Carrie Retakes Hollywood

JOAN JULIET

The daughter of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher survived her Holly wood-hell childhood by putting it all down on paper. And with the movie release of her first novel and the publication of her second, she's becoming L.A.'s Dorothy Parker. JOAN JULIET BUCK reports

Carrie Fisher's first public appearance was in Life magazine, as an angry toddler in her mother's arms. Her father had just run off with another woman. The fact that her mother was Debbie Reynolds and her father was Eddie Fisher and the other woman was Elizabeth Taylor, the recently bereaved widow of Mike Todd, set the unpleasant family drama in the undefended territory of public events.

There are few ways to grow up under such scrutiny; a child either tries to ignore the whole thing and move to a remote state, or gives in to the public pressure to live out high emotions and goes flaming into car crashes, drugs, and bad marriages. Carrie Fisher took a different approach: war reporting. "I'm at the front lines of my own personality, doomed to report the tragic stuff I feel obliged to engage in."

She would be the first to admit it. Whatever it might be. "I had dinner with Jamie Lee Curtis once, and it was hilarious. I just said, 'Womanizer druggie father, cute feisty mom—go figure, go fish, go Fisher.' " Her grasp of irony demolishes moments and leaves only the steaming comic core, a talent that was less apparent when she was playing Princess Leia in Star Wars than it is now. Next month, Simon and Schuster is publishing her second book, Surrender the Pink. A shocking title to some. "One day a friend of mine—male—jumped on me and said, 'All right, baby, spread 'em. Surrender the pink.' I thought it had great rhythm. Although I heard it pomographically, I use it metaphorically, as in, Give up the female side." The book is a chronicle of an obsession, and has already been bought for the movies for $1 million. Her first book was Postcards from the Edge, and it is being released as a film this fall, with her own screenplay, directed by Mike Nichols. Meryl Streep plays a drug-ridden actress, and Shirley MacLaine an alcoholic singer mother. Although Postcards, which earned Fisher comparisons to Nora Ephron, Erica Jong, Joan Didion, and Woody Allen, was written after her rehabilitation from drugs, and set partly in a rehab clinic, she says that neither of her books is really autobiographical.

She describes her childhood as "anecdotal hell— good anecdota, bad reality."

A publisher asked her if she could make the parents in Postcards a singer and an actress. "I said, 'Schmuck, if I make them a bartender and a bowling coach, people are still going to think it's Debbie and Eddie.' "

Last February there was a tribute to Mike Nichols at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. All evening long, actors in evening clothes had been making touching speeches. The effort to be in the Nichols genre—a wisecrack from a higher, perhaps even alien, intelligence— was beginning to tell. While it is common practice, indeed the merest politeness, in show business to express love, when it came to expressing love for Mike Nichols the speakers sensed that the sentiment should come out with some awareness of the bitter fatuity of love. No one managed to carry this off until Meryl Streep appeared in close-up on a huge screen, dressed in fatuous, loving pink, and began a tribute that was a veritable swamp of consciousness.

"I've made three movies with Mike, and I don't think I've ever done three things in a row, except three meals a day. . . .

I've also had three children, and that's a lot like making a movie. There's a lot of the same worries. Will it have legs? Will it go wide? How will it do domestic, and what if it goes foreign?" The paying audience began to laugh and didn't stop, pathetically grateful to be entertained in the spirit of irony rather than lectured in the spirit of sentimentality. The monologue exploded the tribute form from the inside, exposing the previous speeches as me-too hot air. It saved the evening.

The writer hovered in the frame, a small person dressed in a makeup woman's overblouse, occasionally prompting Streep, who would whisper, "Who am I talking about?" "Mike. Mike." "Oh yes, Mike." She was uncredited, but many in the room knew that it could be only one person: Carrie Fisher.

I met her shortly after that; my oldest friend took me to a party at her house in Los Angeles, a gnomelike series of logcabin rooms arranged randomly around a well-tended garden full of weatherproof toys. It was a strange night, cold, a little wet, with that hush that comes from people conserving heat. There was a preponderance of men, and a low proportion of anxious divorcees. Among the knots of people waiting for southern-fried chicken were rock stars, producers, comedians, all of them intent on the hostess rather than on cruising for new flesh. It was Eric Idle's birthday party; Buck Henry and Dan Melnick, Nell Campbell and Sabrina Guinness, Ed Begley Jr., J. D. Souther, Daniel Day Lewis, George Harrison, and Tom Petty wandered in and out of the shadows, and out on the deck, in the dark, in sunglasses, sat Bob Dylan. Guests had trouble going out there. Meryl Streep finally braved the aura and calmly sat beside him.

"Did you speak to Dylan?" Carrie Fisher asked everyone—a challenge, not a question. A small, slim woman of thirty-three, she hardly looks like the person who comes up with lines such as "I'm retaining water for several people and promised to get it home by midnight." Her presentation is oddly urban for a child of Hollywood; the hair is short and well cut, sophisticated rather than androgynous, and a fondness for little black dresses combined with the deep, loud voice of a Broadway singer makes her seem more like a stage star of the fifties than a former member of the Saturday Night Live gang.

Legend has it that Carrie Fisher's first line on-screen, delivered to Warren Beatty in Shampoo, was "You wanna fuck?" In fact, her first line was "You're here to see my mother," followed by a persistent interrogation along the lines of "Are you gay? Are you queer? Well, are you? Are you queer? You can tell me, don't be afraid." The shock value of Debbie Reynolds's seventeen-year-old daughter uttering these lines established Carrie Fisher as a public iconoclast. Her face was made rounder by a head scarf of the sort teenagers used to wear when they hadn't washed their hair, but there was an angry awareness beneath the puppy flesh, a wry distance from the words. Buck Henry, who knew her then, says, "That was a perfect job of casting. It's an amazing piece of Carrie, pure and undiluted." He describes her as being, at the time, "like a little cannonball, going in every direction— such a funny, hot little number."

She was bom in St. Joseph's Hospital, in Burbank. "I'm Debbie and Eddie's little girl, and I'm not supposed to be able to be taken seriously," she says. "When I was bom, Eddie passed out and the nurse went to him, and my mother passed out and the doctor went to her, so I was bom relatively unattended. They were centers of attention; I'm a good off to center. ' '

"I was always drawn to people who looked like I felt, an outcast, ready to leave!'

She has always been a watchful, critical presence. "Lucille Ball, when she came over, said, 'Is Carrie mad at me?' I was, like, three. I was intense." She still is. Charles Wessler, director of music-video production at MCA and a friend of hers since childhood, says, "She raises your level, and your brain starts to work harder, faster, better. It's like an adrenaline rush. You have to join in or just go home." Griffin Dunne, who roomed with her when she was nineteen, agrees:

"She raises the riff factor. You become shtick masters." Lauren Bacall, who was in Appointment with Death with her, describes her as "the most extraordinary feminine brain I've ever come across."

Mike Nichols calls her "a born screenwriter, with tremendous wit and finesse and imagination—and small enough so that if there's a physical altercation I can handle her. We're used to skinny dialogues; with her the ironies are thrown away so fast you can't pin her, yet she's always serious." I suggested to Nichols that her work might bear some resemblance to his duologues with Elaine May. "We were more University of Chicago snotty," he said. "Her combination of intelligence and education and show-biz smart-ass is different. She is of a different time and place."

Her mastery is in the encapsulating one-liner, which is, ultimately, a preemptive strike at anyone who might try to beat her to a description of herself. A new form of punctuation and typeface needs to be invented for transcribing her, a combination of the Spanish exclamation mark that precedes statements of surprise, and capital italics to denote that words are to be taken ironically. And then there is the isn't-that-nice? reading she gives to certain lines—"So this is Los Angeles?" "Shakespeare died drunk in a gutter—really/"—which is supercilious, absurd, wonderful.

She is quick to describe herself as "a walking fortune cookie, full of unapplied insights which are only good for repartee," and her childhood as "anecdotal hell—good anecdote, bad reality." Indeed, she often admits to the danger of being a walking anecdote, a "Mobius striptease," and as she talks it becomes evident that she is bonding you as a fellow outsider; reality falls away.

Carrie and her brother, Todd, grew up without their father. "He was barely a presence, and as for Elizabeth Taylor, I think we had lunch with her once." She describes her parents as "extraordinary ordinary people, South Philly and El Paso—wrong side of the tracks, the Mexican side." Her mother was a gymnast who wanted to be a gym teacher; her father, left to his own devices, would have been a cantor. "I grew up on the backslide of fame. I was bom into big celebrity, and it could only diminish. By the time I was a teenager, my mother was going to play in nightclubs, and my father was doing the same sort of thing."

When Carrie was four, Debbie Reynolds married a shoe tycoon named Harry Karl, a man perceived as her civilian savior until his debts absorbed all her earnings. "My mother always said, 'It's not devastating, dear, compared to the end of the world.' ii What! This! Is! The! End! Of! The! World!! No money, and then the next day we inherited three stepchildren. Changes I perceived as: No! Less stuff! Less! Stuff!" The condition endures: "There is no plateau where you think, I'll just sit here and relax, finally. All the shit that got you to that plateau is not going to make you someone who is able to kick back and say, 'I'll just enjoy this section and then I'll work it again.' You're always working it, and you always know there is no there here."

The original here in which there was no there was a large house on Greenway in Beverly Hills, with a small log cabin in the back built by Carrie's uncle Bill as her retreat. Charles Wessler was one of her early admirers: "When she was thirteen, fourteen, there'd be ten young men waiting in the living room for Carrie to come out of her playhouse, men who were all deeply in love with her, all trying to win her attention. She was the most sexy, adorable fourteen-year-old— cute like you can't believe. We'd all be waiting, and there'd also be a singing teacher, and then we'd hear this deep belting voice singing some show tune, and then she'd come out and say, 'O.K., let's hang out.' "

Debbie Reynolds took Carrie on the road when she was thirteen; Todd stayed with their stepfather. In Reynolds's nightclub act, Carrie was done up in antique lace, with a lace cap, while her mother was "glittery." "My mother was beautiful and funny and young-acting. I always felt like this pigpen disheveled minion next to her." The musical Irene was then revived as a vehicle for her mother, and at sixteen Carrie went into its chorus, sharing dressing rooms with disillusioned grown-up women.

She dropped out of the Professional Children's School in the eleventh grade. "I was writing my journals in those Kahlil Gibran hardbound books, writing lyrics—'You took my breath away / And now I want it back'—that I've been trying to give away for years. I wanted to be Dorothy Parker. I liked Stan Laurel, Lenny Bruce. I read all the time, but I'm incapable of telling you the names of the authors or the plots or why I liked them. I can't remember anything. To my mother I must have been some sort of weird monster, because I used to write her letters telling her what she should do with her life.

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"People wanted me to go on doing this nightclub stuff, like Liza Lorna junior, but my mother insisted that I go to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London. When I went to England, it was great, because it was the only unobserved time I had in my life. I had my English boyfriend, and we'd smoke and have those yellow stains on our fingers and do Chekhov and Ibsen and fencing and whatever the hell I did—and nobody was there. I was going around with packs of people from Central and was, to the degree that I ever was, NOT SOMEBODY'S KID

NECESSARILY."

But she already had an agent, the same agent who had represented Debbie Reynolds when she was seventeen—"The apple not only doesn't fall far from the tree, it has its mother's core"—and before her two years at Central were up, she had been cast as Princess Leia in Star Wars. "I felt like I shouldn't be in the picture, because the princess was described as staggeringly beautiful. I just felt I had to keep very quiet or they'd know they'd made a mistake and fire me. The area I kept most quiet in was when they put that stupid Swedish Aztec insane-asylum hair on me, and I said, 'It's fine.'"

When she returned from London, she moved into maid's quarters at the Hotel des Artistes in Manhattan with Griffin Dunne, who says, "I was a waiter at Beefsteak Charlie's. She'd done this oddsounding movie. It never occurred to her it would do well, and then things happened very, very fast—the phones rang off the hook all day, all night. She would get ridiculous expensive flower arrangements from men in limousines who were obsessively in love with her. People would try to get ahold of me to find out how to seduce her. 'Just pretend you're not interested,' I'd say. Our deal confused the hell out of people."

Despite the testimony of her friends as to her unending number of suitors, she seems to enjoy presenting herself as somewhat lovelorn. One of her recurring themes—in conversation, riff, and fiction—could be entitled "Come On, Be a Man, Deprive Me."

It was through Griffin that she met John Belushi, who brought her into the Saturday Night Live pack. "I was the new girl in New York," she says. "I looked like a Kewpie doll, and I sounded like hell. I came out into this high social intelligentsia—such as it is when it's show business." Through Belushi she met the writer Tom Schiller, Lome Michaels, and Paul Simon.

"I got involved with Paul, fast," she says. "I met him in April, and by the summer I was in Greece with him." She was twenty-one when they met, she married him five years later, and they were divorced two years after that.

"I had too much personality for one person and not quite enough for two."

She made two more Star Wars movies, Under the Rainbow (a movie with dwarfs), and The Blues Brothers, and she traveled constantly, to Japan, Europe, Africa. "I felt frightened I wasn't keeping up with something."

Before she wrote her first book, she had been addicted to Percodan and deeply fond of acid, had been rehabilitated, and had gone into what she calls "the lonely perspective years. It's as if after the first part of my life, at age twenty-eight, they drew a line under me and tallied it. I had too much personality for one person and not quite enough for two. In Fitzgerald there's the man who was waiting for events to fill him up—I was waiting for them to drain out of me. There's a line of Jerry Garcia's about heroin: 'It cuts away care.' I cared very much, and I wanted apathetic indifference. I'm jammed full of my reaction to wherever I am and my need to convey it, to a degree that is unsettling. That is what propels me, and it's constant; whether it's positive or negative, it's extreme. Maybe, growing up in an observed situation, at a certain point I wanted to watch, too, so I became watched and watching, and if you're doing both you're running between the two poles all the time. My body chemistry does roll around. It's what they can end up diagnosing as a bipolar disorder—and the now Bill Styron made famous—all of us with the phantom flow of serotonin/norepinephrine. Neither a lender nor an epinephrine be. I don't think there's a general rule; there's a lieutenant and a corporal rule."

She is at a wooden table in her garden, where she has arranged herself in a Hollywood curl on a wooden garden chair in a New York dress, a short sleeveless number that hardly lends itself to relaxed West Coast contortions. The afternoon is beautiful, sunny and clear and warm; the two parrots—Joan and Dean—are fairly silent in the back hall, and Buddy, the overweight dog, is behaving. We each have a large glass of Coca-Cola. "We always had Coke in the house," she says. "My father did Coke Time in more ways than one." The riff takes on its own velocity, and although nothing in Fisher's physical position denotes anything out of the ordinary, the words join up like crazed amoebas, a law unto themselves. She talks about her body's "schedule of effervescence." "I was always trying to get the right combination of chemicals, where you'd feel fine, or now the right combination of humans, where you'll feel appropriate. You're always trying to get over the plate. There is no over the plate. There is no plate. There are spoons, however, and a knife. .." She looks over at me. When the jokes and puns come like this, it's exhausting and a little unnerving. "I'm high-strung," she says. "There are nice little ways of putting it."

Separating the factual, flesh-and-blood Carrie Fisher from her abstract representations of herself in print is utterly thankless. "I'm a mind reader, engaged in reading my own mind," she had said over the telephone. It turned out to be a line from Surrender the Pink. "My defense was always, Once I can say it, it no longer is me," she says. "It's a way of getting it away from you. But if it's an unsaid experience that I'm floundering around in— that's me. I've been in relay shrink toss since I was fifteen." She has done Jungian, Freudian, est.

She wrote her first book with the help of Paul Slansky, a close friend, whom she hired to be her editor. "It was really fun. I could call him in the middle of the night and read him stuff, and he would be around. He had always been this great witness to the spectacle that was me, and this was at a time in my life when it was truly Berlin in 1945—but it was still burning."

She claims to feel generally inappropriate. "I feel like a spy in the house of— hey! it's my house. I go into the closet and look at these little clothes... Oh, no! These are mine!" For all her feelings of dislocation, her protests that she truly is an alien, Carrie Fisher is known for bountiful, even inappropriate, generosity. People she doesn't know well become houseguests, her parties are renowned for the food, and she is always giving. Charles Wessler recalls that, as a schoolchild, Carrie would take a gang to the Luau and buy mounds of hors d'oeuvres, "because we were too young to drink." When she was in high school, she paid Griffin Dunne's way to L.A. so that he could spend a weekend with his girlfriend at the Hyatt on Sunset. "What I did," she says, "was to create a very homey personality, so I had a portable world that was me, that people could fit into very easily, and I would draw them around the roaring fire of my being." The ordinary, she says, is her fantasy. "I want to do what human beings do. Actors and movie stars do it too, only they do it larger and in better clothes. They're all spoiled. I think you get used to just getting what you want, in other areas, and it tends to leak. You get dissatisfied, and you have the money to service that dissatisfaction." She makes a large point of disliking the way she looks: "I'm trying to make my appearance way beside the point, like a salad. A wilted salad. I don't even identify with my voice, with the sound of me. ["Her voice was a brass band parading through her throat."—Surrender the Pink.] I have an old Broadway voice, as my ex-husband once said to me."

Her mother came from Protestant stock; her father is Jewish. "I think I have a Jewish demeanor and a Protestant ethic. I think my extroversion is the Protestant manifestation, but emotionally I am Jewish, and I was always drawn to people who looked like I felt, a little upset, a little like an outcast, uncomfortable, ready to leave. So I would go and engage these people with my effervescent vitality, but all it got was not the tip of an iceberg but the tip of a dungeon. I felt like a very unhappy man, but I acted just like a Kelly Girl. I don't see it in my father, but one must assume he can't have been deliriously happy and been on speed for thirteen years, although, depending on the speed...

"Can you imagine," she asks, "casting this? That's why I could never play how I write. Like the monologue Meryl did: if I had done it, it would have been completely bizarre. But this elegant, luminous, poised person spewing this eccentric mash, it's a nice dichotomy. When that stuff comes through Meryl's poise, it's like the royal family going insane in an accessible way. I don't think I would be played well by a Jew. The vessel is Wasp, and the passenger is Jew."

She still acts, keeping "a hand in, not the whole arm. I like sets, the people, but I don't like the hours or the food." She plays, she says, sidekicks (as in When Harry Met Sally. . .) and difficult people (as in Sibling Rivalry, Rob Reiner's new movie). "Acting engenders and harbors qualities that are best left way behind in adolescence. People-pleasing, going on those interviews and jamming your whole personality into getting the job, ingratiating yourself to people you wouldn't fucking spit on if they were on fire."

Her second book will become a film, having been optioned while it was still in manuscript, and she is writing the screenplay for a third film, based on a short story of hers called "Christmas in Las Vegas." Her progress as a writer has been exceptionally successful.

Surrender the Pink started as one hundred pages she wrote about seeing a former love who had a new girlfriend. "Which has happened to me several times. It's all right if you've lost him, but if someone else finds him and you become the outsider, the dysfunctional character in that equation, there's something very urgent about discovering what their new situation is." The heroine of her book ends up hiding in a closet in the man's house to eavesdrop, an act which Fisher never committed, but which she says proves "there really is something beyond calling and hanging up."

The inevitable supposition will be that the former love, here a playwright named Rudy, is in fact Paul Simon. "All of the characters are compilation characters," she says. "Part of the female stuff is probably truer to me than any other. Rudy has a lot of qualities like Paul, but I talked to a lot of powerful men—Rick Drey fuss, Dan Melnick, Don Henley—who had a certain dynamic. I wanted to reflect that thing of infinite option and inability to choose. I resent having to deal with people guessing who everyone is, but I don't resent it for long, because the thing itself, the book, exists."

There are other resentments she voices, however; the end of the book is a sort of female version of the end of Carnal Knowledge, and she is obviously a little embarrassed about having written something so graphic. "Why is it men can write that they drag their cock out of their pants and they jack off and it hits the ceiling? How come Warren Beatty can go on television at fifty-two and say he'd like to have a child SOMEDAY? I was in a film in Paris when I was writing the ending, and it was hard, because I hadn't come to it myself as a reality—I always wait for the reality to come to me, then I transmute it. But in some weird way that I'm not accustomed to, I cured myself. It's very hard for me to let this book go, because it was a nice place to put everything, and at the end I got happier."

She seems to be in a fairly happy state right now. Her handsome, wry blond boyfriend, CAA agent Bryan Lourd, sits in her garden reading scripts, and there is a vast underground coterie of impassioned admirers, some left over from her extreme youth. "There are these choices where you say, 'I'll give 85 percent and reserve 15 percent in case HE finally arrives.' I look for skewed and interested and interesting. A lot of the people I know have what Mike Nichols calls the twitch that they turn into a talent. I always admire people who can take the thing that damns them and dress it up. Most of the people I know who are very talented are alcoholics or in analysis. The others are not from your tribe."

Over Easter weekend, I had the opportunity to observe Carrie Fisher in all kinds of party situations involving small children. She watched them with deep interest. "My biological clock went off at twenty-five," she had said. It was obvious how much she wants children.

Late on Easter Sunday, she came to a homey egg-painting party with Bryan and sat on the uncomfortable sides and edges of chairs. A small boy, the child of a British producer, stood in front of a mirror that covered an entire wall. Completely naked, he stared at his mouth, around which he ran his tongue in a slow, calibrated manner. Carrie Fisher watched the child intently. At first I thought she was once again in a state of longing. Then she turned to the person next to her and said in her deep, loud voice, "Look at that. The birth of Narcissus."