New York -- Maybe it has to do with Carrie Fisher's not-so-repressed wish to have a session with her psychoanalyst, or maybe it's because after four days of talking to reporters she's just plain tired. Whatever the reason, Carrie Fisher is conducting an interview from a semi-reclining position in her suite at the posh St. Regis Hotel.
"The other day I got on the elevator here and I pushed 16 because that's the floor my shrink is on," says Ms. Fisher, visibly amused at the sly way her unconscious expressed itself. "I was ready to go to the shrink . . . where you can just say anything awful, stupid and random."
It's hard to imagine this witty, sharp and very smart 38-year-old woman -- who's invaded Manhattan to promote her third novel, "Delusions of Grandma" -- ever saying anything stupid. As for awful, well, awful is in the eye of the beholder. True, Ms. Fisher takes no prisoners when she talks, but one senses it's the truth she's after, not the shock value.
Which brings us to random.
It would be wrong to say Carrie Fisher speaks in a random fashion. Let's face it: Carrie Fisher is way beyond random. Indeed, her entire approach to conversation appears to be based on the James Joyce-Sigmund Freud Stream of Consciousness Method. There are few points-of-reference in her conversations. And no transitions. You either catch the wave and ride it, or you don't.
She writes that way, too, says Simon & Schuster editor Becky Saletan, who worked with her on "Delusions." "Carrie is not a linear person. But that's true of any good fiction writer," she says.
Not only is Ms. Fisher not linear, she also keeps forgetting to promote the book -- which, like her other two novels, "Postcards from the Edge" and "Surrender the Pink" -- is based largely on her own life. Instead, she keeps returning to the past -- moving back and forth between The Scandal, as she calls it, of her childhood and The Scandal that is dogging her now. Listening to Ms. Fisher, one supposes, is like being an analyst listening to a patient.
Take, for instance, the following soliloquy concerning an important passage in her childhood:
I remember being a baby in the first house we grew up in, and I remember standing in the doorway of my bedroom, and I remember looking at my mother and she was alone in a really big bed. And I remember clocking that. And I remember my father took me to meet Elizabeth Taylor. I couldn't have been more than 3. I remember her opening the door at the Beverly Hills Hotel and she was in a nightgown. And she was beautiful. And I remember I had to notice who that was. Because something bad had happened. Something that people didn't talk about . . .
What people didn't talk about back then, when Ms. Fisher was barely 2, was The Scandal. She assumes you know what she means. But there are those who might think Ms. Fisher's celebrity began with the Princess Leia role in "Star Wars" or her marriage and divorce to and from singer Paul Simon or her dark battle with drugs that eventually landed her in a rehab center. So a brief history of her life up to the age of 2 might help:
When she was about 18 months old, Daddy (teen idol Eddie Fisher) left Mommy (America's sweetheart Debbie Reynolds) for The Most Beautiful Girl in the World (Elizabeth Taylor). Mommy was left with the task of trying to shield Carrie and her 6-month-old brother, Todd, from the fallout of one of Hollywood's hottest scandals.
"It was a big, long thing," Ms. Fisher says now. "I remember the photographers. They used to almost knock my brother and me down to get, like, some tragic photo of my mom after the 'thing.' They paid attention for a long, bad time to my mom. I was only 2 but I was not unconscious." She attributes her "hatred" of being photographed to that experience. "But I will still do it." Pause. "The thing I will always do is what I'm afraid of."
Elegant and unstyled
Ms. Fisher, dressed in an elegant black Ungaro suit, is leaning back against the headboard of a twin bed, one hand fiddling with her unstyled auburn hair, the other lighting up a cigarette. She is barefoot, a small, knockout of a woman who resembles her mother when she smiles and her father when she doesn't. Her voice is an instrument: throaty, warm, deep, dark and musical. But it's beginning to take on signs of too many Marlboros smoked for too many years.
"You know, I asked my mom later, 'What did you ever say to me?' about that time. You have to say something to your kid, I think, on the off-chance they need you to. But she didn't say anything to me. Nobody told me. She said I used to walk around looking for my father. Just opening doors and looking for my father."
She stops, laughs, then in a voice edged with sarcasm, says: "Well, that's like a tragic story, isn't it?"
She's traveling with her 21-month-old daughter, Billie Catherine; her daughter's nanny; and a woman friend who also acts as co-producer on some of Ms. Fisher's successful script-writing projects. In the works is a TV sitcom pilot. "It'll be something
about me," she says. "I'll use whatever I can of myself for the character."
Billie's father, Hollywood agent Bryan Lourd, is no longer in Ms. Fisher's life. Eight months after Billie's birth, Mr. Lourd walked out of the 3 1/2 -year relationship with Ms. Fisher. Columnist Liz Smith attributed the split to Mr. Lourd's relationship with another man, a speculation that's shocked even the shock-proof Hollywood crowd.
"I don't want to address the scandal stuff," Ms. Fisher says, introducing it into the conversation in a pre-emptive strike. "I have a baby, I have a life. Why would I say anything bad about her father?"
But her thoughts seem to be leaping back to another 2-year-old girl whose father left abruptly; a girl who wandered around opening doors to see if Daddy was there. That, she says, is not going to happen to Billie.
"So in the car one day I said to Billie, 'Look, everything's going to be fine. Your father loves you and I love you, blah, blah, blah.' So, long story -- she's watching my mouth; I finish talking. Then she went: Blah. Blah. Blah," says Ms. Fisher, pausing somewhat ominously between each "blah."
Billie was how old?
"One and change," replies Ms. Fisher. "But she knew there was a blah, blah, blah going on in Mommy that she didn't like."
Billie was close to her father, says Ms. Fisher, and will remain so. There will be no "bad-mouthing" to Billie about her father -- just as there was none about Eddie Fisher from her mother.
"I never spoke badly about their father," says Debbie Reynolds. "I always told them, 'Daddy is away, working for us.' It wasn't true. He couldn't have cared less about the children. Never sent them a present or was present. But as he's grown older, he came around to wanting to know them."
Suits in the closet
Ms. Fisher remembers one childhood visit with her father -- whom she describes as a manic-depressive, just as she is -- this way: "My father had just gotten back from Tokyo and he asked me if I wanted to see something. And then he opened his closet doors and there were 100 new suits in there. In all colors. Pink, green, orange, purple, yellow." She is determined that Billie will see her father often and in a more normal way.
Despite reports to the contrary, Ms. Fisher and Mr. Lourd never married. ("I was surprised," deadpans Ms. Fisher, "to learn we were married.")
And, as one expects, there is a relationship in "Delusions of Grandma" that closely resembles Ms. Fisher's recent failed liaison. The narrator, a scriptwriter named Cora who gives birth to a child, has Ms. Fisher's voice and Ms. Fisher's difficulties in sustaining an intimate relationship.
There is also, as in all her novels, the usual supporting cast of characters based loosely on Ms. Fisher's famous friends. A Hollywood insider from birth, she hangs out with the likes of David Geffen, Penny Marshall, Meryl Streep, Albert Brooks. But unlike some writers who have fictionalized their famous friends, Ms. Fisher continues to eat lunch in Hollywood.
"If I want to write a character I know would be somewhat recognizable, I will give that person the material and I will say to them they can exercise the right of veto," she says. Among others who were given this "right of veto" before "Delusions" was published were David Geffen, Meryl Streep and Debbie Reynolds.
No veto of her own
The only person, it seems, who doesn't get the option of having things taken out is Ms. Fisher herself. From her three books we know all about her drug problems, her insecurities, her relationship with her mother and, of course, her troubles with men.
"I am a world-class disappointer to men," says Ms. Fisher who, by this time, has changed into a brown velvet dress, sat patiently through a photographic session and is now lying in a supine position on the bed. "They always feel either unattended to or unappreciated by me," she continues, her voice sounding tired. "I've tried, but I've failed at it."
What she is good at, she says, is "being intimate with strangers." But it is also one of the reasons why her personal relationships falter. "I have this trick of being intimate with strangers. And people you're in a relationship with don't like that. They see it as a betrayal. But I like it. It's hard for me to give up." She laughs a sardonic laugh. "In fact, I lose the relationships but I've never lost this trick."
She's right, of course. Trick or not, Ms. Fisher is brilliant at giving good quote and relating to strangers. Some of it, she says, she learned from watching her mother.
Answering everything
Says Debbie Reynolds of her daughter's prowess with the press: "She disarms people with her honesty and brilliance. . . . But I feel sometimes she's asked questions that she doesn't need to answer. She feels compelled to answer everyone's questions, however inappropriate. And I don't."
Questions, one supposes, like: Are you financially secure?
Ms. Fisher answers right away. "No. No. I have to work. Especially since I just bought a house that cost what I had. If I'd known I would be living there alone, I wouldn't have bought it," she says, referring to the departure of Mr. Lourd. About the breakup, she says, "I'm over it."
Her mother says otherwise: "She has a lot of upset over it still. But she's coming out of it," says Ms. Reynolds. "I'm just so proud of her. That with all the personal unhappiness in her life she could still finish the book. Somebody else would have gone to bed, pulled the sheet over her head and not come out."
Ms. Fisher, still prone but elegant in her velvet gown, is asked if she'd ever consider marrying again. "Yeah," she says. "And I might go to the moon, too. You know what I mean?" She lights a Marlboro. "Yeah, I would do anything again. Unfortunately. Like I took drugs again. I had a drug slip at a certain point." She worries about it, she says. "But better to worry about it than get cocky about it."
One last question: The book jacket states that she and her daughter, Billie, "divide their time between Beverly Hills and Florence, Italy." Just how much time do they spend in Florence?
Ms. Fisher laughs out loud. "It's total bull," she says, turning her head sideways on the pillow. "I made the whole thing up so I'd sound more interesting."