When Debbie Reynolds called her daughter, Carrie, she would invariably announce over the phone, “Carrie, this is Debbie Reynolds, your mother.”With the sardonic, eye-rolling flippancy that was her trademark, Fisher told that as-if-I-didn’t-know story in her 2009 Broadway show, “Wishful Drinking,” at the Roundabout’s Studio 54. The script of the hilarious one-person comedy was concurrently turned into a best-selling memoir in which she expounded on her delirious life as the bipolar daughter of a famous couple — Reynolds and her father, Eddie Fisher — whose fame she’d eclipse with her international stardom as Princess Leia in “Star Wars.”Fisher’s death, at age 60, on December 27th was met with universal mourning, and praise for a brave and funny truth-teller — “You can’t find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody fakes closeness so well” — whose gimlet-eyed unmasking of celebrity culture was a reaction, in part, to her mother’s fulsome embrace of it. So the shock of her death was amplified when less than forty-eight hours later, Reynolds, 84, succumbed as well, after a stroke apparently caused by the profound loss of her daughter.When I first arrived in New York in the early ’70s and got a job at an entertainment magazine called After Dark, one of my first assignments was to serve as a go-fer on a fashion shoot planned around Reynolds, who was then making her Broadway debut in a revival of a 1920s musical frolic “Irene.” Despite her carefully cultivated America’s-sweetheart image (she was one of the last of the MGM musical stars), Reynolds was all business. No, she said, she would not be in the fashion shoot. She would sit for an interview, but only if the shoot was recast to feature her daughter, Carrie — then 16 and in the chorus of the show — and if her son, Todd, who had just turned 15, could be the photographer. Reynolds got what she wanted.Even then, Carrie Fisher had a forthright sophistication, which she would use to great effect soon after as the precociously seductive teen in “Shampoo,” opposite Warren Beatty, and, most memorably, as the tough, laser-wielding princess in the “Star Wars” franchise. She later adopted the image of Everybody’s Best Friend, cemented in the film “When Harry Met Sally,” and in her blazingly honest memoirs — the thinly-fictionalized “Postcards from the Edge” and “Wishful Drinking.”“Postcards,” made into a 1990 Mike Nichols film starring Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine, charted a version of the tempestuous relationship between Reynolds and her eldest child, then in the midst of recovering from drug addiction while living with her mother. On the other hand, “Wishful Drinking,” which was made into an HBO Television special (the network will show it again on New Year's Day at 9pm Eastern time), was a self-deprecating and wickedly funny confessional strewn with broken love affairs; it covered her short-lived marriage to Paul Simon and a dalliance with agent Bryan Lourd, who left Fisher for a man—but not before they conceived a daughter, Catherine “Billie” Lourd, who went into the family business (TV’s “Scream Queens”). Lourd now survives her mother and grandmother along with her uncle, Todd Fisher.“I’m very sane about how crazy I am,” Fisher writes in “Wishful Drinking,” so self-contained that she seems detached from the feelings she is pouring out. She even admits, “I rarely cry. I save my feelings up inside me like I have something in mind for them. I am waiting for the exact perfect situation and then I explode in a light show of feeling and emotion — a piñata stuffed with pent-up passions.”For all of her too-short life, Carrie Fisher slyly crafted those turbulent emotions into art that was especially comforting to her fellow freaks. Reynolds and, to a lesser extent, her father Eddie Fisher, was often the affectionate butt of her jokes. (Of her philandering dad, she once observed that she couldn’t hate him because he was “too adorable.”) She was much closer and umbilically-tied to her mother. They were “Hearts and Bones,” to quote the title of the song written by Paul Simon about his short, stormy marriage to Fisher.When Fisher died, four days after a heart attack, she was planning a return to the stage in a follow-up to “Wishful Drinking.” The loss of her bracing art is mourned along with her death. One wonders how Reynolds might have figured in her next show, and if the resentments against her mother had been burned away by time, leaving only love. In the film of “Postcards,” MacLaine, as Doris, asks her beleaguered daughter, “Are you less mad at me now?” to which a resigned Suzanne responds quietly, “I’m always less mad at you, Mom.”
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