Last Carrie Fisher post

Last time we spoke we were talking about that David Spade movie- I couldn't really get into it; it just wasn't Joe Dirt.

The other night I was flipping around and Wishful Drinking was on HBO- it was during the Hollywood Inbreeding section- and I stopped to watch it again.

There's one thing that came up and I'd meant to discuss it earlier: This is the kind of trivia that fascinates me and it's one of the aspects of Carrie Fisher's life that I'm really interested in.

Carrie Fisher and Paul Simon were together ("on and off," she says) for about 12 years- roughly 1978 to 1990. In the beginning they were both part of the cool Saturday Night Live crowd. Simon was good friends with Lorne Michaels and Fisher partied with Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi (plus SNL guest host Buck Henry- I know him as writer of To Die For and The Graduate).

Fisher and Simon married in 1983 and divorced about a year later but they got back together at some point and tried to make things work. Let's talk for a moment about the songs. Simon's 1983 LP Hearts and Bones was meant to be a Simon & Garfunkel record but it didn't work out and it ended up being a solo album. It's been acknowledged that two songs, "Allergies" and the title track, are about Fisher. The first has a few good lines but it suffers from early-to-mid-1980s production; it was an ugly time for music. Songs from that era- unless they were made by Prince or Cyndi Lauper or, of course, Tom Waits- just haven't aged well. Even Elvis Costello couldn't escape this. Listen to his records from that time. He's said that the keyboards that were popular then "date-stamp" the songs.

While "Allergies" has the stamp, "Hearts and Bones" sounds more like one of Simon's songs from the 70s. Not in a bad way, it just has certain touches. It wouldn't sound out of place played along with "Something So Right" or "Still Crazy After All These Years".

It's been suggested that the song "Graceland" makes references to Fisher and that sounds right to me. Three other songs from Graceland's Side One are probably about her too.

So the two divorce and while he has huge success with the Graceland album- I think it got the Grammy for Album of the Year- she made movies like Hollywood Vice Squad.

Her friend John Belushi didn't make it; he had overdosed in 1982. Life went on. His friend Dan Aykroyd had been writing a script and a part just for him. After Belushi's death Aykroyd kept writing and Bill Murray ended up playing the part when Ghostbusters was made the following year. Bob Woodward wrote a book about Belushi called Wired. Among the many sources was Fisher. She doesn't pop up in the book very often but when she does it's usually saying something thoughtful.

Sometime around 1985 Fisher overdosed on painkillers and ended up in a drug clinic. She got clean and wrote about the experience in the 1987 novel Postcards From The Edge. I read it last summer. It holds up pretty well, even a lot of the jokes, so I can see why it was such a big deal back then.

Plans were made to turn Postcards into a movie starring Meryl Streep. Fisher was hired to write the screenplay and Mike Nichols signed on as the director. As Fisher says in Drinking, in the late 1980s she was living in New York with Simon and she kept leaving to visit the movie set. This led to the end of their relationship.

1990. The movie of Postcards came out. Fisher's second novel, Surrender The Pink came out (like Postcards, this book draws from her life and Pink is based on her relationship with Simon. Simons album Rhythm of the Saints came out. It contains what Fisher says is "the last song Paul ever wrote about me"; it's called "She Moves On".

Now, I read and watched Postcards, I read Pink, and I know a lot of Simon's songs, plus I'll read whatever magazine article I can find online. But none of that means anything. Nobody really knows what happens in a relationship. The people actually in it don't always know.

But there's one thing that I find interesting. Simon & Garfunkel provided the songs for Mike Nichol's The Graduate. They all became friends I guess. Then Garfunkel was cast in Nichol's next project, Catch-22, while Simon was left alone and pissed in NYC. Simon ended up putting his anger into the 2011 Honda Accord theme song, "The Only Living Boy In New York".

Twenty years later, Mike Nichols took away another partner and Simon wasn't even asked to provide any songs (Carly Simon did the music).

That is what really fascinates me about the whole thing.