus’s lead when it came to dating. And is that what this was? Dating? Oh, Leia, where are you when I need you? Oh, Jesus, if you’re watching, please don’t let my stomach look other than flat if it should get to that.

  “Cheers, mate,” the cabbie said as Harrison paid the fare. He then drove off, leaving us in something better than a lurch.

  “You wanna come up?” I asked absurdly.

  He almost laughed. “Sure.”

  I reached in my bag for my keys. Leia found them and led him into the building to her apartment, and Carrie spent the rest of the night making sequels with her future cinematic husband. How would it all end? Would it all end? And how would I look when it did?

  • • •

  it’s difficult to recall with any kind of clarity details from that weekend. Even if I could, what are we talking about here, soft porn for hardened sci-fi fans? I can’t remember events from yesterday, or earlier tonight when I put away my credit cards for safekeeping. Now for the life of me I don’t know precisely what safekeeping is.

  What I do know about that weekend is more along the lines of what didn’t happen. I know we didn’t have any in-depth conversations about anything. So if we didn’t spend a bunch of time talking or playing Monopoly, then we must’ve done more physical things. Long walks, waterboarding, things of that nature.

  Oh, but why be coy or discreet? We had a sleepover—you know, like we made a fort with pillows after we had a really big pillow fight, then we called his mom and got permission for him to stay overnight, but we couldn’t stay up too late, because we had school on Monday, and besides which we were in the school play. All I can remember after he followed me into the apartment and turned on the hallway light was that I meant to show him around my little flat, only now our fumbling was not in a moving vehicle, driven by a knowing spectator. We were once again practicing for our cinematic snog.

  The bedroom couldn’t get dark enough; even with the lights off I still wanted to turn the lights out. I didn’t want him to recognize me from the movies. “Hey! Weren’t you in . . . that scene we shot today? Don’t I know you from . . . Cloud City?”

  Okay, so now we’d spoken together with our words, we’d bantered together using George’s words—now we were exploring the outer reaches of no speak, of memorizing the bottom of each other’s faces with our mouths. If you’d told me that morning when my bed was being used for other purposes that—well, if I didn’t know Star Wars was going to be that big of a hit, how could I have predicted that the stars of Star Wars would find themselves in bed together?

  I don’t believe people are across-the-board confident. If they are . . . well, they’ve misjudged the situation where there’s an arrogant result. Mostly people have those few things they do well and hope those things make up for the other shit.

  Why am I telling you this? Partly because with my combination of insecurity and inexperience I was paralyzed. Scared to say anything that might make Harrison leave me in the lurch that had all too recently been Riggs’s apartment. A tiny part of me felt like I’d won the man lottery and here I was both counting and spending the money. Our skin agreed. We pressed our luck—first his, then mine, then ours—until we had smoothed our way into the thick of it, until nothing else was possible except to get through to each other, in and on through each other, until we eased into the other side.

  I looked over at Harrison. He was . . . God, he was just so handsome. No. No, more than that. He looked like he could lead the charge into battle, take the hill, win the duel, be leader of the gluten-free world, all without breaking a sweat. A hero’s face—a few strands of hair fell over his noble, slightly furrowed brow—watching the horizon for danger in the form of incoming indigenous armies, reflective, concerned eyes so deep in thought you could get lost down there and it would take days to fight your way out. But why run? It couldn’t really be a hardship to find yourself lost in such a place with all that wit and ideas safely stored there. Hey, man! Wait a second! Share the wealth here. Give the face to one man and save the mind for another and both would have plenty. But no! This was the ultimate living example of overkill. So how could you ask such a shining specimen of a man to be satisfied with the likes of me? No! Don’t tell me! The fact is that he was! Even if it was for a short while. That was way more than enough. It would eventually get to be exhausting trying to measure up, or keep up. I was a lucky girl—without the self-esteem to feel it, or the wherewithal to enjoy what there was to enjoy of it and then let go. Only to look back on it forty years on with amused, grateful, and all-but-puffy eyes.

  Suffice it to say, we survived and then some. Difficult from this distance to know how close our close was, and whether this brand of close had as much to do with the proximity of someone who looked so very much like my space date—he who smirked at me while jumping to light speed (while I required no assistance whatsoever).

  Our affable ordeal behind us, Harrison fell asleep and I tried to. God, he really was handsome. I forgave him for not loving me in the way one usually expects—and almost forgave myself for not expecting it. I tried to follow him into slumber land, and when I couldn’t, I breathed with him there in the dark—wondering what he was dreaming and hoping that if I actually managed to fall asleep, in the morning, I would wake up before he did. Maybe I’d be better at talking with him now—less daunted, in character and out.

  There are some things that I still consider private. Amazing, isn’t it? You would think, without concentrating too hard, that I consider whatever I said and did up for grabs. Way up where the grabs are groped the most. But sex is private. That might be one reason we do it—for the most part—in the nude. Clothes falling away signals a situation that I’ll likely avoid putting into words. If clothes don’t dress it up, don’t expect talk to, either.

  So it is with uncharacteristic reservation and scruples that I quash any details, put the kibosh on sharing anything but the most general information or description hereinafter when relating what occurred between Mr. Ford and me on that fateful Friday night in May 1976. This applies also to whatever it was that occurred between Harrison and me on subsequent Fridays at ungodly hours. For that is when we spent our time together, when we had our sleepovers, like good youngsters do. Oh, we spent time together during daylight hours following our time together at night. Such as it was. I think I recall his reading the paper while I . . . while I pretended to do something else.

  Privacy questions aside, I can barely recall our time together during our first weekend. I didn’t know how I would live through the five whole days of filming following that first weekend. Those five days on set together went unbearably slowly, with our having to behave toward each other as though the weekend before hadn’t even occurred. Weekdays were off-limits, intimacy-wise. Not that this had ever been expressly stated by either one of us. We simply intuited we would spend our weekdays treating one another as though not only had that first weekend not happened, but all of the ensuing ones hadn’t happened either.

  Despite the common use of the phrase “going out with” to describe two people spending time together, Harrison and I didn’t spend a lot of time going out, or wouldn’t.

  Instead, we went into each other’s apartments. I remember spending most of our weekends together at my ren
ted domain in Esmond Court, but that could just be where my memory goes when I send it back to the seventies. I know I wanted to spend our time together there and not at his place.

  I preferred Harrison staying over at my apartment because—as the borrowed flat of a friend of mine—it was nicer than his. Sorry, but it was. We all received scale for the first film, which amounted to about $500 a week. And while I came from a wealthy family (though of recently reduced circumstances) and could have afforded rent for nice accommodations even if I hadn’t been able to borrow Riggs’s flat, Harrison had a wife and two children at home, so in order to maintain their support, he lived in the most modest housing that the studio could get away with providing him. So when it came down to where we would stay, the choice became fairly obvious soon enough.

  Once, on one of the rare occasions when we did have a sleepover at Harrison’s apartment, Mark and his fairly ubiquitous friend Peter dropped by unannounced. It was about eleven o’clock in the morning, and it might have looked odd that I was there. Clearly I hadn’t just dropped by for brunch, as no scones or eggs were in evidence, and we didn’t appear to be running lines. Harrison, after letting Mark in, returned to the table we’d been sitting at, sat down across from me, took my hand, and pronounced solemnly, “We’re engaged.” It was hiding in plain sight, mocking the suggestion that there was anything going on; therefore, it couldn’t be true—a technique I like to use to this day.

  • • •

  but I also know that I wasn’t good at being clear about anything that I wanted with Harrison. I could charm the birds out of everyone’s trees but his. That’s something I wrote in the diaries that I kept during the filming of Star Wars. The first one, Episode IV. The diaries I found recently while expanding my bedroom at home. I was going through the many boxes that were stored romantically beneath the floorboards and came across three written notebooks I had kept during that epic time—and then promptly forgot I’d kept. Or that they kept me, in some ways, sane. When I read them, I was struck by how unusual they were, which is when I first considered publishing them. (I still might. What do you think?)