luminous beings were we
In the beginning, when Star Wars became a bona fide phenomenon, none of us knew how to be famous (maybe Harrison or Mark did, but if so, they weren’t sharing their insights with me). They didn’t offer that class at Berlitz, and we lacked a manual containing suggestions on how to edge into this transitional state smoothly. Yes, I know I should’ve been able to access what was expected of me by watching my mother and elusive part-time father, which I would’ve done had I anticipated a life like theirs—which was in fact lifelike—but remember, I knew I would never go into such a fickle business.
It all happened so quickly. Instantly there was a lot of fan mail, and we initially read all of it ourselves.
As I’ve said, I had known celebrity before in connection with the tabloid frenzy surrounding my parents, so I wasn’t exactly swimming in unfamiliar waters. But having watched their fame diminish over the course of their lifetimes had taught me the limit of fame. You could clutch the tail of this wild tiger but you had to know—or at least I knew—that at some point it would wrest itself from your desperate grasp and hightail it off to someone else’s jungle.
Besides, this Star Wars fame meant that Princess Leia was famous and not Carrie Fisher. I just happened to look like her—minus her bad hair, and plus less conspicuous bad hair all my own. I think fame might be more fun when it’s personal and not just someone remarking how trippy it is that you look so much like that Star Wars character. It’s still fun, though, don’t get me wrong. Or do. I can’t stop you.
I’d had what I always referred to as associative fame. By-product fame. Fame as the salad to some other, slightly more filling main dish. Celebrity-daughter fame (and later, when married to Paul Simon, celebrity-wife fame). And now, with Star Wars, I had that happened-to-have-played-an-iconic-character fame. Still, being newly famous in whatever way you were famous was a very busy business. The main task at hand was showing people that I was just as independent and likable as was the intergalactic princess I portrayed.
I think boys may have been attracted to my accessibility. Even if I did have some princessy qualities, I wasn’t conventionally beautiful and sexy, and as such was less likely to put them down or think I was too good for them. I wouldn’t humiliate them in any way. Even if I teased them in the context of running around with laser guns dodging bullets, I wouldn’t do it in a way that would hurt them.
What is happening? How did we get here? Where is here? How long will it last? What is it? Do I deserve it? What does this make me? What do you wear to an event like that? What do you think I should say? What if I don’t know the answer? Being around my mom when she was being recognized was hardly an effective preparation for any of this.
Fame can be incredibly intense, and of course none of us had any idea that anything like it would ever happen. You’d have to be a psychic of a very unique Hollywood sort to guess something of this order was up ahead ready to ambush you, transforming the character you played into a household name. The studio would set up a tour, a press junket, which was what you did especially for a movie like this where the cast were virtual unknowns. Then the movie came out and everybody went wild. Suddenly this little movie needed no promotion. But because no one could ever have anticipated that, we ended up doing the junket anyway, which became the definition of overkill. But whatever it was, it turned out that wherever we went, people were waiting and they all seemed very happy to have us there, selling the sold.
We’d done this little low-budget film. They’d even flown us economy to our location in London to save money, and we lived off a per diem that came nowhere near the vicinity of luxurious. We’d done a cool little off-the-radar movie directed by a bearded guy from Modesto. A thing like that wasn’t going to make people want to play with a doll of you, was it?
It was one movie. It wasn’t supposed to do what it did—nothing was supposed to do that. Nothing ever had. Movies were meant to stay on the screen, flat and large and colorful, gathering you up into their sweep of story, carrying you rollicking along to the end, then releasing you back into your unchanged life. But this movie misbehaved. It leaked out of the theater, poured off the screen, affected a lot of people so deeply that they required endless talismans and artifacts to stay connected to it.
Had I known it was going to make that loud of a noise, I would’ve dressed better for those talk shows and definitely would have argued against that insane hair (although the hair was, in its own modest way, a big part of that noise). And I certainly wouldn’t have ever just blithely signed away any and all merchandising rights relating to my image and otherwise.
And on top of whatever else, Mark, Harrison, and I were the only people who were having this experience. So who do you talk to that might understand? Not that that is some sort of tragedy—it just puts you in an underpopulated, empathy-free zone. I mean, obviously I’d never starred in a movie, but this was completely not like starring in your average everyday movie. It might’ve been like being one of the Beatles. Sure, most of it was a fun surprise, but the days where you could really let your guard down were over because now there were cameras everywhere. I had to comport myself with something approaching dignity, at twenty.
But when we first began getting fan mail forty years ago, it was complicated to know what to do. Do you answer every letter or ignore some of the less enthusiastic? So for the first few months we all—that’s all, Harrison, Mark, and I—answered every letter. How I know this is because we all received a letter from the mother of a little girl who was going blind and who had seen Star Wars with her last sight and would we send her daughter an autographed picture of ourselves before she went blind altogether. So the three of us promptly hurried off and sent her the letter before she lost her sight and somehow we all ended up discovering that little Lisa was a 20-20-sighted woman of sixty-three, causing us one of many laughs in our giddy days of early fame.
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none of us had done talk shows before, so we were forced to develop not only our public personas but our talk show styles as we went from one to the next, touting the film that needed no tout. A tout-free experience, we should’ve informed the hosts before lining up like tin ducks at a carnival waiting to be shot. And shot we were—by televised film cameras all over the U.S. and eventually onward overseas.