Fisher did it his way
By JIM SLOTEK
BEEN
THERE, DONE THAT
Eddie Fisher
(Thomas Dunne Books)
The book is Been There, Done That -- though it
could more appropriately be called "Been There, Done Her" for the
Wilt Chamberlain-like quantity of sexual episodes and
Still wincing from La Taylor's public statement that Eddie's "living
in a fantasy world ... I hope he gets better soon," Fisher can't hide his
interest when I haul out a copy of the latest Talk magazine, with Liz on the
cover.
But Betty Lin is even more intrigued. "Ooh, can I see that?"
she says, lunging for the magazine.
Points of interest from the interview are exchanged. Fisher hears that
"Wendy, and him, Peter Pan? She says that
really? And I'm the one living in a fantasy world?"
Further in the article, there's a comment that
"Oh yeah, she gets along great with Nicky Hilton, but he's dead.
Michael Wilding is dead. Mike Todd is dead. Richard Burton is dead. It's easy
to get along with someone who's dead." (In fact, only John Warner and
Larry Fortensky are alive, and they've signed
non-disclosure clauses).
At a stiffly moving 71, looking very much like a little old
Like the time he had romances going with Ann-Margret
and Edie Adams (widow of the great comic Ernie Kovacs), as per this Been There, Done That passage. "Edie was a sexy lady
who liked to wear a full-length chinchilla fur coat with nothing under
it," he writes. "After the show, I was in my dressing room when Ann-Margret walked in. She'd flown to Vegas to surprise me, and
immediately got down on her knees and started showing me how happy she was to
see me. Suddenly the door opened, and Edie Adams was standing there in that fur
coat. 'Oh ... I'll be at the bar,' she said, embarrassed, shocked, maybe even a
little hurt." Gee, Eddie, ya think?
Marlene Dietrich, Joan Collins (he calls her "the British
Open"), Michelle Phillips, Mamie Van Doren, Stefanie Powers, Abbe Laine, Mia Farrow, Juliet
Prowse, Judith Campbell Exner (a mistress he shared
with John F. Kennedy and mobster Sam Giancana). The
list goes on and on, and it's telling that none of the women still alive have
commented on the book, save for
Even what principles he had with women are shaky. "About the only
thing that prevented me from pursuing a woman was a wedding ring. I knew what
it felt like to learn your wife was cheating on you. I didn't want to do to
someone what
"I'm not proud of what's in there, it's just the truth," Fisher
tells me. "I'm not apologizing for it either." Ironically, though, he
was as big a cad with Stevens as with anyone (he got cold feet on their wedding
day, and called it off in front of the wedding party, declaring the event an
"engagement party"), he says Stevens is the only ex he's still
friends with.
Indeed, Been There, Done That gives you a
glimpse of the kind of grudge-holding that keeps the Balkans in business as a
trouble spot. Despite
"That's not even a guess," he laughs. "That's the
answer."
As
What goes around comes around, of course, and Eddie ended up the jilted one
after Liz met Dick on the epic, Cleopatra. "Debbie has never forgiven me
for what happened," he says. "But she knows that I did not leave her
for
In the book, he's even less generous. "Debbie Reynolds was the girl
next door," he writes, "but only if you lived next door to a self-centred, totally driven, insecure, untruthful phony."
He says their sex life ended soon after the wedding, that she was always a cold
fish in bed with him, and apropos of that, he suggests she might have been a
lesbian. Oh, and by the way, as for her public declaration that she stayed a
virgin until the wedding, he reports, "That, I know is not true, because I
was there long before our marriage."
But it's with his whirlwind three-year marriage to Liz that the book
takes on an almost Tennessee Williams plot turn. Fisher, a drug addict who was
attended to by a
One section, where he and Richard Burton have a man-to-man, is so
over-the-top, I have to ask Fisher to his face if he made it up.
"
"I'll never forget his response. 'You don't
need her anymore,' he said with a calculated coldness I'd never seen in him
before. 'You're a star already. I'm not, not yet. But she's going to make me
one. I'm going to use her, that no-talent nothing."
C'mon, I suggest, did that really happen? "It did!" Fisher
says, making one correction. "He actually called her 'a
They must have had some simpatico, because, according to Fisher, when
mobster Frank Costello offered to break
Betty Lin looks up from the magazine and we all talk about a passage in
the Talk interview where Liz recalls a tracheotomy she received while suffering
double pneumonia during the Cleopatra shoot -- a near-death experience during
which she saw "a white light."
"She said she had a near-death experience, and that's in the book
too," Fisher says. "But she didn't mention (in the interview) that I
was there with 10 doctors and nine nurses, and there were a couple of times
that if I hadn't been there, she would have been dead.
"That hurts me, absolutely, that she's forgotten that. And what did
happen, when she came out of the coma, she said, 'I saw God, I saw Mike (Todd)
and they both told me to love Eddie.' "
Betty Lin puzzles me, living out her husband's past love life the way she
is. "Given his past history with women, why did you get involved with
him?" I ask. A sweet-faced, 50-ish Chinese-American woman, she smiles and
says, "I like a challenge."
'A big challenge'
"And, heh, heh,
I was a challenge," Fisher laughs.
"A big challenge," she says. "He's a changed man. I feel
like I have the original Eddie."
"I always say," continues Fisher, "
"Marlene Dietrich -- she was a very wise woman -- told me never
marry an actress. So I went ahead and married three."
Regrets, he's got a few. Professionally, he feels he squandered "The
Voice" -- a vocal instrument that gave him everything he wanted in life,
for a while. "I could have done as Sinatra did and Tony Bennett, these are
people that really paid attention to their talent, to their gift. They enhanced
it by having great taste in their choice of songs and music. And I didn't. I
got on a kick of having hit records, starting with Thinking Of
You in 1950. But they all had the same kind of feeling, they were all ... well,
they were not real adult songs, they were teenybopper, bobby sox. Mine was not
a career built on albums. And it should have been. But I spent more time with
women and drugs and gambling."
And then there are the kids. That's my main regret," he tells me.
"I was one of the worst fathers in the world. And there's no way I can
change any of that. I can't make up for it by seeing Joely
every night in Cabaret. I have as good a relationship as we can have
considering what happened our whole lives. I get very guilt-ridden when I talk
about it. I'm a Jew, and I'm very conscious of guilt."
"Todd (Fisher, his son with Reynolds) is the farthest from me, and
yet when we're together, he's the closest. But he's been far away because he
became a born-again Christian and a very fine one. He tried to convert me.
"Carrie is in a class by herself. She's a rare writer, a rare
talent. I see myself in all my kids. Joely came to do
an AIDS benefit in San Francisco with Rita Moreno and a bunch of other people,
a brilliant show. And afterward, I went to Joely and
said, 'Y'know, I see me in your face.'
"And she said 'I see my mother.' " He
recalls the diss with a laugh. "Fine. But I see Connie and I see me."