By Doug Sturdivant
22 Sep 2009

Carrie Fisher
photo by Michael Lamont

Carrie Fisher takes a sobering look at her famous lineage and the pitfalls of Hollywood in her Broadway solo show, Wishful Drinking.

*

This year's Tony-show producers tapped Carrie Fisher, of all likely people, to provide Cliffs Notes on Next to Normal's dysfunctional, pharmaceutical, manic-depressive heroine, and she soon erupted — hilariously! — into a Whitman's Sampler of tics and twitches that portrayed a certain electro-shock of recognition.

"They actually wanted me to say something, and I didn't feel I really had to," says Fisher, whose Exhibit A — called Wishful Drinking, based on her best-selling comic memoir — opens Oct. 4 at Studio 54 (the same Studio 54, ironically, which was a rest stop in her distant and hazy past).

Life among the icons hasn't been easy, but the tough, resilient humor she inherited from mom Debbie Reynolds has seen her through some pretty dark patches.

Like Mom, she also turned, at 19, into an icon with a film-for-the-ages, "Star Wars" (for her mom, it was "Singin' in the Rain"). Also like Mom, she married and divorced a short Jewish singer (Paul Simon). Reynolds lost hers — Eddie Fisher — when he famously flew to the side of The Widow [Mike] Todd, Elizabeth Taylor, "gradually," Fisher notes, "making his way slowly to her front." Another blow to Fisher's midsection came from Bryan Lourd, who fathered their daughter Billie: he left her for a guy named Scott, "making Scott the man who got the man who got away."

For every punch, a punch line. "I was street smart," Fisher has admitted, "but unfortunately the street was Rodeo Drive." At one point in the show, Fisher conducts a quick, uproarious class in "Hollywood Inbreeding 101," which was originally prompted when her daughter asked her (not unreasonably) if she was related to her new boyfriend, Rhys Tivey, Elizabeth Taylor's grandson. With pointer in hand and a blackboard cluttered with 8x10 glossies, she tracks the tangled genealogy of her parents' subsequent flings and errors. Her findings: "You're related by scandal." Whew!

"So many people want to be famous, like that's going to solve everything," says the gal who's done that, been there and got the T-shirt. "I try to find the ordinary part of extraordinary. I know people know that celebrities aren't just a bunch of happy people skipping around, but I also think a lot of people don't believe that. Even though they know they don't, they think they do on some level. But, for me, I'm just trying to make peace with things you normally can't make peace with. It's the best alchemy you can do — to take unhappy situations and turn them into funny gold.

"They say, 'The truth will set you free,' but once it sets you free, it rarely makes you laugh. It should set you free and make you laugh. That's a better deal."

Carrie Fisher in Wishful Drinking
photo by Kevin Berne

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