At the time, the last thing I thought I wanted to do was go into show business, a fickle occupation that doled out a sense of uneasiness and humiliation like tepid snacks at movie screenings. This uneasiness was nurtured by the almost invisible diminishment over time of one’s popularity. First you’re in movies—a few small parts in popular films. Then, if it happens, the thing all actors are waiting for—stardom. You’re a years-in-the-making overnight success.
I had missed the early giddy portion of my parents’ rise to success. I arrived on the scene when my mother, Debbie Reynolds, was still making good, big-budget films at MGM. But as I grew up and my consciousness all too slowly snapped into focus, I noticed that the films were not what they had originally been. Her contract expired when she was in her late thirties. I recall her last MGM Studios film at forty was of the horror variety, entitled What’s the Matter with Helen? This was no Singin’ in the Rain, and her costar Shelley Winters somewhat thoughtlessly killed her at the film’s close.
Soon after this, my mother began doing nightclub work in Las Vegas at the now-defunct Desert Inn. Coincidentally, I also began doing nightclub work, singing “I Got Love” and “Bridge over Troubled Water” in her show. It was a huge step up for me from high school. My younger brother, Todd, accompanied me on guitar, and my mother’s backup singers danced and sang behind me (something that, at occasional odd moments throughout my life, I’ve wished that they continued to do).
My mother then took a modified version of this show to theaters and fairs across America. After that she did a Broadway musical. I was then one of the backup singers behind her, where backup singers tend to lurk. She then continued to do her nightclub act for the next forty years—with forays into television shows and films (most notably in Albert Brooks’s Mother).
My father, Eddie Fisher, played in nightclubs until he was no longer asked to, and when he wasn’t asked to it was in part because as a crooner he was no longer relevant, and in part because he was more interested in sex and drugs than anything else. Shooting speed for thirteen years can really put a crimp in whatever career you might otherwise be attempting to sustain—ask around.
Periodically, he would manage to secure a book deal or—well, actually, that’s it. No one could take the risk of hiring him to sing; he could easily be a no-show, and his vocal range was severely limited by his debauched lifestyle. Also, people found it difficult to forgive him for leaving my mother for Elizabeth Taylor all those years ago, causing him to be viewed for his remaining years as “America’s Cad.”
One day when I was about twelve I was sitting on my grandmother’s lap—not a good idea at any age, given that Maxine Reynolds was, to say the least, not a cuddly woman—when she suddenly asked my mother, “Hey, did you ever get those tickets to Annie that I asked you for?”
She regarded my mother with suspicious eyes. (My grandmother had three looks: glaring suspiciously, glaring hostilely, and glaring with disappointment—active disappointment, lively disappointment, condescending disappointment.)
“I’m sorry, Mama,” my mother responded. “Is there another show you want to see? Annie seems to be sold out for the whole month. I’ve tried everywhere.”
My grandmother pursed her lips, giving the appearance of someone who smelled something bad. Then she pushed air out of her nose and pronounced a very disappointed “Hmmmmmm.”
“It used to mean something in this town to be Debbie Reynolds,” she said. “Now she can’t even get a few measly show tickets.” I involuntarily squeezed my grandmother, as if to do so would push all future demeaning remarks out of her stocky little body. It was episodes like this that made me decide: I never wanted to be in show business.
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so why did I agree to visit the set of Shampoo knowing that there might be a role in the film that I was right for? Go figure. Maybe I wanted to see what it felt like to be wanted by Warren Beatty in any capacity at all. At any rate, at seventeen I didn’t see it as a career choice. Or perhaps I was kidding myself—Lord knows it wouldn’t be the last time in my life I would do that. Kidding yourself doesn’t require that you have a sense of humor. But a sense of humor comes in handy for almost everything else. Especially the darker things, which this did not fall anywhere under the heading of.
I got the role of Lorna in Shampoo. Lorna, the daughter of Jack Warden and Lee Grant. I basically had one scene and that scene was with Warren, who played my mother’s, and everyone else in the film’s, hairdresser and lover. My character doesn’t like her mother and has never had her hair done (i.e., slept with her hairdresser).
Was Lorna’s not getting her hair done a way of rebelling against her mother? Possibly. Was propositioning her mother’s hairdresser a way of screwing with her hated mother? Absolutely. Would Lorna have been sorry if her father found out? Probably. Or not. You pick.
In the film, I am discovered on the tennis court wearing a tennis outfit, holding a racquet, and standing next to a tennis pro who is hitting balls as I watch Warren arrive. I inform him that my mother is not at home and take him to the kitchen, where I ask him if he’s making it with my mother and if he wants anything to eat. I tell him I’ve never been to a hairdresser, that I’m nothing like my mother, and ask him if he wants to fuck. The scene ends with my proposition and we then find me in the bedroom, postcoitally reapplying my headscarf.
Why did I wear a headscarf, you most likely failed to wonder? Because I, Carrie, had short hair—the kind you get from going to a hairdresser—so I had to wear a wig to show that a visit to a hairdresser was not something that would ever be found on my schedule. I wore the scarf because the wig looked less like a wig that way. The other big question you’re probably not asking yourself is, did I wear a bra under my tennis outfit (and if I didn’t, why didn’t I)?
Simple. Warren, the star, cowriter, and producer of Shampoo, was asked by the costume department if he wanted me to wear a bra under my tennis clothes or not. Warren squinted in the general direction of my breasts.
“Is she wearing one now?”
I stood there as if my breasts and I were somewhere else.
“Yes,” responded Aggie, the costume designer.
Warren pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Let’s see it without.”
I followed Aggie to my hamster-cage trailer and removed my bra. Whereupon I was returned to Warren’s scrutiny forthwith. Once again he squinted at my chest impassively.
“And this is without?” he asked.
“Yes,” Aggie groaned.
“Let’s go without,” he pronounced, directed, charged, commanded.
My breasts and I followed Aggie back to my dressing zone and the subject was closed. My braless Shampoo breasts can be ogled on YouTube (or LubeTube), as can my no-underwear-in-space look in the first Star Wars and the metal bikini (or Jabba Killer) in the third (now confusingly known as Episodes IV and VI).
My two scenes in Shampoo took only a few days to shoot, and when they were done I went back to living at home with my mother and younger brother, Todd, hoping that I wouldn’t be living there for too much longer, as any amount of time was way too long for the now-too-hip-for-words me.
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i had never had an audition like the one I had with Terrence Malick, the director of Days of Heaven. I recall sitting with him for over an hour and talking. Not just me talking, thank God—though I do think the emphasis was on getting to know me and what I was like. After all, I hadn’t called him into a room to meet about a movie I was making.
I remember telling him far too much about myself, a habit that would only increase as I aged. But as a teenager I didn’t yet have that big a repertoire of anecdotes. One of my best up to that time had to do with the comic Rip Taylor—he and my mom did a show together in Vegas—and his gay secretary, Lynn.