Postcards from the Eddie
Who would ever suspect that the man who made so many awful records could create an autobiography that is such a kick in the pants?

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By Lorenzo W. Milam

Sept. 27, 1999 | By the time he was 15, Eddie Fisher was on three different radio shows in Philadelphia. By the time he was 21, his records were selling in the millions. "I had more consecutive hit records than the Beatles or Elvis Presley," he says in "Been There, Done That." "I had 65,000 fan clubs and the most widely broadcast program on television and radio."

After returning from the Korean War, Fisher married Debbie Reynolds, the girl next door. Theirs was the ideal marriage, at least to the media. "I've often been asked what I learned from that marriage," he says. "That's simple: Don't marry Debbie Reynolds."

Soon enough, he left Reynolds for Elizabeth Taylor. And when that marriage collapsed, he got hitched to Connie Stevens. Throughout all these musical chairs, he was singing, pouring out records -- and the money was pouring in, along with the women. Queen Elizabeth asked him to dance; Bette Davis "made drool eyes at me." He knew, sometimes intimately, Ava Gardner, Audrey Hepburn, Marilyn Monroe, Gina Lollobrigida, Brigitte Bardot, Joan Collins, Sue Lyon, Lana Turner, Margaret Truman. So much fun, so many parties. One wonders how he was able to find time to record songs between his bouts of passion.

In anyone else's hands, this would be your typical ho-hum let-me-tell-you-about-being-a-star-and-getting-laid routine. But there is something else going on in "Been There, Done That." First, Eddie Fisher and his co-writer know how to put words together. The story is fascinating; the one-liners are funny; the vignettes are out of this world. Especially when he is telling us exactly what it was like to live with Elizabeth Taylor: "She was drinking and taking pills and passing out. She was constantly passing out. It was just awful; not awful enough to make me miss my life with Debbie, but awful."

Once when he threatened to leave, Taylor swallowed an entire bottle of Seconol. "I tried to stay calm," Fisher writes, "although it's hard to stay calm when foam is coming out of your wife's mouth." Another time, he dared to venture the opinion that she should do something about her addictions. "Elizabeth, what would you think about going to see a psychiatrist?" he asked.

"As it turned out, not very much," Fisher recalls. "She erupted. She started screaming at me ... She got out of bed, totally naked, and ran down the stairs. I ran right after her. She got into her Cadillac and turned on the engine. It was crazy, this hysterical naked woman trying to drive while I ran alongside the car, holding on to her door. I was begging her to stop, telling her, 'It's not you, it's me. I'll go to the psychiatrist. I'll go, I'll go, it's me ...'"

There's a genuine juvenile enthusiasm in "Been There, Done That." It's the sense of wonder that you or I would have if we woke up one morning as a star. And we get the feeling that Fisher's still stunned that a poor kid from the streets of Philadelphia could end up, all of a sudden, living "under the bank on the hill, where the money just rolls down." With Elizabeth Taylor.

The tale of Elizabeth and Eddie -- they called him "Mr. Taylor" -- is enough to make a grown man cry ... and, often, to laugh: "The one thing that it was impossible to ever forget when you were with Elizabeth Taylor," he tells us, "was that you were with Elizabeth Taylor ... She was smart and funny and beautiful. And sexy. Very, very sexy. Sexually she was every man's dream; she had the face of an angel and the morals of a truck driver."

Fisher did not marry Elizabeth Taylor. Rather, he entered into a contract with her to let her run his life, and to be subject to her every whim, to deal with her incessant pill-taking, her endless boozing, her tantrums, her sulks, and her impossible Jezebel nature. "I had successfully made the transition from one of the country's most popular singers to Elizabeth's companion and nurse," he writes. "I was caught in a magnificent trap, and even though I was madly in love with her, it was still a trap. I'd forgotten who I was ... The only singing I was doing was around the house."

And what did he do when he she ran off with Richard Burton? "I couldn't stop loving her, and needing her. I missed her more than I had ever missed anyone in my life. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. I couldn't sit still, so I did the only thing that made sense at the time. I appeared on the television quiz show 'What's My Line' as the mystery guest."