Wishful Drinking excerpt
“Fisher makes each crushing tragedy hilarious.”
“Spoken like a true princess.”
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 media 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.