Carrie Fisher Moves On

When I heard the voice on the other end of the phone – thick, slow, fogged – my heart sank. "Oh Jeez, what is she on?"

"She" being Carrie Fisher, the actress once known as the daughter of Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds, then known as the heroine of "Star Wars," but for the past two decades best known as a woman telling the world about her status as a mentally ill, drug-addicted alcoholic. She's been clean for three years, but wouldn't it just be my luck to reach her on Day Zero of the next round?

"I'm stoned out of my mind," she admitted as the conversation began. 

"Oh," I replied.

"I'm dealing with this head cold I just got yesterday. It's awful."

"Oh!" I said, trying to recall if I'd ever before been so thrilled by another person's flu. I asked Fisher if she preferred to delay our interview hyping the release of her latest memoir, "Wishful Drinking" [Simon & Schuster], but she replied, "No, it's fine. If I don't talk and just lie there, I wheeze, which is worse. I don't like being sick." 

Tempted to respond with the obvious, "Who does?", I held myself in check, remembering that I was talking to a woman who's dealt with other kinds of sickness for a very long time. "I was told I was hypomanic when I was 24," Fisher explains. "In my teens, I knew something was the matter with me.  A psychologist even asked if I was hyperactive. But I was always an incredibly intense person. Then, we moved to New York when I was 15; mom was on Broadway doing Irene, and I was in the chorus. That's when my personality changed dramatically. It was the first time I'd gone to a psychiatrist – mom had a hard time accepting that because she thought I'd just blame her all day. But what I told the doctor was, `I wanna stop trying so hard.' And he was great. Right away he said, `You're not a victim. And it's not about blame – that's just "injustice collecting."' He took that away from me intellectually to say, `it's all so-and-so's fault.'"

Asked the chicken-and-egg question of which came first: showbiz or bipolarity (i.e., did fame have a hand in her madness, or does it take an already crazy person to be an actor in the first place), Fisher offers a qualified response. "It's in your genes. It's a physical thing, although people can be de-stabilized by events. Yes, I'm a product of Hollywood inbreeding, and I don't have a conventional sense of reality. But my shrink said, `Carrie, if you hadn't had celebrity parents, if you were a check-out girl, you would have been institutionalized.'"

Actually, she was. "I've been in mental hospitals. Lots of them, in Connecticut and London. People have an image.. I mean, nothing could ever be as bad as the words, `mental hospital' or 'institutionalized' if someone commits you. But they're not country clubs. They're places you go because you're a danger to yourself – as with drug addiction – or you display suicidal behavior. My judgment was impaired, and I was taking a lot of drugs. But for me, it wasn't about killing yourself; it was just as a way to turn off your mind. `Anywhere but here.'  That's what you wanna feel. Because you have no insulation; everything hurts you so bad. And it takes an alcoholic to always think the solution is booze."

Prescription medications are also in the mix, of course, though the downside of Prozac and Seroquel is obvious to anyone seeing a recent picture of the actress who once did for metal bathing suits what Bo Derek did for braids. "It makes you fat," Fisher says flatly. I'm on three meds that are brutalizing me. I hardly eat anything, and I do exercise, so it's really cruel." 

Asked if her physical changes are extra difficult because so many people still see her as Princess Leia, Fisher turns philosophical. "It makes sense for people to feel that way. I was in a fairy tale, which is a very rare thing." Rare but a tad creepy. Fisher opens "Wishful Drinking" with an anecdote about shopping in a Berkeley store where the salesman confesses that after seeing "Star Wars," he thought about her every day from when he was 12 to 22. "Every day?" "Well, four times a day."

In a 2008 blog, Fisher also demystified her sexy "Star Wars" garb. "The biggest problem with the metal bikini was that it wasn't metal.  Not that metal would've been an improvement over what it was actually made of, which was kind of a hard plastic. Whatever it was, it didn't adhere to one's skin. My skin. My young, soon to be popular, unlucky skin.  So, when I was relaxing leisurely against Jabba the Hutt's gigantic, albeit grotesque, stomach…the actor standing playing Bobba…could see beyond my yawning plastic bikini bottoms all the way to Florida." 

If only her relationships had been as transparent. Writing of her connection with first husband Paul Simon, Fisher notes that although she served as the muse for such songs as "Hearts and Bones," "Allergies," "She Moves On" and "Graceland," "Paul…had to put up with a lot with me. I think ultimately I fell under the heading, `Good Anecdote, Bad Reality'. …when it came to day-to-day living, I was more than he could take." The marriage lasted two years, though they dated a long while afterwards.  In the early 1990s, she lived with casting agent Bryan Lourd, who fathered her daughter, Billie. "Bryan took really, really good care of me," Fisher writes, which is why it stung badly when he left her – for another man. "I did an interview with Catie Couric," Fisher recalls in our chat, "and she said, `shouldn't it feel better that he didn't leave you for another woman? He wasn't rejecting you; he was rejecting your entire sex.' I said, `ha ha ha,' but I felt stupid and blamed myself. When Bryan left, my daughter was the same age as I was when my father left, so everything kicked up more." In her book, Fisher quotes Debbie Reynolds putting it this way: "You know, dear, we've had every sort of man in our family – thieves and alcoholics and one-man bands – but this is our first homosexual!"

On a more serious note, Fisher makes no bones about her absentee father likely having bipolar disorder as well, so I ask if she's worried that Billie, now in her teens, might be prone to the same problems. "My daughter is a very strong girl," Fisher replies, "and much more self-aware than my mother or myself ever were at her age. People know now if you have a parent who's alcoholic, there's a 50 percent chance of doing that as well. But my daughter's very confident, works very hard and is a great student. And she's not exhibited any signs of being bi-polar."

Asked if writing about her life has served a therapeutic or even cathartic purpose, Fisher says, "It can be, but more often it goes from inclination to obligation. I didn't even start writing until I was 30 because it's hard to muster up perspective until you're that age. Still, I have to find in me what I relate to, so everything I write is somewhat autobiographical." If "Wishful Drinking" reads as more of a monologue than a memoir, there's good reason: Fisher has been performing the material as a solo act since its 2006 premiere at Los Angeles' Geffen Theater. Since then, she's toured the show to Boston, WashingtonDC and Seattle, and in September she'll bring the piece to Broadway's Studio 54 as part of the Roundabout Theater Company's fall season.

"That's a great, great victory," she notes. "If you can take something that's completely not funny – in fact, it's painful, devastating – and find the funny part, the gallows humor, and make an audience laugh, that's magic. The darker the stuff is, the more essential it is to find the funny. Of course, if you look hard enough, there's a funny thing in everything. Literally everything."

SIDEBAR:

BRUSHES WITH GREATNESS

On Cary Grant

"My mother was upset that I was doing drugs. I admitted I was doing acid, so she did what every normal mother would do: she called Cary Grant. He had a reputation of doing acid under a doctor's supervision, which always fascinated me. So Cary Grant called me and talked to me for well over an hour. And later on, when my father went to Grace Kelly's funeral in Monte Carlo, he met Grant there but didn't know what to say, so he said, `My daughter's addicted to acid.'  So Cary Grant called me again. He was a very nice man." 

On Mike Nichols

"He wanted me to write the screenplay for `Postcards from the Edge,' and I said, `I can't do this. Get someone professional to do it.' But he said to me the times I felt like quitting were when I did my best work. So I did it and was there throughout the filming. He's an incredibly creative, brilliant man."

On Bob Dylan

"[In the 1980s], someone from his office called my business office and asked, `Can we give Bob Dylan your phone number?' And I wanted to say, `No, you keep that stalker away from me. I don't want any more Sixties icons fucking up my life!' But of course, I took the call. He'd been asked by a perfume company to do a fragrance called, `Just Like a Woman.' He didn't like the title but liked the idea of a cologne. What is it about me that made him think I went around making up cologne names? Anyway, I gave him, `Ambivalence – for the scent of confusion,' `Arbitrary – for the man who doesn't give a shit how he smells,' and `Empathy – feel like them, smell like this.'"