The forgotten marriage of Carrie Fisher and Paul Simon: 11 months of screaming, depression, fame and drugs
María Porcel
Los Angeles, 28 March 2024
That complicated relationship with fame and substances did not fit in with Paul Simon’s life, which was much more conventional. The New Jersey singer explains in the new documentary that “Carrie was much more show business oriented,” and that “she was used to a lot of press and things like that.” Simon notes that “it wasn’t intimidating or anything. She knew how to manipulate it and make it work for her. She was really good at it, and I wasn’t.”
As producer Lorne Michaels (the creator of the famous comedy show Saturday Night Live), who was Simon’s best man at the couple’s August 1983 wedding, recounts in the documentary, everything in their relationship had an extravagant point that they always wanted to go beyond. “For the engagement, we went to Greece. Paul chartered a boat. I was seasick for three days — at the rail, praying for death. Other than that, it was a really fun time, and for the honeymoon, we went up to Egypt, went up the Nile,” he recalls, as quoted in People. In addition, Michaels observes that “there were lots of things that were remarkable about the time, but also it was two people at career peaks, and that’s always complicated. All of it was kind of a whirlwind. Carrie was in a complete fame bubble because of Star Wars.”
In her 2016 memoir, Wishful Drinking, Fisher wrote that marriages were not her thing, that she could be a fun and great girlfriend but not a good wife. Still, for years, she helped Simon raise his eldest son, Harper, the fruit of the musician’s first marriage to Peggy Harper, whom he married in 1969 and divorced in 1975. Harper, now 51, tried to make a career in music, although he never succeeded. During his youth he battled depression as well as several addictions (to alcohol, marijuana and LSD as a teenager; and then to heroin and morphine), and Fisher was always by his side during his recovery.
Paul Simon himself discusses the difficulties of being married in this documentary. “I mean, what was I thinking? Certainly not thinking about life, you know, that you actually, like, have to stop,” he says. “Marriage is very… it’s a hard thing to do. You have to concentrate on — not everything can happen at once, not everything is a media event. All types of mistakes on top of mistakes on top of mistakes... I realized… I could exhaust myself from emotional upheaval.” Carrie Fisher said something very similar in her celebrated biography, when asked if her brief marriage was a “mistake,” she responded affirmatively. “Well, because I think, if you look at me, at the most, you can think I’m an interesting girlfriend. But a wife? I think you’re going to be disappointed,” she said with her trademark self-deprecating humor. “Poor Paul. He had to put up with a lot with me. I think ultimately, I fell into the heading ‘good anecdote, bad reality.’ I was really good for material, but when it came to day-to-day living, I was a little more than he could take.”
The couple separated in July 1984, after less than a year of marriage. But that did not mean the end of their relationship, because they dated on and off for another 12 years. The end came on a trip to the Amazon in Brazil, when a shaman prepared a psychedelic plant-based concoction for them; after taking it, Simon fell asleep on Fisher’s lap, and she then had a vision that he controlled her too much and therefore she should end their relationship. And that put an end to their long romance, although they remained good friends. In 1992 Simon married Texan singer-songwriter Edie Brickell, with whom he has three children, Adrian, Lulu and Gabriel; they are still together today. In 1991 Carrie Fisher began dating agent Bryan Lourd, with whom she had her only daughter, Billie. They never married but were together until 1994, when he left her for businessman Bruce Bozzie, whom Lourd married in 2006.
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