In Praise of Difficult Women

by Karen Karbo

  This isn’t to say there’s a dearth of well-rounded, compelling middle-aged characters on TV. But they always find themselves in what I think of as Eileen Fisher television—shows that are well made and stylish, with no expectation that anyone under 45 will tune in.*3

  In Season 1, Episode 6 of Girls, Hannah goes home to East Lansing for a weekend with her parents. While she goes off to a sad party with Eric, the cute pharmacist she’d met earlier in the day when she’d picked up Loreen’s prescription (which we assume is hormone replacement related), Loreen and Tad celebrate their anniversary with a nice dinner out and shower sex.

  “Wet and wild!” exclaims Tad. Loreen moans as her boobs slap about. But the evening proves to be too much crazy for Tad. Between the heavy meal out, the booze, the frisky sex, the hot water, he passes out, slips, and falls. Hannah walks in the door after her own awful one-night stand with Eric the pharmacist only to hear her mom yelling in distress. She bursts into the bathroom to see her dad passed out. He’s naked, and her mom is naked. It’s the first time we see Hannah assess the situation quickly and take charge, helping to cover her dad and move him to the bedroom. There’s more to the story of Loreen and Tad—no spoilers here. But kudos to Lena for making them complex characters—and for also giving them the full cringe-worthy Girls treatment, including awkward nudity.

  In 2015, while Girls was heading into the final stretch of its run (the final season aired in 2017), Lena and her friend Jennifer Konner started Lenny, a weekly newsletter for young (and not so young) feminists. When I signed up I thought, Leave it to Lena Dunham to make newsletters cool again. Her provocative Tweet storm–inducing pieces include “Supporting Reproductive Rights When You’re a Person of Faith”; “One of a Kind: On the Healing Power of Sexual Fantasy”; and “The All-American Menstrual Hut.” She’s also been vocal about her fight for birth control rights, which includes the care she receives for her own complicated and ongoing personal battle with endometriosis (she posted a picture of herself in the hospital getting treatment after a horrific episode following the Met Gala).

  This determined outspokenness has made Lena one of those women about whom people say “Why won’t she just go away?” And it’s to her credit that she has no intention of shutting up in order to make people like her. Full disclosure: I also find her annoying at times. She’s a difficult woman, and sometimes difficult women grate on our last nerve. But here’s a radical notion: That’s okay.

  The cries of outrage over her remark that she wished she’d had an abortion to better empathize with women who’d undergone the procedure could be heard in outer space. Should she have said it? No. Has any man on the planet ever said something stupid and been forgiven within the time it has taken me to write this sentence? You know the answer.

  Recently, I watched Lena on 73 Questions, the vogue.com video series where a guy with a camera follows you around while shooting off intimate queries. Lena wore a striped tank top, hip-slung jeans, and high heels. She appeared cute, smart—not perfect but perfectly acceptable. It’s a measure of how difficult she is that I didn’t worry, seeing her this way, that her unruly self was going to be sucked into the celebrity machine, where she would be turned into a likable size 2 star who wears the right message T-shirts but otherwise doesn’t rock the boat. Lena is far too difficult for that.

  *1Somewhat icky factoid: Twenty-two percent of viewers during that first season were men over 50. I’ll leave you to make of that what you will.

  *2That her mother bought the place, housed inside a former textile warehouse, back in the ’70s when Tribeca was still sketchy, before the invasion of J.Crew, is overlooked.

  *3Grace and Frankie, starring Lily Tomlin and Jane Fonda, comes readily to mind, as well as any other show featuring women over 50 who fail to still look fetching in a sleeveless sheath, à la Julia Louis-Dreyfus in Veep. (I’m not upper arm–shaming Lily and Jane, I promise.)

  CHAPTER 29

  CARRIE FISHER

  Droll

  I CRIED WHEN I HEARD Carrie Fisher died, a couple of days after Christmas in 2016. People all across the galaxy did: Star Wars nerds, avid readers of her novels and memoirs, mental health advocates, self-proclaimed killjoy feminists. The coroner’s report, released six months later, reported that traces of heroin and cocaine had been found in her system. Some fans left the club, outraged that it wasn’t a simple, noncontroversial heart attack caused by too much fish and chips (she was on her way home from London) that ended her life. But Carrie was never easy, never well behaved, never secretive about her demons. She was never not controversial in life, so why should her death be any different?

  I’ve always claimed Carrie as a very distant cousin, if the definition includes going to the same film school as George Lucas, who gave us Princess Leia. I entered USC School of Cinematic Arts not long after Star Wars had become a Hollywood blockbuster and was on its way to becoming a cultural phenomenon on a par with…well, nothing. There had never been anything like Star Wars before in the history of cinema. We studied it as if it were a holy text. We collected arcane trivia about the production long before anyone else. (I still have an early draft of the screenplay, where R2-D2 talks instead of beeps.) I had seen the movie many times in class, but only twice at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre: once, with a boy I’d met in Switzerland (a real Swiss shepherd), who wept at the wonder of it; and once with my dad, an engineer and industrial designer, who seemed to enjoy it but whose only comment was, “You know, there’s no sound in space.”

  There weren’t any (or many) women in film school in those days, either. I recall production classes in which I was the only girl among the nerds. No one had much to say about Princess Leia. (Return of the Jedi was still a year or so in the future, and guys had not yet beheld her perched beside Jabba the Hutt in her metal bikini.) Instead they obsessed over camera angles and the sound effects. I, on the other hand, was completely taken with Leia: a fearless, principled, snarky tomboy in eyeliner. She could not be intimidated by authority, and seemed impervious to torture. She lied when it suited her, shot first without bothering to ask questions, and failed to get all dewy-eyed with gratitude when she was rescued. She was fierce, but caring. I didn’t think Carrie Fisher was a great actress, but I smelled a whiff of smirk in her line readings. A kindred spirit.

  BORN OCTOBER 21, 1956, to movie star Debbie Reynolds and star crooner Eddie Fisher—the most famous couple in Hollywood—Carrie never wanted to be in show business. From the day she could sit up, she had a front-row seat at the slow-motion catastrophe that is megacelebrity. Still, entertainment was the family business, and it was easier to fall into that than, say, law school. In 1975, she scored a bit part in Shampoo, with Warren Beatty. In 1977, Star Wars was released, and whatever hope she may have had for living under the radar was destroyed, along with Leia’s home planet of Alderaan. She would appear in other movies—some good ones. But to filmgoers, she would always be spunky Leia, in her drapey white gown and cinnamon bun hairstyle.

  In 1987, Carrie published a damn good autobiographical first novel: Postcards From the Edge. It became a pretty good movie starring Meryl Streep as a recovering addict living in the shadow of her fabulous, self-involved mother, played by Shirley MacLaine, for whom every day offers another chance for a star turn. The book became a New York Times best seller, as did her three subsequent novels and three memoirs. Her one-woman show, Wishful Drinking, was a hit on Broadway; in 2015, she reprised her role as Leia in The Force Awakens*1 to great acclaim. In 2016, she and her mother co-starred in the touching documentary Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds. Whatever rifts existed from the Postcards From the Edge era seemed to have largely healed.

  Layered between these accomplishments was a lot of suffering and struggle, all played out in the public eye. At the age of 28, after a drug overdose and a stretch in rehab, Carrie was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Rather than try to play off her erratic behavior as mere
addiction—always a more glam option than straight-up mental illness—she came out as bipolar, advocated for it, and wore her disease with grace and her trademark searing humor. “I’m actually in the Abnormal Psychology textbook,” she once said. “Obviously my family is so proud. Keep in mind though, I’m a PEZ dispenser and I’m in the Abnormal Psychology textbook. Who says you can’t have it all?”

  CARRIE WAS A MERE BABE OF 19 when she was cast as Princess Leia—the same age as her mother when she was cast as Kathy Selden in Singin’ in the Rain. By the time Carrie was born in 1956, Debbie was America’s Sweetheart, a stone-cold A-list movie star. She had further burnished her star by marrying teen idol Eddie Fisher, who ruled the charts in the early 1950s (between 1950 and 1956, he had 35 songs in the top 40). Their courtship consisted essentially of Eddie saying in an interview that if he could date anyone, it would be Debbie Reynolds, and so their managers arranged it. Debbie was blond and sunny. Eddie was dark and boyishly handsome. As a couple, they were white hot. One struggles to make a contemporary comparison: Britney and Justin? Kim and Kanye? Brangelina? None of these couples are surrounded by the aura of sweet, Internet-less innocence that enveloped Debbie and Eddie. Sixteen months after having Carrie, her brother, Todd, was born—and the perfect family was now complete.

  Oh, those home movies. In both Wishful Drinking and Bright Lights, you can see golden Debbie with her sweet babies in the bright California sun. Pool parties, Easter egg hunts, Carrie and Todd going round and round on their tricycles. Only because of what we now know does Carrie seem more expressive and animated than her little brother. She grimaces, grins, scowls, and howls. Her dark eyes snap with intelligence. In a few shots, Carrie drags Todd around by his ankles. Debbie smiles at it all, because that’s what stars did.

  In 1958, when Carrie was two, her father left her mother for Elizabeth Taylor (see Chapter 2). Debbie would go on to marry Harry Karl, whom she did not love but who was the opposite of Eddie. Karl was a shoe store magnate, a “millionaire businessman” who lost his money on bad investments and gambling debts, then plowed through Debbie’s fortune. They wound up divorced when Carrie was 17.

  To my knowledge there are no studies that quantify how much a child suffers when her parents are involved in Hollywood’s scandal of the century—probably because the only children who would have been qualified to participate in the study would be Carrie and Todd. How isolating it must have been, and how bizarre. Old copies of Photoplay feature Debbie, toddler Carrie, and baby Todd on the cover, with headlines ranging from “The Night My Children Kept Me From Dying” to “What Debbie Tells Her Children About Liz and Eddie.”

  One of Carrie’s first memories was sitting on the lawn watching a cameraman fall through the shrubbery, trying to snap a picture. After she could walk but was still a small child, she remembered fans would lunge over her and shove her aside, trying to shake hands or touch her mother. She believed her mother belonged to everyone but her. She believed her father left—or so Carrie would confess to him in 2010, three months before he died—because she wasn’t funny enough. Even as a toddler she tried to be amusing, to keep him from leaving.

  THERE’S A CLIP IN BRIGHT LIGHTS of Debbie doing a nightclub act in 1971 or so. She’s wearing a black jacket, hot pants, and stockings—and weirdly, a white boater straight out of The Music Man. Carrie is in the audience, and Debbie coaxes her up to sing a song “for your old mother.” (Debbie was 39.) Carrie is wearing a velvet dress, as you would for a special occasion. Her hair is long and shiny, and she looks younger than 15. When she opens her mouth and belts out “Bridge Over Troubled Waters,” in a theatrical contralto to rival Judy Garland’s, you can see the stirrings of her adult default attitude: “facerious,” a perfect word I made up just now to describe her singular mingling of the serious and the facetious. Look, Mom, she seems to be saying, I’m singing my heart out like some over-the-hill nightclub diva in a beaded ensemble, even though I’m barely old enough to babysit.

  Carrie’s wasn’t a trained voice—nor would it ever be, since dismissing her vocal gifts was one way of rebelling against her parents. The child of two of the most beloved and celebrated singers of the age would refuse to sing! I should clarify: She would refuse to use her voice in a professional capacity. Setting aside her 1982 guest appearance on Laverne and Shirley (where, dressed in a green satin bunny costume, she sang “My Guy” to guest star Hugh Hefner), she generally used her voice as a secret weapon, like a knife tucked into a boot.

  In 1973, at 17, Carrie enrolled in the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Her goal of avoiding show business at all costs wasn’t going so well. At her mother’s urging, she had quit high school to act in the ensemble of Irene, Debbie’s Broadway musical. In the racy Shampoo, she went on to play the braless and bandanna-clad “sexually liberated” teenage daughter of one of hairdresser Warren Beatty’s clients, who seduces him with the immortal words, “Wanna fuck?”*2 She struck upon drama school in London because it was a way of getting as far as possible out of the house—while still pleasing her mother, who was also footing the bill.

  She read for Star Wars over Christmas vacation in 1975, because why not? A goofy low-budget sci-fi flick? What harm could there be in that? When she received the pages for the audition and saw that Princess Leia said things like, “A battle station with enough firepower to destroy an entire system!” she thought, oh yeah. For Lucas’s part, he cast her because even at 18 she was formidable but also warm and shrewd, as a warrior princess would be.

  Is there anything that remains unknown about the making of Star Wars? A quick scroll through Amazon reveals dozens of encyclopedias, atlases, compendia, and definitive stories behind the making ofs. Despite my inside track at USC, I’m not sure I can add anything new.

  Oh wait, yes I can.

  In The Princess Diarist, published a month before she died, Carrie confessed to an affair with Harrison Ford during filming. “I’ve spent so many years not telling the story of Harrison and me having an affair on the first Star Wars movie that it’s difficult to know exactly how to tell it now,” she wrote.

  It happened thus: After a surprise 32nd birthday party for George Lucas, they started smooching in the car, which led to them smooching in her flat, which led to “a one-night stand that lasted three months.” He was 34, married, already movie star–like. She was 19, had had exactly one serious boyfriend (from drama school)—and, although she pretended to be an experienced woman of the world, she was freaking out. She wondered, in teen girl parlance, whether he “liked” her in the same way she “liked” him. During the week they practiced their true acting skills by pretending to be two people not having an affair; on the weekend, they got it on in her flat.

  He didn’t talk much. He was an absolute mystery to her, one of those strong silent types in whom we always presume there are cavernous depths of heart and soul that only we can plumb.*3 She wrote in her diary about spending a lot of time trying to make him smile (“…obviously I have not heard of child labor laws”). Once, in a pub, she pulled off an imitation of his gruff swagger that had him shuddering with soundless laughter, and she counted that moment among the greatest in her love life. When the film wrapped, and so did the affair, she claims he tried to buoy her spirits by saying, “You have the eyes of a doe and the balls of a samurai.” I’m sorry, but I call bullshit. That line is classic Carrie Fisher.

  IN 1983, CARRIE MARRIED PAUL SIMON, the genius lyricist half of Simon and Garfunkel. (Their union would crash and burn after only 11 months.) They had met when Simon visited the set of Star Wars. He was, as she noted, a short Jewish singer, just like her father, Eddie. It was tempestuous from the start, based on a shared sensibility, a passion for words and each other and, apparently, a lot of cocaine. In fairness to everyone involved, I can assure you that pretty much everything in the entertainment world involved a lot of cocaine in the early 1980s. I was, at the time, just out of film school, and it wasn’t unusual to be
offered a Perrier and a line during a pitch meeting.

  Carrie/Leia started snorting coke on the ice planet of Hoth—that is, on the set—during the filming of The Empire Strikes Back.*4 Allegedly, even John Belushi, who would die of an overdose in 1982, advised her to dial it back a little. She didn’t love cocaine, but it was what was around, and she would ingest anything that offered a respite from the intensity of being Carrie. Every morning when her eyes clicked open—that is, if she’d managed to sleep at all—a tsunami of thoughts and feelings surged into her mind, a literal brainstorm every waking moment. She’d found that LSD made her feel more normal. The spinning inner monologue was transformed into visual hallucinations. A change is as good as a rest! Plus, if she dropped acid with friends, everyone was out of their gourds, and she didn’t feel so alone. Among prescription drugs she favored Percocet, and once confessed to having taken upwards of 30 a day, just to quiet her mind.

  In 1980, when she was 24, a doctor diagnosed her as bipolar. She thought he was just telling her that because who in his right mind would want to tell Princess Leia she was a garden-variety drug addict? When she was shooting the unbelievably awful Under the Rainbow, she weighed 90 pounds—I’m sure everyone thought she looked hot and fabulous—and was so sleep deprived that she had a seizure on the set.

  In 1985, after filming wrapped on Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters, she accidentally overdosed on the aforementioned Percocet and sleeping pills.