Postcards from Princess Leia: Jeff Ryan Explores an Inter-Galactic Bond

I just read, in the Los Angeles Times, about a religious cult that believes our world is guided by Galactics, most of them dead celebrities. And yes, Carrie Fisher’s name is on the list. There’s something about Fisher, better known to many of us as Princess Leia Organa of Alderaan, that transcends the usual Hollywood hype. In life and in death, she was not so much a movie star—and pretty much the sole female in a blockbuster series of outer-space epics—but also both a role model and a cautionary tale.  As a royal who has her ups and downs in six Star Wars films, starting with the so-called Episode IV: A New Hope in 1977, she is powerful and pragmatic. But she also tends to get kidnapped, humiliated, and made to wear wacky costumes (Those hair buns! That kinky harem outfit!). Fisher’s personal life was equally complicated: the well-heeled daughter of celebrities, she found fame early, but also faced marital disaster as well as serious addiction issues. Always honest with herself and her public, she eventually owned up to the bipolar disorder that helped to shorten her life, as a way to make the public aware of mental health challenges.

 Jeff Ryan clearly reveres Carrie Fisher, both for her contributions to pop cinema and for her forthright approach to her own failings. That’s why, when the publishing industry let him down, he launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to make his tribute to Fisher a reality. The result is a handsome 2023 volume called Your Worshipfulness: Starring Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia. Ryan’s is by no means an insider biography. Following Carrie’s sudden fatal heart attack in 2016, he never approached her colleagues, nor her bereaved family. Much of his research comes from published sources, including fan sites on the web and the memoirs of others involved in the Star Wars universe. He also delves deeply into Fisher’s own writings: her four novels and such non-fiction works as Wishful Drinking, in which she confronts her own topsy-turvy life.

 With affection and wit, Ryan sizes up what it was like to BE Carrie Fisher, paying special attention to her complicated but affectionate bond with her famous mother, one-time Hollywood cutie-pie Debbie Reynolds. (Postcards from the Edge—a 1987 Fisher novel about mother-and-daughter celebrities that later became a Meryl Streep screen hit—clearly reflects something of her own parental memories.) We also learn through Ryan’s book about the father who neglected her. (“Nice-guy” singer Eddie Fisher, whose marriage to Reynolds was at one time big Hollywood news, famously dumped Debbie when Carrie was two years old to marry the newly bereaved Elizabeth Taylor.) There’s also dish about Carrie’s short-lived marriage (1983-1984) to singer/songwriter Paul Simon. The strained relationship allows Ryan, always a clever wordsmith, a chance to get snarky: “They had not enough bridge, way too much troubled water.”

 Perhaps the most engrossing part of the book for me was the in-depth discussion of 2019’s Star Wars Episode IX: The Rise of Skywalker. The final triad of Star Wars films were meant to showcase what became of the famous trio—Leia, Luke, and Han Solo—as they grew older and the universe moved on. But Carrie’s unexpected death challenged George Lucas and his crew to figure out some creative solutions to her absence. They couldn’t ignore Leia, nor could they re-cast her. In the end, up-to-the-minute technology made all the difference, allowing the filmmakers to suggest Leia’s presence, even in the absence of the very special woman who embodied her. As Ryan himself might say, Good night, sweet Princess.

 

 

 

 

 

Mike Nichols: Postcards from the Edge of a Career

It’s not easy for me to say nice things about film historian Mark Harris. Not that I’ve ever met Harris, and I doubt he knows I exist. But the publication of his first book, Pictures at a Revolution, ended up derailing my own book deal with a major university press, because I had planned to explore some of the same historic material his book had just finished covering. And when my Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How The Graduate Became the Touchstone of a Generation appeared in late 2017, a reviewer in the New York Times posted a full-page review trashing my work, mainly because (as she herself pointed out) her good buddy Mark Harris had already written about The Graduate in a way she liked better. So it’s hard to be neutral about Harris’s achievements. even though I’ve heard from a professional colleague that he’s a good guy. Grrrr!

 That being said, I read with great interest Harris’s brand-new biography of director Mike Nichols, who evolved from a comic sketch-artist (with partner Elaine May) into a major film director largely on the strength of early films like The Graduate.  Surely this six-hundred-page tome was a book Harris was meant to write. Harris, you see, is married to playwright Tony Kushner. And Kushner’s Angels in America, a strikingly imaginative exploration of American history and the AIDS epidemic, became in Nichols’ skilled hands a landmark 2003 television production. So Harris, by way of Kushner and their circle of friends, knows pretty much everyone who was anyone in Mike Nichols’ long and complicated life.

 As a film director, with a comedy career and a Broadway smash behind him, Nichols hit the ground running with an unexpected invitation to direct Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the screen version of Edward Albee’s corrosive Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? That work won him an Oscar nomination, and he went on to nab the golden statuette for his very second film, The Graduate. Then, just as he was beginning to seem invulnerable, he had a series of major artistic and financial flops that began with a misconceived version of Joseph Heller’s famous anti-war novel, Catch-22. Throughout a Hollywood career that ended with his death in 2014, Nichols moved in and out of favor, exploring a wide variety of genres and working with most of the industry’s brightest stars. For a while, in films like Carnal Knowledge (1971), he seemed to specialize in bitter humor from a male perspective. But lately I’ve been interested in a late-career series of movies (1983-1990) in which the female point of view emerges triumphant. This shift was apparently sparked by his teaming with Meryl Streep, the central figure in 1983’s political drama, Silkwood. In 1990, Streep took on the role of Suzanne in Postcards from the Edge, Carrie Fisher’s semi-autobiographical look at the life of an addict who’s also a Hollywood princess, thanks to the role of her superstar mother in her life.

 Gossip columnists, of course, saw Shirley MacLaine’s character in the film as a riff on Fisher’s own mother, Debbie Reynolds, someone well past her prime but still itching for public adulation. (Throwing a surprise party after her daughter’s released from rehab, she belts out a sexy version of Sondheim’s a “I’m Still Here” for the guests). Nichols’ direction gives us the Hollywood environment in spades, filling small roles with classic showbiz personalities like Gary Morton, Rob Reiner, Gene Hackman, and even good old Mary Wickes. But the film is also honest about addiction, a subject Nichols himself clearly—as Harris shows us—understood all too well.  

 

Wishfully Thinking About Carrie Fisher

I never saw Carrie Fisher’s solo show, Wishful Drinking, when it played on a local stage. Now, it’s too late, given Fisher’s untimely death in 2016.  But a recent JetBlue trip allowed me to view HBO’s filmed version of her show, which was an Emmy nominee in 2011. It proved the perfect thing to watch while suspended in mid-air—much like Fisher herself—between L.A. and New York City,

Not everyone may know that Carrie Fisher was one of Hollywood’s best-regarded script doctors. Her wit and her off-kilter view of the world more than make up for a  life that could come off as soap opera. She begins, inevitably, with the story of her parents’ marriage. (I’m quoting from notes scribbled down during my flight, so the zingers may not be absolutely exact.) Perky Debbie Reynolds and suave crooner Eddie Fisher—both of whom were alive when this show aired—were often called America’s Sweethearts. In 1956, the year Carrie was born, they actually starred together in a musical about a young couple and a baby: Bundle of Joy. Debbie and Eddie had close friends in Hollywood, producer Mike Todd and his wife, Elizabeth Taylor. The friendship was so strong that the Fishers’ second child was named Todd, in Mike’s honor. In explaining this, Carrie references the Jewish tradition of her paternal ancestors, who felt that naming a baby after a living person is bad luck. The Fishers may have laughed this off as old-world superstition, but in 1958 Mike Todd died in the crash of a private plane. Eddie quickly took it upon himself to console the beautiful widow. Here’s how Carrie wryly puts it: “He flew to her side. Gradually he made his way to her front.”

The Fisher/Reynolds divorce, which was prime fodder for the movie mags of the day, led to multiple re-marriages on both sides. Fisher’s last of five wives was Asian, and Carrie notes, “My father has had so many facelifts he looks Chinese himself.” (She also theorizes that, as a short, Jewish singer, he inspired her own brief marriage to Paul Simon.) Carrie’s mother gets off no more easily. Noting that Debbie Reynolds’ lineage is Texan, but that celebrity gives her a certain aristocratic sheen, Carrie labels her mom “blue-blooded poor white trash.” Certainly Debbie had some unconventional ideas. When she married her third husband, but realized she herself was too old for child-bearing, she had the bright idea that Carrie (unmarried in her late 20s) should be impregnated with his sperm, so that his genetic material would not go to waste.

Carrie Fisher of course made her own mark on Hollywood by playing Princess Leia (she of the Cinnabon hair-do) in the original Star Wars. She’s hilarious in discussing her first impression of this project: “It sounded like a fight between my original parents.” She also expresses her chagrin that George Lucas owns her likeness, which has even shown up as a Leia-headed Pez dispenser. She has been hailed for her acid-dipped pen (see her skewering of a slightly fictionalized version of her own upbringing in Postcards from the Edge, for which she wrote both the source novel and the screenplay). But, given her medical issues, which included bipolar disorder and an addictive personality, it’s remarkable she lived as long and as well as she did. In Wishful Drinking she explains that survivors like her “have to keep getting into trouble to show off your gifts.”

When I finished watching Wishful Drinking, I turned to Singin’ in the Rain, featuring Carrie’s mom at her most adorable. Who knew what she would spawn?