Sheila Weller - Carrie Fisher--A Life on the Edge

On December 23, 2016right before her favorite holiday (for a long time, she had a year-round Christmas tree in her house)as the day was just starting in London, Carrie Fisher boarded United Flight 935 at Heathrow Airport. The plane was scheduled to leave London at 9:20 a.m. and arrive in L.A. at 12:40 p.m. (local times). With Fisher was her constant companion, Gary, the baby French bulldog shed adopted from a New York shelter a few years earlier. She took Gary everywhere: to talk shows (interviewers happily gave him his own directors chair), to restaurant dinners, and now to his own seat in the first-class cabin of this plane. The damaged, not-very-housebroken mutt, whose hot-pink tongue invariably hung sideways out of his mouth (It matches my sweater, she once told an interviewer, pointing to her own hot-pink top), was like her canine twin. They were sweet survivors together: he, of a puppyhood of neglect; she, of several things. First, shed survived a Hollywood childhood of glamour, popping flashbulbs, and headline-making scandal when the marriage of her parents, Hollywoods sweethearts Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, blew apart under the spell of the gorgeous, just-widowed Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Eddie fell in love. Then Fisher survived early, sudden, international mega-fameat age twenty, in 1977as Princess Leia, the arch-voiced galaxy-far-away heroine in that flowing white gown and those funny hair buns. Despite Leias storybook royalty; her silky, almost-parody-of-feminine clothing; and a touching, repeated pleaHelp me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, youre my only hopemade all the more plaintive because she uttered it as a hologram miniature, she was the fiercest hero of them all: ironic, tart, yet positive, and already a Resistance leader who could deal with her own survival while her twin brother, Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill), was still a mere farm boy and her later love Han Solo (Harrison Ford) was a cynical gun for hire. She was the only girl warrior among the boys, and she could hold her own better than they could. If second-wave feminism had a science fiction stand-in, it was the Princess Leia created by Carrie Fisher.

As Fisher and Gary settled into their plane seats for the long flight home to Los Angeles, if Fisher had wanted to use the hours in the sky to mull her accomplishments, she had plenty about which to feel satisfied.

More seriously than surviving huge early fame, Fisher was a survivor of inherited drug addiction and of major bipolar disorderthe latter an incurable, biologically rooted mental illness that causes changes in the way ones brain processes the chemicals the body naturally produces. Fishers versionthe more serious bipolar one versus bipolar twocould come on unpredictably, and for her, enduring it was like living with a war story. She talked about both of these problems so frankly and so helpfully to others that in the early years of the twenty-first century she completely kicked the stigma of bipolar disorder to the curb, says Joanne Doan, the editor of bp Magazine. Expert after expert would gratefully agree: nobody took the shame out of bipolar disorder the way Carrie Fisher did.

Of course there was more, much more. Fisher had a brilliant, sage honesty and madcap personalitya crazy joyousnesspretty much unequaled in Hollywood. During the three-year run of her self-written one-woman show Wishful Drinkingher autobiographical late-career tour de forceshe started sprinkling the audience, and her friends, with glitter. Actual glitter. She did it backstage at the Oscars; she did it at restaurants. She became such a glitter aficionado she had special glitter-holding pockets sewn into her coat. Many years earlier, on her honeymoon with Paul Simon, shed brought the bridesmaids who traveled to the Nile with them silly fairy costumes to camp up their visits to the ancient catacombs. Her house, tastefully decorated though it was with antiques and folk art, was also chockablock with felicitousness: the tiles in the kitchen were embossed with linoleum images of Prozac bottles; one of her bathrooms contained a piano (didnt all bathrooms have pianos?), and a series of what she called ugly children portraits hung over her bed.

Her bons mots were epic. During an Equal Rights Amendment march in the 1980s with her friend the screenwriter Patricia Resnick, Fisher had wisecracked of a small weight gain, Im carrying water for Whitney Houston. When she first dated Paul Simonwho was almost as short as her five feet oneshed remarked, Dont stand next to me at a party. Theyll think were salt and pepper shakers. When, with her fluent French, she had saved her friend, the world-famous security expert Gavin de Becker, from the Hotel George V concierges outrage because Gavin had made off with the bathrobe from his room, she eyed the straight-arrow boy shed known in high school and said, I didnt know you were a thief. Pause. Now that I do, Ill take you traveling with me more often. When, late in the first decade of the twenty-first century, men started weight and age shaming her on social media, she bounced back with Youve just hurt one of my three feelings. When her father, Eddie Fisher, wrote of his dislike for her mother, Debbie Reynolds, in his second memoir and falsely accused Debbie of being a lesbian, Carrie, hurt and angry, nevertheless riposted, My mother is not a lesbian. Pause. Shes just a really, really bad heterosexual. Most recently, when, six weeks before she boarded this plane, it was revealed that the presidential candidate Donald Trump, whom she despised, ogled only beautiful women, she tweeted, Finally, a good reason to want to be ugly.

It wasnt just snappy wisecracks that were her forte; she was good at substantive aphorisms. She knew from the up-and-down (including the very down) career moments of her parents that celebrity is just obscurity biding its time. And she warned about the toxic nature of competitive Hollywood. Resentment, she liked to say, is like drinking poison and waiting for the other person to die. Fishers main maxim for her complicated life was If my life wasnt funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable. It had to be funny, and she made it so.

Fisher was gifted with a quicksilver tongue. She is the smartest person I know, many of her friends said about her. Charisma is an easy word to throw around, but she possessed it. In her book The Princess Diarist, she wrote that as a girl she had longed to be so wildly popular that she could explode on your night sky like fireworks at midnight on New Years Eve in Hong Kong. Many would say that Carrie Fisher had achieved this goal. She was irresistible, said Albert Brooks; her friend Richard Dreyfuss called her a subject of worship among their friends. I am a very good friend, she once told Charlie Rose, in a way that didnt sound conceited, because shed been brutally frank about so much else. She was a loyal, alert, fierce, vulnerable friend, shed said. I can go the distance with people.