TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/101590/1015520.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 12.2 KB | 249 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 72

A Spy In Her Own House


Author, actress, screenwriter and purveyor of a warm wacky
wisdom, CARRIE FISHER has achieved a new renown and yes, some
peace too

By CARL WAYNE ARRINGTON


    Recently, a young actor at a party complimented actress
turned novelist-screenwriter Carrie Fisher on her career
transition, saying, "Gee, it must be great now that you are a
writer. Now you get to call the shots."

    "Not really," she replied, "but at least I get to fill some
of the syringes."

    These days Ms. Fisher is needling the world with several
potent concoctions. A movie adaptation of her best-selling
snort-and-chortle novel, Postcards from the Edge, has opened
big. It features Fisher's screenplay directed by Mike Nichols,
with Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine as the star-worn
daughter and mother. There is also a new paperback edition of
her novel to add to the media jet stream. And Fisher's lovelorn
modern romance, Surrender the Pink, has just been published.

    All that has created a high-angle trajectory of fame that
has given her a cultural hat trick: both books are on the
best-seller list, and the movie has grossed more than $23
million in its first three weeks.

    Whether in a book, in cinematic ventriloquism or in the
dangling conversations of her radio and television interviews,
Fisher's words work like a Rorschach test. What she says is
often what you feel. She feels it too. "I am a spy in the house
of me. I report back from the front lines of the battle that
is me," she explains. "I am somewhat nonplussed by the event
that is my life."

    The grist for her artistic mill is the jagged facts of her
life. To sort these out you have to suspend normal conventions
of reality and place yourself in her screenplay childhood.
"Other people's fantasy was my reality," she says.

    Her mother was known on marquees around the world as Debbie
Reynolds, the queen of spunky beauty from the '50s. Dad was
Cool Daddy-o singer Eddie Fisher. "I was born of a golden
womb," says Carrie. People like Lucille Ball and Jimmy Stewart
used to come for dinner. Candice Bergen was always at their
house because her best friend was the family baby-sitter.
Unfortunately, father Eddie just barely had time to bequeath
his eyes and voice to Carrie and sire her brother Todd before
he gallivanted off with famous film fatale Elizabeth Taylor.
The whole affair ended badly and publicly. As her legacy from
the broken fairy-tale family, Carrie got a wounded heart and
an emotional predilection for "short Jewish men -- preferably
musicians." Eddie's parental abdication left the kids to be
raised by their extraordinary mother.

    Even at an early age, Carrie was thoughtful and inquisitive.
"She was always asking questions," recalls Debbie. "She was
always searching for answers. A seeker." To cope with her
mother's klieg-illuminated life, Carrie repaired to a world of
private musings in journals and diaries. "I always wrote," she
says, "even when it was just bad poetry like `My nose runs/ my
mind follows.'"

    She attended the Professional Children's School in Los
Angeles with the offspring of other famous people. "My life was
like this kind of enviable weird thing that I spent my life
apologizing for." Mother Debbie rebounded, marrying retail
footwear magnate Harry Karl, who eventually drank and gambled
his way through his millions and into debts large enough to
swallow her fortune too. The bright starry life-style collapsed
by 1972 into a Saturnian world with concentric rings of
emotional pain, financial instability and psychological drama.
"My mom had the breakdown for the family, and I went into
therapy for all of us," says Carrie. To dig their way out of the
financial hole, Debbie went back to Broadway, starring in the
musical Irene. Carrie played in the chorus behind Mom. By 16
Carrie struck out on her own and went to London to attend the
Central School of Speech and Drama for 1 1/2 years. "It was the
only unobserved time in my life," she recalls.

    At 18 she suffered a serious success as the central dramatic
character, Princess Leia Organa, in the great modern movie myth
Star Wars. Fisher then moved to New York City, determined to
seek her fortune without the Reynolds wrap. She became a
regular homegirl of the Samurai Night Live gang. She was good
friends with the late John Belushi and seriously dated Dan
Aykroyd. She casually nurtured an acting career with two more
Star Wars films, had a role in Under the Rainbow and a part in
The Blues Brothers.

    In 1983, at 27, she married singer Paul Simon. They had been
friends for seven years, but the stormy marriage lasted only
11 months. Or so. Winds of the tempest that was their love
affair blow through both her novels and through Paul's
passionately painful songs like Hearts and Bones and Crazy Love
Part II. The names have been changed, but the feelings haven't.
"We are built more for public than private," says a Postcards
character.

    Somewhere along the line, drugs became a convenient escape
route. She took the prescription drug Percodan for the ongoing
heartbreak and pain, and she dropped LSD ritually for
transcendent illumination. "Drugs became a way of blunting the
sharpness of the juts. Juts-tapositioning oneself," she says.
"I always wanted to blunt and blur what was painful. My idea
was pain reduction and mind expansion, but I ended up with mind
reduction and pain expansion." Her excesses eventually landed
her in a hospital emergency ward, having her stomach pumped.

    Writing rushed in to fill the void that had been occupied
by drugs. Her first sprawling demi-autobiographical outpourings
were bound and ungagged between the covers of Postcards in
1987. The gist of the haywire parable is that fame and fortune
are no shield; things can go very wrong in rich families with
smart, talented people too. The book is less about the outlaw
romance of drug abuse than about the process of picking up the
pieces. She explains, "The facts don't change, just the fiction
that you make up about them."

    While Fisher admits that she draws on her personal
experiences for her work, her characters have facets borrowed
from several people. Surrender the Pink takes her thematically
out of drug rehab and into romance rehab. It is hard not to
read it as a roman a clef about the flopped relationship with
Simon. It is the tale of a soap-opera scribe who goes to the
Hamptons and finds herself stalking her playwright ex and his
new girlfriend. In a frenzy of neurotic obsession, she steals
into their house to eavesdrop. "I didn't really do any of
that," she says, adding, "but I might." Just to make the flame
of intrigue burn brighter, Simon has a new album with a song
called She Moves On that might be mistaken for the wistful
lament of an ex. She says, he says. A kind of call-and-response
in the modern media garden.

    While Fisher seems glib on the outside, her witticisms are
emotional bandages in disguise. She's been seeing a
psychiatrist regularly for 18 years, has been through 13 est
workshops, and has sampled just about all 57 varieties of
excess and illumination available in Western civilization.

    She is an admitted Twelve Step-following, A.A.-attending,
God-grant-me-the-serenity, flat-out, media-flaunting drug
addict. But she is such a fetching one, not menacing or
dangerous. Everyone's doing fine now. Fisher has remained
"clean and legal" for nearly five years. And thanks for asking.

    Director Nichols has been a witness to Mondo Carrie for most
of her life and says, "There is a thing in her voice that is
tuned so that in our ears there is something that says, `This
one is for me. This experience, this line, this job, this
truth, this woman is especially for me.' That's the secret of
her enormous charm, and she is so utterly and completely
charming that she captivates people left and right. There is
a kind of path of smitten people in her wake."

    Fisher, now 33, takes her wacky, wise sensibility into her
daily life. She says, "My personality has an emergency to it
like a bad dress." At the drop of a premise, she can talk about
Albert Camus's "amusing broodings" or the probity of Madonna's
grabbing her crotch on TV. She proclaims a new movie idea, the
story of Hitler's illegitimate son. She calls it The Doug
Hitler Story. It is the tale of a young man who finds out at
age 30 that he is the blood progeny of the Fuhrer. One night
his mother gets drunk and screams at him, "You're just like
your father! What are you going to do -- roll over me like the
tanks going into Poland?" A little social criticism? "Show me
a child with a simple, happy uncomplicated childhood, and I'll
show you Dan Quayle," she says with a slightly snarlish smile.
Like Woody Allen's Whore of Mensa, she is a high-I.Q.,
postmodern premillennial uberchick.

    As an actress, in recent years she has broadened her casting
range from just Princess to Princess Pal. In When Harry Met
Sally . . . and in Hannah and Her Sisters she played the Friend
much like herself: chatty, astute, troubled, warm, engaging,
empathic and wry.

    She is at the center of a circle of bright, successful
friends -- a post-Beatles hipster Algonquin Table that
cellularly convenes to muse and amuse. She survives the mottled
curse of fame by fostering deep, intimate friendships. Her
coterie ranges from her ex's 18-year-old son to a 71-year-old
psychiatrist and includes director Penny Marshall, comic
philosopher Albert Brooks, actor Richard Dreyfuss, musicians
Don Henley and J.D. Souther, and many more.

    For her side, Fisher is still always stalking and recording
the wild anecdote:

    I once went to South America and took a drug there called
ayahuasco. I was actually there with my ex-husband. He had laid
down his head on my lap, and I put my hand on his forehead and
it felt like it was pulsing and growing and WARRRrrhh. Every
once in a while they would shine a flashlight. Every time they
did, bugs would scurry on the walls. And that was no
hallucination. They brought this woman in who had to be carried
in. And the shaman sang over her. La-la-la-la-la-la-la.
Jamorino heh-heh-heh. The Indian thing, right.
La-la-la-la-la-la-luh. It was a healing song -- though I am
sure that the woman is no longer with us. Then the guy
explained to us that we might see snakes -- the anacondas --
coming toward us. That was fantastic. I went to South America
a bunch of times. But no snakes ever came. So I didn't get
anything from it, but I like those drugs.

    Fisher comes by her boldness genetically. Her grandmother
is a marvelously blunt character who, after seeing the movie
of Postcards, said loudly, "I don't know how they made such a
great movie out of such a lousy book." And her legendary mother
is feisty, circumspect, keen and nurturing. "It is always an
interesting fight," says Fisher, "for the remaining chair in
the musical chairs of who is going to get the focus in the
room. But she always gets the chair because she is the mother."
Fisher tilts toward her grandmother's wise grandeur and is
currently at work on her third novel called -- what else? --
Delusions of Grandma.

    Even before her current burst of renown, Fisher had become
a sought-after scriptwriter. Film rights to Surrender have been
sold to Paramount with Steven Spielberg producing and Fisher
supplying the dialogue. She's also finishing a film script
called Christmas in Las Vegas, a recast, modern Hansel and
Gretel tale based on one of her short stories.

    Through the therapy of writing about her woes and heartache,
Fisher is finding perhaps not happiness but at least
satisfaction, day by day. And she is in love. His name is Bryan
Lourd. He is a talent agent and four years younger than she.
She'd like to have a baby. She lives in a colorful, comfortable
cabin in Beverly Hills that is filled with knickknacks like
miniature cities in bottles, cutouts of the Seven Dwarfs and
a large cow decoy. Jack Nicholson's comment upon visiting the
abode was: "Just exactly how old are the children?" While she
sorts that out, she'd still like a good gander at a giant
anaconda.