PLAYBILL ON OPENING NIGHT: Wishful Drinking — Carrie-ing On As Best She Can
By Harry Haun
October 5, 2009
"Hello, I'm Carrie Fisher, and I'm an alcoholic," the lady declared at the top of Wishful Drinking, her autobiographical act that bowed Oct. 4 at Studio 54.
This turns out to be the good news. For almost two and a half hours of quips and chatter and hilariously healing self-depreciation, Fisher is the roller-coaster conductor of her life, careering from chemical highs to all sorts of lows and lowers.
A self-described "manic-depressive, alcoholic, addict with the powers to turn men bald and gay" makes quite a chaotic journey, so fasten your seatbelts at the station.
Wishful Drinking is postscripts from the edge — musings on the life that late she led, how through all manner and man-made turbulence she has finally made it to shore and a relatively safe (for now) harbor. Her comic style, sardonic and smart, is to view the wreckage from on high, wryly and wisely, almost detached except that she manages to pull you into her corner and her own uniquely skewed view of life.
Fisher wrote the book on galloping dysfunction — figuratively and literally. Simon & Schuster published it last year, and the author recites vast chunks of the text verbatim and lickety-split. Miraculously, she somehow makes it all appear fresh and spur-of-the-moment. That's the actress in her. She's a much better actress than last month's horror flick, "Sorority Row," would have led you to suspect. She can spike a line with italic timing, then follow it up with a funny two-or-three-word undertow.
She treats praise, in character, with deflective good-humor. "Well, I'm playing a part that's close to me," she shrugged later in the long lobby of "54" when she emerged from her epic confessional. "I didn't want to give away the ending — but I live."
Her problems began at birth, to hear her tell it. She comes from "simple folks" — if "simple" is remotely the right word for Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher at the hysterical height of their mid-'50s heyday. Carrie's dad fainted in the delivery room dead away at the sight of her entrance, and the flock of nurses attending the birth rushed to him, triggering a lifelong "pathetic bid for the attention I lacked as a newborn" and culminating with the evening's entertainment.
Life in her goldfish bowl was a constantly churning affair, and it went into Double Rinse when The Widow Todd entered the waters. Elizabeth Taylor more or less borrowed Carrie's dad for a few years, wrecking the marriage and many a fan-magazine myth. At this point, a chalkboard descends from the rafters, cluttered with 8x10 glossies, and allows Fisher, marker in hand, to launch into a quickie course of Hollywood Inbreeding 101. Reason for the lecture? Her daughter, Billie Lourd, started dating Rhys Tivey, who happens to be Elizabeth Taylor's grandson, and they were just wondering if they were committing incest. Fisher's findings: "You're related by scandal" — arguably, the century's yummiest.
When one commends the massive memory feat involved in doing a show like this, Fisher says you don't know the half of it, and factors in "LSD, ECT — and age."
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Husband No. 1 was Paul Simon, "a short Jewish singer" (like Daddy, she noted with a nudge to Freud). It was a rocky marriage, but he incorporated her into some of his lyrics, which she was happy to give a deconstructed, bittersweet replay. Her second marriage — to Bryan Lourd — produced Billie, now 17, and ended when he met Scott, "making Scott" (she said in a line not used on opening night) "the man who got the man who got away." Lourd has since gone bald, too.
Another irony in life, given her Rodeo Drive roots, is that she'd find fame in a film called "Star Wars," playing the iconic Princess Leia Organa. But fame had a downer, too: that monstrously unbecoming hairpiece with the matching Danish buns over her ears. Considering the curve balls she's been thrown in life, it's a miracle she can laugh at all — and translate that into a group therapy that resembles entertainment.
Bearing witness to the opening-night testimony were Jane Fonda, Harvey Keitel, Patti LuPone, playwright Terrence McNally (revved up, coming from a runthrough of next month's Broadway revival of Ragtime, which is being co-produced by his life-partner, Tom Kirdahy), Tovah Feldshuh, TCM host Robert Osborne (who has shot 30 movie intros with Fisher for "The Essentials" series and flew in from a Seattle Film Festival especially for her opening), Debra Monk, three-week-old honeymooners (and radiating it!) Kathleen Marshall and Scott Landis, actor/songwriter/fledgling cook Jeff Blumenkrantz ("Cooking is my most fun project right now. I'm cooking my way through a Martha Stewart cookbook, like 'Julie & Julia,' and blogging about it. Her show found my blog, and I may be on her show cooking with her at some point this month or next month."), Boyd Gaines, director-designer Tony Walton (looking forward to directing Melissa Ericco as Shaw's Candida at the Irish Rep after the first of the year), Justin Bond, playwright John Weidman, directors Walter (Chicago) Bobbie and Jason (Shrek) Moore, New Group honcho Scott Elliott (drumbeating for his upcoming Kenneth Lonergan play with Matthew Broderick, The Starry Messenger), Craig Bierko, Avenue Q composer Robert Lopez) and his new lyricist, wife Kristen Anderson-Lopez (currently collaborating on an original Roundabout musical called Up Here, "a romantic comedy with a twist" that will get a reading at the end of this month), Speech & Debate's Stephen Karam, Jim Dale (plotting a new one-man show, called Still Carrying On), Martha Plimpton, former (and longest-running) Phantom Howard McGillin, lyricist-director David Zippel, Byron Jennings and Carolyn McCormick, Stephen Lang (with two big movies on the horizon, "Avatar" and "The Men Who Stare at Goats"), Jefferson Mays, director Mark Brokaw, legendary composer John Kander, Salman Rushdie (who described himself as "an old, old friend of Carrie's"), Griffin Dunne, conductor Paul Gemignani, Mario Cantone and a whole Bye Bye Birdie contingent (Gina Gershon, director Bobby Longbottom, Bill Irwin, composer Charles Strouse, Dee Hoty and Jayne Houdyshell).
Since I wasn't invited to the big post-party bash at Amalia a block away, this seems as good a time as any to go into how long Carrie and I go back. If this is news to her, that's because she was an embryo at the time.
One Sunday morning in early 1956 — even then, I was in journalism — I had opened my bundles of The Dallas Morning News and was methodically doubling them up and folding them for my paper route when, about 4:30 AM, I heard on the car radio that Eddie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds would be leaving Love Field for California in a couple of hours. They had been flying back from his singing engagement in Miami the night before when she became ill en route, and they opted for a layover in Big D.
I flew through the paper route that morning, got to the airport while their plane was still on the runway and, somehow, with a lot of teen-angst urgency, brazenly talked my way on board to get their autographs. A stewardess acted as a go-between and got their permission. The Golden Couple, unfazed by this pesky intrusion, received me graciously, dashed off their best wishes and John Hancocks and smiled an awful lot.
The Polaroid is forever in my head, holding up beautifully — better than all of us. Later I learned it was during that Dallas stopover that Debbie discovered she was pregnant with Carrie. There has been, to understate, a lot of sturm und drang over the dam since, but Carrie has come out on the other side a sunny survivor who has learned to laugh at her life and share that laughter with others.
In 16 days, she turns 53 and has much to celebrate. Long may she rage . . .