Shockaholic

by Carrie Fisher

  But it was when we filmed These Old Broads—a TV movie I wrote—that she finally actually did apologize, for real, to my mom. I mean, she’d sort of apologized before, but now my mother told me that she’d said, “I hope if there’s any outstanding . . . you know . . . whatever . . . I . . . ”

  Notorious withdrawn issue of gossip magazine that accidentally contained locations of nuclear power plants.

  No. (Permission: Dr. Dre Photo Archive)

  And as I watched I saw my mom following Elizabeth out of the trailer that day with tears in her eyes. It was a really nice gesture on Elizabeth’s part. I mean, you know, considering. And when Elizabeth discovered that my mother had become kind of a potty mouth, things became much easier between them. They could really be motherfucking friends again.

  A few years before Elizabeth died, we were on the phone, and I asked her “Did you love my father?”

  After the smallest of pauses she said, “We kept Mike Todd alive.”

  The last time I spoke to Elizabeth, she called to get my father’s number because she was going to try to make amends with him or something. Apparently you get to a certain age and, if you’re still alive, you want to contact people from your past. I realized recently that Elizabeth and Eddie were married for the same amount of time as my mom and Eddie. And that whole clusterfuck of choices completely ruined his career. Just slaughtered it. Well, that and the fact that he shot speed for thirteen years—another distinction for me. I mean, who else in my class could say, “Dad, show everyone your tracks!”

  The thing is, my parents weren’t really people in the traditional sense. I think this was partly because they were stars before their peopleness had a chance to form itself. The studio essentially designed my mom—they taught her to talk, had her ears surgically pinned back, shaved her eyebrows (which never grew back) and changed her name. Made her into this celebrity someone, new and improved. A STAR!

  My dad’s big break happened at fourteen, which was when he was discovered by Eddie Cantor while he was singing in the Catskills. Cantor put him on his radio show, which led to him getting a record contract with RCA. A few years later, he was drafted into the Army and served his country by entertaining the troops. (There was no way my father was gonna be caught with a gun in his hand, unless we’re talking about a chocolate-scented euphemism.)

  While he was in Germany, he’d apparently seen my mother in Singing in the Rain, so when he was asked, “What’s the first thing you want when you get back to America,” he said, “I want Debbie Reynolds.” So, fast as a bullet to a bad guy, a publicist simply set it up. Arranged for them to meet at a Hollywood restaurant, and from that point—I mean really from the very first few minutes—people were watching them. On their fourth date, the publicist arranged for the two cute stars to go to Yankee Stadium. As they entered the stadium, thirty thousand people stood and cheered. And that was it—the game was ON.

  My mother was twenty-two, my dad twenty-six. She was known as a good girl, so he became her adorable other half. It took a lot of years for him to be known as this womanizing, drug-addled rake. It’s hard to know if he ever really loved her. I think he did in his youthful, infatuated way. I do know that they both loved being adored by millions of people they’d never meet. Who wouldn’t? I mean, except somebody secure and sane. They just happened to be treasured as a twosome. She was this really pretty, famous girl who everyone seemed to agree was adorably fun and desirable, so you gotta figure that if everybody else wanted her, well, then, he probably did, too. Right?

  Eddie (left) and Debbie, sometime following the invention of electricity.

  Debbie (left) and Eddie, not on Jupiter. (Dog, Dwight, just out of frame.)

  Everyone just seemed to love the notion of my dad and my mom together. I mean, look at them—he had black hair, she had blond hair. He could sing, she could dance. And they both had pearly white teeth—not only pearly white, but also über straight—and to top it all off, neither one was a hunchback, which put them way ahead of a small but significant portion of the population right there. Bottom line: the two of them looked like a perfect teensy couple that could be found perched optimistically on a wedding cake.

  They were good for show business, so what the hell, they just went with it. I honestly think they were just kind of swept along. I don’t think they really had any idea who the other one was. What they did know was that they had a big impact on a lot of people when they were together. They were America’s Sweethearts, they embodied the American ideal, they belonged to the fans who had invested all this energy in their unbelievably cute coupleness. So, when it all went so incredibly wrong, people felt betrayed.

  I really think there was a point when one—or maybe both of them, but certainly him—kind of said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a second. How did we end up here! Whose idea was it to fucking get married?” But by then they’d been cast as husband and wife in the most popular early version of a reality show ever. So in a way, they kind of lost their vote in the whole thing. I’ll bet they spent more time together in front of the camera than they did when the cameras weren’t around. Certainly the time in front was probably a lot more fun.

  More old nostalgic magazine covers . . .

  . . . than anyone could possibly . . .

  . . . give a shit about in their entire lives.

  So there you go. This was the dream, that elusive fantabulous American dream. The dream where these two little ordinary anybodies from nowhere all of a sudden had everything, demonstrating perfectly what was not only possible in America, but what was great about it! Two poor kids who had just pulled themselves up by their bootstraps meet, fall in love, have a few children, and BOOM! Happily ever after the deluge!

  Cut to a million years later and now one of those two children of that couple with their wonderful life was twenty-one and living in New York, and one day she was taking this cooking class from some Yugoslavian woman who felt that it was not only necessary but important to tell her, “I hate your father. He is a not good, very very bad, mean, mean man. Your mother, she is an angel—a good woman, yes?” She shook her head emphatically and repeated, “Your father, him I hate. Also the woman who is Elizabeth Taylor, no good. You cannot trust a lady like that. A lady with the black hair.” She made a spitting sound. It was as though she wasn’t talking about real people, and certainly not real people who were related to me and who maybe it might not be appropriate to speak about like that.

  • • •

  You know how when people pass away they leave instructions as to what to do with what remains? I believe they’re referred to as “wills”—but then so is one of those two princes in Great Britain.

  True to form, my father continued to neglect his parental duties in death as he did in life. No last will and testament, no wishes or instructions on where he wished to be buried or however else his remains or possessions should be disposed of, was found among his effects. This could be because he essentially left nothing behind, but I also think that, having never done anything that could be misconstrued for some kind of responsible act, why start now? Why begin at the end?

  So without any last wishes to guide us, Eddie’s offspring—myself, Joely and Trisha (Todd having chosen not to attend the division of my father’s lack of spoils)—descended on his little Berkeley cottage overlooking the bay. The nice thing about all this was there was nothing for the three of us to fight over. Oh, there was a piano, an assortment of sheet music, a closet full of clothes that hadn’t been worn in over a decade, a watch, and the one item ultimately worth coveting—my dad’s diamond pinky ring that he’d worn for as long as any of us could remember.

  This famously flashy multi-faceted diamond ring was the one and only item that any of us wanted. And I thought it only fair(ish) that, since I was the main one of us to look after him in his declining years, this ring should go to me, and then eventually to my uniquely spectacular child.

  A few years prior to his final decline, I’d moved my dad from his San Franc
isco apartment which was located on a hill directly across the street from Grace Cathedral and reinstalled him in a little white house in the Berkeley hills with a spectacular view of the bay and bridge, all of whose charms were, alas, lost to my ailing parent, whose gaze remained faithfully fixed on the iconic vistas of CNN. Eventually I realized that I’d simply moved him from one bedroom on one side of the Bay Bridge to another bedroom on the other. But while he may not have been impressed with the view, he had become much more involved with me. Or was it me that had gotten more involved with him? The bottom line—one of the few my father failed to snort—is that we had both become increasingly involved with one another, finally and for the first time in our once strangely uninvolved lives.

  Somewhere along this line I finally found that maybe I had to stop waiting around for him to give me something he probably didn’t—at least not in any conventional sense—actually have to give. But, what if that turned out to be enough! Or how about if it were more than I could have ever imagined getting—especially given how low, bordering on nonexistent, my expectations actually were. But there I was, looking after him in those last however many years. I talked to his doctors, keeping in constant contact not only with him, but with his ever-changing, reliably constant rotation of Asian caregivers who not only rolled his joints, changed his jammies, administered his medication, and fed him his meals, but also routinely scrubbed the age lines that regularly creased his pale worn skin till it seemed to return to its former appearance of being both shiny and uncommonly smooth.

  The ladies held on to both his watch and pinky ring for me after they’d been removed following his recent unsuccessful surgery. And holding his ring in the flat of my hand, I remembered the square-shaped stone sparkle as he nervously gripped my upper arm as we stood dead center stage at the Berkeley Repertory Theatre, where I had been performing my show Wishful Drinking. On this particular evening my father had attended my show, accompanied by his two nurses Sarah and Augy, his dealer Randy (naturally), and his little dog Minnie. The audience applauded wildly as I stood beside my beaming father, his head hunched over and his left leg jiggling nervously. When the applause finally subsided, I leaned down to him and whispered, “Do you want to sing ‘If I Loved You?’ ” I asked him this tentatively, with my shoulders scrunched up high, and he began to laugh, his eyes shining.

  “Of course!” he replied enthusiastically.

  So, I held my hand up in order to silence the cheering crowd and told them, “My dad and I are going to sing the song we always sang together, ever since I was a little girl. It’s the song ‘If I Loved You’ from the show Carousel.” And as the audience’s clapping and cheering once more subsided, I kneeled down next to him, my face upturned to his and, with his gaze fixed tightly to mine and after a hush no bigger than your fist, we began to sing—face to face, voice to voice, each wound round the other, father and daughter, two voices, no waiting, one song. My father, wheelchair-bound at my side, riding the song to the end of its harmonious journey. And as the last note slowly faded back to silence, the crowd rose to its feet as one, cheering. My father sat quite still, holding my hand, seemingly absorbing his ovation. Then he began oh so slowly to rise until he was standing upright, miraculously, as if he’d somehow been healed by show business. Raised up to the heavens, mobile, and in somehow perfect health. Whole again. The crowd had loved him till he was healthy, happy, and home free.

  I wore the ring to his memorial, on the middle finger of my right hand. His send-off was a small affair attended by his three daughters, this one mournful ex-wife, and a couple of comics. The sad gathering was naturally held in the exclusive private back room of Factor’s, a West Side deli located on Pico Boulevard. We all mingled beneath an array of photos of Eddie laughing with beautiful women or singing in clubs or on TV. My half sisters periodically snuck covetous looks at Eddie’s ring glittering smugly on my hand, knowing on some secret level of the Fisher family language that it belonged to all of us, and that one day each of us would look down at our hands and there it would shine. “Oh, that’s at least five or six karats,” one untrained observer studying my stubby little hand told me, while another, looking doubtful, his brow furrowed seriously, volunteered, “I’d say it’s ten, and I know my diamonds,” prompting a third to say, “That thing is worth at least fifty grand, and I’m being conservative. I mean, who knows how much this thing could turn out to be worth?”

  Well, it turned out that someone did. A few weeks after this, I not quite unexpectedly found myself doing my show in Australia, and one day, while shopping in one of their malls one afternoon in a jewelry shop specializing in fire opals, I suddenly thought, Hey! Who better to appraise my dad’s ring than a jeweler with one of those 10x magnifying eyepiece things?

  At first this particular jeweler hemmed and hawed awkwardly, a timid predator circling his distracted prey. As I watched, he turned the ring slowly, squinting at the stone, studying it carefully, turning it back and forth and back and forth. He finally spoke, still examining the gem in his hand. “This could be as much as ten karats,” he offered. My eyes widened. I looked at my friend Garret, whose eyebrows also climbed northward toward his hairline and beyond to the blue Sydney skies.

  Suddenly the jeweler’s voice changed slightly. “Oooooh, wait. Hang on a tick,” he suggested. And so we waited—I mean, really, what were our options? “I’m beginning to notice these . . . uh . . . what would they be? . . . little chips around the edge near the center, which . . . Well, if it were actually a diamond . . . ” He lifted his head and gave me a look, a combination of concern, guilt, and apology. “Well, you see, if it were actually a diamond . . . there wouldn’t be any chips is all.” I hesitated, gradually absorbing this new information, and then I began slowly nodding, a smile spreading across my not-that-amazed face. Perfect. There you go. This totally made absolute Eddie Fisher sense. “Would you like to have a look?” the jeweler offered gently, holding his magnifying glass sympathetically toward me.

  I held up the palm of my hand to convey my low level of need to confirm that my father’s ring turned out to not be the hoped-for legacy of not quite inestimable value, but was, instead, seven or eight karats of cubic zirconium.

  The thing is, I loved my dad. I mean, the man was beyond fun to hang out with, appreciative, playful, and eccentrically sweet. He was all those things and a whole lot more, but this was also a man who—though he genuinely meant to give bona fide diamonds of only the finest color, cut, and clarity—ultimately was only able to offer cubic zirconium. But hey, a ring’s a ring however you cut it, right? I mean, karats or no, the thing sparkles. The main thing is, finally, that my dad wore this ring for years and years and years until the end of his long lovable lunatic ride. So if you see any of my siblings, could you tell them about the ring not being real? I’m sorry, but I just can’t seem to bring myself to break this one last, teeny bit of hilarious exciting news. Not that I think any of them will ultimately be any more surprised than I was. I mean, there is just something so perfect, so right, so Eddie about this news.

  He came to me in a dream one night while I was in Sydney on tour Down Under, with my now one-and-a-half-woman show. It was the night before my birthday and, after watching an enjoyable documentary on serial murderers, I took my meds and drifted off to sleep. I dreamt my father was alive again and particularly wanted to let me know how pissed he was that I had his ring. Keeping my eye on the bigger picture here I said, “But we embalmed you! How could you have survived that?” I mean the man sounded fantastic, albeit pissed about how he’d been treated in death. Ringwise, that is. “Tell you what!” I said. “Next time write a fucking will that gives us ANY kind of instruction on what you want done! And who you want to do it!” Then I attempted to shift gears. Where were my manners? The man was back from the dead! “Wait till you see some of your obituaries! They were totally awesome! Seriously! I mean, there was even all this stuff about you knowing presidents and everything! Elizabeth Taylor even cried when I told her!”r />
  Somehow, though, none of this alleviated his irritation. I told him how glad I was that he was alive. His death had upset me so much. Then I realized that all the people who had sent me their condolences would probably write me again, wanting the details on how he had outlived death. What was his secret? I called my half sisters, Joely and Trisha, to tell them, but they already knew—it had been on the news—and they were en route to see him at the house I had rented for him in Berkeley. I tried and tried but couldn’t reach my brother, no matter what combination of numbers I employed. I wouldn’t be able to go see him for a while, because I was in Australia doing my show, but I knew now that I would have to send him back his ring.

  • • •

  In his later years Eddie had come to realize that he was a very bad father (though, to his credit, unlike Harry, I don’t think I ever heard him pass gas). His less than commendable paternal skills were never far from his mind, and you have to give him a lot of credit for acknowledging that. I know I do. I mean, he truly knew that any attention I gave him during the last few years of his life was not of a reciprocal nature. I was caring for him not because I was expected to but because I wanted to. Because he so enjoyed my visits that it was a pleasure to give them to him and my pleasure increased his even more. He appreciated being taken care of, and it was largely for that reason that I did it.