The Princess Diarist(2)
Bottom line, I was going to be able to pay some if not all of my overhead! Maybe not now, but soon. Sure, if it wasn’t very soon I’d be paying bills from an apartment, but at least I’d be able to buy stuff I didn’t need again. Stuff I didn’t need and in such unnecessary quantities! I’d maybe even have a charge at Barneys again soon! Life was good! Public life, that is . . . swimming pools, movie stars . . .
And this, ladies and gentlemoons, is how my whole new Star Wars adventure began! Like an acid flashback, only intergalactic, in the moment, and essentially real!
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who do I think I would’ve been if I hadn’t been Princess Leia? Am I Princess Leia, or is she me? Split the difference and you’d be closer to the truth. Star Wars was and is my job. It can’t fire me and I’ll never be able to quit, and why would I want to? (That’s both a rhetorical and a real question.)
Today, while going through some boxes containing some old writing of mine, I found the diaries I kept while filming the first Star Wars movie forty years ago. Stay tuned.
life before leia
Two years before Star Wars I’d been in a film called Shampoo, starring and produced by Warren Beatty and directed by Hal Ashby. I played the part of Lee Grant’s angry promiscuous daughter, who ends up having sex with her mother’s lover/hairdresser—the starring role played, of course, by Warren. It was he, along with the screenwriter Robert Towne, who hired me for the pissed-off-daughter role.
At the time, the last thing I thought I wanted to do was go into show business, a fickle occupation that doled out a sense of uneasiness and humiliation like tepid snacks at movie screenings. This uneasiness was nurtured by the almost invisible diminishment over time of one’s popularity. First you’re in movies—a few small parts in popular films. Then, if it happens, the thing all actors are waiting for—stardom. You’re a years-in-the-making overnight success.
I had missed the early giddy portion of my parents’ rise to success. I arrived on the scene when my mother, Debbie Reynolds, was still making good, big-budget films at MGM. But as I grew up and my consciousness all too slowly snapped into focus, I noticed that the films were not what they had originally been. Her contract expired when she was in her late thirties. I recall her last MGM Studios film at forty was of the horror variety, entitled What’s the Matter with Helen? This was no Singin’ in the Rain, and her costar Shelley Winters somewhat thoughtlessly killed her at the film’s close.
Soon after this, my mother began doing nightclub work in Las Vegas at the now-defunct Desert Inn. Coincidentally, I also began doing nightclub work, singing “I Got Love” and “Bridge over Troubled Water” in her show. It was a huge step up for me from high school. My younger brother, Todd, accompanied me on guitar, and my mother’s backup singers danced and sang behind me (something that, at occasional odd moments throughout my life, I’ve wished that they continued to do).
My mother then took a modified version of this show to theaters and fairs across America. After that she did a Broadway musical. I was then one of the backup singers behind her, where backup singers tend to lurk. She then continued to do her nightclub act for the next forty years—with forays into television shows and films (most notably in Albert Brooks’s Mother).
My father, Eddie Fisher, played in nightclubs until he was no longer asked to, and when he wasn’t asked to it was in part because as a crooner he was no longer relevant, and in part because he was more interested in sex and drugs than anything else. Shooting speed for thirteen years can really put a crimp in whatever career you might otherwise be attempting to sustain—ask around.
Periodically, he would manage to secure a book deal or—well, actually, that’s it. No one could take the risk of hiring him to sing; he could easily be a no-show, and his vocal range was severely limited by his debauched lifestyle. Also, people found it difficult to forgive him for leaving my mother for Elizabeth Taylor all those years ago, causing him to be viewed for his remaining years as “America’s Cad.”
One day when I was about twelve I was sitting on my grandmother’s lap—not a good idea at any age, given that Maxine Reynolds was, to say the least, not a cuddly woman—when she suddenly asked my mother, “Hey, did you ever get those tickets to Annie that I asked you for?”
She regarded my mother with suspicious eyes. (My grandmother had three looks: glaring suspiciously, glaring hostilely, and glaring with disappointment—active disappointment, lively disappointment, condescending disappointment.)
“I’m sorry, Mama,” my mother responded. “Is there another show you want to see? Annie seems to be sold out for the whole month. I’ve tried everywhere.”
My grandmother pursed her lips, giving the appearance of someone who smelled something bad. Then she pushed air out of her nose and pronounced a very disappointed “Hmmmmmm.”
“It used to mean something in this town to be Debbie Reynolds,” she said. “Now she can’t even get a few measly show tickets.” I involuntarily squeezed my grandmother, as if to do so would push all future demeaning remarks out of her stocky little body. It was episodes like this that made me decide: I never wanted to be in show business.
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so why did I agree to visit the set of Shampoo knowing that there might be a role in the film that I was right for? Go figure. Maybe I wanted to see what it felt like to be wanted by Warren Beatty in any capacity at all. At any rate, at seventeen I didn’t see it as a career choice. Or perhaps I was kidding myself—Lord knows it wouldn’t be the last time in my life I would do that. Kidding yourself doesn’t require that you have a sense of humor. But a sense of humor comes in handy for almost everything else. Especially the darker things, which this did not fall anywhere under the heading of.