Fisher Files

Carrie Fisher takes a sobering look at her famous lineage and the pitfalls of Hollywood in her Broadway solo show,

Wishful Drinking.

By DOUG STURDIVANT

This year’s Tony-show producers tapped Carrie Fisher, of all likely people, to provide Cliffs Notes on Next to Normal‘s dysfunctional, pharmaceutical, manic-depressive heroine, and she soon erupted — hilariously! — into a Whitman’s Sampler of tics and twitches that portrayed a certain electro-shock of recognition.

“They actually wanted me to say something, and I didn’t feel I really had to,” says Fisher, whose Exhibit A — called Wishful Drinking, based on her best-selling comic memoir — opens Oct. 4 at Studio 54 (the same Studio 54, ironically, which was a rest stop in her distant and hazy past).

Life among the icons hasn’t been easy, but the tough, resilient humor she inherited from mom Debbie Reynolds has seen her through some pretty dark patches.

Like Mom, she also turned, at 19, into an icon with a film-for-the-ages, “Star Wars” (for her mom, it was “Singin’ in the Rain”). Also like Mom, she married and divorced a short Jewish singer (Paul Simon). Reynolds lost hers — Eddie Fisher — when he famously flew to the side of The Widow [Mike] Todd, Elizabeth Taylor, “gradually,” Fisher notes, “making his way slowly to her front.” Another blow to Fisher’s midsection came from Bryan Lourd, who fathered their daughter Billie: he left her for a guy named Scott, “making Scott the man who got the man who got away.”

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