#and yes i am wearing a john belushi shirt john belushi is the only funny man ever

[st4rry4pples]

this video is my magnum opus and my crown achivement in life

[trikadekaphile]

Carrie’s 1985 Esquire interview

https://classic.esquire.com/carrie-fisher/

This is the interview that got her a deal to write “Postcards from the Edge.”

HOME: Los Angeles, California

AGE: Twenty-eight

FATHER: Eddie Fisher

MOTHER: Debbie Reynolds

MOST FAMOUS STEPMOTHER: Elizabeth Taylor

OEUVRE: Shampoo, the Star Wars trilogy, Garbo Talks, Mr. Mike’s Mondo Video

UPCOMING OEUVRE: Stan Dragoti’s The Man with One Red Shoe and Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters

LAST BOOK READ: West with the Night by Beryl Markham

FAVORITE LINE FROM LAST BOOK READ: “Life is life and fun is fun, but it all goes quiet when the goldfish die.”

At age eleven Carrie Fisher was copying lines from Maugham’s Of Human Bondage into her diary. She dropped out of high school after becoming a chorus girl in her mother’s Broadway show Irene and made her movie debut as a teenager who sleeps with Warren Beatty in Shampoo. She attended London’s Central School of Speech and Drama and at eighteen got a leading part in a science-fiction film called Star Wars that made her character, Princess Leia Organa, a pop-culture heroine.

We meet her at her rustic L.A. ranch house, where a blue neon VACANCY sign hangs outside the kitchen door. She is wearing black-based striped pants, a deep fuchsia sweater, and unmatched earrings—one an oversize face and the other a small globe of the earth. Fisher’s secretary sits in the kitchen answering fan mail, her housekeeper does the laundry, and a friend talks to Fisher’s myna bird.

Our conversation moves to various settings: on the wooden swing in her bedroom, in the backyard between the pool and the full-size plastic cow (a sign at the front gate warns BEWARE OF THE COW), on a drive to Knott’s Berry Farm in her blue BMW with Bruce Springsteen blasting in the background. Her life is proof of her favorite T-shirt of the moment: IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO HAVE A HAPPY CHILDHOOD.

On Being America’s Niece

“I can have an entire country of people come up to me and say, ‘You have your mother’s eyes, your father’s nose, your mother’s mouth, your first stepmother’s legs.’ I grew up in a big small town called America. My parents were ‘America’s Sweethearts,’ and I think I’m ‘America’s Niece.’ I look like your niece, someone who you could bring home to your whole family and it would work.”

How She Picked Her Parents

“Early on, people used to ask me, ‘What’s it like to be Debbie Reynolds’s daughter?’ And I would say, ‘You mean compared to when I wasn’t?’ That portion of time when I lived with the Andersons and then moved in with the Wilsons for a while; you know, to sample each form of growing up—being an accountant’s kid and a car salesman’s kid and so on—until I finally arrived at being a movie star’s kid, liked that, and said, ‘Let’s stay here, this is fabulous, we’ll go with this one.’”

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

“My family is really the epitome of an unfilmable Dynasty. I call us blue-blooded white trash, and there’s an obsession in this country with that kind of thing. I sometimes believe certain things I read about myself. You know, you have a transcendental experience in front of the National Enquirer and think, ‘Of course, why, that must have been true what I read about myself. I am going out with Andrew Stevens.’ I made a horrible mistake—I thought I was going out with Andrew and I called him, and he was going out with somebody else. It turns out he’s just my neighbor.”

May Divorce Be with You

“A few years ago I found these scrapbooks of my parents’ breakup in my mother’s attic—someone had actually compiled them and sent them to her at the time. I looked through them and discovered a lot of things I didn’t know about it, which is an amazing thing to do when you’re sliding through your twenties and your parents have been broken up your entire life. I realize now, of course, that they’ll never get back together. And now I hear that the child of the woman who sent these things to my mother is compiling the scrapbook on my marriage to Paul.”

So What Went Wrong with Her Marriage to Paul Simon?

“Once I was on this talk show hosted by this child psychologist who kept asking me questions like, ‘When did you realize your father was a horrible human being?’ And finally I said to him, ‘You wanna hear about the wire hangers, don’t you?’ Questions about my marriage are ‘wirehanger questions,’ and no matter how I answer them they’re wired to blow, no pun intended. ”

What About the Book on Her Friend John Belushi?

“I think Woodward is brilliant at that wire-hanger aspect of life. I hear that he’s going to be playing Belushi in the movie version of the book: ‘Bob Woodward IS Wired!”

Drugs

“It’s very good to get through them while you’re still young, and then talk about how great or bad they were for the rest of your life.”

What’s the Difference Between New York and L.A.?

“Three hours. Most people know that. I’m stunned that you don’t.”

What It’s Like to Be Her

“I feel like I’m the doctor and the patient, but a lot of times the doctor isn’t in. I operate at such a level that sometimes it feels dangerous. If I fell off the edge of myself, I don’t know how long it would take to get back up. People think that I’m on drugs because of this velocity of being. And at the same time it’s slow enough for me to be aware of it. Like when I just said ‘velocity of being, ’ I liked the sound of it. ”

Why 60 Watts of Rock?

“In the face of something operating at full throttle, I can finally relax. That’s my form of meditation. My system is recharged in the presence of great rock ’n’ roll, it’s a very high testosterone outlet. Movies are very estrogen—they take you in, give you a house, make you dinner while you warm your feet by their fire. My mother brought me up on them. The Philadelphia Story, It’s a Wonderful Life, Bringing Up Baby—those are my black-and-white teddy bears. But rock ’n’ roll grabs your ear, wrestles it to the ground, and slaps a big wet kiss on it.”

Kids Say the Darndest Things

“I was photographed at an age when I was helpless to do anything about it—two hours. You can tell from the distressed look on my face in all my childhood pictures that I don’t like to be photographed. One time when I was five or six my governess took a picture of me and she was very tight to my face, and I said, ‘No ECUs, no ECUs.’ I hate extreme close-ups, even now.”

O Mein Papa

“David Letterman said he’d heard that my father sang everywhere, and I said, ‘Yes, the world is his shower.’ And often he likes to use women for soap.”

A Night to Remember

“I came home one night when I was sixteen, and there was blood all over the bedroom. My brother Todd had accidentally shot himself with a blank. The next day the Daily News headline was PICASSO DIES, and under it was a picture of my brother, and my mother in a mink hat. We were still up at 8:00 in the morning after this whole night at the police station, my brother was in the hospital, Picasso was dead, and all these photographers were at our door because the big story, in all the confusion, was that my mother had shot my brother, and she and I were discussing why she’d done it: ‘Well, you know, he wouldn’t clean his room.’ Or, ‘He never fed his turtle or brushed his teeth, so I finally had to penalize him in a way he’d understand.’ Someone came up to her in the hospital and said he thought it was a publicity stunt for her play Irene, and she said, ‘Yes, I shot him, and I only have one other child to shoot for publicity for the next play, so obviously there’s just one play left.’”

Something She’s Noticed About the President

“A good actor would have this thing down of not looking so expectant between sentences. You have to conceal the fact that you are waiting to talk, and look like you’re listening. He never looks like he’s listening; he’s always waiting to talk. He becomes an entire energetic called ‘President Waiting to Talk.’ Also, he’s not funny, but he really wants to be. I don’t want someone to want to be funny. I want him to be funny, or not.”

Favorite Bumper Sticker

“LOVE IS THE LIBERACE MUSEUM. That expressed it so succinctly for me, and I felt better having that clearly stated on my vehicle.”

Oh, and One Other Thing About the President

“He’s melting. No one’s noticed yet, but he is melting. We’re talking about a semisolid mass with dark hair. If the Democrats had come out and just said, ‘He’s melting,’ I think they would have done much better. I usually don’t talk about this unless someone looks like he also knows—if you know the President’s melting, you know how to identify other people who know that too. It’s going to be a real flood when he finally goes into total liquidation.”

Will She Ever Play Princess Leia Again?

“Yes, the Yiddish Theater has asked me to do it.”