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.

 

 

 

 

 

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?

Debbie Reynolds: Star Mother

What a terrible irony—in death, Golden Age star Debbie Reynolds is mostly being referred to as Carrie Fisher’s mother. Over the course of her forty-year career, Fisher never achieved the level of moviestardom that her mother enjoyed. On the other hand, Reynolds’ fatal stroke (at 84) just one day after Fisher succumbed to heart failure (at 60) is so very startling that I suspect the two will always find themselves linked in the public mind.

It was not always so. Back in 1952 the barely 20-year-old Reynolds was the toast of the town after nabbing the ingénue role in Singin’ in the Rain. The part of Kathy Selden, a pert chorus girl in the early days of talkies, required her to sing (something she was good at) and dance (something she was not). To keep up with expert hoofers Donald O’Connor and Gene Kelly, she was coached by Kelly, a stern taskmaster. So grueling were their practice sessions that it’s remarkable she looks so carefree in numbers like “Good Morning.” (One charming bit of trivia: as part of the story, Reynolds’ low, sweet speaking voice replaces the shrill and nasal on-camera enunciations of Lina Lamont, the screen diva played by Jean Hagen. The problem was that Reynolds’ slight Texas twang lacked the elegant sound the script required. So Hagen herself was called upon to dub in the lines, using her own natural register rather than Lina Lamont’s unforgettable squawk. Got that?)

Early on, Reynolds consistently played women who are spunky, but still subscribe to conventional values. In The Tender Trap (1955), 23-year-old Reynolds lands 40-year-old Frank Sinatra. He plays a ladies’ man with no use for domesticity, until the adorable Debbie convinces him he’d be happier with a home and babies. Similar roles marked other films, including Tammy and the Bachelor. In the next decade, she stretched, but just a bit, playing a spunky frontier woman in How the West Was Won (1962), and then the really spunky lead in the screen version of a Broadway musical hit, The Unsinkable Molly Brown. Her theme song in that film, “I Ain’t Down Yet,” served to sum up the rest of her career, as well as her turbulent personal life.

In 1955 she had married nice-boy crooner Eddie Fisher. The two of them starred in a 1956 comedy, Bundle of Joy, that was meant to reflect their status as the perfect Hollywood young-marrieds. That same year, Debbie gave birth to Carrie; son Todd followed in 1958. But a year later the perfect marriage was on the rocks, thanks to Eddie Fisher’s dalliance with the newly-widowed Elizabeth Taylor. The scandal enveloped everyone: I remember reading at the time that Debbie’s publicist made sure she had diaper pins affixed to her blouse to help ratchet up sympathy when the press came to visit. (A second marriage, to millionaire businessman Harry Karl, was also a disaster – his gambling habit sapped her fortune as well as his own.)

Throughout it all, Reynolds remained active, in both business matters and humanitarian endeavors. She also kept performing, most notably playing an addled mom in Albert Brooks’ Mother (1996)/ In 1990 the rumor was that her daughter’s deeply satiric Postcards from the Edge reflected her own imperious style of mothering. No question that there was strain, at times, between Carrie Fisher and her mom. But in early 2017, HBO will air Bright Lights, an acclaimed documentary chronicling the connection between Debbie and Carrie, with a focus on the unshakable bond between them. No one who worked on it could have guessed that it would be their valedictory.