Fisher - My girls a lifetime with Carrie and Debbie

Me and My Girls.

O n September 26, 1955, twenty-three-year-old movie star Debbie Reynolds married twenty-seven-year-old teen-idol crooner Eddie Fisher. The couple instantly became Americas Sweethearts, mobbed by the press and hordes of screaming, swooning, adoring fans wherever they went. The birth of their daughter, Carrie Frances Fisher, on October 21, 1956, made headlines around the world. They were darling. They were envied. They seemed almost too good to be true.

Which, of course, they were.

In the late spring of 1957 Eddie gave a concert at the Palladium in London. Debbie flew there to meet him. It speaks volumes about the state of their marriage by then that Debbie brought along her best friend from childhood, Jeanette Johnson, so shed have someone to talk to.

From London, Eddie, Debbie, and Jeanette headed on to Europe to meet super-producer Mike Todd and his impossibly gorgeous movie-star bride Elizabeth Taylor, who were on an extended honeymoon. Mike was Eddies closest friend, and Debbie and Elizabeth had gone to school together as teenagers on the MGM Studios lot. Eddie was Mikes best man at their wedding. Debbie was Elizabeths matron of honor.

The five of them spent a few days together at a magnificent villa in the South of France. Debbie and Jeanette had made plans to head on to Spain and leave Eddie with Mike and Elizabeth, to give Eddie the space Debbie had learned he needed and apparently preferred. Debbie described her last night at the villa in her 1988 book, Debbie: My Life:

Neither Eddie or I drank in those days, but at dinner I asked the butler to bring him a beer. Eddie was in a great mood whenever he was with the Todds, and the beer loosened him up more. He was acting as if I were actually his wife, even showing affection. After dinner, Jeanette went up to bed. The rest of us moved from the dinner table to the library. I ordered Eddie a second bottle of beer. The ice melted entirely.

He got drunk on two beers that night. Not only that, but he became very amorous. Elizabeth and Mike had put him in the mood, or he forgot whom he was with. It was a happy time with all of us entertaining each other with stories and jokes. Eventually they went off to make love and I turned to Eddie and said: Why dont we do the same? And so we did.

I had wanted another child as soon after Carrie as possible. Id hoped she would have a brother who would be as close in age to her as I am to my brother Bill. Bill was always my strength and my ally when I was growing up. He still is to this day. I wanted Carrie to have that too.

At that stage of my marriage to Eddie, he wasnt interested in sleeping with me. There was less and less opportunity for me to get pregnant.

I just remember praying to God that night that I would be pregnant. We had a good time and there werent many of those....

I just knew when I left that I was pregnant. I couldnt have known, but I knew.

Nine months later, Debbie Reynolds gave birth to me. They named me Todd EmanuelTodd for Mike Todd and Emanuel after Manny Sacks, the recording executive who started Eddie on his record career. Mike and Elizabeth came to see me, and Mike was thrilled to have his best friends son named after him.

For the first time in our marriage, I finally felt very happy and secure, my mother would later write.

Unfortunately, it didnt last. On March 22, 1958, when I wasnt quite four weeks old, Mike Todd was killed in a plane crash in New Mexico. About a month later, my father left my mother for his best friends widow, Elizabeth Taylor. As my sister Carrie described it decades later, in a book called Wishful Drinking, My father flew to Elizabeths side, gradually making his way slowly to her front.

Debbie was devastated. Numb, as she described it. Blank... as if I were alone on the top of a mountain, like floating in space.

It was one of Hollywoods biggest, most notorious scandals. The world was stunned. Eddie and Elizabeth were vilified. Eddie was declared a philandering, opportunistic loser, and Elizabeth was labeled a bad-girl, home-wrecking slut. Debbie, the good girl, the innocent, unsuspecting victim and single mom, was globally embraced with love and sympathy.

Carrie and I were too young to remember the insane tabloid feeding frenzy. But I do have one flash of a visual and emotional memory in the aftermath of our parents breakup thats as vivid to me today as it was the morning it happened. Mom and Carrie and I were still in the Conway Drive house wed lived in with Eddie before he left. I was maybe two years old, sitting on the floor, happily playing with my toys. Carrie, age four, was standing on the couch, staring out the window at the street, watching for our father, who was supposed to pick us up for a visitation. He never came.