The Princess Diarist(7)
My mother recommended the Green Door in Texas, but it was probably called the Golden Door or something else because the only Green Door that anyone had heard of was a porn film, Behind the Green Door, which was known for making its star, Marilyn Chambers, if not a household name then a whorehouse-hold name. (I had seen it at fifteen, not having heard the phrase “blow job” before.)
At the Texas fat farm, I met Ann Landers (aka Eppie Lederer), a famous advice columnist, and Lady Bird Johnson, who both took me under their (overweight) wings, which was an uncomfortable place to be. Lady Bird, when I told her the title of Star Wars, thought I’d said Car Wash, and Ann/Eppie gave me a lot of unsolicited advice over a less-than-filling dinner of a burnt-looking partridge that seemed to have been singed and then torched. It was still more than enough; with a heavy heart and heavier face, I left a week later.
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when we started filming, I tried to keep myself well under the radar so that the powers that be wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t lost the weight they’d asked me to. I only weighed 110 pounds to begin with, but I carried about half of them in my face. I think they may have put those buns on me so they might function as bookends, keeping my face right where it was, between my ears and no bigger. There I would stay, cheeks in check—my face as round as I was short, but no rounder.
We usually finished shooting around six thirty p.m., Monday through Friday. The unluckiest members of the cast—a group that definitely included me—were summoned to the set at around five a.m. I rose before dawn; was picked up at my flat in Kensington by my cheerful driver, Colin; and was spirited through the largely still sleeping London to the rosy dawn hem of its outskirts, arriving some forty-five minutes later at the less-than-stern guardrail of Borehamwood Elstree Studios.
Why was I asked to arrive at this ungodly hour? What monstrous chain of command had selected me apart from many others more deserving, more endowed with tresses thick and wavy tumbling toward their waiting waists?
Perhaps by now the sci-fi aficionados have guessed it. Yes, that god-awfully laughable Leia hairstyle! There were two hairpieces that were practically bolted to each side of my head. First one, then the other, these long brown tresses that, once latched on grimly, were twisted into some oversized-cinnamon-bun shape, which then—with a deftness that never ceased to amaze me—the hairdresser would very slowly and deliberately wind into the now-famous buns of Navarone.
Pat McDermott was the hairdresser assigned to supply me with the hairstyle that I would wear in the movie. Having only worn one hairstyle in Shampoo, I couldn’t see how this could be anything but a straightforward task. Apply a wig, brush some hair, affix some hairpins—voilà, hairstyle. What could be simpler? Well, this straightforward task turned out to be a little more than that when you considered Leia’s look would be something worn by children, transvestites, and couples involved in what might be considered a sex fantasy immortalized on the show Friends. There might have been more responsibility involved than first met the eye. Of course, there was no way to know this initially. So Pat attempted to deliver what was requested of her, an unusual hairstyle to be worn by a nineteen-year-old girl playing a princess.
Pat was from Ireland and spoke with a lovely Irish brogue—causing (or enabling, depending on the morning) her to refer to a movie as a “fill-um.” She also called me “My lovely” or “My dearest girl”: “Isn’t this quite an amazing fill-um, my dearest girl” or “Who is this but my darlin’ girl and that crazy hairstyle I put on her each and every day for the new fill-um they’re makin’.” I doubt she ever said the latter sentence for me, but she could have, and no one would be any the wiser.
Having arrived oh so early in the a.m., I would invariably fall asleep in the makeup chair, a plain girl with damp scraggly hair—falling just past the shoulder of whatever unprepossessing T-shirt I’d worn that day—and would miraculously awaken two hours later transformed from “Who the hell is she?” into the magnificently mighty mouthful herself, Princess Leia Organa, formerly of Alderaan and presently of anywhere and everywhere she damn well pleased.
I had endless issues with my appearance in Star Wars. Real ones—not ones you bring up so people think you’re humble because you secretly find yourself adorable. What I saw in the mirror is not apparently what many teenage boys saw. If I’d known about all the masturbating I would generate—well, that would’ve been extraordinarily weird from many angles and I’m glad it didn’t come up, as it were. But when men—fifty-year-old-plus men down to . . . well, the age goes pretty low for statutory comfort—when men approach me to let me know that I was their first love, let’s just say I have mixed feelings. Why did all these men find it so easy to be in love with me then and so complex to be in love with me now?
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i had no idea how much time Pat and I would spend together. She was the first person I saw in the morning and the last person I saw at night. But it was the morning bit that was the most intimate. Because the hair took two hours to style, we spent inordinate amounts of time coming up with conversation. The horror is sitting with someone silently. It’s the conversational low. Sure, you can turn on music and sit or stand there smiling vaguely, trying to pretend there’s nowhere else you’d rather be, but . . .
The sketches of hairstyles that Pat had been given to use as a guideline were shown to me. I looked at her aghast, with much like the expression I used when shown the sketches of the metal bikini. The one I wore to kill Jabba (my favorite moment in my own personal film history), which I highly recommend your doing: find an equivalent of killing a giant space slug in your head and celebrate that. It works wonders when I’m plagued by dark images of my hairy earphones.