In the '70s and '80s, Hollywood was much smaller. Not physically (that too), but rather mentally and socially. The stars rubbed shoulders with each other, the producers invited them to house parties, the directors went out partying with their actors. And romances blossomed and withered as quickly as blockbusters. Hence, it is possible that many have forgotten a relationship that at the time surprised the entertainment world and united two unlikely celebrities: the singer-songwriter Paul Simon, half of Simon&Garfunkel, and the actress Carrie Fisher, who died in December 2016 and the penultimate of a saga of actors, divorces and tragedies. The two were together for years, and that crystallized in a marriage that barely lasted 11 months, and about which, in an exceptional way, Simon has spoken these days.
The American network MGM+ premiered a documentary called
In Restless Dreams: The Music
of Paul Simon at the end of March
(which can also be seen on Apple TV+),
in which the 82-year-old musician reviews in first person his personal and professional adventures. Produced and directed by Alex Gibney — winner of the Oscar in 2008 for
Taxi to the Dark Side
, about the torture methods of the US Army, and nominated two years earlier for
Enron: The Guys Who Scammed America
, about the great fraud of the electric company—, during two chapters Paul himself and his entourage recall a good part of his professional career and its personal derivatives, such as the breakup of his friendship with Art Garfunkel from the mid-seventies after releasing
Bridge over Troubled Water
until his recent loss audition and, of course, his love life. And Carrie Fisher fully enters it.
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“In the middle of a tour meeting [with Art Garfunkel] I got married. “I married Carrie Fisher,” Simon recalls in the footage. Everything about her romance was as chaotic as he lets on in that statement. The couple met at the end of the seventies, and by the eighties they were both big stars. But although he was the author of the famous
Mrs. Robinson
and 15 years older than her, by then it was difficult to overcome the fame of Fisher, who since 1977 had become the eternal Princess Leia of
Star Wars
. Fisher had also dealt with a far from easy childhood. Her parents were the singer Eddie Fisher and the actress Debbie Reynolds, star of
Singin' in the Rain.
The two had a high-profile marriage from 1955 until 1959, when Fisher left Reynolds (and her two children, Carrie and Todd) for what she was then his wife's best friend: Elizabeth Taylor. They were close; Reynolds had been a bridesmaid at Taylor's wedding to her third husband, film producer Mike Todd (and in fact named her son Todd after him), whom the violet-eyed star had just widowed after He died in a plane accident just a year after getting married. The divorce of her parents and her early fame made Carrie have a complex childhood and adolescence, consuming drugs, alcohol and medication from the age of 13, including an opioid of which she took 30 pills a day. “Drugs made me feel more normal,” she said in an interview with a psychology magazine in 2001.
The Fisher-Simon relationship was born of passion, and they both clung to each other tightly as they were two personalities with emotional difficulties and plagued by depression, hers being especially serious. As the writer Peter Ames Carlin recounted in 2016 in a biography about the singer called
Homeward Bound: The Life of Paul Simon,
since they met they connected quickly and soon moved to an apartment next to Central Park, in New York, where They would end up getting married. They had intense fights where they shouted at the top of their lungs, and after which they ended up laughing out loud. “Carrie brought speed to Paul's life, a kind of wild energy that often turned him on and other times made him scream,” Carlin said at the time about that relationship full of ups and downs. According to the author, the interpreter came home loaded with remedies and pills, and “he was ashamed of her whims and bad manners, convinced that he did not have the brains or the maturity to deal with her brilliant older boyfriend. she that she.” But then she thought again that breaking up would be too difficult and they stayed together, laughing until the next fight: “He loved her with a desperation that scared him himself.”
Paul Simon and Carrie Fisher at their wedding, at the singer's apartment in New York, on August 16, 1983. Ron Galella (Ron Galella Collection via Getty)
That complex relationship with fame and substances did not fit into Paul Simon's much more conventional life. The New Jersey singer explains in the new documentary how Fisher was “very focused on show business” and also that she “was used to having a lot of press and things like that”: “she wasn't intimidated by him or anything like that. He knew how to manipulate her and make her work for her. She was very good at it, and I wasn't.”
As producer Lorne Michaels – creator of the famous comedy show
Saturday Night Live – now tells in the documentary,
that that August 1983 he was best man at Simon's wedding, everything in their relationship had an extravagant touch, they always wanted to go further. there. “For the engagement we went to Greece. Paul rented a boat. I was dizzy for three days, praying I would die on the railing. Beyond that it was a lot of fun, and for the honeymoon we went to Egypt and went up the Nile,” he recalls, as reported by
People
. Furthermore, Michaels states that “there were many notable things at that time,” but above all that the two of them were “two people at the top of their careers, and that is always complicated. It was kind of a whirlwind. Carrie was in an immense bubble of fame thanks to
Star Wars
.”
Fisher wrote in her memoir,
Wishful Drinking,
published in 2016, that marriages were not her thing, that she could be a fun and great girlfriend, but not a good wife. Even so, he helped Simon for years in raising his eldest son, Harper, the result of the musician's marriage to his first wife, Peggy Harper, whom he married in 1969 and divorced in 1975. Harper, now 51 years old, he tried to make a career in music, although he never succeeded. During his youth he went through complicated problems of depression and also addictions (to alcohol, marijuana or LSD in his adolescence; already in his youth to heroin and morphine), and Fisher was always by his side in your recovery.
Carrie Fisher and Paul Simon at a party in London in May 1978.Tom Wargacki (WireImage)
Paul Simon himself talks about the difficulties of being married in this documentary. “What was he thinking? It's clear that not in life, you know, where you have to stop," says the musician. “Marriage is a very hard thing. You have to concentrate on it, not everything can happen at once, not everything is an event for the press. [We made] every kind of mistake upon mistake on top of mistakes,” he claims. “I realized that I could exhaust myself, I could be exhausted from myself with so many emotional upheavals.” Carrie Fisher also said something very similar in her celebrated biography, when asked if her brief marriage was “a mistake,” which it was. “Let's see, I think if you look at me, at most you'll think I'm an interesting girlfriend. But a wife? “I think you are going to be disappointed,” she said with humor. “Poor Paul. He had to put up with me a lot. I think in the end I fell into the 'good anecdote, bad choice in real life' thing. I was very good as material, but on a day-to-day basis it was more than he could handle.”
The couple separated in July 1984, before completing a year of marriage. But that did not mean the end of their relationship, because they dated, intermittently, for another 12 years. The final point was a trip to the Amazon in Brazil, where a witch doctor prepared a psychedelic herbal concoction for them; After taking it, the actor fell asleep on the actress's lap, and she then had the vision that he controlled her too much and that therefore he should end her 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. In 1991 Carrie Fisher began dating artist agent Bryan Lourd, whom she never married but had her only daughter, Billie. They were together until 1994, when he left her for businessman Bruce Bozzie, whom she married in 2006.