The Princess Diarist(6)

The images of space opened around us, planets and stars floated by. The character I was reading for, Leia, was kidnapped by the evil Darth Vader—kidnapped and hung upside down when the smuggler pilot Han Solo (who Miguel was reading for) and his giant monkey creature copilot Chewbacca rescued me. I had been (in the script) upside down and unconscious with yellow eyes. I’ll never forget that image. Whoever got the part of the princess named Leia would get to do this. I would potentially get to do this! Maybe—if I was lucky—I would be rescued by Han and Chewbacca (Chewie!) from the caverns underneath wherever they’d tortured me, and Chewie would carry me, slung over his shoulder through thigh deep water as we made it out of (interplanetary) harm’s way.

Unfortunately, none of this imagery was ever realized due to a combination of cost and the fact that Peter Mayhew—who they hired to play Chewie—couldn’t do the stunt due to his extreme height of over 7 feet. He had a condition that left him unable to stand up quickly and remain stable; it was impossible for him to lift up weight of any kind. And my weight, as everyone at Lucasland can recall, was, and remains, of the “any kind” variety.

But I can safely say that any girl cast in the part of the feisty Princess Leia would’ve been of the any kind size—because once Peter was cast, the lifting and being carried through those thigh-high drenched caverns was out. But I also recall hearing that the water-engulfed caverns were quite an expensive set to build, and this was a low-budget film, so they were out for that reason—leaving only Leia’s unconsciousness and those yellow eyes. Most of us know how inexpensive unconsciousness is or was to achieve, so that wouldn’t have been a budget problem—just inappropriate. But by the time you lose Peter’s inability to carry any feisty princess and consider the cost-ineffective underground water caverns—it doesn’t matter how beautifully you can portray insensibility—it ain’t happening anyway.

The Force was put in me (in a non-invasive way) by the script that day with Miguel, and it has remained in me ever since. I ended up reading for the film with a new actor, an actor I’d never seen before, but then he had never seen me, either. I’ll bet since that reading with me he’s rued the day—if he can get his strong hands on a rue that is—and if anyone could get their hands on a rue or a Woo it was Harrison Ford. We read together in a room in that same building I’d met George and Brian De Palma in. I was so nervous about the reading I don’t remember much about Harrison, and given how nervous Harrison would come to make me, that was plenty frightened indeed.

The following week, my agent, a man who’d been my mother’s agent, Wilt Melnick, and was now mine, called me.

“Carrie?” he asked.

I knew my name. So I let him know I knew it. “Yeah,” I said in a voice very like mine. Mine but hollow, mine but it didn’t matter because my stomach had swung into action.

“They called,” he said.

Great, ’cause that was really all I wanted to know. If they called, that they called, not what they said—that didn’t matter.

“They want you,” he continued.

There was a silence.

“They do? I mean they did?”

He laughed, then I laughed and dropped the phone and ran out into the front yard and into the street. It was raining. It didn’t rain in L.A. It was raining in L.A. and I was Princess Leia. I had never been Princess Leia before and now I would be her forever. I would never not be Princess Leia. I had no idea how profoundly true that was and how long forever was.

They would pay me nothing and fly me economy—a fact that would haunt my mother for months—but I was Leia and that was all that truly mattered. I’m Leia—I can live in a tree, but you can’t take that away from me.

I never dreamt there actually might be a day when I maybe hoped that you could.





the buns of navarone

The movie was being shot in England, so I could drop out of school but wouldn’t have to leave the scene of the crime. My friend Riggs let me use his flat in Kensington, behind Barkers department store, and that’s where I stayed for the three-month duration of the film.

I remember arriving on the set that first day, attempting to seem as benignly unobtrusive as I possibly could. I showed up at the studio in Borehamwood—about forty-five minutes outside of London—where they fitted me for wardrobe and did hair and makeup tests. (The crew was mostly men. That’s how it was and that’s pretty much how it still is. It’s a man’s world and show business is a man’s meal, with women generously sprinkled through it like overqualified spice.)

The hairstyle that was chosen would impact how everyone—every filmgoing human—would envision me for the rest of my life. (And probably even beyond—it’s hard to imagine any TV obituary not using a photo of that cute little round-faced girl with goofy buns on either side of her inexperienced head.) My life had started, all right. Here I was crossing its threshold in a long white virginal robe with the hair of a seventeenth-century Dutch school matron.

I was awarded the part in Star Wars with the dispiriting caveat that I lose ten pounds, so for me the experience was less like, “All right! I got a job!” and more like, “I got a job and I hurt my ankle.” The minus 10 percent was an agent’s fee, in flesh.

So I went to a fat farm. In Texas. Weren’t there any fat farms around Los Angeles? The only answers I can think of are (1) no, because everyone in Los Angeles was already thin, and (2) no, because this was 1976, years before the whole exercising, body-obsessed, fat-farm thing would take hold. The only exercise guru then was Richard Simmons—a flamboyant fuzzy-haired creature who vaguely resembled a gay Bozo the Clown, unless that’s redundant, which I, thank God, have no way of knowing, having no, thank God, direct experience with Bozo the Clown.