Essentially he truly understood that he’d really blown it with me—I mean blown it with all of his kids, but I like to think he regretted his lack of relationship with me the most. Not that that’s necessarily true. It’s just that it’s never too late to want to be the favorite.
Near the end he was doing all he could to get to know me, everything from hugging me tighter than any man had ever hugged me in my life to calling me fifteen times a week. I mean, if when I was young, I had gotten even one of those calls a month, I would’ve been over the moon. I talked to him on the Fourth of July, a few months before he died, from Jackson Hole, Wyoming, where I was on vacation with a few friends, and I was telling him all the stuff we were doing—river rafting and fireworks and all this other cool stuff—and when I finished he said, “I wish I had your life.” To which I replied, “You did, Daddy. That’s why you’re in bed.” And the great thing was that he totally got it. It wasn’t just something I was saying for my own amusement that whizzed over his head, and that I would tell my friends about later. My dad had a real sense of humor, and on top of that he had this huge appreciation for irony. He was packed to the gills with a hunger for fun. FUNGER! The guy was loaded with it, that and especially in the end so, so much more.
When my father died, I lost something I never had. Something I sort of got in the bottom of the ninth. But by then things were reversed. I was the parent, to the point that sometimes he even called me Mommy.
But you know what? What was great was that if he loved you—and he truly did love me, maybe he especially loved me even more in his desperate state—he could make you feel that your world lit up brighter than any star, movie or otherwise. More than almost anything this was a joyous man, which is the thing I truly realized about him right in time to lose it. But at least I had it to lose. Which was for me, in the end, the thing. Ultimately I’m grateful that we connected at all. Because a little of him was a whole lot for me. Not really enough, of course, but a big bunch of something essential.
I did an interview recently where I was talking about, of all things, myself. And I said that sometimes I felt like I was more a persona than a person, designed more for public than private, and I illustrated this notion with the thing that Cary Grant famously said: “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant, even me.” And the interviewer said, “Yeah, but no one really wants to be Carrie Fisher.”
I mean, he said it in the nicest way possible, and I completely understood what he meant. “Well, you know, actually there is an area where you should want to be Carrie Fisher,” I told him. Because there is something in me that is joyous, that’s joyful. I don’t hate hardly ever, and when I love, I love for miles and miles. A love so big it should either be outlawed or it should have a capital and its own currency.
And that, along with an unfortunate affinity for illegal substances and a diagnosis of manic depression, are among the many gifts bequeathed genetically by my father.
The man Eddie and I forged a relationship from common characteristics that most people don’t actually covet and some of these characteristics were immaturity, forgetfulness, a perhaps unhealthy fondness for shopping (continuing to make purchases long past the point that we could afford to) and an enthusiasm for the altered state that bordered on suicidal. Not that we went to those lengths while in one another’s company, but there was an unspoken understanding that we were willing to go to any lengths in our attempt to escape experiencing any and all intense and/or unwelcome feeling (i.e., the high) that’s simply not otherwise inescapably low.
So this is what we shared in addition to brown eyes, good singing voices, and kidney stones. This is what we shared instead of a wealth of common experience and history. We shared a love for escape from reality, a sense that any reality one found oneself in could, and should, be improved. And for a long while, that was enough, perhaps because it had to be and partly because I finally realized that the way to have a satisfying, even fulfilling, certainly reliable and predictable relationship with my dad was for me to take care of him. To make him feel loved, appreciated and understood. To parent my parent was the pathway to my relationship with Eddie Fisher, my old Pa-pa. Enough of a relationship to where I miss him now. A lot. And I miss him in a very different way than how I missed him throughout my childhood.
Then I missed the idea of him. Now I miss the man—my dad.
Carrie Fisher, Eddie Fisher and Todd Fisher, nude from the waist down.
The last picture in the book.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank my dad for staying alive long enough for me to have a relationship worth savoring (but I can’t thank him because he passed away).
I’d like to thank my mother—so I will! Thank you, Mama, I mean, who’s a more bitchen parent than you, right? Seriously, there are no words. There are, however, a few dance moves.
Thanks to my brother Todd, his loyal cat, my Uncle Bill, Trisha and Joely and their respective clan, which pretty much covers things on the immediate family front.
Thanks to Clancy Immusland for the years of keeping me so close to sanity, I can sometimes feel the breezes.
Thanks to Garret, my familiar, my memory and without whom I would be something—but the sum of that wouldn’t be as high (but I might be).
Thanks to Gloria Grayton and Mary Douglas French, without whom I hope I’ll never have to find out how close to nothing I’d be.
Thanks to my old, but not elderly, friend Paul Slansky, who’s been known to save me from myself, or someone just as short.
And finally I’d like to thank my tribe: Bruce Wagner (for the title, for wanting to be a nurse, and for knowing what a lie is), Dave Mirkin (innovator of the “blurse” phenomenon—hybrid of blessing and curse), Cyndi Sayre (my souped-up new improved savior), Michael Tolkin, Wendy Mogel, Melissa North, Edgar and Rachel Phillips, Fred “the fixer” Bimbler, Roy Teeluck, Abe Gurko, Chas Weston, Michael Gonzales, Gale and Nikki Rich, Quinn Tivey, Nancy Braun, Teresa Crites, Kerry Jones, Dr. Jeff Wilkins, Dr. Barry Kramer, Bryan, Bruce & Ava, Penny, Bev, Sean, Salman, Melan, Max, G deB of Fee and Gee, Griplin, Helen, Nichols, Marcus, Graham, Ruby, Rufus, Buck, James B., Corby, Cynthia, Art, Merle, Carol, Steve, the Cohens, AWK & Co. and the Godchildren (James Goodman, Little Ed, Dash, Olivia and Anton), and my father’s nurses: Sarah and Augie and everyone else from the far flung east.
Turn the page for an excerpt
from Carrie Fisher’s
“wickedly funny” (USA Today) memoir
WISHFUL DRINKING
The New York Times bestseller that inspired her hit one-woman Broadway show
“Fisher makes each crushing tragedy hilarious.”
—People (4-star review)
Spoken like a true princess.”
—Elle
INTRODUCTION:
AN ABUNDANCE OF APPARENTLYS
So I am fifty-two years old. (Apparently.) Actually, that’s more verifiable than the rest of it. I’d better start off with certainties. Here are the headlines (head—in so many ways—being the operative word):
I am fifty-two years old.
I am Carrie Fisher.
I live in a really nice house in Los Angeles.
I have two dogs.
I have a daughter named Billie.
Carrie Fisher is apparently a celebrity of sorts. I mean, she was (is) the daughter of famous parents. One an icon, the other a consort to icons. Actually, that’s not completely fair. My father is a singer named Eddie Fisher. What was, in the ’50s, called a crooner. A crooner with many gold records. I only say my father is a consort because he’s really better known for his (not so) private life than the life he lived onstage. His scandals outshone his celebrity. Or you might say that his scandals informed his celebrity in such a way as to make him infamous.
My mother, Debbie Reynolds, was in what might be called iconic films—most notably, Singin’ in the Rain. But for whatever reason, when my parents hooked up it had an extraordinary impact on the masses who bought fan magazines. The m
edia dubbed them “America’s Sweethearts.” The idea of them electrified—their pictures graced the covers of all the tabloids of the day. They were adorable and as such were ogled by an army of eyes. So cute and cuddly and in some ways adorably average. The Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston of the late ’50s, only slightly more so—because they actually managed to procreate—making two tiny children to fill out the picture. Or pictures, as the case turned out to be. An All-American and photogenic family.
When I was younger, starting at about four, other children would ask me what it was like to be a movie star’s daughter. Once I was a little older and understood, to a certain extent, the nature of what celebrity meant, I would say, Compared to what? When I wasn’t a movie star’s daughter? When I lived with my normal, non-show business family, the Regulars (Patty and Lowell Regular of Scottsdale, Arizona)? All I’ve ever known is this sort of hot-house-plant existence, and I could tell from watching how normal people lived—normal people as depicted by Hollywood and burned into our consciousness—I understood that my life was unusual. Like many others, I grew up watching television shows like My Three Sons and The Partridge Family and The Real McCoys. And based on the lives depicted on those shows, I knew my life was a different sort of real. It was the only reality I knew, but compared to other folks—both on television and off—it eventually struck me as a little surreal, too. And eventually, too, I understood that my version of reality had a tendency to set me apart from others. And when you’re young you want to fit in. (Hell, I still want to fit in with certain humans, but as you get older you get a little more discriminating.) Well, my parents were professionally committed to sticking out, so all too frequently I found myself sticking out right along with them.
Now, I’m certainly not asking anyone to feel bad for me or suggest that my existence could be described as a predicament of some kind. I’m simply describing the dynamic that was at work during my formative years.
My parents were focus pullers—and when I say parents, I mean my mother, who raised me, and my father, who checked in from time to time.
I mean, if I came into a room and said, “You know how you saw your father more on TV than you did in real life?” I don’t think many people would say, “Oh my God! You, too!”
And by the same token, I have to ask you, how often do you say, “in real life”?
Like real life is this other thing, and we’re always trying to determine what’s going on in this distant, inaccessible, incomprehensible place.
“What are they like in real life?”
“That happened in real life? Really!”
Stuff like that.
• • •
I am truly a product of Hollywood. You might say that I’m a product of Hollywood inbreeding. When two celebrities mate, something like me is the result.
I grew up visiting sets, playing on backlots, and watching movies being made. As a consequence, I find that I don’t have what could be considered a conventional sense of reality. (Not that I’ve ever had much use for reality—having spent much of what I laughingly refer to as my adult life attempting to escape it with the assistance of a variety of drugs.)
So, as I said, my reality has been formed by Hollywood’s version of reality. As a child, I thought that Father Knows Best was real and that my life was fake. When I think about it now, I may not have been far wrong.
I tell you all of this as a newly made bystander. As I have been reintroduced into my world by electroconvulsive therapy (more commonly known as ECT for those oh-so-fortunately familiar with it and electroshock for those who are not)—reintroduced to my life at the ripe old age of fifty-two. My memory—especially my visual memory—has been wrenched from me. All of a sudden, I find that I seem to have forgotten who I was before. So, I need to reac-quaint myself with this sort of celebrity person I seem to be. Someone who was in an iconic, blockbuster film called Star Wars. (How trippy is that?)
One thing I do recall is that one day when I was a toddler, I sat planted closely to the television set watching my mother in a movie called Susan Slept Here. And, at a certain point there’s a scene where my very young mother tilts her face up to receive a kiss from Dick Powell. A kiss on the mouth. A romantic kiss. So, she has her eyes closed, waiting. But instead of kissing her on the mouth, Mr. Powell bends down and kisses her on the forehead. I sit there, registering this and then look quickly over my shoulder to see if anyone else had seen what I saw. To see if I should be more embarrassed for my mother than I already was. I tell you this to illustrate that I didn’t know the difference between movies and real life. In my life, they tended to overlap. Cary Grant (yes, the Cary Grant) became a family friend, even though he wasn’t precisely that. And characters that my mother played in movies became confused with the person who was and is my mother. So in a way, movies became home movies. Home became another place on the movie star map.
Later on, I worked out that my mother’s appearance in the classic film Singin’ in the Rain was not unlike my own appearance in Star Wars. When she made that film, she was nineteen and costarred with two men. I was also nineteen when I made Star Wars and appeared opposite two men. How this is relevant, I have no idea. Maybe I was just grasping around for a sense of continuity.
• • •
I emerge from my three-week-long ECT treatment to discover that I am not only this Princess Leia creature but also several-sized dolls, various T-shirts and posters, some cleansing items, and a bunch of other merchandise. It turns out I was even a kind of pin-up—a fantasy that geeky teenage boys across the globe jerked off to me with some frequency. How’s that for a newborn-how-do-you-do damsel in very little cinematic distress?
To wit, one afternoon in Berkeley I found myself walking into a shop that sold rocks and gems.
“Oh my God, aren’t you . . . ” the salesman behind the counter exclaimed.
And before he could go any further, I modestly said, “Yes, I am.”
“Oh my God! I thought about you every day from when I was twelve to when I was twenty-two.”
And instead of asking what happened at twenty-two, I said, “Every day?”
He shrugged and said, “Well, four times a day.”
Welcome to the land of too much information.
On top of all this celebrity parents and Star Wars stuff, apparently I was once married to a brilliant songwriter, a rock icon of sorts. I mean, this is a man who wrote an array of beautiful songs, and even a few songs that were about me. How incredible is that? And get this—I had always been a really big fan of his music. Huge. As a teen, it was just him and Joni Mitchell. And, as I couldn’t marry Joni, I married him. I loved this man’s lyrics. They were one of the reasons I fell in love with words.
How can you not love someone who writes “medicine is magical/and magical is art/ think of the boy in the bubble/and the baby with the baboon heart”? The answer for me was I couldn’t. I couldn’t not love him. I apprenticed myself to the best in him and bickered with the worst. And to top it off, we were the same size. I used to say to him, “Don’t stand next to me at the party—people will think we’re salt and pepper shakers.”
And wait’ll you hear this—I’ve written four novels. Seriously! And two of them were best sellers. My first novel, Postcards from the Edge, was adapted into a film directed by Mike Nichols, starring Shirley MacLaine and Meryl Streep, basically playing a sometimes better, sometimes worse, dolled-up version of my mother and myself.)
I could go on and on—because there are certainly a lot of other cool things. The coolest being that I’m the mother of this amazing daughter named Billie. She’s my most extraordinary creation.
It occurs to me that I might sound as though I’m boasting. I promise you I’m not. It’s just that ECT has forced me to rediscover what amounts to the sum total of my life. I find that a helluva lot of it fills me with a kind of giddy gratitude. Some of my memories will never return. They are lost—along with the crippling feeling of defeat and hopelessness. Not a tremendous price to p
ay when you think about it. Totally worth it!
But now that we’ve established that I’ve had ECT, I have a list that I thought I’d share. A list of the electroshock treatment gang who have also benefitted from ECT.
I do this because I find that I frequently feel better about myself when I discover that we’re not alone, but that there are, in fact, a number of other people who ail as we do—that there are actually a number of “accomplished” individuals who find it necessary to seek treatment for some otherwise insurmountable inner unpleasantness.
I not only feel better about myself because these people are also fucked up (and I guess this gives us a sense of extended community), but I feel better because look how much these fellow fuckups managed to accomplish!
So here are a portion of the folks with whom I share electrocompany:
Judy Garland
Bill Styron
Sylvia Plath
Cole Porter
Lou Reed
Vivien Leigh
Yves St. Laurent
Connie Francis
Ernest Hemingway
Dick Cavett
Kitty Dukakis
I should also add that a lot of these people also show up in the alcohol addict line-up and bipolar crew (chapter nine), giving some of these multi-listers and myself the admirable distinction of having a trifecta score.
These fine folks are:
Bill Styron
Vivien Leigh
Frances Farmer
Sylvia Plath
Ernest Hemingway
Dick Cavett
Kitty Dukakis
Yves St. Laurent
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