“Carrie?” he asked.
I knew my name. So I let him know I knew it. “Yeah,” I said in a voice very like mine. Mine but hollow, mine but it didn’t matter because my stomach had swung into action.
“They called,” he said.
Great, ’cause that was really all I wanted to know. If they called, that they called, not what they said—that didn’t matter.
“They want you,” he continued.
There was a silence.
“They do? I mean they did?”
He laughed, then I laughed and dropped the phone and ran out into the front yard and into the street. It was raining. It didn’t rain in L.A. It was raining in L.A. and I was Princess Leia. I had never been Princess Leia before and now I would be her forever. I would never not be Princess Leia. I had no idea how profoundly true that was and how long forever was.
They would pay me nothing and fly me economy—a fact that would haunt my mother for months—but I was Leia and that was all that truly mattered. I’m Leia—I can live in a tree, but you can’t take that away from me.
I never dreamt there actually might be a day when I maybe hoped that you could.
the buns of navarone
The movie was being shot in England, so I could drop out of school but wouldn’t have to leave the scene of the crime. My friend Riggs let me use his flat in Kensington, behind Barkers department store, and that’s where I stayed for the three-month duration of the film.
I remember arriving on the set that first day, attempting to seem as benignly unobtrusive as I possibly could. I showed up at the studio in Borehamwood—about forty-five minutes outside of London—where they fitted me for wardrobe and did hair and makeup tests. (The crew was mostly men. That’s how it was and that’s pretty much how it still is. It’s a man’s world and show business is a man’s meal, with women generously sprinkled through it like overqualified spice.)
The hairstyle that was chosen would impact how everyone—every filmgoing human—would envision me for the rest of my life. (And probably even beyond—it’s hard to imagine any TV obituary not using a photo of that cute little round-faced girl with goofy buns on either side of her inexperienced head.) My life had started, all right. Here I was crossing its threshold in a long white virginal robe with the hair of a seventeenth-century Dutch school matron.
I was awarded the part in Star Wars with the dispiriting caveat that I lose ten pounds, so for me the experience was less like, “All right! I got a job!” and more like, “I got a job and I hurt my ankle.” The minus 10 percent was an agent’s fee, in flesh.
So I went to a fat farm. In Texas. Weren’t there any fat farms around Los Angeles? The only answers I can think of are (1) no, because everyone in Los Angeles was already thin, and (2) no, because this was 1976, years before the whole exercising, body-obsessed, fat-farm thing would take hold. The only exercise guru then was Richard Simmons—a flamboyant fuzzy-haired creature who vaguely resembled a gay Bozo the Clown, unless that’s redundant, which I, thank God, have no way of knowing, having no, thank God, direct experience with Bozo the Clown.
My mother recommended the Green Door in Texas, but it was probably called the Golden Door or something else because the only Green Door that anyone had heard of was a porn film, Behind the Green Door, which was known for making its star, Marilyn Chambers, if not a household name then a whorehouse-hold name. (I had seen it at fifteen, not having heard the phrase “blow job” before.)
At the Texas fat farm, I met Ann Landers (aka Eppie Lederer), a famous advice columnist, and Lady Bird Johnson, who both took me under their (overweight) wings, which was an uncomfortable place to be. Lady Bird, when I told her the title of Star Wars, thought I’d said Car Wash, and Ann/Eppie gave me a lot of unsolicited advice over a less-than-filling dinner of a burnt-looking partridge that seemed to have been singed and then torched. It was still more than enough; with a heavy heart and heavier face, I left a week later.
? ? ?
when we started filming, I tried to keep myself well under the radar so that the powers that be wouldn’t notice that I hadn’t lost the weight they’d asked me to. I only weighed 110 pounds to begin with, but I carried about half of them in my face. I think they may have put those buns on me so they might function as bookends, keeping my face right where it was, between my ears and no bigger. There I would stay, cheeks in check—my face as round as I was short, but no rounder.
We usually finished shooting around six thirty p.m., Monday through Friday. The unluckiest members of the cast—a group that definitely included me—were summoned to the set at around five a.m. I rose before dawn; was picked up at my flat in Kensington by my cheerful driver, Colin; and was spirited through the largely still sleeping London to the rosy dawn hem of its outskirts, arriving some forty-five minutes later at the less-than-stern guardrail of Borehamwood Elstree Studios.
Why was I asked to arrive at this ungodly hour? What monstrous chain of command had selected me apart from many others more deserving, more endowed with tresses thick and wavy tumbling toward their waiting waists?
Perhaps by now the sci-fi aficionados have guessed it. Yes, that god-awfully laughable Leia hairstyle! There were two hairpieces that were practically bolted to each side of my head. First one, then the other, these long brown tresses that, once latched on grimly, were twisted into some oversized-cinnamon-bun shape, which then—with a deftness that never ceased to amaze me—the hairdresser would very slowly and deliberately wind into the now-famous buns of Navarone.
Pat McDermott was the hairdresser assigned to supply me with the hairstyle that I would wear in the movie. Having only worn one hairstyle in Shampoo, I couldn’t see how this could be anything but a straightforward task. Apply a wig, brush some hair, affix some hairpins—voilà, hairstyle. What could be simpler? Well, this straightforward task turned out to be a little more than that when you considered Leia’s look would be something worn by children, transvestites, and couples involved in what might be considered a sex fantasy immortalized on the show Friends. There might have been more responsibility involved than first met the eye. Of course, there was no way to know this initially. So Pat attempted to deliver what was requested of her, an unusual hairstyle to be worn by a nineteen-year-old girl playing a princess.
Pat was from Ireland and spoke with a lovely Irish brogue—causing (or enabling, depending on the morning) her to refer to a movie as a “fill-um.” She also called me “My lovely” or “My dearest girl”: “Isn’t this quite an amazing fill-um, my dearest girl” or “Who is this but my darlin’ girl and that crazy hairstyle I put on her each and every day for the new fill-um they’re makin’.” I doubt she ever said the latter sentence for me, but she could have, and no one would be any the wiser.